
Facebook Calls for Government Regulation - davisoneee
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-47762091
======
mindgam3
Discussed earlier today:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19531457](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19531457)

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imartin2k
I'm kind of tired to read what he (and other way-too-powerful-tech guys, such
as Jack "thoughtful" Dorsey) "believe" about how things should work on this
planet.

It's horrible that single individuals can gain that much influence while
possibly being entirely unfit for the kind of responsibly that comes with
that.

I have a lot of respect for how Zuckerberg has built the business that is
Facebook. But I have zero trust left in that he's able to do anything else
than just to make things worse (for everybody except Facebook's bottom line).

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acslater00
Only surprised it took this long. One of the below-the-surface purposes of
regulation is to provide a mechanism for private players to shed liability
(and public accountability) for things that go wrong in their businesses. A
builder can make 1000 choices that might increase or decrease the risk of a
fire in a new project, but as long he is within the regulated parameters of
"fire code" he is unlikely to face liability if there happens to be a fire,
since compliance will be used as a defense against a charge of negligence.

Now imagine you build nearly every building in the state of California, have a
personal relationship with the governor, and have the means to subtly
influence the development of fire codes in such a way that makes it easy for
you to comply, minimizes the effect on your business, but may make it harder
for other competitors to gain compliance. This is regulatory capture, and it
is endemic in almost every industry in America, with the glaring exception of
software.

Facebook has finally realized that they have enough influence and market power
to be confident that a regulatory regime for data and content will benefit
them over the long-run. They will not get 100% of what they want, but they
will get 80%, and in the long run, they will reap the benefit of knowing: \-
that they can continue to shape the evolution of these rules over time \- that
they no longer have to worry as much about black swan liability arising from
UGC on their network \- that the next generation of UGC startups will have a
hard time achieving compliance, either hurting their growth or motivating them
to sell to larger players like Facebook

Regulation benefits incumbents.

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jen729w
Mods, any reason the original title “Mark Zuckerberg asks governments to help
control internet content” shouldn’t be used?

The alternative used here seems clickbaity.

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nabla9
If something is not allowed, it should go through courts if government is
involved.

Free speech is not freedom from consequences, but pre-censorship is against
liberal values.

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ilaksh
Its very strange to me that no one mentions any concerns about government
censorship in this thread.

You ask the government to control what is allowed online, eventually they will
start doing it.

The problem is that many people on Hacker News have this rose-tinted glasses
worldview where their governments could never do anything too bad. Most people
here have no knowledge of the history of propaganda or that it actually is
part of western government operation.

What will happen is that governments will start saying that certain content
about certain election candidates is "fake" and then remove it. That will be
applied to some actual spam. But then some candidate will come along that is
just plain completely against the direction of the current government or there
is a grudge with a high-level official. They put something slightly emotional
in their content. The government then flags that content as spam. This is
called suppression of political dissent. And that is what you people are
asking for, and will get, in your new unified global system.

I mean I'm all for global integration but you've got to be extremely mindful
of the direction it goes in.

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jacknews
So he's calling for a regulatory barrier-to-entry of the social networking
space, along with asking governments to shoulder the responsibility for
policing the industry.

But presumably not the responsibility to collect profits

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kodz4
The only thing I want regulated is the Like count next to every human thought
being expressed.

This number influences human behavior and thinking.

Talking about privacy, free speech, harm, manipulation, polarization/echo
chambers etc etc cannot be done, without talking about the FEEDBACK
architecture that Facebook has slipped under society.

People have blindly taken this architecture based on
likes/view/click/upvote/follower counts as an unchangable base layer on top of
which everything gets built.

Whatever position anyone takes on any subject cannot be reduced to a game of
maximizing these arbit numbers.

These numbers cannot be blindly accepted as the fundamental building blocks of
society. It's just too arbitrary and thoughtless.

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ekianjo
Not surprising, Facebook can ask for regulations because it becomes a way to
lock the market for themselves - it will be difficult for new entrants to
respect all regulations from the get go, it's a well known appeal from
companies that control the market. It's not innocent.

