
Facebook: Breaking Up Facebook Is Not the Answer - tysone
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/11/opinion/facebook-nick-clegg-chris-hughes.html
======
oil25
What absolute mindless drivel! Mr. Clegg starts his opinion piece with a
nirvana fallacy: breaking up Facebook won't solve all the world's problem, so
why bother? More appeals are made throughout to Facebook's large user-base, as
justification for continued market dominance. Yet Mr. Clegg claims anti-trust
laws do not apply to Facebook those laws are to ensure "low-cost, high-quality
products" \- and since Facebook is free, they're immune from such rules. He
proudly denigrates and defies the laws simply because they were "developed in
the 1800s" which is an outright disgrace. I find his arguments wholly
unedifying and severely lacking in substance and creativity. That pro-Facebook
propaganda by their PR head is even deemed worthy of publishing (in NYTimes of
all places!) is frankly a disappointment.

~~~
remarkEon
>That pro-Facebook propaganda by their PR head is even deemed worthy of
publishing (in NYTimes of all places!) is frankly a disappointment.

Ehh this seems completely appropriate to me. NYT often publishes controversial
OpEds (including from Putin in the past). This seems well in line with the
mandate of established media outlets.

~~~
livueta
Moreso, given that it's a direct response to a previously-published op-ed
arguing the opposite side:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/opinion/sunday/chris-
hugh...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/opinion/sunday/chris-hughes-
facebook-zuckerberg.html?module=inline)

I agree that this response is drivel, but not affording FB the opportunity to
respond in kind smacks of bias. If the NYT had really sacrificed all
objectivity in their campaign against their main rival for eyeballs, they
would simply have not published this and allowed their readership to assume
that the anti-FB piece had gone unanswered. In this case the NYT is acting as
a somewhat neutral stage for a public debate, a role which I think is
important when it's very easy for both sides to talk past each other to
different audiences.

Think for a minute on whether you'd have read this rebuttal if it were posted
on FB, instead of in the same medium as the argument it is responding to.
Would you, as a presumed Facebook detector, have even read it then? I probably
wouldn't have.

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ImprovedSilence
I largely agree with the sentiment in this article, despite not really liking
Facebook or using it too much. Does anyone here in HN favor a FB breakup,
whatever that would look like, and why?

~~~
awakeasleep
Facebook (and other SV mega corps) are monopolies, and they're growing too
powerful, both in the market and in the government, for our society.

Regulation will be captured by Facebook to cement their monopoly position.

The only antidote to this is competition- and that means not only breaking
facebook into separate companies, but also prohibiting them from buying new
entrants into the market.

~~~
sneak
In which line of business does facebook have a monopoly?

In which line of business does google have a monopoly?

~~~
jtr1
Social media. Search.

~~~
RandomInteger4
What are they monopolizing in social media? People? Are we going break up
Facebook by telling Jim and Dan that they have to use two separate social
media sites and can no longer communicate via the same social media site?

------
rudiv
The only time I've been interested in what Nick Clegg had to say recently has
been when the writers of HIGNFY were writing what was on the autocue.

------
remarkEon
Honest question: would we be having this argument if 2016 had gone the other
way in the US, and if we had not seen the other illiberal trends we've seen in
democracies in Europe? I'm getting the sense that a lot of the peal clutching
here has to do with this idea that Facebook is "responsible" in some way for
Trump, Brexit, AfD, extremists winning elections in Austria, Italy, Hungary
etc. But which way does causation flow here? Was this inevitable, and it just
manifests on the Facebook platform in the form of lots of memes or do people
really think that, without Facebook, Trump and Brexit never would have
happened?

~~~
pubutil
I won’t pretend to speak for everyone, but my personal problems with Facebook
are their wont to perform social experiments on unknowing users, hoarding of
user data, especially from sites that aren’t Facebook; and overreach in
multiple markets (to name just a few things).

I’m also bothered by their “free internet” programs in developing countries. I
appreciate the sentiment behind it, but the way they only have a few sites
that users can access rubs me the wrong way. I’m aware that Facebook is one of
a handful of companies involved in that project, but Zuckerberg founded the
project.

Whatever sway Facebook could have had on the 2016 election is at least
tertiary to everything else, IMO. Especially since (from what I’ve read) it
seems that that event was an example of outside actors using/gaming Facebook
to push their agenda. That could have happened anywhere, including offline.

I take just as much issue with most other social networks, but Facebook
happens to be the largest and most egregious offender of them all. I also
think that Mark Zuckerberg seems to be incredibly disingenuous.

------
jonathanhd
I will accept vaporizing it in one piece.

------
bogomipz
I think this sentence from Nick Clegg's own biography on the Liberal
Democrat's website illustrates both the hollowness and absurdity of this
piece:

>"He was also the Trade and Industry Spokesman for the Liberal group of MEPs
and piloted a radical new law breaking up telecoms monopolies." [1]

[1]
[https://www.libdems.org.uk/nick_clegg](https://www.libdems.org.uk/nick_clegg)

------
hellllllllooo
Written by Nick Cleg, who now works for Facebook - the Lib Dem party leader in
the UK who destroyed the party for ten years by making a deal with the
conservative government to enable them to implement an unpopular adgenda while
acheiving nothing he promised to his voters.

For anyone from the UK, using Nick Clegg as a representative to help improve
FBs reputation seems laughable.

------
IXxXI
The united states is the only nation in the world that attacks and breaks up
its own private sector to make itself less competitive in global markets. This
is why people make fun of americans.

------
kodz4
With elections around the corner. And everyone dependent on FB I am finding it
hard to believe anything is going to happen until after 2020.

Who expects a politician, to take a stand on this when their views, clicks and
likes might take a hit? I fully expect Trump to milk the threat of breakup to
keep his views, clicks and likes growing.

------
itcheeze
these are not the droids your looking for

------
qrbLPHiKpiux
Individual personal responsibility is a problem, lack thereof. Facebook isn't
the problem - the individual is - as a collective. They feed the beast.

------
nbabitskiy
The idea, that Facebook has to be split up, is imho delusion of perceived
grandeur, and in that respect is not unlike what fb managers seemingly think
of the company.

An export button in profile will do.

~~~
joedevon
On the fence.

I've been doing talks on ethics and dark patterns. And although most of my
research for the talks are things I knew about as they happened, it feels
different when you see it all together. Just scroll through the Wikipedia on
FB criticism for a sense of it:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook)
(as an aside, criticism of Google ain't too shabby either
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_google](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_google)
)

It's hard to look at this as something other than systematic, intentional
trampling of decency. If no laws were broken, then we are missing some
important laws.

I wouldn't cry any tears if they were broken up, that's for sure. But the
argument? Here it is:

Facebook buys up any up and comer before they become a challenge. And if they
don't sell like Instagram did and Snapchat didn't, they will crush them by
copying them until the newcomer is completely crippled.

How's Snap doing by the way?

