> it's constantly asking the government to tell it what to do because it doesn't want to be in charge of speech
This is a bad thing, according to you? Should Facebook instead make those decisions on its own?
The thing is, no matter what Facebook decides there will be criticism. If they make the decisions on their own, bad. If they ask for government to decide what speech is lawful and what isn’t, bad. If they don’t block fake news, bad. If they block fake news and realise months later it was real, bad.
And your genius solution is to break up the company. But any network, regardless of size will have this issue. The rise of Tiktok makes this very obvious. There’s tonnes of misinformation on Tiktok but it doesn’t get the same coverage because that’s not what aligns with the NYT’s priorities. Tiktok gets around the content moderation problem by simply saying and doing nothing, hoping no one notices.
So what’s your solution to TikTok? Break it up as well? Into what pieces?
The problem with people who come up with simplistic, unrealistic solutions to hard problems is that when the obvious flaws are pointed out in their thinking, they’ll double down.
The weight of any moderation decision is directly proportional to the size of the platform making that decision. This is a generally well understood principle in a lot of free speech circles, I'm surprised that of everything I've written about Kiwi Farms here, this is the thing that is getting the most pushback from people.
The principle behind breaking up platforms is that individual moderation decisions do become harder the more people that they impact. It's also not just a free speech thing, this is the same reason why it's dangerous to have a browser monoculture. If I tell you that having one company in charge of the entire web makes their individual decisions about the web more impactful and more dangerous, that's something you understand, right?
Same deal for moderation.
Of course, see mlyle's other sibling comment -- sometimes we genuinely can't do anything about a natural monopoly and we just need to recognize what they are. But in instances where we can, decentralizing power decreases the overall risk of moderation mistakes for the entire network.
This is a bad thing, according to you? Should Facebook instead make those decisions on its own?
The thing is, no matter what Facebook decides there will be criticism. If they make the decisions on their own, bad. If they ask for government to decide what speech is lawful and what isn’t, bad. If they don’t block fake news, bad. If they block fake news and realise months later it was real, bad.
And your genius solution is to break up the company. But any network, regardless of size will have this issue. The rise of Tiktok makes this very obvious. There’s tonnes of misinformation on Tiktok but it doesn’t get the same coverage because that’s not what aligns with the NYT’s priorities. Tiktok gets around the content moderation problem by simply saying and doing nothing, hoping no one notices.
So what’s your solution to TikTok? Break it up as well? Into what pieces?
The problem with people who come up with simplistic, unrealistic solutions to hard problems is that when the obvious flaws are pointed out in their thinking, they’ll double down.