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Facebook Should Be 'Regulated Like Cigarette Industry', Salesforce CEO Says (theguardian.com)
Facebook should be regulated like a cigarette company, because of the addictive and harmful properties of social media, according to Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff. From a report: Social networks would be regulated "exactly the same way that you regulated the cigarette industry," Benioff told CNBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos. "Here's a product -- cigarettes -- they're addictive, they're not good for you, maybe there's all kinds of different forces trying to get you to do certain things. There's a lot of parallels. I think that, for sure, technology has addictive qualities that we have to address, and that product designers are working to make those products more addictive, and we need to rein that back as much as possible," he added. Benioff, who founded B2B cloud computing company Salesforce in 1999, and is now worth more than $4bn, suggested that regulation of some form was inevitable for the technology industry. "We're the same as any other industry," he said. "Financial services, consumer product goods, food -- in technology, the government's going to have to be involved. There is some regulation but there probably will have to be more."
By the same token, creimer's videos should be regulated like nuclear waste or genetic engineering.
but I don't see anyone regulating that.
Pursuit of happiness is a founding principle of this nation, and you dont get to define when the pursuit should be abandoned.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
What's interesting about the debate over net neutrality is how much it focusing on the infrastructure of transmitting data instead of the platforms that now control all of our data. When it comes to Facebook/Apple/Google/Amazon/Twitter/Instagra/Youtube/Netflix, so much of our data and daily activity is centered around those platforms. We've seen it recently where people get thrown off Youtube or Twitter for incendiary comments or violating terms of service. I hate racists, but Cloudflare shutting down the Daily Stormer (or whatever it was called) is concerning.
But what isn't discussed is that those companies so dominate the internet in terms of engagement and content that being kicked off for violating those company's vague terms of service is tantamount to being thrown off the internet. If you made videos that generated income on Youtube one day, but they demonetize you the next, it's akin to being thrown off the internet (slight hyperbole, but still).
So yes, these dominant platforms do need to be regulated, not only because of their addictive nature but the overall influence they have as platforms controlling which information we do and don't see.
I didn't know Facebook killed that many people. I blame the kittens.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
No. Just no. Facebook is a form of free speech. The internet is an platform for free speech. Stop trying to regulate free speech!
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especially on the Christian right & among evangelicals. Still this guy is full of it. The public health risks to Facebook alone are a fraction of smoking. Plus there isn't a concerted effort on the part of Facebook to downplay those risks. We ought to keep a close eye on social media vis-a-vis fake news but we don't quite need the same level of regulatory muscle as tobacco companies get.
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Are we going to have to show our driver's license before we log on? Put warning labels on it? Tax it heavily? Run anti-Facebook adds on TV? "Here is your brain. Here is your brain on Facebook. Any questions?"
You mean I won't be able to post to facebook within 200 feet of a school. And I'll start seeing my tax dollars used to fund obnoxious adds on tv now?
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
It's hard to take a CEO seriously when their own products promote vendor lock-in. It's literally a "leaving us feels difficult" versus a "leaving us is difficult" situation.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
First of all, if your kids are addicted to facebook, its your fault, stop blaming someone else... stop asking the government to raise your kids. "more regulation" is not the answer to anything when it comes to government.
Facebook should just die! It should go the fuck away!
These guys want you to be THEIR little bitches. Not facebook's. Davos hates competition.
Inoculate, drain the swamp, put out a ton of sterile fakes so they can't breed. Eradicate the scourge.
At least on Facebook, one can edit their posts. Slashdot has a system which deliberately elicits the most visceral responses possible -- it rewards being 1st to post more than anything else. Certainly, 1st to post is rewarded more than accuracy here. Galloway is a marketing professor and he's been "predicting" that Amazon and Facebook would be targeted by the government for a while. I guess he is calling for it openly now. Maybe their relevance algorithms are too good? So good that they make him irrelevant? Hard to say. Of course, the fact that he took his message to a British publication is pretty telling. Brits are all too eager to give up their freedom for safety.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
...the very idea of regulating human behavior that this would seem to require seems far worse to me.
When a bunch of fucktards like SpammerForce advocate just about anything, its a safe bet that the opposite position is the correct one to take.
SpammerForce can get fucked.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
The CEO of a company that sells nothing to consumers is calling for the regulation of a company that also sells nothing to consumers. I have no idea what SalesForce actually does. It must do something, because businesses are throwing all this money at it. Still though, the economy ran pretty well before all of this crap existed. We were on top of the world. We put a man on the Moon without SalesForce, and none of the guys that did it were FaceBooking while red lights flashed on panels at Mission Control during Apollo 13 so we got our boys back! I don't spend any time on FaceBook. They get none of my time. I've never given a dime to SalesForce directly. Presumably some companies that I *do* give my money to are giving them money, and because of that he gets to say these things; but I digress.
SalesForce. FaceBook. It could all just disappear and I wouldn't care. Others would, but we'd find our way. That's surreal.
They changed the San Francisco skyline. The Chrysler Building changed the New York City skyline; but you could *drive* a Chrysler. It made sense. None of this makes any real sense.
Surreal.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
it's a major part of the discussion. A big part of NN is allowing a startup to join the big players and disrupt the industry if they've got the tech and a good idea. You can't beat the established players without NN because you won't be able to buy enough bandwidth. Hell, even if you could exclusivity deals will kill you deader than Elvis.
