
We Can’t Trust Facebook to Regulate Itself - augustocallejas
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/opinion/facebook-regulation-incentive.html
======
wybiral
A lot of the comments here seem to focus on the issue of regulating FB because
of their social media output and potential for spreading fake news, etc.

But the thing I would want more regulation on is their possession of personal
data and the tools to target people using that data. The same applies to all
similar advertising-first platforms.

If all of this data and the tools to analyze it are as powerful as the data
giants seem to suggest by their marketing and actions (given the increase in
collection, storage, and analysis)... Then maybe we, as a society, need to
have a conversation about that. And possibly regulation of some kind is an
outcome of that conversation.

~~~
fbonetti
Honest question: why is it a problem that Facebook has personal data and uses
it in their advertising platform?

No one is forced to give their data to Facebook. It's not a public utility.
It's an entertainment site, first and foremost.

~~~
thg
> _No one is forced to give their data to Facebook._

Neither do we have to. Facebook is grabbing it all anyway. With pre-emptive
measures ala ad-, cookie and tracker blocking we can _reduce_ the amount of
data they get, but they still get _something_.

If they'd only collect data about their users, that would be totally fine. But
they don't. They build shadow profiles of people who _are not_ on FB and track
them just the same way.

FB is a whole lot closer to Orwellian surveillance apparatus than it is to
entertainment site.

~~~
wybiral
It's interesting to me how upset so many people got about the level of detail
that the NSA collected while so many hand over their entire digital presence
to FB and Google.

Maybe they think "you don't have to use FB"... By that logic "you didn't have
to use AT&T or the internet at all" either.

~~~
thg
Public opinion is shaped a great deal by what and in what way the mass media
covers a specific topic. There was a lot of uproar about NSA surveillance
_while it was in the news_ , which quickly died down as the headlines
disappeared. _Out of sight, out of mind._

And then there's also the thing that, arguably, Google and FB give those
people _something_ in return which they might consider worthwhile for _just
data_. I'd question that the majority of the user population is aware of the
implications of handing over data about themselves and specifically other
people, who may or may not be okay with that.

~~~
wybiral
> Out of sight, out of mind.

All the more reason to keep an eye on the people who control the page that so
many people view their news from these days.

------
varelse
At the risk of falling prey to "WhatAboutism" it is hard for me to be
concerned here when we give such free reign to credit agencies and other
traditional corporate entities who can't be arsed to even keep their data
secure. That has affected and inconvenienced me personally as opposed to the
annoying buzz from the dumbasses who used to get their reality from a daily
two hour hate from a minority of right-leaning pundits and who now thrive on
fake news from Facebook and Twitter.

Their pre-existing intellectual incuriosity is the root problem IMO, not the
current medium on which they gorge their ignorance. And by the time the same
clowns in Congress who think it's hunky dory to tax grad student tuition
waivers craft anything to regulate Facebook, there will be a new and scarier
kid on the block extracting and analyzing the information at a whole new
unforeseen level.

As others have said, large corporations are effectively the malevolent AIs
Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking keep squawking about. Good luck with regulating
that.

~~~
existencebox
I'd typically be the first person to call you out on distracting from the core
point, but in this case I agree wholeheartedly; I don't think you fall prey to
the typical anti-patterns of whataboutism in that the broader context of
American regulation and our prioritization of goals is very relevant to this
discussion.

The entire "Fake news" epidemic seems absurd to me. (and frankly, an
intentional distraction) Tabloids have been around literally my entire life.
The only difference now is that people apparently can no longer distinguish
them from fact. (Not to mention as far back as our first presidents, you can
find newspaper articles trumpeting that e.g. Jefferson was in a pact with
Satan and his alcoholism would overturn the country. Somehow America prevailed
then; what is different now.)

Meanwhile, we have public schools in some states that can't afford more than 4
days a week, politicians for whom lying is absolutely a pathology with no one
holding them accountable, and a literacy/numeracy rate far below many other
first world countries.

