There should be only one regulation for fb, display following warning on all pages/screens:
Statutory Warning: This product is specifically designed to cause behavioral addiction so you are guided down a slippery slope of over consumption & that is how this company makes money.
Overuse of this product is known to cause - anxiety, depression, low self esteem, constant craving for attention, short attention spans, inability to concentrate on tasks, inhibited social development in the real world & possibly general "unhappiness", especially among the young & impressionable.
I always disliked Facebook and still don't care much for it, but having worked on ranking there for a few months, comments like this just sound incredibly naive.
Facebook is not "specifically designed to cause addiction". It's designed by a complicated process with many people trying to maximize many competing metrics, some of which might go up when people are "addicted". In fact the complete opposite is one of the main goal metrics for most teams (measures of well being) and only a small fraction of people are even trying to increase time spent.
On what basis are you claiming that that most teams at FB are optimising the product for well being as opposed to ‘engagement’ (addiction)? Do you have first hand knowledge? Do you know the people involved? Do you have citations?
I stopped using FB a few years ago after I had an argument with a friend on the platform. The algorithm decided to keep showing us one anothers’ content - I assume so we would both write more angry comments (“engagement!”). I ended up blocking the friend, then on reflection left the platform entirely, since as far as I can tell FB was optimising as intended to manipulate me.
If facebook only shows content you agree with, it's creating social bubbles where everyone is cheering each other on and criticism is not allowed, and you end up with anti-vax groups.
And if facebook emphasizes content you engage with (albeit negatively), you end up with anecdotes like yours.
Facebook is a tool, use it as such rather than being entitled and feeling disempowered. You can hide people from your timelines, get "less messages like these" and more.
Entitled is a loaded word. That makes it seem like the user is unreasonable and he should take whatever facebook gives him. Be quiet you don't matter, you are lucky they allowed you on the platform.
Is it unreasonable to expect facebook to be able to determine the tone of the conversation. They probably already do this or are in the process of researching this. This is a great feature and I look forward to getting content aligned with my mood. I'm mad, show me angry posts, I'm nervous show me calm posts. I'm bored show me exciting videos. Maybe a box on top how do you feel to determine current mood.
Users complaining give free feedback. As a developer it helps shape the product.
I absolutely think the user is unreasonable in this context. what about people who actually enjoy discussing other people's conflicting opinions? (maybe hard to believe that exists any more, even moreso on facebook, but still...) how would you allow this positive engagement to keep happening but avoid OP's example of negative engagement?
the tools are there on facebook to control the content of your feed to quite an extent. if you don't use this and demand that facebook change its system to adjust the feed for everyone based on your personal tastes, yes I think that's entitled.
not saying I like or even use Facebook, but still.
> Be quiet you don't matter, you are lucky they allowed you on the platform.
That's actually the feeling I get from YouTube when you try to Like a video when not signed in: "Like this video? Sign in to make your opinion count." -- I always found it mildly condescending.
> If facebook only shows content you agree with, it's creating social bubbles where everyone is cheering each other on and criticism is not allowed, and you end up with anti-vax groups.
Just because the solution would be hard or complex doesn't mean FB gets to continue its problematic behaviour.
> Facebook is a tool, use it as such
It is not. It is a corporation and you definitely don't get to use it like a tool.
At its most charitable, it is a tool like a beehive is a tool to make honey. Which are less dangerous than Facebook and still require protective gear to operate.
Anti-vaxxers are relentlessly criticized everywhere. They don’t have a protective social bubble. The criticism they receive from people they assume are brainwashed idiots only strengthens their beliefs.
the reason they're able to dismiss criticism is because there's a bubble of people and content (blogposts, videos) that are being fed to them via social media, gradually convincing them that they are right. if social media like Facebook showed a more "objective" collection of content in your feed, you would end up with <1% anti-vax, flat-earth, climatechange-denial etc. content, and it becomes much harder to hold on to this conviction.
I'm not disagreeing with your point that FB sometimes ranks content more highly when it is likely to increase engagement at the expense of your long term happiness and continued use of the site. The point I am making is that FB is well aware, doesn't want that, and devotes far more resources to fixing it than to increasing "engagement".
Also "engagement" is not the same as addiction. People who follow more close friends are more engaged on FB, but they are not addicted.
Agreed, but the point is that FB's algorithm optimizing for "engagement" is in fact also optimizing for addiction[0]. And so are many others of a certain type of industry that includes YouTube, FB, Instagram, etc. It's not quite social networks, but a common factor seems to be that they're ad-funded and highly automated.
[0] and I believe it is currently way beyond our state of the art to design an algorithm that does not have this unwanted property.
> Also "engagement" is not the same as addiction. People who follow more close friends are more engaged on FB, but they are not addicted.
That's debatable. I think people who spend hours pouring through pictures from thousands of acquaintances and commenting can be considered addicted, especially when it becomes difficult to get their attention from it. I see it with people over 50 most often, I think because of an internal desire to feel connected with people who they drifted apart from years ago, or to live vicariously through others.
> On what basis are you claiming that that most teams at FB are optimising the product for well being as opposed to ‘engagement’ (addiction)? Do you have first hand knowledge? Do you know the people involved? Do you have citations?
OP answers this in his first paragraph.
> bla bla I left facebook bla bla
You are arguing that "the algorithm" didn't read your mind and figured out you are actually "mad" at your friend, not simply interacting.
ps: sentiment out of bodies of text is not a terrible old thing, is fairly new.
It may very well be a naive sounding comment, but at the same time I think your comment reads at least as naive if not more. Think about it for a moment:
First, as an employee there is a tendency to find and only focus on the good aspects of your employer. This is not a bad thing, it's what helps us get out of the bed in the morning and go to work. It can wrap your perception though and make you more biased.
Second, you were part of a company and like any other company it wants to maximize its profits, i.e. maximize the engagement. I really want to believe you (and in some degree I actually do) that there are teams that focus on users' wellbeing (however this is measured) but in the end of the day, if it will come down to decide if I will be shown a post that has higher chance of generating profit VS a post that will make me feel better, in the vast majority of cases it will show me the first kind. You don't make money by being nice, unless you can combine the two. Facebook has done everything that it could to destroy any good will that we may have had to trust that it wants to combine the two (think about the experiment about influencing people's mood from a couple of years ago)
A banner with a text similar to what blunderkid wrote would be not only fair and accurate but the least we could do. And Facebook has only itself to blame for it.
I don't think Facebook is "evil" by design, but the end result is the same. The framework is as follows:
There were probably thousands of internet companies that competed to be the dominant sites in the 90s and 00s. By several orders of magnitude the predominant business model is ads for eyeballs, and the predominant network effect scales with number of users.
