Could be. Some of the proposed regulation I've seen for this specifically exempts companies under, say, $100m/year in annual revenues. So legislators aren't unaware of the problem.

Another possibility is that Facebook knows that asking Congress to do something is either a) not going to increase the odds of them doing anything, b) actually decrease the odds by sounding contrite, or c) puts it in a place where Facebook's army of lobbyists and otherwise connected individuals make sure nothing meaningful will get passed into law.

It's not a bad bet given how polarized Congress and the American electorate are. And gosh, who is a big enabler of that polarization?

The base problem isn’t really solveable, and its as much of a public discussion on what we want to do with speech first, before its a question of how we want Social Media firms to act.

In the end, there is no algorithm which can match the scale of bad content, no robust definition of bad content which can work without creating a flood of false positives.

Every false positive is now someone who had something valid to say who is silenced.

How are we going to decide which grey area speech is unwelcome (leaving out obvious things that are illegal).

———— The popular idea is increased human centric moderation, but thats still going to be 2k email escalations for one region per day, at a 10% escalation ratio from a base of 20k.

It only appears unsolvable because you've presumed that social media should exist in its current form. Yes, algorithms can't match the scale of the bad content before we hit AGI. But that problem only exists because we have for-profit companies hosting way more content than they can afford to police on the thin margins ads provide. (Twitter, for example, makes about $1 per user per month.)

Prior to the late 2000s, this problem didn't exist. In alternate universes, it surely doesn't; there are many ways this could have gone.

its hard to say the problem isn't really solveable when nobody has really tried to begin with.

There are academic researchers and private teams all over the planet attempting to find solutions to disinformation, bullying and even spam.

Of course, it's pretty clear by now that there isn't going to be a magic bullet that is going to make everybody happy.

People are trying, what are you referring to?

Not OP. My impression is that a lot of the focus is around safety and specifically privacy. Both play right into social media giants' hands.

Instead we need to target Ads. Almost all problems can be eventually traced back to ads. At the very least traced back to the money incentive that ads create, on any platform.

Thanks, thats actually a great answer.

I would go one step further and suggest that ads are an issue for certain types of Economic games or Markets.

Any industry that depends on Ads tends to consolidate, and has an issue of incentives - the more people on the network, the more likely the network is able to survive.

On a tech forum people assume that challengers have better tech - but I would argue that challengers actually allow for more salacious/engaging content.

This is what creates the race to the bottom.

If the race to the bottom can be stopped - i.e. an incentive structure created that stops engagement being the primary metric, then the rest of the downstream problems are largely prevented.

Thats my root cause assessment of the situation. However once I get to this point, any solution seems to be a mess of intersecting fields ranging from morality, legal constraints, issues with press freedoms, free speech etc. etc.

So... I guess how do we set up incentives to not allow the most "engaging" content to dominate?

Or

d) He realizes that there are opposing factions with different ideas of what needs to happen, and it's impossible for his company to please them all, so pushing the decision to some semblence of a vote that claims to represent everyone is the only way to put an end to the endless arguing.

or

e) He believes what he wrote and doesn't think these social issues should be decided by corporations.

Either interpretation is fine and a lot more generous than yours.

He also wants the legislation to be toothless or misplaced so Facebook can pay lip service and not be fundamentally altered. Haugen just offered congress more surgical solutions than they were drafting as well as valid critiques of their drafts. That's why this particular post from Zuckerberg comes with such a large side of koolaid.

That's an extremely pessimistic view of regulation. Somehow other industries manage to do fine despite it. In the EU, GDPR somehow hasn't snuffed out all small businesses.

I mean, the harmful effects of regulation are much less visible then the harmful effects of what is being regulated. We don't know to what degree the GDPR has snuffed out potential small businesses.

> In the EU, GDPR somehow hasn't snuffed out all small businesses.

Simply because there was enough regulation in place in that area that they didn't exist in the first place