I have many thoughts on why this comes to pass but the cynic in me is focused
heavily on that the incentives in the current system (for the current power-
players at least) do not align with spending resources to have a highly
educated population en-masse.

~~~
a235
I would argue that the cause of the "Fake news" epidemic is partially due to
the social media. Specifically, Information Overload is to blame.

A few decades back we had and now loosing: \- Traceable reputation -- which is
now lost, and much harder to learn in our uncontrolled, random and sparse feed
interactions. \- Focus on topic -- social crises were build up, considered,
reflected on. Nowadays, we moved into the realm of emotional reactions. Noone
is expected to have mental capacity to consume as many pieces of disjoint
information as we do today on social media. In an average feed, a president
eats a kid, and a cat does a funny trick one after another.

The prime incentives in the current social system is the instant
gratification. This new system is easy to abuse, as we are moving further away
from analytical to emotional consumption.

~~~
thomastjeffery
> Information Overload is to blame.

The information overload is due to centralization and advertising.

Individuals can easily overcome information overload via compartmentalization,
but Facebook works directly against that strategy by mixing sources, and
mixing in advertisements.

What we need to provide individuals is a decentralized communication network
that has all the features and accessibility users want.

------
TAForObvReasons
> Facebook needs to be regulated more tightly, or broken up so that no single
> entity controls all of its data.

What would a break-up of Facebook look like? The most famous modern example is
the breakup of Bell, but the infrastructure lent itself to a natural
geographical split. It's not entirely obvious if a geographic split would work
for FB, and it's not entirely obvious along what planes one could split up the
company.

~~~
jerf
One option would be to Just Do It, just break the company up along that sort
of arbitrary line, and expect that that will push the Baby Faces [1] to be
forced to communicate with federation protocols, which could also let others
in to play too. One would imagine a condition of the breakup would be that any
such federation protocol that was developed could not privilege the Baby Faces
amoungst each other.

It isn't necessarily the best choice, but it is one choice. I'm not sure
there's necessarily a much better one, either. It's a very big problem to try
to wrap your head around.

[1]: I _think_ you heard it here first, though I can't promise nobody else has
come up with that. I haven't heard it before to my knowledge.

~~~
dwaltrip
I think this is definitely a very interesting line of discussion for this
problem.

I really like the idea of essentially forcing federation protocols to be
developed. E-mail was an overwhelming success -- we should look for ways to
repeat that success with other aspects.

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
What about developing federated protocols by 'just doing it'.

~~~
s286912
How about creating a open standard for social media,i.e, open API so that no
matter what platform you use, you can connect to ppl on other platforms. This
should introduce more competition in the market without creating a loophole to
regulate internet.

so ppl would be able to choose platform based on variety of variables like
advertisements, data collection, looks, usability.... just an idea

~~~
uoaei
Creating standards is the easy part, uptake is a whole other beast.

~~~
daveid
Mastodon uses ActivityPub and has over a million users

------
randiantech
I dont trust NYTIMES to regulate itself either, or any other major news outlet
there. Or any oil company, or big food corporation, or any militar company. Or
the department of defense. I just dont know what is the ideal solution ,but
state regulation is not the answer. It looks very dangerous.

~~~
shrimpx
How do you distrust governments and Google, Apple, Facebook, Samsung, HTC,
Verizon, Comcast, etc., while still using the internet meaningfully, or
really, participate in society meaningfully? In the current climate pretty
much everybody understands, on some level, that by using "the internet" you
are letting unknown third parties create a market out of your private life at
no compensation to you beyond access to their "service". Yet we all continue
tapping away on our shiny screens. In many ways it's really a deplorable,
unacceptable situation.

~~~
aerotwelve
Everyone understands that letting third parties sell your personal data at no
cost to you is what happens when you use the internet, but it doesn't have to
be that way.

With some meaningful regulation, we could put a stop to this overnight. The
internet existed and flourished before this manipulative business model became
the norm, and it would exist if we outlawed it. We wouldn't even need to
outlaw it, just require explicit written consent to sell personal data.

Can you imagine the ramifications? Once you eliminate the lazy, tired, and
frankly intellectually barren model of "make a mediocre service that sucks
enough personal data from our users so we can sell ads against them", startups
could go back to designing products that solve interesting problems that
people are willing to pay for!

