I see you're getting some downvotes, but I agree with you. Put another way, though: the problem is not Zuckerberg per se, it's the business model of advertising-supported, general-purpose social networks. If you took everybody out of Facebook and replaced them all with other equally qualified people, they would behave the same, as an organization. The problem is not Who, it's What. You can't
"fix" Facebook, because the problem is pretty fundamental to what they are.
Zuckerberg holds 90% of class b shares which have 10x the voting rights of normal shares and gives him 4 billion votes. There are -2.4 billion class A shares. He has stacked the board with loyalist yes men. It is a dictatorship bent on maximizing profit. The business model and how they operate is defined by Zuckerberg. It seems to me that he should hold the majority of the blame.
strong disagree that a Facebook staffed with different folks would behave the same. Zuckerberg has a majority of the votes due to his super voting shares. Leadership matters, individual actions matter. Twitter, for all its faults, has a leader who is leading the company down a different path than the pure money chasing and dominance, and i can imagine a differently lead Twitter being making more money and being worse for society. Zuckerberg is motivated by dominance, nothing else, and he has the ability to change course. Their actions are constrained along a set of possible outcomes but the leaders of both companies are choosing where in that set they want to land.
Exactly, except that we don't have to imagine anything. If Facebook were to disappear today, there already exist many companies with similar business models willing to take its place. Some more willing to cross the line than Facebook.
This is the critical point virtually all criticism of Facebook often fails to address. Sure, you could regulate to death/kill Facebook tomorrow with legislation in country X. All that happens is a clone launches immediately overnight from a country with less onerous regulation, one that anglosphere legal systems will have even less direct control over than the Facebook we have today.
FB, for all its flaws, is at least still based in a democratic nation and operates within a (_relatively speaking_) fair legal system. That the FEC is able to demand (and force implementation of!) regulation already at FB is evidence this works, at least a little. Better the devil you know as they say...
We can't remove the natural human desire to connect to one another on the internet (and associated problems). For me personally, the cat is out of the bag - you can't rewind time and uninvent the underlying communication infrastructure. If people want a social network, the internet will make it for them again and again and host from whatever polity/region allows.
Regulations are never for particular companies, that would be legally untenable. Whatever regulation a country comes up with for Facebook will also affect any other company trying to get into their footsteps. Regulation is the only way to prevent companies from abusing their positions of power. The idea is illusory that they would do it voluntarily even if they could make a profit. Some of them might under some leadership, but not in general and not all of them.
Yes. This is surveillance capitalism taken to its extreme. Facebook didn’t invent it, they’re just doing it in a way that makes the consequences more difficult to ignore than Google, which has been able to largely sidestep the blowback by being mission critical to so many people and also having massive goodwill projects that don’t directly point to being profit driven.
It’s up to citizens of the US and EU to reign this in. We can hate the player but we gotta hate the game even more.
I would argue they basically invented it. A lot of the dirty tactics in play today are because companies feel the need to catch up to Facebook, who set the ecosystem as it is by continually being dishonest and predatory
>Surveillance capitalism was invented around 2001 as the solution to financial emergency in the teeth of the dotcom bust when the fledgling company faced the loss of investor confidence. As investor pressure mounted, Google’s leaders abandoned their declared antipathy toward advertising. Instead they decided to boost ad revenue by using their exclusive access to user data logs (once known as “data exhaust”) in combination with their already substantial analytical capabilities and computational power, to generate predictions of user click-through rates, taken as a signal of an ad’s relevance.
>Operationally this meant that Google would both repurpose its growing cache of behavioural data, now put to work as a behavioural data surplus, and develop methods to aggressively seek new sources of this surplus.
>The company developed new methods of secret surplus capture that could uncover data that users intentionally opted to keep private, as well as to infer extensive personal information that users did not or would not provide. And this surplus would then be analysed for hidden meanings that could predict click-through behaviour. The surplus data became the basis for new predictions markets called targeted advertising.
>Here was the origin of surveillance capitalism in an unprecedented and lucrative brew: behavioural surplus, data science, material infrastructure, computational power, algorithmic systems, and automated platforms. As click-through rates skyrocketed, advertising quickly became as important as search. Eventually it became the cornerstone of a new kind of commerce that depended upon online surveillance at scale.
>The success of these new mechanisms only became visible when Google went public in 2004. That’s when it finally revealed that between 2001 and its 2004 IPO, revenues increased by 3,590%.
>Surveillance capitalism is no more limited to advertising than mass production was limited to the fabrication of the Ford Model T. It quickly became the default model for capital accumulation in Silicon Valley, embraced by nearly every startup and app.
I mean, GDPR is a step in the direction. Many websites, and by extension, people seem to think that you comply by 'gdpr' by putting up a stupid cookie banner.
But the real compliance is not storing PII, then you don't even need a cookie bar!
Asking companies not to retain PII is like asking a crack addict to please ignore the crack pipe and torch while you step out for an hour. The only solution is to make PII radioactive. Tax it. Burn companies that abuse it or leak it to the ground. HIPAA is a fucking nightmare but companies still figure it out:
GDPR is mostly that; the penalties for data breaches are essentially a tax on PII. GDPR also restricts how you can process data and the user should always be informed and has the right to object.
The problem is that the GDPR is not being enforced seriously.
I think you're on the right track, but it's not just because it's an "advertising-supported" business model. It's the fundamental laws that govern our society: profit. Replace Zuckerberg, Bezos, et al. with anyone else, and the new CEOs' decisions will be bound by the same constraints.
Thought experiment: Cory Doctorow becomes CEO of Facebook with Zuckerberg's entire stock allocation and equivalent voting control. Do you stand by your assertion that nothing changes?
One of two things happens:
1) Cory Doctorow gradually morphs into Zuckerberg
2) Another social network, run more like Facebook is currently, replaces the one that Cory Doctorow is running. The reason Facebook didn't go the way of Friendster, Livejournal, and MySpace, is that he figured out how to play the game (as it currently exists) better than anyone else. Cory Doctorow would be like someone trying to win the Tour de France when everyone else was doping. In this analogy, Zuckerberg is Lance Armstrong, playing the existing game the way you need to play it to win that game.
Reddit isn't perfect, but it is run totally differently from Facebook, including: offering paid subscriptions, having an open API, and not trying to justify widespread surveillance as an ad-targeting tool.
