Oh, there’s no company based in the United States that’s “too big to regulate or control.” We’ve had all the laws that are needed on the books since the first president Roosevelt designed to take down monopolies. It’s just that our political culture now is to turn a blind eye. Plus, our leaders are tech illiterate people who barely understand what is happening these days. I mean, who does? Even those of us who actually know how software works can’t keep up. We just watched one of the world’s biggest cyber security firms (FireEye) announce that they and most of the institutional world has been hacked in an even more fantastical way than ever before. Perhaps that’s the innovation of the 2010s. Hacking.
I also don’t exactly get what “breaking up” a company like Facebook would look like, either. I mean, okay: We could spin off Instagram and WhatsApp. Sure. But beyond that, what would make them not a big monopoly? Maybe force them to create a separate social media company for each country and state of the US? There’s already competition in the form of other social media platforms. IDK, and I expect regulators are a little stumped, too.
The real issue to me isn’t that Facebook is big, it’s that social media has turned out to be better than mass media are driving people crazy with propaganda. Politics is rapidly becoming international as countries jump into each others elections. Here in the US, we appear to have just witnessed one of the two major parties officially decide it’s against fair elections. It’s all very dystopian, and court action against Facebooks seems to me very, very much like closing the barndoor after the horses are gone.
India banned TikTok. It’s not hard, just pass a law.
I understand that the problems are complex. The thing is, it’s not our job to solve them.
Imagine there was a restaurant, and the health inspector did a random test and found that their food was full of E. coli. “Fix it or shut down,” would be the message. “But it’s hard to fix!” the owner might say. “We get food from different places. And all the different staff, and keeping everything clean, and everything!” Yes, running a restaurant is hard, we all know that. But if you can’t do it without killing people, you need to close down.
They created the problems, it is up to them to solve them, and if they cannot, they shouldn’t be allowed to do business. Maybe the whole idea of social media as we have it today is a fundamentally flawed concept. (I think so!) What would replace it? We don’t know. Maybe an open standard for social sharing (like email but better!) Maybe the Fediverse? Maybe make a limit for the size of social media? (1,000,000 people seems like a lot.)
Remember when tech was all about innovation, about solving problems, about “move fast and break things”? They’re supposed to be the best and brightest. Why can’t they solve the problems that their own deliberate choices have created?
But I think all this is merely window dressing. The real problem is far more fundamental: we need to learn to value right speech. At its root it is a moral problem.
Things are getting no better at Facebook.
They are just getting started. They are building tech to read minds.
Do you trust them with this power? With this power over our children? Never forget what Zuck said:
Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard. Just ask. I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
What? How’d you manage that one?
People just submitted it. I don’t know why. They “trust me”. Dumb f***s.
Let’s say that actually happens in the West. What do we do about the other social networks? Do we ban them too? Maybe you don’t care about them at the moment because they’re small, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have the same kind of problems. It just means they’re not on the radar at the moment. Let’s say TikTok gets banned and then PikPok comes in to fill the resulting vacuum. What do you do then? Ban them too? What about LikLok and NikNok over there?
What about all the 13-year-olds who know how to use VPNs to get around these bans? It takes about 3 minutes to set up a VPN connection. That’s how the Chinese get around the Facebook ban.
Banning things doesn’t work. It just drives things underground. America tried to ban alcohol in 1920. It worked for a while until black market alcohol gained sufficient momentum to counteract the positive effects of forced sobriety. Meanwhile the government was losing a massive amount of taxes. People have been trying to ban prostitution for millennia. Good luck with that one – any well travelled tourist knows it’s never remotely hard to find. I do fancy living in a world without alcohol and prostitution, but that will only ever be achieved through better education and the empowerment of women, and not through the whack-a-mole approach of banning things that we don’t like.
I’m sure a lot of restaurants got away with that before germ theory became standard teaching in schools. A closer analogy might be a restaurant with hidden cameras everywhere. When you touch the menu, it captures and stores your fingerprints. The food contains nanomachines that remain in your body long after you leave the restaurant, track your movement, eating habits, read your mind, and relay them all back to the restaurant.