~~~
icebraining
What does "sell your personal data" mean? Facebook (and Google) doesn't do
that - it's much more profitable to keep it guarded so you can charge for
services based on it (like ads) again and again.

So what specifically would that regulation say?

------
SirensOfTitan
I don't think we can break up Google or Facebook like AT&T or Standard Oil.
The data economy requires new antitrust tools, which the Economist wrote about
recently:

"A break-up would be highly disruptive and slow down innovation. It is likely
that a Googlet or a Babyface would quickly become dominant again."[1]

Federated social networks will never catch on if they require more work from
the user for likely less utility.

Facebook is also nothing like MySpace. This comparison is tired: Facebook is
orders of magnitude larger than MySpace ever was. It's not going to get
squashed away by a competitor, especially given its ability (alongside Google,
Amazon) to buy up would-be competitors while they're young.

I also quite dislike the idea of regulating Facebook as a utility, as I
dislike the idea of that tight coupling with government. Facebook quickly
becomes a tool for coercion, propaganda, and oppression.

There needs to be a new set of rules built around enforcing competition around
the data economy. The real risk is that a couple small players completely shut
the door to new competition (which leads to more improper use of data as a few
players have all of it). Regulators need to get smarter about blocking mergers
(like FB and WhatsApp). New rules, like enforcing data sharing, need to be
explored (although this reveals a big risk for data privacy).

[1]: [https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21721634-how-it-
shap...](https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21721634-how-it-shaping-up-
data-giving-rise-new-economy)

~~~
ethbro
_> There needs to be a new set of rules built around enforcing competition
around the data economy._

Agreed. In the US, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was the last major
attempt at FCC rework. Our world looks nothing like 1996.

My emphasis would be on a more utilized regulatory authority over two methods
of entrenchment: (1) data & (2) cloud infrastructure.

Service providers past a certain market share should be limited in how they're
able to wield these against competition. _If_ they choose to utilize either
for their own, non-neutral services, they should be _required_ to offer them
to external parties under reasonable terms that allow for existential-caliber
competition.

I realize we failed at this with carriers, but I don't see how the alternative
is anything other than a mono-, duo-, or tri-opoly that's able to simply buy
any threat to its revenue before the company is able to scale.

------
partiallypro
There's nothing more on this earth that Google would want than to split up
Facebook. Essentially destroying its biggest digital advertising competition.

I don't trust Facebook or Google...but I also don't trust the government to
regulate them (in the regard to the topic of this piece); or for government to
be unduly influenced by either company's competitors trying to stifle the
companies, or the possibility of limiting speech. There are so many things
that can go wrong in getting government involved in this aspect.

------
ProAm
Why does it need to be regulated? What ever happened to 'don't believe
everything you read' and 'do your research'? No one has ever said Facebook
holds anything remotely truthful, it's a social network. Your friends are not
100% honest or accurate. Same goes for Twitter, Reddit, Quora,...etc... It's
always been a YMMV scenario, but for entertainment.

~~~
stochastic_monk
The problem is that people trust their friends on facebook. How do you protect
the people who can't use critical thinking to get answers?

Using your reasoning, you might ask why it's bad to let vulnerable elderly
individuals be hoodwinked out of their savings. What happened to their
responsibility?

It seems to me that the people as a body are incapable of managing themselves
and so they need safeguards. (Wow, that makes me sound like a dictator.)

~~~
dvt
> Using your reasoning, you might ask why it's bad to let vulnerable elderly
> individuals be hoodwinked out of their savings. What happened to their
> responsibility?

It's a bit different because in your case, we're actively reducing harm. You
can't just say "censorship will fix it" or "oversight will fix it" unless
we're talking about specific scenarios. Which is why, in _general_ censorship
and oversight doesn't really fix anything.

This is also why laws are very detailed and specific. It would be nice to say
"be good to one another" and be done with it.