Several factors influenced success but, on average, sites that captured user attention more effectively got more views and a larger userbase. Thus there was overall selective pressure for addictive properties, and sites like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram won over sites that were less able to hold attention like Blogger, Digg, MySpace, etc.
We cannot know, for example, that Jack Dorsey was knowingly trying to maximize outrage with his character limit, which feeds into the "two-minutes-hate" emotional addiction. But we can be sure that he was trying to maximize several KPIs like # users, bounce rate, time on page, etc.
The result? The dominant sites today == the sites that are best able to capture attention!
How successful were they? Not only have they captured a huge portion of time people spend on the internet, the amount of time people are on the internet has itself increased! So they won over other websites and also grabbed attention away from traditional media, newspapers, random thoughts while standing in line, uninterrupted dinner, etc. time.
What's the problem? I think the major challenge is that these sites feel more effective at shaping attention than many drugs (no reference for this yet)!
This parallels the opioid crisis -- maximizing certain good pain relief characteristics (short onset, hits opioid receptors) just happens to be addictive. I doubt the Sacklers cackled during dinner and clinked glasses at the future misery they were causing, but it's pretty damn easy to convince yourself that you're doing the right thing when the money is rolling in.
Jack Dorsey similarly thinks he's saving the world but he's probably the single most responsible person for the "populist politician" phenomenon.
We are all addicted to something or the other. There are people who spend insane amount of time on HN (including me) - sure it is billion times better than FB, but it is still an addiction.
This is one of those things where no amount of regulation or blaming FB (or instagram or twitter or HN or whatever) is going to help much. It might be more fruitful to think about why people spend so much time online outside of productive work, instead of having person to person interactions, playing sports, playing music etc. Just a small example - there is not a single park within 10 miles of where I live, but there are at least 3 big malls (sprawling ones with dozens of stores).
Exactly, people need to take some personal responsibility and stop calling a web app evil because people some donkey spends all their free time on it. Grow up and stop feeling outrage about something that doesn't even affect you, and the people that it does affect have every opportunity to do something about it.
> There are people who spend insane amount of time on HN (including me) - sure it is billion times better than FB, but it is still an addiction.
Why is it billion times better? I spend a lot of time on Facebook talking to my family that lives on the other side of the world. Is spending time talking with other geeks more valuable?
One site is owned by a huge corporation and other is owned by a company that tries to get rich by creating more corporations.
If "well being" is a core metric for "most teams" why do we have investigative exposes of the horrible conditions content moderators are forced into?
If well being were truly important, those moderators would be treated like valuable core metric maintainers, not barely paid, badly unsupported afterthoughts.
And advertising performance and monetization would take a back seat as well, which is obviously not the case.
Step out of your prior employee shell, and look at the whole picture of FB's interaction with its users. Not a net positive, and as others have said, no one but themselves (Zuck?) to blame.
Time spent isn’t the same as addiction though. The grossness of Facebook is not that people spend too much time on it (though they may), but what content they see, how they are encouraged to engage with it, and the effect it has on people’s world views and psychological health.
The addiction component would be the constant concern with either how you are perceived on the platform or outrage with what others are saying.
I see precisely nothing they’ve done to increase the well being of people who are constantly tilted by the dumbest political garbage.
Actually, we are addicted because of the tragedy of the unmanaged commons, where the commons is human attention and the mechanisms are Notifications and Updates from Your Contacts.
If Facebook doesn’t do it, then LinkedIn or Twitter will. So Facebook is like Microsoft - do whatever it takes to win.
If you disable types of notifications or otherwise remove sources of notifications on Facebook, and those are the notifications that you normally get, Facebook will start giving you new notifications for things that you weren't getting notifications for before. Things like "We have a new friend suggestion for you". Facebook is engineered to give you a steady stream of notifications, and as far as I know, there's no way to disable them completely, despite the slew of options Facebook gives you. Why do you think that is?
Notifications can be designed to be less addictive, but that's not what Facebook is doing.
Well, you are right. I am simply pointing out that Facebook is not alone in this. Even small sites like Alignable spam you with notifications like “{{PersonYouNeverHeardOf}} has looked at your profile, you’re being noticed!” in an effort to try to get people, and it works!
We have known this since 2011 when we started Qbix to build an open source alternative — see https://qbix.com/people for a list of how it is different and more responsible. I hope other companies take on board these principles. Our tagline is “Empowering People. Uniting Communities”. So I feel passionate about this.
Instead of regulation, maybe have browsers give you a warning on how the site your about to visit treats your personal data?
We already have warnings in one way or another for: expired SSL certificates, lack of HTTPS, potential malware sites, if your account may have been breached (at least in Firefox), requests for your location or to show notifications, etc.
The next logical step is to have our user agent warn us about sites that have bad reputation for protecting your data.
I use the DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials, which gives a letter grade based off of the trackers used and terms of service analysis from tosdr.org, in your browser toolbar. You can get it from here:
I like this idea, every website should have a popup warning you that it uses cookies and data. Maybe a politician older than my dad could come up with a regulation to enforce this, give it a catchy name like Governments Drunk Popup Regulation.
Education is a good idea but in reality every site with google analytics is invading your personal data and people don't really care.
I don't like the idea of my browser trying to protect me from social problems. I'm fine with my browser warning me that a site may be a risk to my machine, but I wouldn't trust my browser to display content to me reliably if my vendor was using it as a platform for any activism that isn't narrowly focused on keeping web standards open.
Perhaps I'd tolerate it as an opt-in, but even then, I'd be leary and start looking to switch because I think it's a bad precident to set, and (slippery slope warning) could go toward normalizing similar warnings for other issues.
If there's going to be a warning, I think it ought to be produced server-side.
>> There should be only one regulation for fb, display following warning on all pages/screens: Statutory Warning: This product is specifically designed to cause behavioral addiction so you are guided down a slippery slope of over consumption & that is how this company makes money. Overuse of this product is known to cause - anxiety, depression, low self esteem, constant craving for attention, short attention spans, inability to concentrate on tasks, inhibited social development in the real world & possibly general "unhappiness", especially among the young & impressionable.
> Instead of regulation, maybe have browsers give you a warning on how the site your about to visit treats your personal data?
That wouldn't work. Facebook may see browser warnings like that as an existential threat. In response, they could create their own browser and heavily push it on users, a la Google & Chrome.
They've already done that. They're called the Facebook and Messenger native apps for Android and iOS. Conveniently, the Facebook mobile web app shows you Messenger notifications but won't let you read them without installing the native Messenger app, or visiting the Facebook on a desktop browser, despite the fact that direct messages have a much simpler interface than the rest of Facebook and that it used to be possible to view messages in the mobile web app, so they push for native app usage pretty hard already.
