Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

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Millennie Al
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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by Millennie Al » Thu Apr 02, 2020 2:14 am

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Thu Apr 02, 2020 2:05 am
Millennie Al wrote:
Thu Apr 02, 2020 12:50 am
noggins wrote:
Wed Apr 01, 2020 9:38 am
I think actually making either work means smashing facebooks commercial basis. So why not just smash then anyway.
Because lots of people seem to find them useful. If you don't care what people want, you're part of the problem - not part of the solution.
Which people find Facebook's commercial basis useful (other than Facebook investors)?

Or are you intending to suggest that their service (which lots of people find useful) depends upon their (post hoc) commercial basis?
Facebook is not funded by charity. If you just smash its commercial basis then it ceases to exist. If you think you have a suitable different basis, the correct thing to do is to try it out first. Destruction is easy: creation is hard.

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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by tom p » Fri Apr 03, 2020 12:52 pm

If people want a facebook that doesn't sell their data, then they have to pay for it.
If you're not paying for a product, then you are the product.

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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by Bird on a Fire » Fri Apr 03, 2020 8:37 pm

tom p wrote:
Fri Apr 03, 2020 12:52 pm
If people want a facebook that doesn't sell their data, then they have to pay for it.
If you're not paying for a product, then you are the product.
I'm not. I'm a shoplifter.
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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by plodder » Sun Jul 12, 2020 6:40 am

break them up.

make the code open source.

wait for thousands of cross compatible platforms to evolve (like, overnight).

the competition would be extremely healthy and we’d all end up with nice dashboards that show us whatever we wanted.

also solves the problem of social media being too big to tax .

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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by lpm » Sun Jul 12, 2020 8:56 am

But that ignores people who have a professional need to publicise themselves/their work on social media.

It's already a nasty time drain, just building Twitter, Facebook and Insta profiles.

How can Reyansh in my little story build a profile and get his concerns onto the national agenda, if everything is fragmented. Or, to take a totally imaginary blogger called Mr Jobbins, how can he publicise his blogs, turn them into published articles, get a book deal, promote a book, if he has to spend all his time seeking out his audience in nooks and crannies?
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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by plodder » Sun Jul 12, 2020 11:32 am

Nothing is fragmented. If it was open source then the various platforms would talk to each other.

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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by Bird on a Fire » Sun Jul 12, 2020 11:59 am

Perhaps another way of looking at what I think plodder is talking about, is that everyone posts into the same network (even if its hosting is distributed) but have a choice of different "platforms" using the network's API to select, filter, sort and present those posts.

This is a bit like how RSS works, which is still how I follow blogs and journals.

Cross-compatibility is probably achievable. For instance I can already configure Instagram to post automatically to both Twitter and Facebook if I want to (I don't).
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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by Bird on a Fire » Sun Jul 12, 2020 12:05 pm

If content were being promoted by different algorithms to different users, it would probably become harder to game the system and content promoted would be closer to things people genuinely want to engage with.

Users are sensitive to perceived inauthenticity, so if one platform got overrun with manipulated content, platform owners would have an incentive to prevent the manipulation or risk losing their userbase to another platform.

At the moment they don't have much incentive, as each platform monopolises a network, and attempts to start new networks (eg ello, menschn, ruqqus, voat, kialo, etc) often struggle to pick up critical mass.
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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by plodder » Sun Jul 12, 2020 9:40 pm

Yes, exactly. With other monopolies we look at market share before deciding whether or not to break companies up (or regulate the sh.t out of them). Given the opportunities breaking up seems overwhelmingly the more positive option to me. It's ridiculous that Facebook owns Instagram for example.

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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by Millennie Al » Mon Jul 13, 2020 1:41 am

plodder wrote:
Sun Jul 12, 2020 11:32 am
Nothing is fragmented. If it was open source then the various platforms would talk to each other.
Do you know what "open source" means?

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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by Millennie Al » Mon Jul 13, 2020 1:46 am

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Sun Jul 12, 2020 12:05 pm
If content were being promoted by different algorithms to different users, it would probably become harder to game the system and content promoted would be closer to things people genuinely want to engage with.
That's where the web started. Anyone could set up a website and there were many different search engines to use. Such a situation is unstable, as once one search engine is perceived to be better, lots of people switch to using it, so it gets richer, leading to it having the resources to improve more, and so on until there's only one major one left.

Similarly on the hosting side. There's nothing stopping you setting up your own website from scratch. There are plenty of tools to assist. But for many people it's so much easier to exploit an established platform where all they have to do is type in their message.