~~~
stochastic_monk
I agree. It would take a very specific set of interventions.

What _could_ do good? A disclaimer every time you log in saying "Pro tip: get
your news from reliable sources, not your facebook feed."? Are there any ways
people could be prompted to do the right thing?

The question is then: what can be done? Just because it's hard to know how to
handle the problem doesn't mean we shouldn't try to.

------
maxharris
I could easily write a headline such as, "We can't trust the New York Times to
regulate itself," and be just as misguided as the headline above, for the same
reasons.

~~~
duckMuppet
I think this is a bad analogy.. The NYT is a left leaning paper, but people
who have some intellectual honesty already know this..

Even if the Times went completely far far far left, they aren't the only game
in town. I can choose to read any of a number of other papers, LA Times, Wall
Street Journal, Economist etc..

What alternative is there fire FB?? Mastodon.. Hubzilla..? They're great, if
someone has the capability to run the service. I'd argue that most users can't
be bothered to learn more than a chromebook let alone understand how to run
their own server.

When you have a monopoly like this, it either needs government regulation, (
which is generally bad because it tends to hurt other similar companies), or
break them up, i think this is the ideal option, but i don't know in this
case.. Break it up by forcing all their code to open source, of perhaps force
them to run it more federated or diaspora like and mandating interoperability
with these other services..

I'm not sure what the answer is. Of course the real answer is nobody has to
use Facebook.. But for a lot of people, that's not an option they're
interested in, and since fb literally have all the data, it likely needs
regulation which i find very distasteful and terrifying.

~~~
dvt
Why do we need to break up FB? That makes no sense to me. In previous
antitrust cases, there was always the economic argument (to help out up-and-
coming competitors or to prevent price gouging). But Snapchat clearly showed
that new players can compete.

Are we breaking them up because they have "too much information"? What does
that even mean? A move like that would be beyond unprecedented.

~~~
volgo
The point for government to breakup anything is to prevent monopoly.

NYTimes is far from a monopoly - there are tons of news site with more
traffic. But there's no competitor that comes close to Facebook

~~~
dvt
And the purpose of preventing a monopoly is, yet again, generally an economic
one: to prevent price gouging or help out smaller competitors. Neither of
those applies to FB.

~~~
volgo
It could be a monopoly on ideology too. There's a precedent for this. Back in
the early days of broadcasting, NBC was broken up into NBC + ABC for having
too much control of public discourse

~~~
dvt
This is simply not true. It was an economic argument[1]. Newer & smaller radio
stations could not compete. And if anyone should be broken up for monopolizing
online ad revenue, it should probably be Google (Alphabet).

[1]
[http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...](http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=7045&context=penn_law_review)

------
matchagaucho
I worked at FB during the same time, and while I admire Sandy's sentiment in
principle, this article is conflating what 3rd party _Developers_ were doing
with user data.... not FB.

In fact, Zynga, and many other social gaming Developers, practically went out
of business as FB started to enforce data usage policies.

~~~
netsharc
But Facebook was allowing 3rd party developers access to a lot of data. I've
even seen my profile on a 3rd party site where the developer said "Facebook
granted me access.".

It's like the NSA saying "We collect your information, but we have laws to
prevent their abuse.". First you have to be caught, and then they'll punish
you. There are no technical limitations. This is like someone like Equifax
saying "Here's our database server credentials, but connecting to it or
querying is illegal.".

~~~
matchagaucho
Review the app perms before opt-in. "This app is requesting access to Full
Name, Email, Friends, etc..."

FB trusted Developers to do the right thing with that data through T&Cs.

------
Steeeve
It's ridiculous to think that regulation is any sort of solution. It's even
more ridiculous for somebody to suggest that in 2017 when we have such shining
examples of altruistic heads of regulatory agencies. (Ajit Pai, Scott Pruitt,
etc.)

