Facebook is bad and democracy is not safe

It’s not my responsibility to solve their problems, it’s theirs. None of this is intractable, they just haven’t cared enough.

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There is nothing that can be done. It’s simply a defect of democracy. Such defects have been exploited by Putin or other totalitarians for a long time, it’s nothing new. But the benefits of democracy greatly outweight it’s downsides.

Also, this vulnerability of democracy is taken care of when it comes to wars and foreign affairs. The media, no matter their leaning, totally submits to the official state narrative and behaves almost as obedient as in a totalitarian state. And this is a good thing that I totally agree with. Foreign afairs should not be decided by the people, otherwise we end up with totalitarian states being able to take any decision they want while democracies are totally paralized. A good example is the vietnam war where USA was forced to leave the war because of public opinion. Almost 3 times more people died in the next 2 years than people that died during the 7 years war and the country also suffered half a century of abject poverty and oppresion as a result of that. But USA has learned something from that and now media liberty on foreign affairs does not exist anymore.

But other than foreign affairs, I don’t agree with media or the internet being controlled.

Well right now, the social media companies in the US are under intense pressure from the political and national security establishment to do more to police their content and combat “polarizing” or “divisive” content, especially from “foerign” sources. I suspect these pressures will eventually lead to a much more heavily controlled social media environment in the US.

Perhaps, someday, someone in Silicon Valley will invent a Watson-like knowledge engine that is so powerful, and so capable of absorbing all incremental additions to scientific knowledge, that they will be able to convince Washington policy makers that it should be permitted to scan and label every declarative sentence on the internet with a simple “true” or “false” label.

Can’t wait to have that true and false thing implemented on buddhist topics :smiley: Who will get to run it ? An abbhidhabamist ? A mahasist ? :smiley:

That’s the problem with this sort of things. And facebook is pretty much a monopoly, it’s not like TV where you can just change the channel if you don’t like it.

PS: They actually did pass a law or a deal recently with FB to censor russian propaganda stuff. It was passed in deep quiet. Hopefully it will only affect russian propaganda.

No. This is false narrative, and inaccurate analysis imo.

Democracy is old, totalitarianism is old, propaganda is old. Social media is new, and is an unfamiliar potent influence, with surprising effects.

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Thanks for posting this info on Facebook - It is much worse than I had thought. Looking into the articles I came upon a reference to Richard Stallman and he has a page about Facebook and also has pages on problems with operating systems and sites as well - worth a read to see just how pervasive this is.

I started looking at what alternatives were out there and came upon something called Diaspora.

Diaspora is a nonprofit, user-owned, distributed social network that is based upon the free Diaspora software. Diaspora consists of a group of independently owned nodes (called pods) which interoperate to form the network. As of March 2014, there are more than 1 million Diaspora accounts.[3]

The social network is not owned by any one person or entity, keeping it from being subject to corporate take-overs or advertising.

I think the OP mis-identfies the threat. FB is more of an exemplar of one type of threat. The first story cited in the OP could have been about any popular media site including ones with technology like suttacentral.

My theory is that if FB were to disappear the same things could be done with a different platform … including platforms like this one. The technology behind suttacentral could be so used.

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Summary (and @Feynman, please see highlighted text below):

“In 2014, Facebook bought WhatsApp for $16 billion, making its co-founders – Jan Koum and Brian Acton – very wealthy men,” reports The Verge. “Koum continues to lead the company, but Acton quit earlier this year to start his own foundation.” Today, Acton told his followers on Twitter to delete Facebook. From the report:
“It is time,” Acton wrote, adding the hashtag #deletefacebook. Acton, who is worth $6.5 billion, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Nor did Facebook and WhatsApp. It was unclear whether Acton’s feelings about Facebook extend to his own app. But last month, Acton invested $50 million into Signal, an independent alternative to WhatsApp. The tweet came after a bruising five-day period for Facebook that has seen regulators swarm and its stock price plunge following concerns over data privacy in the wake of revelations about Cambridge Analytica’s misuse of user data.
Acton isn’t the only one taking to Twitter to announce their breakup with Facebook. The #DeleteFacebook movement is gaining steam following the New York Times’ report about how the data of 50 million users had been unknowingly leaked and purchased to aid President Trump’s successful 2016 bid for the presidency. For many users, the news “highlighted the danger of Facebook housing the personal information of billions of users,” reports SFGate. “And even before the Cambridge Analytica news, Facebook has been grappling with its waning popularity in the U.S. The company lost 1 million domestic users last quarter – its first quarterly drop in daily users.”

Many good links there…

https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/the-wrap/article/DeleteFacebook-Movement-Gains-Steam-After-50-12765222.php

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I “deleted” my account this week. As i posted just before, FB has been weaponized. I will not participate.

or be a part, used by warmongers and tyrants to mess with the world.