I might try to get this regulated as soon as possible, but I would also try to push for greater awareness of hidden cameras, nanomachines, and mind-readers, how they work. Not saying that you yourself are guilty of this, but it’s all too common for people to try and ban things that they don’t understand and that sets a bad precedent. Tech literacy is the only long-term inoculation against this and future technological threats.
Maybe it is flawed. Human brains didn’t evolve to process the input of millions of voices at once. But I don’t see it going anywhere. Social media is way too convenient, and way too profitable. I’m happy to see that Facebook is being scrutinized, but being fixated on it is not seeing the forest for the trees. There is a widespread lack of tech literacy among all age demographics that needs to be addressed.
Yes, I was born in the 80’s at a time when the idea of having a computer at home was just starting to become popular. Right now we’re in a phase of evolution rather than innovation. I agree that big corporations can never be expected to self-regulate, and they need constant pressure and scrutiny to evolve and refine their practices. I don’t think that motioning to get things banned sets a good example.
You know right speech, I kinda know right speech, most of the people on Sutta Central know right speech. Good luck invoking that outside the Buddhist world where wit, sarcasm, and the right to offend are often held in high regard, and arguments are more about scoring points and less about truth.
I think it’s easier to get people, especially children, curious about things, and curious about technology. Tech curiosity opens a path to tech literacy. A tech literate person will be inoculated against the current threats you mention, as well as future threats that we haven’t yet conceived of in our minds.
It’s definitely an attention grabbing headline, but reading the body of the article, none of it seems that far-fetched. Haven’t we had some kind of mind reading technology for a while now? We have technology that can predict what choice a person will make before they actually make it. We have brain control interfaces where we can basically plug a brain into a robot and control it with thoughts. It doesn’t look like they’re at the point where they can tap into the juicy personal thoughts that run through my mind every day.
By all means people should keep an eye on these developments, but “omg they’re building mind reading devices” sounds a lot scarier than what the tech is actually capable of at the moment.
I’m no fan of Zuckerberg, but let’s not get worked up over what 19-year-olds said during a power trip now.
I’m not. I’m reminding people of what the person behind this thought of them when he created his software.
Being 19 is not an excuse, it is when character is formed. I used to be 19 years old, and I was never a like this.
Think it through: what happens if you take a foolish and immoral 19 year old, and grant them unlimited power, fame, and wealth? Do you think they are going to to get better? That’s not how it works. He has been massively rewarded for his behavior, and all the history of Facebook shows that it has just gotten worse.
You think that I’m overstating it? Well, nothing I’ve said is nearly as far out as the extreme radical voice of — checks notes — Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic, a 150 year-old news magazine from Boston. But you know what? She’s goddamn right.
Anyhow, I think we agree to a similar extent that social networks are dangerous and require more stringent regulation. I just think that when people are too fixated on big corporations, it distracts from the more fundamental problem here which is a lack of tech literacy. A tech illiterate senate can’t regulate anything, and based on the questions the senators asked Zuckerberg at his questioning, the lack of tech literacy is obvious.
Lack of tech literacy and education is also at the heart of the political and social stagnation in Myanmar. As someone who lived there for ten years and still travels there every year or so, I couldn’t help but groan a little when you wrote that Facebook is destroying democracy in Myanmar. I mean, first of all you can’t destroy something that never really existed. But more importantly, the utter lack of education – technical and otherwise – is responsible for this and countless other messes they’ve gotten into over there. We’re talking about a populace that went from not knowing what copy and paste is to suddenly having access to affordable smartphones and the Internet in a couple of years. Most internet users in Myanmar lack basic computing skills such as copy, paste, and writing an email. And then suddenly they got phones and Facebook. What could possibly go wrong! If Facebook disappeared overnight, everyone would mobilise on some other social network. The hardcore junta supporters have already assembled on a Russian network called VK since their beloved general U Whatever got banned from Facebook.
You can point out the problems with Facebook and TikTok all you want, and rightfully so. But that doesn’t cut into the heart of the issue, especially in Southeast Asia.
like this.