Someone is always going to be thinking about the bottom line, but come on now.
Facebook isn't the only internet business that the russians used to influence
people. Have you looked at reddit over the last 3 years? Any and every site
with influence is going to get gamed by every government who has the bandwidth
to play ball. You can't regulate your way around that. Look at how the Trump
administration is currently using Twitter. Is that proper? no, but it's great
for Twitter. Should they refuse to service him?

Governments shouldn't be looked to for solutions. Government is TERRIBLE at
solving any problems. If change is required or desired, you go about making
change happen the good old fashioned way - by getting others to agree with
you.

~~~
Bartweiss
> _It 's even more ridiculous for somebody to suggest that in 2017 when we
> have such shining examples of altruistic heads of regulatory agencies. (Ajit
> Pai, Scott Pruitt, etc.)_

The recent "regulate Facebook" furor (as seen near-daily at the NYT) seems to
feed into a larger pattern of this. There are a lot of establishment-friendly,
technocratic people who don't seem to have adjusted their worldviews to
accommodate the last ~18 months.

These are people who argued over the last eight years that we need the
trustworthy, knowledgeable parts of government (roughly defined as "executive
branch bureaucracies") to rein in the excesses of productive-yet-reckless
businesses.

And then Trump became president and appointed a string of regulatory heads who
support entrenched businesses and oppose the existence of their own
departments. And seemingly, _no one noticed_. Whether or not Tom Wheeler and
Michelle Lee were qualified to regulate the tech sector, Ajit Pai and Andrei
Iancu aren't.

My opinions on regulation are not strictly libertarian. But I'm absolutely
baffled by watching left-leaning voices work their hardest to empower grossly
incompetent regulators who disagree with all of their goals.

------
shmerl
You can't force Facebook to be decentralized. Quit using it, and use real
decentralized social networks. The point about trust is correct though. One
surely should not trust Facebook.

------
Blazespinnaker
Linked in is way more brutal than Facebook. I(and all my friends)can take fb
or leave it, put any kind of random info / pictures. LinkedIn though.. I am
stuck!

~~~
adamnemecek
LinkedIn is less of a monopoly.

------
mikro
This reminds me of a recent TED talk:
[https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dy...](https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dystopia_just_to_make_people_click_on_ads)

------
golergka
Am I the only one who noticed a big flow of hit pieces on Facebook from papers
like NYT and Guardian lately?

The thing is, I actually agree with the overall message, and that's why such a
change of heart from the media is so noticeable - I've been talking about this
for years, and I never saw opinions like that in the MSM. But now it seems
like there's an article like that every week on the HN front page.

What happened?

~~~
Tempest1981
Concern over Facebook being a powerful tool used to influence elections.

------
blrgeek
For splitting Facebook into face babies, look at p&l lines, geographic lines,
what could become api boundaries,different apps, and different apps within fb
wall.

So one and more of

WhatsApp vs Instagram vs fb vs messenger

FB video vs FB ads vs fb news

FB EU vs US vs India vs...

FB identity vs fb communication vs fb ads

There was no precursor to regulating standard oil in the last century, and no
precursor to regulating Google, FB, Amazon, this century.

Doesn't mean it's not warranted.

------
hishnash
The issue I see with adding gov level regulation to Facebook (or any other
media) is it very quickly becomes a tool for oppressive regimes.

If Facebook builds in the tools so governments can control exactly what is
posted on them then expect every single nation in the world to require access
to these tools overnight.

Even nations we might think of as being very condition of the right of their
citizens have content they deem illegal and would if they could be required by
their own laws to compel Facebook to let them control this.

This, in the end, would not just be about public content but also about all
private content, messages sent over FB messenger etc.

Do we want a popover to show up next time we share a hypothetical "dick pick"
with a 'lover' saying 'awaiting review from your local authorities'? God
forbid you are on holiday/changing planes in a religious extream region of the
world and find yourself carted off to jail for 10 years for this.

~~~
te_chris
There's nothing stopping governments doing this already. Facebook operates
financially within their jurisdiction the minute ad transactions with
companies and citizens registerd in that territory happen. Governments can cut
this off, and it would behove FB to get in front of this.