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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by plodder » Mon Jul 13, 2020 6:33 am

once one company dominates it needs to be broken up. that’s one of the basic rules of capitalism - it requires competition. without competition we get sludge.

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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by shpalman » Mon Jul 13, 2020 8:43 am

plodder wrote:
Mon Jul 13, 2020 6:33 am
once one company dominates it needs to be broken up. that’s one of the basic rules of capitalism - it requires competition. without competition we get sludge.
... but social media only works if everyone else is also on it.
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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by lpm » Mon Jul 13, 2020 8:50 am

plodder wrote:
Mon Jul 13, 2020 6:33 am
once one company dominates it needs to be broken up. that’s one of the basic rules of capitalism - it requires competition. without competition we get sludge.
I'm not sure that's true.

Societies benefit from monopolies. In the UK, the English language has a monopoly and it benefits everyone to all use the same. There's a natural monopoly of weights and measures, and the UK muddle shows how foolish it is to run with two. We all sit down at a Qwerty keyboard with a mouse and it's very helpful to have everyone using Windows - I was swearing the other day about having to waste five minutes googling how to turn a pages doc into a proper word.doc.

It's really useful to have all relatives on a single monopoly. It's not just the nodes thing, it's also the common convenience. You comment on a photo of your cousin's baby in the same way as your sister-in-law's aunt does. I want Facebook to be a monopoly on this. It's also the place to establish local groups, e.g. for coronavirus support, because it has such good reach into low internet users (such as elderly people who use to for photos of grandkids).

Are we forgetting how good Facebook is, at its core function of providing free connections between people?
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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by plodder » Mon Jul 13, 2020 10:17 am

The post-facebook and twitter competing platforms would obviously be cross compatible.

You're used to a world where you need to remember which of your conversations are on Facebook, which on twitter, which ones are on here, which ones are on Instagram, which are via SMS, which are on your emails, which are on Reddit, which ones are comments on blog posts, which ones are on WhatsApp etc.

You're also used to a world where you need to remember which of your friends prefer to use Facebook, twitter, which ones are on here, which ones are on Instagram, SMS, emails, Reddit, blog posts, which ones are on WhatsApp etc.

These weird silos are stupid and what you actually want is just to log into your phone and have it take care of that sh.t for you. The actual platforms should just talk to each other. You should be able to opt out of their algorithms by going to a competitor.

We don't really have standardised monopolised weights and measures any more. Who buys a kilo of cherries? You buy a bag and some clever person has already worked out the price.

We don't have monopolised language so much any more either. Everyone knows what this means: :roll:

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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by Bird on a Fire » Mon Jul 13, 2020 10:25 am

shpalman wrote:
Mon Jul 13, 2020 8:43 am
plodder wrote:
Mon Jul 13, 2020 6:33 am
once one company dominates it needs to be broken up. that’s one of the basic rules of capitalism - it requires competition. without competition we get sludge.
... but social media only works if everyone else is also on it.
I think this is why plodder is talking about having all the platforms being cross-compatible. What we're really talking about is breaking the monopoly that particular algorithms hold over public discourse, while simultaneously expanding the underlying network (by breaking down the arbitrary silos).

As Millennie Al notes it would probably have to be an ongoing process, due to the way networks behave over time.
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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by plodder » Mon Jul 13, 2020 10:30 am

Every other field of business happily evolves over time. No-one is saying that the future needs to be fixed - in fact that's pretty obviously daft.

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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by lpm » Mon Jul 13, 2020 10:48 am

I want silos. I need silos.

I use Facebook for extended family stuff, Twitter for professional self-publicity, Whatsapp for close family/friend stuff, emails for work, Instagram for pretty photos, forums for discussing interesting stuff, bookmarked blogs and websites for interesting journalism or articles. Each works really well for their individual purposes.

I don't want any of this to mix. It's vital to remember where you are - I've seen people run into big personal problems from forgetting to keep political rants on Whatsapp and letting it spill onto Facebook. I think people on this forum who have linked identities into Facebook identities are totally mad. I think people who get into arguments on Facebook are self-destructive.

If the problem exists between chair and keyboard, you're not going to solve it with infrastructure. It's more like a public health challenge.
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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by Stephanie » Mon Jul 13, 2020 12:57 pm

ha, this explains so much about you, lpm. though i don't know if i believe you possess an instagram account.
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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by Bird on a Fire » Mon Jul 13, 2020 1:14 pm

lpm wrote:
Mon Jul 13, 2020 10:48 am
I want silos. I need silos.