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thepangolino
Cold me old fashioned but I miss the days of the declaration of independence
of cyberspace.

~~~
torqueTorrent
That gum you like is going to come back in style.

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scotty79
"I don't know how to sort this out. Come get me off the hook. You can censor
whatever you want! Globally!"

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mrhappyunhappy
If only legislators read HN and could see through the motives behind Mr.
Zuckerbergs announcement.

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rohan1024
Blaming is kind of defence mechanism to admit a truth about yourself.

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gyaniv
I have to say I'm happy for this, I don't see much bad that can come of this,
and I also agree that a lot of his suggestions are correct.

But I also agree that because of how powerful Facebook is, they can just do
many of those things without fear of losing business to competition (like
adopting the GDPR worldwide, or just not fighting certain governments when
they do press them for privacy issues).

I think for him to blame the governments is a bit (or a lot) an escape from
responsibility.

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grej
Facebook announces its strategy to prevent future competition, by pressing
governments to introduce regulations so opaque, open to interpretation, and
difficult to implement, that no company other than a mature large established
player with ample resources could hope to meet them.

~~~
Aqua
That's probably only half of the story. Facebook is already a monopoly and
with their endless resources they don't need government's help to marginalise
their competition. I suspect the real reason is preemptive strike, Zuckerberg
calls for something that was already coming whether he likes it or not, this
way he controls the narrative and puts Facebook in a positive light.

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raverbashing
"Facebook calls for regulatory capture" is a more apt name for it

~~~
walterbell
_Facebook Lobby reaches quorum on desired regulation._

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intended
Someone’s being studying strategy.

This is a great move for FB. This is the correct strategic move - punting the
ball.

Fundamentally most people, and that includes most people even on tech websites
like HN, don’t understand that social media governance is a black hole which
leads to hell.

By pushing the ball into the regulator’s courts, he’s hoping to divorce
himself of the baggage of lawsuits and moderation costs.

Moderation work is fractal in nature - the more nuanced your rules, the more
training surface area for abusers.

Leading to more nuanced ways to define the same issue, but the overall
structure not changing.

That means it’s a cost/spending black hole as well.

This day was coming anyway, no matter what the free speech advocates who’ve
never had to moderate difficult forums have to say.

I’m an active mod elsewhere and its obvious to me that the internet and social
media firms will dump the costs of actually moderating the web at first
chance.

It would eat their income almost entirely.

There’s no automated way to fix this so scaling is man power driven.

The manpower issues are simple anyway - deciding whether something is
newsworthy or whether it will be pg-13/A/or PEGI-x is a whole different
problem.

This means a national editorial desk in each country.

So all the benefits SM firms have been enjoying by sucking up the benefit of
attention which used to be filtered by editor and journalists teams now has to
be spent.

(I recognize that news was dying before the internet.)

Facebook has the answer.

It’s good PR.

It’s good law.

And it’s good for profits.

~~~
2sk21
Absolutely agree - despite all of the advances in "AI" (quotes used
deliberately), I simply don't see fully automated moderation happening any
time in the near future.

~~~
chillydawg
But it doesn't need to be fully automated. Automate 999 out of 1000 (probably
quite easily) and flag the rest for human review. Surely we've got enough GPUs
now to train a neural network smart enough to do that.

~~~
intended
Automation of moderation IS very dangerous.

If there is one thing people need to realize, is that automated moderation is
inherently dangerous.

People think of news and informaiton online. but its all just Content.

CONTENT can be anything, fake news, lies, or fighting against an unjust
leader, rebellion, fighting for the environment and more.

Tools that effectively get better at moderating content do so for ALL content.

Any tool that you use to cut bad will is always useable to harm good.

\--------

So far I have good reason to assume that intent is not paresable from content
online, so human beings should be relatively safe online.

Figuring out INTENT, is the holy grail of moderation. If you know why someone
said something, you know whether its meant as Nazi apologia or whether its no
malicious historical context.

As long as we don't figure out a way to automate that, private thoughts are
safe.