------
cwyers
The headline is probably right, but we can't trust the government to regulate
it either and markets seem to be broken so there really aren't good options
here.

------
taway994
My worry is MANY Facebook employees having access to key profile data and not
all their data logs can be downloaded.

For example, I know that a current employee accessed data on profiles I had
viewed and shared it with another friend. Unclear how they secure PII and how
such abuse can be reported.

------
Kequc
Other people could make competitors, and more importantly, people who are
using Facebook could switch. It happened to MySpace. Makes a lot more sense to
me than turning it into a public utility or breaking it up anyway.

Just stop using it, it really isn't that important.

~~~
fahayekwasright
Facebook has sufficient accumulation of capital to make this impossible. Build
something good enough to challenge them and you will get purchased.

~~~
dreamdu5t
Facebook does not have the power to force people to sell to them. They do not
have the power to force people to use Facebook. That's a fact. It's a free
website, that people use of their own accord, at their own discretion. Just
like someone that chooses to read NYT.

The call to regulate a free press (Facebook) is far more disturbing than any
targeted advertising Facebook is engaged in.

~~~
fahayekwasright
FB’s power is not a binary of either “can force” or “can’t force.” But they
can offer an amount so high it’s hard to say no, and they can manipulate their
users’ attention in ever more complex and subtle ways.

I don’t consider FB a pure evil, just a potential danger. Their moral hazard
is comparable to that of a heroin dealer—-they are incentivized to get you
using the product as much as possible, regardless of the possibility that more
than a small amount could be harmful.

~~~
armenarmen
Offering an extremely high price that surpasses the sellers expectations +
potential buyers remorse and making a sale "hard to say no to" is not force.
It is not Don Corleone making an offer they cannot refuse. Let's not equate
voluntary exchange with a mugging

~~~
fahayekwasright
I agree, it’s not force. I just don’t think “force” in the literal sense is
required to make it a scary situation.

------
b0rsuk
Of course you can't trust anyone to judge himself fairly. That's the
definition of conflict of interest. I suppose USA has a soft spot for Facebook
because the company it's one of their champions.

It's a farce. It reminds me of church pedophilia in Poland. Various
transgressions commited by priests are left for the Church to handle with its
internal procedures. Which is usually just sweeping under the carpet, like
moving a pedo priest to a different region. The faithful do their part -
denial, and ostracism for people who criticize Church too loud.

------
lps41
We need to regulate private data amassed by internet giants the same way we
regulate data gathered by credit reporting agencies.

The Fair Credit Reporting Act [1]:

\- regulates what data credit agencies can store,

\- mandates that people be able to access data about themselves,

\- mandates that third parties cannot access a person's data without the
person's consent _every single time_ ,

\- mandates that people must be able to correct false information in their
credit file,

\- mandates that people be able to place a "freeze" on uses of their credit
data

Each of these things translates quite nicely to private data that internet
giants gather on us.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Credit_Reporting_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Credit_Reporting_Act)

------
dqpb
I would take this a step further and say we can't trust anyone to regulate
anything.

If it's not measurable and automateable, you can't trust it.

------
CalChris
Splitting Facebook into Face and Book will change nothing. Face will sell you
out or Book will sell you out. Your choice. Instead, Facebook needs to be
forced by regulators to become SafeBook. Zuckerberg will whine like a stuck
pig. So be it.

------
snvzz
Facebook is an evil company that exists only to profit from harming society.

Why not take over the domain name, dismantle the company and put its board on
prison?

That would make sense.

------
ihsw2
And again, the big lie about Russia continues to propagate. It really is
embarrassing.

------
WallWextra
Can we trust the New York Times to regulate itself either?

~~~
shangxiao
I find this to be a legitimate question. At least in my country all news
outlets have a political bias one way or another, including those run by the
government itself.

Is there something about NY times (I don't read it) that warrants a downvote
on OP's comment?

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
Yes, the simple fact that it's not a de-facto monopoly with network effects.

------
akulbe
Maybe FB does need regulation... I don't trust FB to do it. Obviously.

I trust the government even less.

There's got to be a better solution.