I'm not sure they'd see desktop browser warnings as much of an existential threat considering 94% of their advertising revenue comes from mobile [1].
> Sounds great to me! We need more competition in the browser market.
I'm almost certain that a Facebook browser would end up being Chromium with tight Facebook integration and extra-invasive data collection.
If Microsoft made the decision that it was too much work to maintain an independent browser engine and they already had one, I find it highly unlikely that Facebook would come to a different decision, given they're starting even farther behind.
You make a good point. The counterpoint that springs to mind is similar to the California law that requires a warning for anything containing chemicals known to cause cancer.
I’m sure this case is commonly known but I’ll spell it out as I understand it briefly: the bar for “cause cancer” is apparently low and wide enough to mean a huge number of products have this warning, diluting the spirit of the warning. Cynics and critics suggest this over-labeling is a deliberate attempt to undermine the warning itself through over saturation.
In your Facebook example, this could end up meaning any site with user generated content and comments would have to carry the warning — including Hacker News.
If you think that takes balls, then you have no idea how big are European Union balls. Just google “cigarette packages in europe” and get ready to get seriously shocked.
As a European, I think Australia went even further and just removed all the branding from packages completely. In Europe, brands still get to have some design.
"Europe" is not a single place with one set of regulations - in the UK for instance there is no branding on packages at all. It's called "standardised plain packaging":
Canadian packages too. They required a rather graphic health warning over 50% of the surface area (showing a smokers lungs with explanation, etc) and also removed branding. So it’s a giant health warning over the top half, and then a plain brown lower half with the name/type
(I don't smoke btw, but my father-in-law smokes like a chimney)
Its hard to relate cause and effects, but I see a noticeable decline in smoking among younger people, and smoking has become very uncool. People will also make a big deal about second hand smoke, for instance if you're near a bus stop or busy sidewalk you may get called out.
I don't know if anything besides medical intervention can stop a seasoned veteran smoker, though. Packaging certainly hasn't had any effect on my few family members that smoke.
I don't know if it apply to the whole country or only my province (Quebec) but since then we also added that they can't be marketed at all. That include not being visible in a convenience store. I don't know how effective the pictures were, but not being visible that must have affected the statistics too.
What are you talking about? That (and way more explicit) has been standard in most western countries for decades. The US is just slow to adapt modern practices. No balls involved there.
HN is addictive, but I think we're dramatizing things. Is a product that people like to use a lot a bad thing? Maybe that just speaks to having a good product that gives people what they want, rather than some insidious mind-control scheme where people have no agency to stop using it. Are creators supposed to make their products worse so people don't use them as much? I don't get it.
I think the split comes now that companies, such as FB, have focused to maximize 'engagement' with zero thought on the repercussions. Cigarette companies knew people were addicted to nicotine, but I guarantee in their planning sessions they talked about engagement or some other corporate fluff word.
It's less about having a good product or making a worse product, and more about the moral and ethical responsibility to consider what that addicting product's end result will be.
Well you should stop coming back then. You have identified a destructive behaviour, that's step 1. Step 1.1 is ACT right now: set up a very long noprocrast in your profile and keep on living your life. You really won't miss anything actually important by not coming here as often.
If FB is addictive then you need the medical community in on this, but the fact that they aren’t means you’re left alone making medical arguments about the affects of FB. Maybe my speech, this very one, is designed to give you the flu. But when we’re talking stakes like serious medical claims, then we should have serious medical consensus.
I don’t know if you work at Facebook or really believe what you’ve written. My spouse and I got so bad that we’d be on our phones over brunch or dinner looking at Facebook instead of having a conversation. It took us a couple years to break the habit and we both eventually deleted Facebook.
I defend big tech all the time (see my post history), but saying FB isn’t designed to be addictive isn’t accurate.
There is a very simple solution to Facebook - demand that they offer compatibility through an API so that other products can offer News Feed products that are seamlessly integrated with the FB Friends. Same as having a universal messaging protocol that's compatible with WhatsApp, and an Instagram API that also allows for compatibility with competitive photo feed products. Basically - open up the social graph and allow for super aggregators with different functionality. That's allowing for competition and breaking down the artificial moat they created, where they have managed to legally extricate their users from their own data property (essentially a form of digital enclosure that violates your right to your data as your private property). They would be destroyed within a year.
Same as windows - you just force them to have an anti-monopoly function.
Alternatively, allow for other ad suppliers to work through their network with a minimal amount of friction. Then you annihilate their revenue.
> There is a very simple solution to Facebook - demand that they offer compatibility through an API so that other products can offer News Feed products that are seamlessly integrated with the FB Friends.
Allowing tons of third parties to access all your data. That’s for sure going to solve all the problems (and Facebook had same idea few years ago, that brought you Cambridge Analytica scandal)
The problem with Analytica is it was done without your knowledge as a user. If you had volunteered to share tour data with CA how is that is that different from sharing it with Google or Instagram or any other service? We pick services to use in exchange for data everyday.
Why is it different if Facebook has access to your data from any other service? You just pick one.
Anyway this is the only solution and it will eventually be implemented. Either that or the Warren plan.
Main issue with CA wasn’t that it got data of users of an app - people have explicitly gave consent for it. They scraped data of your friends, that shared this data with you, and made it a big deal. Users explicitly granted access to data, but their friends didn’t. If you have an open API between networks, how is that different?
User A uses app X and shares data with user B. User B uses app Y. App Y is scraping data. They now have data of both user B (which expressed consent) and user A (which didn’t). It’s exactly like Cambridge Analitica.
I thought that Facebook's stance was that it was a platform not a publisher? If you have no editorial oversight or opinion on the content you publish (cf. not taking down known false political advertising) can you then claim "free speech"?
They didn’t. They ruled corporations don’t have much free speech when it comes to product advertising and declarations of potential harm their products may cause their users.
Can you post a link to RCT-based evidence backing this claim? I don't see anything on CDC website or any professional medical organization about Facebook being as harmful as cigarettes.
The single most important thing they did to turn the tide against smoking, to create a strong disincentive, was to make it a lot more expensive of a habit. Cigarettes used to be inexpensive when I was growing up in the 1980s. Now you'll nearly spend a car payment on just a pack per day. Chain smoker? There went your rent for the month.
Chinese men are the most voracious smokers in human history, they consume nearly half of all cigarettes smoked on the planet. They don't know cigarettes are bad for them? Of course they do. The imagery would make little difference unto itself. Smoking hasn't been made wildly expensive in China yet, that's the single biggest issue. It's also not enough of a socially excluding behavior yet in China; the party could take care of that if they wanted to (they will eventually, it will be a health & social wellness thing they aggressively focus on in the future; they allow it for now, for obvious reasons, as a placative).