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trpc
I like how Zuckerberg insists on blaming all his problems on Russia, white
nationalists and all these memes and not addressing the real issues of his
company because he knows he can exploit the MSM due to its liberal/left
tendencies for a long time. Facebook is a spamming website pretending to be a
social network. Everybody can tell the difference of Facebook now and pre-2014
before he deliberately changed the feed algorithm to become the biggest spam
website of all time in order to make money. Is the low interaction rate on
Facebook now compared to 5 years ago due to Russia? Is hiding posts from pages
people like and subscribe is due to Russia? Is extorting pages to pay to
promote posts to get 1/10 of the organic reach (mind you this is the organic
reach of people who like and subscribe to your page, they can't even see your
posts on their feed anymore) of what they got for free 5 years ago is due to
Russia?

How about reverting all these changes and going back to simple feed as in
2000s and early 2010s Mr. Zuckerberg? oh yes you won't because the entire
business plan of your company is to sell users data to advertisers and make
users stay in your services as long as possible to view and click on these
ads.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
_"...Facebook is a spamming website pretending to be a social network..."_

This.

The claim to offer you tools for controlling what you see and your privacy. I
spent quite a bit of time trying to limit idiotic, banal, and click-baity crap
out of my feed. What did I learn? That more and more of it keeps coming.

At some point, I realized what it reminded me of: the early days of email,
when nobody had invented spam filters yet. You could easily spend 5, 10, 15
minutes a day clicking and deleting junk ... only to see just as much in your
inbox the next day.

Facebook uses your friends against you. That lonely lady that lives down the
street? Turns out she loves horses -- and wants to share things from a 100
different horse sites with everybody all day long. The teenage kid that your
uncle is raising? He loves funny memes, and there are a 100 of them too.
Repeat and rinse for anybody, anywhere that you might consider some version of
"friend" who wants attention.

And they keep finding more sources. As quickly as you block one, 15 more show
up.

I tried finding the people who don't value my time and preventing them from
sharing anything except things they wrote themselves. Nope. Not an option.
Wonder why, Facebook?

It's a captive-audience, self-generating spam machine. Anybody that knows
anything about regulatory capture saw this politicized pitch for more
regulation coming a mile away. We were always headed here.

~~~
threatofrain
But aren't these... the people you accept into your network? Facebook injects
ads and applies their own capricious weighing to the visibility of posts, but
doesn't the content ultimately originate from the people you accept?

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Sure. So here's the question: do you want everybody you want to keep in touch
with to have control over your attention span throughout the day? The site is
engineered so that it's a steady stream of almost-interesting, emotionally-
manipulative things somebody you once knew finds interesting.

For many things, at least at first, I was more curious as to why these people
found these things interesting, so I clicked. I slowly realized that "things I
rind interesting to share" and "things a lonely person who has a lot of
emotional drama in their life" would find interesting to share are worlds
apart.

Doesn't mean I don't like these people. Doesn't mean I want to shut them off.
Many of these people are part of my past, they feature highly in important
memories. And Facebook is the _only_ way to stay in touch. (No, my 85-year-old
former English teacher isn't going to join Slack anytime soon)

So we're left with this binary yes-no choice. Either you accept them in your
life and spend the rest of your years each day going through and muting all
the various ways they find to spend their time -- or you either unfriend or
unfollow them and have no idea what they're doing.

Unfollow is best of those two options, but then you end up missing things you
really wanted to hear about, like them getting sick and dying. Facebook
presents a Faustian choice: accept your "friends" and let them spam you or
mute them completely -- and perhaps never hear from them again. Who wants to
do that to Aunt Lisa?

~~~
threatofrain
The situation I see is that most people have multiple points of contact
(phone, Line, FaceTime, Whatsapp, even Facebook Messenger) and different
overlapping social networks which relay information. There's a difference
between chatting with someone on Facebook Messenger vs. having the Facebook
feed for major signals in life like death.

I think there may be "too much" when you're keeping track of people who die
(or get married) and you're legitimately nervous about how you would've missed
the news had it not been for Facebook.