I think Zuckerberg has been “summoned” to the UK. i wonder if he realizes his legal jeapordy yet.

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I came here to post Stallman’s website(I got yelled at by discourse for trying to post the same link, haha).

Anyway, I thought it would be beneficial to highlight some of the stuff from those articles.

Facebook has imposed political censorship on Instagram, bowing to Russia.

Facebook has frequently removed postings about protests (both planned and ongoing), political satire, and various political issues. Specific examples are given below.

Facebook deleted the news item announcing a major protest against Monsanto.

Facebook has developed software to allow various countries to directly control censorship of what useds* in that country can see.

Facebook censored an ACLU post about censorship.

Whistleblower Christopher Wylie exposed how Cambridge Analytica misused the data Facebook gave it, so Facebook shut down his account.

Facebook’s “conversation topics” experiment actively shows certain selected useds everything that their “friends” are doing.

Facebook bought WhatsApp and committed not to combine that data with Facebook’s other data. Now it is going to do just that.

Facebook’s mobile app snoops on SMS messages.

Pages that contain Facebook “like” buttons enable Facebook to track visitors to those pages. Facebook tracks Internet users that see “like” buttons, even users who never visited facebook.com and never click on those buttons.

Tricks that Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat use to make people feel anxious and spend time there.

(think casino)

Being used by Facebook tends to be bad for your mental health.

* useds: Stallman is referring to people that “use” Facebook. His claim is that people don’t actually use Facebook, but are “used” by Facebook.

There’s much more: Reasons not to use (i.e., be used by) Facebook

Hopefully this shines some more light.

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There was a really great discussion on this topic on this week’s edition of The Minefield podcast.

They touched on some issues which I haven’t seen in the discussion here; including whether we are really meant to have such large ‘friend’/social networks and whether this is a corruptor of democracy or at least Athenean democracy.

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I am proposing that the US government nationalize Facebook, get rid of all the advertising, and eliminate the parts of Facebook that exist to sell advertising and data. They could run the whole thing at a cost of only $10-$20 per US taxpayer.

I blogged about the Facebook issue today:

I don’t think that’s possible. Excuse my ignorance, but Facebook is a corporation. The US government can’t just intervene like that. Corporations have the same rights as individuals, no?

But, I don’t really know; I would love to, though, so if I’m wrong, please do explain.

We might have to buy it, unless we can make a legal case for an emergency taking. Given that Facebook has massively violated the public trust and its data giveaways now constitute a major threat to property and security, perhaps such a case can be made. If they are sued for antitrust violations, perhaps handing over the company can be part of the settlement.

My concern here is that FB will be painted as “the bad apple” and the may other ways in which private electronic data is used unethically will be forgotten/missed. Facebook is just symptomatic of a greater issue. It may be an illness that is pervasive throughout the entire internet.

Yes, I agree. This is just the tip of the iceberg, I suspect. There is no Facebook subscription fee, nor or a fee for any of the other online services. Their business models depend completely on collecting data and selling it in some way, either to help marketers target buyers, or for some other purposes.

Farcebook is the spawn of the devil. :yum:

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“I don’t think that’s possible. Excuse my ignorance, but Facebook is a corporation. The US government can’t just intervene like that. Corporations have the same rights as individuals, no?”

“But, I don’t really know; I would love to, though, so if I’m wrong, please do explain.”

In the USA, corporations do NOT have all the same rights as human people; though there has been a trend to grant more and more people rights to corporations, this has been contested, and is a change rising and falling in this society.

Since they cannot be imprisoned, do not suffer aging illness or death in the same way human or biological lives do, i do not think they should, either.

Historically, the USA has lots of case law and legislated law that government can apply involuntary restraints, punishments, seizures etc to protect society and individual rights. This is recognized as part of the nature of “government”. Tax refusal is unlawful, tax evasion is unlawful, tax avoidance may be lawful or not but can be made very expensive.

Corporations in the US have, as a matter of public policy since the 1970s, faced only token fines even in blatant law breaking. The rationale has been, if the corporation is fined out of existence, individuals and communities can be hurt, by lose of jobs or other material effects. Also very large fines are often just passed on to consumers, by jacked up prices or rates.

Meanwhile the operators / board / CEOs etc who broke the law, get to hide behind the polite fantasy and social construct “obligation” to make profits. We may imprison more people per capita than any other nation, but that is unfortunately not the wealthy criminals usually; it is poor and marginalized people within our now very stratified society.

America has not had feudalism - YET. lol and if that statement causes a “serves them right” conditioned response - it’s a global world; suffering is less and less localized, everywhere.

The USA has federalized / taken over entire industries before. While not exactly something i would expect from this administration, EU law, and other jurisdictions might make it moot.

I am not a lawyer, anywhere.

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