The second most important thing authorities did to curb smoking, was the imagery & information campaign. That has been quite successful, it's distinctly branded as an ugly, nasty, killer, social excluding taboo habit now.
The third most important thing the authorities did, is push regulations such that smokers became quasi socially excluded and couldn't easily smoke anywhere considered a public space and at work. They added friction to the smoking process, making it a far bigger hassle.
The recipe was: much higher cost, persistent information campaign, added friction, social exclusion.
By definition, everyone who does illegal drugs is somewhat flexible with regards to suggestions from authority.
One of the core propositions of cigarettes was always that they were legal. They catered to both the rule breaker and (substantially bigger) rule follower markets.
So it seems apples and oranges with regards to imagery / warning effectiveness due to the only partially overlapping consumers.
But guess who gets incarcerated more because of the “war on drugs” and guess what happens when it starts affecting the suburbs? It’s then treated like “a disease”.
Tell me again why I want to give the government more power?
There's plenty stories online about people who have, multiple times, tried to quit smoking and didn't manage it. But they had no issues switching to e-cigs, and then a few months down the line were able to stop using e-cigs - without any urges to return to any kind of smoking.
Wasn't it general awareness of the dangers, that did not existed before?
And when it started to rise generations were already addicted and simply a new generation needed to rise and slowly overcome it.
So rather .. a mix of it all? Because even though tobacco is expensive today, that doesn't stop the smokers from smoking. And people have lots of other expensive habits, so money is only a small part of it I believe.
In the UK it mostly was increased prices, coupled with free smoking cessation services, and with changes in law to make smoking illegal inside many buildings (workplaces, shops, pubs, cafés etc).
Vaping was useful to move remaining smokers to different nicotine delivery mechanisms.
Ironically, in the 1970s, people used pareidolia to discover scary skulls and crossbones in the smoke curls of cigarette ads. These were thought to be subliminal symbols of risk and danger, secretly engineered to appeal to smokers, who knew they were engaging in a deadly habit.
20 years later, governments mandated superliminal death symbolism.
Were they? I have seen so many people keep smoking even though the packaging in Canada have some gruesome pictures. The reduction I seen was mostly based on age, it was just no longer "cool" to smoke, it was simply a change of culture. More often than not right now, when I see younger people smoking, they are mostly from France, where the smoking culture is different, so that kind of confirm this.
As usual the Facebookers are coming out in mass to defend their cash cow, despite it's major negative impact on society. Par for the course on this site
There's a lot more product than just Facebook, making this look a lot like a witch hunt. There are games, foods, brand retailers, who all do this to the exact same extent. The difference is that facebook has utility that lends to participating as frequently as possible (same as MySpace and newsgroups before that). The regulation is needed because of the ubiquity, not the behavior.
Isn't that largely true of most entertainment products?
Music, Prestige and Reality TV, Cable News, Comic books - all are "specifically designed to cause behavioral addiction" if your only criteria is "attempts to attract and keep people on the platform"...
How many of those companies business models relies on getting you hooked so they can continue to perform mass surveillance and being careless with the personal info of users and non-users alike?
Classic regulatory capture. Once you're big enough lobby effectively, get legislators to pull the ladder up from behind you.
This reminds me: I was working at a small health services startup in 2009. We had a good relationship with a number of small-scale healthcare providers, and when the ARRA was passed mandating that all providers move to electronic health records, we evaluated the concept of getting into that business. We concluded that there was so much legal red tape in that sector that the only way to legally create an EHR product would be if your lawyers were the ones writing the laws governing them (which would have been true for Epic and McKessen).
They always talk about the big evil Facebooks of the world when they demand regulations that hit entire industries and mostly just keep the same big companies in power.
The regulations never just target the big firms who caused the individual incidents that caused the outrage or the individuals only doing bad behaviour.
Nor does the regulations go away as industries adapt, change for the better, or get disrupted over the course of decades the same old laws apply, further keeping old entrenched powers in place and their negative anti-consumer behaviour which markets were attempting to correct.
It's the story of modern America industry. And it always starts with good intentions.
It blows my mind how many people talk about over-regulation but almost never target regulatory capture. Examples include liquor laws in Indiana and Texas not allowing Tesla to sell cars direct-to-customer.
I love tech. It pains me to come to the conclusion that in Facebook, we have created something that should not exist: an addicative worldwide mob where peddlers can sell emotionally manipulative ideas to the people least able to handle them, whether it's clicking cows all day long or believing Elvis is still alive.
In defense, I don't think anybody that was on-board at the beginning realized this. I do, however, feel that anybody in the last decade working at FB should have been smart enough to figure out what was going on. They just didn't care.
I view it the opposite way: We underestimated as a society how many people were feeling bad. Addictions to alcohol is horrible, but their harm doesn’t scale. With social networks, we suddenly see what we chose to ignore before: The swathes of MGTOWs, Incels, doubters, we also see the swathes of “scientific studies” which were provably wrong, the lies of the medias when you compare the scientific study and how the articles spin them.
We should rather treat it as a brand new society with new balances, like after Gutemberg’s invention of the printer, which enabled communication and gave birth to Martin Luther, the accession of Bible translation to masses, the accession of The Encyclopedia, and more generally, the Humanists.
And maybe, just maybe, we should have taken better care of so many people we’ve put in such horrible situations that content binging becomes better than their life. Rather than assuming they were just crybabies.
This is a difficult hypothesis to prove by virtue of the fact that if we didn't think people were feeling in certain ways this pre-FB, then it was presumably because we didn't have accurate data. It follows that if we didn't have the data then it's difficult to say whether FB et al tapped in to something that had yet to manifest itself in a subset of people, or had yet to become visible to society. Nevertheless, it's an interesting point that I hadn't really heard put this way before so thanks.
> we should have taken better care of so many people we’ve put in such horrible situations... Rather than assuming they were just crybabies.
It may seemed callused, but they _are_ just crybabies. Just because social media facilitates the formation of certain identity groups now does not mean that the cultures formed from those identities are good or productive. Just look at the increase in suicides, depression, school shootings, and general extremism since the spread of social media. Those are not mentalities that we should foster and support IMO.
>we should have taken better care of so many people
>Those are not mentalities that we should foster and support IMO.
Those are not the same thing. The first says to connect people to services that can help stem the negative and unproductive mentalities. Yours says to help them grow that negativity. These are not the same things.
assuming that its true, "its online medias fault", then why havent we seen similar extremes forming in other countries?
it seems extreme student violence, incels, increased violence, depression and suicide
1. seems to be more of an anerican phenomena (incels, student shootings)
2. started to sharply increase after 2008 financial crisis when huge swaths of people went through huge personal and societal stresses [0]
so while online media can definitely be attributed to accelerating and manipulation of people being easier, i would posit that the seeds were already there in the culture and environment...
