Well, by “appropriate” I more meant “we think this is okay for someone to post on our platform” and not “our inscrutable algorithm / someone’s ad buy thinks you’ll engage with this”. They definitely do a lot of the latter, but not a whole lot of the former (with the possible exception of their laser-focused crackdown on breastfeeding photos and trans people’s usernames). They just haven’t seemed terribly concerned with policing content for accuracy or acceptability based on regional mores (or even laws, as has been the case with their Fair Housing Act-violating ad platform). I think it’s because Silicon Valley techbros are free speech absolutists with no actual understanding of how human communities operate in the real world and a persistent belief that online spaces are somehow magically different than meatspace ones. Even if they did suddenly obtain a grasp of actual human social behavior, though, I think any serious attempt to implement such a rigorous moderation policy would ultimately collapse under the manpower requirements, because algorithmic and crowd-sourced solutions are far to easily gamed by bad actors.
A single, central, global platform is simply too large to moderate. It’s also demonstrably incapable of meeting its social obligation to ensure that everything happening on that platform is in good faith (e.g. no trolls, no impersonation, no covert influence campaigns targeting foreign elections…), and that its users aren’t discriminated against (e.g. systems auto-flagging LBGTQ+ content as “adult”). Such a platform also tears down the barriers separating legitimate sources of news and information from random quacks and cranks until everything is just one big morass of data (this is sort of an Internet-at-large problem too, but Facebook makes it so much easier to fake legitimacy). Facebook basically looks at this problem, says “eh, what can you do?”, and soldiers on anyway under the assumption that the problem will work itself out in the end if they just keep throwing neural networks at it. I look at it and say “Facebook needs to go away”.
The same goes for platforms like Twitter and YouTube, really. They’re all the apocryphal good men doing nothing.
It absolutely isn’t, which was my point. You can’t have a club that doesn’t suck if you don’t exclude people on the grounds of sucking. And it’s not a question of merely setting and policing rules; I’m talking about subjective, “because I said so” choices. On the hypothetical good version of Facebook, someone would simply be able to say “I’m deleting Infowars because I think it’s bad”. That’s not an outlandish thing to suggest.
I doubt Facebook itself could make that transition and live, but then, I doubt Facebook will still be here in ten years whatever happens. If we want its successors to be less horrible, we should be thinking about what was wrong with it from the start, not how to clone its septic final stage (which is the problem I have with Mastodon and most similar efforts) (arguably Mastodon is more a clone of Twitter, but the same argument applies).
Nancy Pelosi herself describes the Democratic message:
“We’ve had for a year, working with the Senate, our agenda: Better Deal. Better jobs. Better pay. Better future. It took eight months or so to put it together, to come to agreement. The members shaped this. It wasn’t something where I said, ‘This is what I think it should be. Now sell it.’ It was: ‘What do you think it should be?’ It’s very important that it spring from the members.”
“And when people say, ‘Well, it doesn’t inspire me’… It inspires me. Because it’s about the economy. No matter the other stuff we disagree on, the financial stability of America’s working families is the unifying force in our caucus. That’s why these people are Democrats, not Republicans.”
Russia is not anywhere in there. People need to remember that the media and especially Twitter are not the Democratic party.
Given the company’s leadership, this isn’t surprising. Indeed, it’s expected.
I deleted my account because I cannot support and enrich people like Zuckerberg, Thiel and Sandberg and others.