I use Facebook for extended family stuff, Twitter for professional self-publicity, Whatsapp for close family/friend stuff, emails for work, Instagram for pretty photos, forums for discussing interesting stuff, bookmarked blogs and websites for interesting journalism or articles. Each works really well for their individual purposes.

I don't want any of this to mix. It's vital to remember where you are - I've seen people run into big personal problems from forgetting to keep political rants on Whatsapp and letting it spill onto Facebook. I think people on this forum who have linked identities into Facebook identities are totally mad. I think people who get into arguments on Facebook are self-destructive.

If the problem exists between chair and keyboard, you're not going to solve it with infrastructure. It's more like a public health challenge.
I'm much the same, FWIW. I don't post anything I'd be exactly embarrassed about on any platform, but I don't want to bombard work colleagues with social frippery nor my 'normal' friends with dozens of papers about birds.

I suppose under the plodder approach, you could have a different account on each of the frontends that you use, which would still be tailored for different purposes, and so could still post different stuff and follow different people on each.

But yes, it could get messy, especially for less technologically ept folk who might not quite get that it's all interlinked under the hood.
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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by plodder » Mon Jul 13, 2020 2:40 pm

pffft, the successful micro platforms will allow you to manage all that stuff. Demanding we retain media monopolies is completely disproportionate.

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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by Millennie Al » Mon Jul 13, 2020 11:54 pm

plodder wrote:
Mon Jul 13, 2020 2:40 pm
pffft, the successful micro platforms will allow you to manage all that stuff. Demanding we retain media monopolies is completely disproportionate.
If you think that will work, go and build it yourself and show us.

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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by Bird on a Fire » Tue Jul 14, 2020 12:44 am

Millennie Al wrote:
Mon Jul 13, 2020 11:54 pm
plodder wrote:
Mon Jul 13, 2020 2:40 pm
pffft, the successful micro platforms will allow you to manage all that stuff. Demanding we retain media monopolies is completely disproportionate.
If you think that will work, go and build it yourself and show us.
I don't want to cast aspersions on plodder's talents but there are very significant barriers to entry in networks. Decentralised projects like PeerTube are struggling to take off, for example.

Yochai Bentler's Wealth of Networks talks about this (though I haven't read it yet).
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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by Woodchopper » Tue Jul 14, 2020 2:46 am

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Tue Jul 14, 2020 12:44 am
Millennie Al wrote:
Mon Jul 13, 2020 11:54 pm
plodder wrote:
Mon Jul 13, 2020 2:40 pm
pffft, the successful micro platforms will allow you to manage all that stuff. Demanding we retain media monopolies is completely disproportionate.
If you think that will work, go and build it yourself and show us.
I don't want to cast aspersions on plodder's talents but there are very significant barriers to entry in networks. Decentralised projects like PeerTube are struggling to take off, for example.

Yochai Bentler's Wealth of Networks talks about this (though I haven't read it yet).
Definitely. Facebook’s advantages are twofold. It has invested in massive amounts of infrastructure. Not just data centers but also it’s own fiber optic cable networks.

It also has 16 years worth of data on billions of people’s user preferences.

Add those to many people’s reluctance to shift to a new network until everyone else has already and it’s going to be difficult for newcomers.

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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by Woodchopper » Tue Jul 14, 2020 3:19 am

Sciolus wrote:
Tue Mar 31, 2020 6:34 pm
In general, businesses can pick and choose who they provide their services to and who they have as customers entirely at their own with, with the only legal constraint that they can't discriminate on certain specified protected grounds (race, sex etc.). That's the only way it can work, in general.

Where it gets interesting is when the business is a utility providing an essential public service, especially if it's a monopoly. Can Thames Water refuse to supply the BNP? Can Openreach refuse to connect the CPGB? I'm not sure, but I suspect their statutory regulators would have something to say if they tried.

Is Facebook now a public utility? It's certainly close to it. As someone who refuses to use it, I often feel I am excluded from a number of normal societal activities, even though it barely existed a decade ago. Maybe it needs an independent regulator to control its behaviour.
Just getting back to this point. TV and radio companies in the UK are already heavily regulated, and that includes regulations on the content they provide. Newspapers have more leeway about what they print, but they are covered by regulations on advertising that apply to all businesses. ‘Free speech’ is already regulated.

Given its market share I don’t see a reason in principle why Facebook shouldn’t be subject to more regulation. However there are huge practical problems given that it operates in a couple of hundred jurisdictions.

Going back to the OP I think there are issues with Facebook deciding who can and cannot use the platform. We can’t really compare it to a newspaper. It’s market share makes it more like a utility.

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