[edit]
just to clarify: this isnt to mean i give fb a free pass of course... they are making money off of manipulating people with this kind of misery and extremism which i find reprehensible
There are a lot of fallacies here. I'll take just one.
If you'll allow, I'll use a political example from 15+ years ago.
When young Bush was running for president, you'd see commentators on TV talking about which candidate had some demographic. Such-and-such had the 50+ white male vote, so-and-so had the hispanic vote, and so on.
These people did not know what they were talking about, but it made for good TV. The people who knew what they were talking about, the folks like Karl Rove, knew that today they were looking to talk about subject X in context Y to a certain type of voter described by several adjectives in precinct 7 of the south side of Columbia, SC.
Pick a word that describes a social problem, say homelessness. There's not one homelessness, there's a dozen or more, each with their own qualities. There's people who are the victim of a disaster, people who have medical bills, people with addiction problems, people living in poverty on purpose for religious reasons, etc. Not only do the reasons vary, the possible solutions vary by personality, demographic, geographic location and resources, and so on.
Your response to my point demonstrates the problem. We talk about social problems in grand and expansive terms because we have to. Otherwise we'd spend forever in analysis. Politicians get elected based on grand visions for social problems expressed in expansive terms. But the actual problems themselves are highly nuanced. So what you're suggesting is that we throw everybody worldwide into one bucket, stick a label on them, and attempt to help them. That's only going to be a workable solution in only the most simple cases. In fact it's not workable. I'm being kind.
Worse, for all of the cases where it doesn't help, you've just given over a monopoly of ideas, labels, and solutions to some company that's beholden to nobody, Facebook. So what will happen, what is happening now, is that people looking to exploit problems are working at the very detailed level. Right now there's probably some scammer looking to target 70+ white females in Sioux City Iowa who voted for Bernie last time. That guy is going to exploit the hell out of his target. There are thousands of targets like this. But when we identify the problem, all we get is how great it is to have some universal solution to addiction or something.
Yes, in grand terms wouldn't it be great to have some solution to X? I'd love it. But that's not how these kinds of solutions work. What we're doing is enabling the people with bad intent to have their way while justifying it all with promises of how huge categories of people might be helped. That's bullshit, and it's the kind of bullshit we've put up with for far too long from SV, making money with one hand while giving out platitudes with another, trusting on the complexity of the application to hide what's really happening from the average voter. It's only continuing. Now, however, we're going to take it to the next level, regulatory capture.
While it's true that social problems are complex and multivariate, what gets missed in the American context is the importance of virtuous and viscous circles.
So for example the net cost of normalising college debt, and the regulatory exceptions to bankruptcy etc around this form of debt, is not simply a generation entering the workforce in debt. It's massive concrete measurable inequality between those who can afford to work in internships (unpaid or underpaid) and those who's loans prevent that. It's exclusion from education for those who cannot take on enormous debt (or won't be granted loans). It's a shift to crude utilitarianism in education generally, because the insane cost of a degree means you'd be insane to do one that doesn't 'repay' its perceived value etc etc.
This is true again and again for the social issues created by the American economic-social pact (call it neoliberalism or what have you). From the knock on domestic violence, abuse and intergenerational trauma caused by the warrior culture of Americans gargantuan military, to its normalisation of militarised policing.
What all these issues have in common it a cultural unwillingness to tackle what are often substantively simple root causes. Issues which have been dealt with successfully in other cultures.
So in confusing how the electorate can be trivially manipulated by playing into their psychographic preferences and prejudices, with the relative complexity of social issues you're actually conceding to the delusion that politics is entertainment. That it's not candidates positions that matter, but the perception of those positions. That really most problems are simply impossible to solve (rather than politically unfeasible in the American context). That the political confusion and anger of the present moment is exclusively generated through persuasion rather than the justifiable (though often misdirected) result of concrete solvable issues.
We can disagree about the causes of social issues in America, and their solutions; but its inarguable that there has been no effort to systematically test and deploy policy interventions at a national level in any kind of evidence based way. The map in America, has become the territory.
>We can disagree about the causes of social issues in America, and their solutions; but its inarguable that there has been no effort to systematically test and deploy policy interventions at a national level in any kind of evidence based way.
Why do we need to do these things at the national level?
The federal government is intentionally not set up to be able do these kinds of things. Doing these things at the federal level is an exercise in Constitution avoiding mental gymnastics and you wind up with hacks like withholding federal money or insane interpretations of the commerce clause in order to get things done or your policy winds up hanging by a threat that SCOTUS can cut at any minute (e.g. Obamacare).
Using policy to mitigate social problems does seem to work well at the state level (for any given problem there seems to always be a state that's doing a good job tackling the problem) because the states don't have to implement back handed legislative solutions or compromise things as many ways and generally run at smaller scale. (For example, there are at least a couple states that have decent universal healthcare programs.)
> Using policy to mitigate social problems does seem to work well at the state level (for any given problem there seems to always be a state that's doing a good job tackling the problem)
In the case of healthcare, the coverage standards, cost controls, revenue collection and payments must be handled at the federal level, otherwise you will end up with huge differences in benefits between state programs, which will result in similar issues seen with insurance companies today.
For example, today, insurance companies are often loathe to pay for expensive-upfront but cheaper long-term procedures because the typical time for customer retention is correlated with how long their customers stay at their job. They don't want to pay for the procedure that their competitor is going to get the cost savings from down the road.
There is nothing to stop an unregulated US-state run universal health system from doing the same thing.
Also, because US states by definition have open borders, it would encourage health care arbitrage in densely populated border areas, which would overstress the systems of states with better health coverage, leading to inevitable legal conflict between those states.
This is not to say that states can't play a role in the day-to-day local administration of healthcare benefits - just as they do with Medicare today - but the baselines have to be defined at a federal level.
I do not think politics is entertainment, and I support the creation of virtuous cycles.
I think you've created a bit of a dichotomy where none was implied. All of our experiences online can be a form of entertainment, at least in part, politicians may be elected or not based on perception, and it's critically important to have and express values using good people. These ideas do not have to be in conflict with one another, and no cynicism on my part was intended.
> It pains me to come to the conclusion that in Facebook, we have created something that should not exist: an addicative worldwide mob where peddlers can sell emotionally manipulative ideas to the people least able to handle them,
Or maybe, alternate world view, it does not even matter as much as you think it does.
We keep having these discussions about the impact of social media as if the relationship was directly causal, ie Zuck pushes a button and robot people do his bidding. Wish the problem were so easy. It's at scale, dealing with fractions of percentages over thousands of randomly subsegmented markets, nobody knows what the hell is going on. It's incomprehensible by any human.
What we know is that people pay billions of dollars to advertise there. We know that most of the world's population (!) has signed up. We know that people who quit feel better. We can observe people doing and saying things with other people at a scale never seen before. In fact, that's one of the selling points. We know that more and more studies are showing addictive and maladaptive behavior from people who spend a lot of time there.
We're not trying to convict FB in a court of law or inventing some new science. The preponderance of all the available evidence says that there's a major social change at work worldwide that has at least some deleterious effects. Works for me. Any small number times a billion is a big number. That's the entire business model of social media. You logically can't deny the way social media works in order to make a defense of social media.
People dying of starvation and homelessness doesn't matter to many people but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a negative impact on society or shouldn't be solved
Yes. those crafty russians who forced the american elite hollow-out the middle class, undermined Bernies primary, and installed unelectable professional grifters on the Dem ticket.
You should also consider that you are not viewing reality correctly.
Why not both? Or rather, all of that? The fact salaries for the bottom half of America are flat for 40 years doesn’t change the facts on Russia and FB.
It is usually not the same people who stay at the bottom for 40 years so this kind of comment is really only useful to push political agendas rather than any kind of reality check.
Campaigns and PACs spend money on all kinds of useless things. The burden of proof is on the people claiming that Facebook ads are uniquely malevolent and effective. This is also not to mention that the money spent on Facebook pales in comparison to other channels.
From my perspective, it has all of the hallmarks of a moral panic, right down to the calls to "think of the children."
==Campaigns and PACs spend money on all kinds of useless things.==
Do you have a citation for this? It seems like a failure in the free market if organizations spend $55 billion [1] on Facebook advertisements with no benefit.
==From my perspective, it has all of the hallmarks of a moral panic, right down to the calls to "think of the children."==
What data is that perspective based on or is it just your gut feeling (aka bias)?
First, you dont know if your investment is good until the election actually happens since polls are massively unreliable, so the opportunity to adjust spending is limited.
Do you need a citation to know that lots of PACs engage in polling using worthless methodology? Surely you've seen expensive TV spots that have no clear messaging and make the candidate they support look awful. A whole lot of campaign spending seems like grifting, but maybe I'm wrong.
Look, I'm not say that FB ads are totally useless in general, just that there's some burden of proof when you claim they swayed an election.
> What data is that perspective based on or is it just your gut feeling (aka bias)?
People have literally used the phrase "think of the children," or some variation.
Political spending happens anyway regardless whether or not Facebook exists. now it is just one more channel to use to reach people, among dozens of others.
Alternative view, the U.S may have got a small taste of what it regularly does to others and continues doing so, having apparently no sense of hypocrysy whatsoever.
Parties within countries were able to manipulate elections, see the UK, with the vast avalaunch of deceptive ads where Cambridge Analytica were involved - circumventing limits on election spending.
I disagree. FB has enriched my life at many ways, when my father was on deathbed I realized how much he used fb to just keep track of me every single time he remembered me. We spoke daily but I did not know he used facebook to "be with me".
I do understand your criticism but it is in the same line as how christian priests opposed education for peasants. They argued that if the ordinary massed could read it would mean they will read stuff they are not supposed to read. I am pretty sure similar criticism has be forced on TV, Cellphones, Comic books and what not.
I would say relax, this too shall will pass and even bigger distraction would take over our lives.
I'm not sure if you misunderstood GP's statement or you're just taking it in the most uncharitable way, but I don't think what was written supports your reading.
> I am pretty sure similar criticism has be forced on TV, Cellphones, Comic books and what not.
No, there is a shit load of difference. It is far more costly to spread misinformation through those other channels. Sure nation-states and tv/cable-companies with agenda will still exist, but ordinary citizen like me, with an agenda, won’t be able to anonymously spread conspiracy theories for $100 ~ $1000
Although oddly it seems that the most egregious violations were done by people with quite a bit of money. It's debatable whether it is a level playing field or a lack of it that's problematic.
We feel that way because rich people operate at scale and poor people steal candy from 7/11. Level playing field is a myth it will never exist anywhere ever.
So the problem is that it isn't restricted to special interests? That sounds like the same logical flaw as cash bail models. If they are going to be a flight risk or going to go out and murder someone them having money available doesn't change if they are going to be a bad actor or not.
I’d place the argument that the type of person susceptible to conspiracy theories already had bad ideas in their head. Now they’re just allowed to share.
Investors care about making money, period. Whether you burn coal until the planet is inhabitable or John Doe data is sold and packaged up for the next couple of decades without him knowing does not matter at all.
It's a strange world for sure, and one that I am virtually certain will come to a crashing halt in this century.
Nobody is required to buy facebook stocks. If you do not want this company to continue it's operations, just get rid of it (if you owned it in the first place).
Zuckerberg's major in college was psychology, not CS. A Skinner Box [1] is Psych 101 - I am certain Mark knew exactly what he was building. And how is the like button nothing but building on the theory of social psychology?
Facebook, IMO (I minored in psych) is entirely built on a solid understanding of human psychology and how to control it. Add in ads and profit!
I love tech, too. This is why I have divested myself from Facebook, beyond messaging tools (FB Messenger and WhatsApp).
If tech is building new edifices to the capabilities of tech, then Facebook is certainly tech, and the nightmare Facebook has become is inevitable. (Though I agree with other commenters that FB probably matters much less than we with in-built pro-tech biases are willing to believe.)
Otherwise, if tech is "doing more with less," then Facebook is extremely hard to justify as tech.
Sounds like Facebook wants the regulations, so that a new upstart competitor, cannot invent something novel, and pull the rug from under them.
Like maybe, a social network that doesn’t manipulate us, or scan our faces without permission, or build dark profiles of everyone, or read our personal messages, or .....
>Like maybe, a social network that doesn’t manipulate us, or scan our faces without permission, or build dark profiles of everyone, or read our personal messages, or
Heh. Fat chance. The next generation of social networks will be coming from China because China is the perfect incubator for this category of software. You'll yet wish for Facebook.
The next generation of social networks is already here. It's decentralized and open-source. Mastodon, Pleroma, PeerTube, loads more, all part of the same network, the fediverse.
The only people who use decentralized and open-source social media are the people who care that it is decentralized and open-source. They are niche at best, no ones grandparents are on Mastodon.
I never said end-users should care that it's decentralized and open source. I am mentioning it because we're on HN, a tech-oriented website. The selling point of the fediverse is the governance model and sustainability, and the way these qualities are missing from Twitter/Facebook/&co has been in the mainstream consciousness for a few years already. Also the grandparents comment is nonsense. How many people's grandparents are on Snapchat or TikTok? How many people's grandparents are on Instagram? It's a completely arbitrary demographic goal post.
good opportunity for you to learn about something new then. ActivityPub is a W3C recommendation and is the protocol powering a diverse and healthy ecosystem of social networking sites.
I'm not sure it's really possible to launch new decentralized protocols anymore, and get any kind of mainstream traction. We have HTTP and email basically by historical accident. Even RSS was shown to really just be an implementation detail of Google Reader, and there wasn't enough of an organic ecosystem outside of that for it to survive.
the protocol has been launched already. it's only a matter of time before the network effect kicks in.
I would assume that once a major media company or government organization realizes they can adopt an implementation of the existing protocol this will move that network a bit closer to the tipping point.
>it's only a matter of time before the network effect kicks in.
Can you quantify that? XMPP has been around forever and the biggest chat messengers are proprietary. IRC has been around forever, but Slack and Teams are what's actually being used.
What is the evidence that an open standard for social use-cases can actually drive use?
The most important regulation for Facebook is that they should provide a way to communicate with other social networks, so someone on Diaspora, MeWe or Friendica can follow people on Facebook and vice versa. That way, people won't be forced onto Facebook simply because their friends are there.
And once that has been done, it'll also be easier to cut Facebook into smaller chunks if it turns out they're still a monopolist.
No. Other platforms already have open APIs, Facebook is the one that has no interoperability. It would make it easier for a Diaspora server to slurp data from Facebook.
I wish more people would consider this option. We're deep in antitrust waters in more than one area of the tech universe right now.
We've blocked several mergers such as US Airways and United Airlines, EchoStar and DirecTV, and AT&T and T-Mobile. Seems to me the time has definitely come to handle the goliaths of the internet the same way.
Exactly this. That is why there is such pressure to keep Warren off the ticket. I'd love to see her swallow her pride and jump to a Sanders/Warren ticket. If she does well, then she can get her chance in a few years.
Depending on the regulation, IMO a sensible middle ground is to phase in regulations based on company size as measured by revenue and/or employee count.
This avoids crushing upstarts while regulating companies large enough to matter.
Why is having all your medical data leaked on the web by a 5 person company any less damaging than by a 5000 person company? Or all of your internet history? Your face recordings?
What you're really just creating here is an economy for small companies to steal and datamine your data and then resell it to others.
For all the constant grinding about FB/Google on this website, small startups are usually a significantly larger privacy catastrophe with little morals and very little security. Most of them don't even consider privacy and security as something to be thought of while they're throwing out their MVP.
Good idea, though I'd add another metric: market reach, in terms of, for the case of social media, users.
This might have other metrics though -- sources / sellers, for a market or middleman entity, some weighted metric of business customers for b2b suppliers (such that an F-10 company weighs more than an F-10000 company). For physical management (say, commodities), total tonage moved. Et cetera.
To be fair, GDPR was first proposed in 2012. In 2016 it was written into law, and then in 2018 it became enforceable. It was these adtech companies that choose to ignore implementing it and/or to do it as late as possible.
It could certainly run with 20 staff – it would just spend a lot of money on license fees to a separate Facebook Services Inc that provides software and server administration services. This is similar to how companies avoid tax e.g. IKEA and Starbucks.
It could similarly avoid large profits but avoiding large revenues works be trickier. But I'm not an expert in these things, so maybe it's possible if you really know what you're doing.
The problem is, there's no legal distinction between a company that own shares but is "really" part of the same company, vs a completely separately company owning shares e.g. a pension fund.
That's easy to fix, just apply the rules only to companies having more than a hundred shareholders, and count shareholders of the parent for any subsidiary. Then you can't restructure Facebook to have less than a hundred shareholders because the number of shareholders is independent of the internal corporate structure.
All of the major tech companies are publicly traded.
Being publicly traded is also a major risk factor for hostile corporate behavior, because the top executives of private companies tend to be the owners and care more about the long-term than short-term profits, so it even makes sense as an explicit policy choice to regulate publicly traded companies more than private ones.
Except no. That's where the regulators fundamentally agree with the regulated company.
This is a different but also common phenomenon. Well established companies tend to favor strict compliance requirements with harsh penalties and difficult targets. The big companies can hit those targets because they can afford to sink time and money into activities that don't make money. Small companies can't.
It isn't necessarily about being anti-competitive. The requirements may be the right thing to do, and better for everyone. Except startups generally can't afford it. In fact, startups are usually absolutely crap at privacy, security, and other elements of social responsibility.
Reading through the actual proposed regulations, most of them are regulations I'd like to have enforced on any social media tech company above some small threshold in size, and are not onerous to implement. Many of these proposed regulations cover exactly the type of issues that are often complained about on HN.
Why does it matter so much that it's Facebook proposing it, and that they have already implemented it?
Because they are using it to prevent competitors from being able to take their market share. They're the market leader, they have resources and codebase already...
Or they have already implemented them cause they consider those measures to be important / effective. Recommending something you don't think is worth the effort would be stupid, just like not implementing good ones. If FB decides against adopting some measure, they obviously will use the same arguments for not recommending it.
As for FB recommending lower standards to govern the competition... would anyone here actually do this unless part of a brand? Evaluating recommendations is a politicians job, and I'd expect them to listen to more than just the few biggest companies.
a typical example of a big company trying to put up barriers to entry by using politicians who want to please the public with worthless (and damaging) regulations and policies.
Should companies be suggesting regulations that they don't know how to meet? Maybe before making something a standard, it should be tested in the real world first?
But this doesn't mean you have to accept their proposal.
They want to get to a point where they just say we follow all laws strictly and continue to violate privacy. That is why zuckerberg keeps bringing it up. Right now he is asking for laws and he wants to get to a point where he can hide behind laws and say “the law has t caught up yet so it’s not our fault we sold your data to the Russians and Chinese “.
The answer to technology is technology. People need better tools for communication and authentication, but tools are public goods, and the market under produces public goods because there is no way a producer of public goods can capture the value generated through private property rights, and so there's no mechanism in the market to sustain and incentivize producers.
The solution will make both free market advocates and government intervention advocates happy: use public revenue to create better communication and authentication tools. Let consumers freely choose between the tools provided by private enterprise and those produced by government funded development.
If the government fails, consumers are no worse off: they still have their market borne options. If it succeeds, they have better options than they did before.
Regulation of private enterprise is lazy, authoritarian and a case of putting all of one's eggs in one basket.
I’m glad to see a case made against anticompetitive lobbying. But I’m disappointed in the use of the GDPR as a straw man.
There are many reasons that could explain why ad network market concentration increased after the GDPR took effect, and not all of them are bad. For example, if some significant percentage of companies depended on exploitative behavior outlawed by the law, we should expect to see concentration increase as those companies leave the market. That’s not a negative side effect; it’s the law working as intended.
It'll probably be too hard to regulate every unethical dark pattern and shitty default on the site.
What you can do is force Facebook to allow the user to 1 click export their graph and all friend data with it in a standardized format.
Once you force them to give me MY friends email addresses, phone numbers, and birthdays in a list, they're fucked because better products can then emerge.
Similar to the idea of regulating Google by making them open source their search index.
The last thing I want is to make it easier for my “friends” to share my information on other sites. Wasn’t that the entire issue with Cambridge Analytica?
I can see Cambridge Analytica or other companies offering $100 for your Facebook data export. Are you sure your friends or your friends' friends will not sell your data?
No, but if they did I'm kind of the one at fault for making them my "friend". The old world analogy is you go around the world collecting business cards. That address book is yours - you can burn it, sell it or do whatever you want with it - most importantly use it to contact the people who trusted you with the info. People just became more judicious about who got what info.
Similar correction needs to happen here. When I add someone to a digital platform, instead of a 1 click process it needs to be a 1 click + select what info to share process.
Maybe it’s a sign that we shouldn’t want government bureaucrats to invade every area of our lives and let grown people make their own informed choices.
Surprisingly enough. I’m perfectly capable of not logging into Facebook and choosing another search engine.
What I’m not as capable of doing without a lot of trouble is changing the government I’m under. So given a choice, a government with less power is good for my personal liberty.
This isn't a new thing. The government chooses lots of things for us. What things are legal to buy, eat, etc. are decided for us. Sometimes people need to be protected from themselves. This is why we are going to lose on privacy. Fear-mongering over pedophiles will sway people instead of them looking into the laws and their effect on their lives.
And the government also "chose" that it is "good for us" if people of different races (miscengenation) weren't allowed to get married up until the 60's and that people shouldn't be allowed to have sex with someone of the same sex (sodomy) until the 80s.
So now you're trusting the same government "to protect your privacy" that would like nothing more than if companies were forced to have backdoors to read secure messages?
That's a fair point and some things take time. But government officials change over time. New ideas come in. I'm not sure who I trust less, FB or the government but government moves more slowly. Companies can (and have... and continue...) to manipulate us on a constant basis. I trust them less.
The article points out that Brussels are alright making regulations around artificial intelligence etc:
"Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is in Brussels lobbying the European Union’s regulators as they form new laws to govern artificial intelligence, content moderation and more"
Does anyone know what they are thinking of doing in this regard? And what problems they are attempting to solve?
One example is facial recognition. From what I gather, there is a growing consensus that unrestrained facial recognition might be either in conflict, or pose a potential threat to certain legal rights of European citizens.
In Germany, for example, privacy-threatening issues are covered by a body of norms called "Persönlichkeitsrecht". Which are based constitutionally on Articles 1 and 2 of the German constitution (Grundgesetz) - the Right to Human Dignity and the Right to Personal Fulfillment/Development.
Allowing anyone storing and sharing facial recognition data willy-nilly might endanger those rights and hence might be a need for regulation.
I'm not sure this sort of meta-comment is allowed. But, given the importance of this information, and it's potentiality to induce outrage that leads to participation and commentary, and given the imperfect hacker news ranking algorithm which can fail to differentiate between conversation and flaming when punishing posts in visibility—might I implore you to refrain from commenting unless substantial so that eyes that may have power to action against such malfeasance catch note of this here? (Really likely of note only if comment:points ratio gets close to 1 and above. I accept that this comment's very existence is ironic, but with hope of the wider aim achieved.)
Assuming the TechCrunch article’s headline is the same as the HN post headline, then I think you are already too late. I would describe it as inflammatory at best.
I can’t actually load the article because (I think) my web browser’s anti-tracking blockers interfere with TC’s adtech. I’m using Firefox Focus with iOS Safari.
The one regulation that could save us from Facebook would be to mandate an open API. That would solve the network effect problem for new social networks and enable real competition.
That would be a mixed bag in several ways - while good for making a diverse ecosystem it would mean Cambridge Analytica style abuses would be the norm and rely upon user savviness for security. In a lowest common denominator base like Facebook - that won't work well.
The multi-billion dollar question is whether someone with serious technical acumen is prepared to step up and fight for a law that meaningfully restrains surveillance capitalism while allowing startups to compete. Or build a compliance-as-a-service business and give it away to startups for free.
Back when the GDPR was still pending, the consensus on HN was that there was nothing to fear because European regulators emphasize the spirit of the law, rather than beating people over the head with the letter of the law like American regulators do.
Anyway, the law went into effect and some guy got fined just over $2000 for using CC instead of BCC on his personal mailing list of 150 people. There are a bunch more examples just like that [1].
I miss the tech community that used to be much more skeptical of government regulation -- remember SOPA/PIPA?
> Anyway, the law went into effect and some guy got fined just over $2000 for using CC instead of BCC on his personal mailing list of 150 people. There are a bunch more examples just like that [1].
> Details on the 2k€ fine; the guy used his mailing list for harassment, the 2k€ fine would likely have also been issued prior to the GDPR as german privacy law is fairly strict.
I'm not sure this is directly related to GDPR as the regulations in Germany are more strict
"using CC instead of BCC... newsletter of 150 people in Germany... between July and September 2018"
But spirit of the law or not, if you're CCing me in your newsletter several times, I'd be pretty annoyed
Edit: people might want to check the actual link provided to get the details 1) he was a repeated offender 2) this mailing list was being used for harassment
GDPR "hurt" tech companies, but hurt the big ones less than the small ones.
The big tech companies have increased market dominance so it seems like spirit of the law was actually to crush competition so that there fewer players for the EU to regulate
I'm not convinced that was some ulterior goal, but even if, I don't mind as long as it is followed by actually regulating the remaining players.
As I keep saying: we don't need innovation in adtech. We don't need more companies in this space. We need this industry burned down to the ground, encased in a concrete tomb, with warnings for future generations plastered all over it.
Anyone else notice that after you accept TechCrunch’s cookie consent pop-up that the site blocks you from tapping back on your browser to get back to HN?
Try a longpress on the back button and there you should see the hn=>techcrunch=>guce.advertising=>techcrunch redirect chain.
Hitting back will go back to guce which immediately forwards you to techcrunch again. Select hn instead
The problem is that there are too many influential people financially invested in Facebook and other monopolies. It creates perverse incentives for governments and other companies.
People these days are using the stock market as a giant collaborative money laundering machine; all small businesses exist only to take bank loans which go straight to paying these big corporations for whatever useless services they provide. The small businesses then go bankrupt and new ones spawn up in their place with fresh new loans for the corporations to feed on. That's what our fiat financial system is all about; the big mega corps feed on the bankrupted corpses of small business and let the rest of society foot the bill through inflation. The main sport for the elites is to move around this inflation to parts of the economy that are not being monitored so that it doesn't show up in the CPI.