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think about the advertisers, the Russians trying to influence voting, people who post murders, guns, and abuse on BookFace? /s
But I plan on opening FB withdrawal clinics. With full rehab programs. Special classes for narc...narcissists. Foodie detox programs. I'll be printing money.
just like cigarettes.
A corollary is that any industry making obscene amounts of money should have been regulated much earlier.
That suit interfered in the politics of Indiana several years ago because he did not like how Hoosiers behaved and what they believed. Now he wants to interfere with the functioning of the walled gardens because he does not like how the human cattle within behave, even though it has been obvious for years how crap-strewn the gardens are. The behavior of the cattle has even been codified long ago.
Nothing is going to come of this because this will be a fight between that rag doll stuffed with hundred-dollar bills and an Ivy League graduate with more pull than the planet Jupiter.
--- Andy West http://andywest.org
Because when I hear "regulated like the tobacco industry", I immediately think of regulations which will be, at best, an annoyance to the established players (ie. Facebook) but devastating to any potential small businesses that could one day be competitive with the big guys. This is exactly the way the tobacco industry has been regulated--the Democrats are a bunch of useful idiots to Big Tobacco, happily instituting whatever regulation seems like a good way to "stick it" to smokers and tobacco companies without the slightest consideration of the long-term consequences or economic effects. Let's look at some examples:
The FDA bans flavored cigarettes, supposedly to keep kids from trying cigarettes, yet for some reason doesn't ban menthol, which is the number 1 flavor that people try when they start smoking. But I guess we can't do anything that might hurt our buddies in Big Tobacco, eh? The actual effect is to put small, niche tobacco firms out of business--less competition for Big Tobacco.
All the ridiculous scare mongering over vaping, because even though it's obviously safer than smoking, it might not be totally 100% safe, and we can't allow anything to be sold that hasn't been proven to be completely 100% safe. Why isn't this standard applied to alcohol or tobacco? Oh, right, I forgot, we can't do anything that might hurt our big corporate friends. Better ban vaping now!
What's that? People got sick of the obscene taxes on cigarettes and switched to rolling their own from loose tobacco. That's a good thing, right? less money in the pockets of big tobacco companies, wasn't that the whole reason we made these regulations? Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot we really made these regulations so Big Tobacco wouldn't have to compete. We better hike takes on loose tobacco by more that 2000%!
The bottom line is that if you want Facebook (or anything, for that matter) to go away, please, for the love of God, do not regulate it like we have regulated tobacco. The tobacco regulations we've made thus far have been nothing but neatly wrapped gifts to big tobacco conglomerates, sold as "onerous rules and regulations" to a public that won't bother thinking about them for five seconds and will support it as long as it has the superficial appearance of "sticking it" to big tobacco companies.
All you really need to know about Marc Benioff is that it took him only 4 years to go from college graduate to vice president of Oracle Corporation.
Yes, that Oracle Corporation.
Making that big a leap in that environment requires a stratospheric level of ruthlessness and ambition, combined with an active willingness to kiss Larry Ellison's ass and swear it tastes like butterscotch. Daily.
Benioff is the guy who coined the phrase "software as a service" - you know, rent seeking? - that has taken the Valley by storm. Because, what the hell, why not take the marks for every possible penny?
(It's worth noting here that Wikipedia's page on Benioff reads like it was written by his PR department.)
Yes, he's big humanitarian. Yada-yada. What's infinitely more important is that his company, Salesforce, is based on a business model of locking its customers into its "platform" (a strategy he adopted from Oracle). Which is to say getting them hooked so firmly on a very expensive sales management solution that it would be castastrophically expensive for them to replace it.
Which makes Marc Benioff a - what's the word I'm groping for?
Oh, yeah: "hypocrite" ...
Check out my novel.
Ever meet a Salesforce Zealot? The CEO essentially runs a cult.
So should all so-called 'social media', it's all a CANCER on our civilization.
As much as I have a distaste for Facebook and don't use it (amongst other entities including Google, Uber, Twitter, Microsoft, Apple, etc) I think it is utterly ridicules that people will argue for utilizing government and thus violence (ie what government is) against others. The harm is so disproportionately off. Nobody is forcing you to use facebook or to gamble or to smoke cigarettes or do any of these things. Government and thus violence should only ever be utilized as an act of self defense against others committing equally egregious and violent acts.
Unfortunately I have a great example of this. The government(s) implemented a monopoly on cable services in the 1980s which has led to an untenable situation today in the internet access market. A reasonable act would be to open up the market and ensure new entrances can get to a competitive point. Violence was used to establish these monopolies and its not unreasonable for violence to be used to counter it. We would probably have a free market and some competition today if not for these violent acts of government that were perpetrated by cable companies in the 1980s. Violence was used via government by cable companies of the day to keep others out of the market and eventually to become so entranced even if no monopoly was in law no one could reasonably enter said market due to dominance that resulted from earlier monopoly status.
I have a hard time seeing how facebook rose to power via violence and competition exists even if you don't want to see it. I don't use facebook and am on social networks. We have monopolies in other regulated markets and its only because of "criminals" that free markets have opened up in certain areas like transportation (ie Uber, etc). We shockingly even have free markets with computers and operating systems in spite of governments creating issues in the free market by adopting operating systems exclusively (in practice) rather than practicing diversification and even mandating software turning many people/companies into dependence on near monopolies. ie to pay taxes in some places or get certain government benefits you must have particular Adobe software which only runs on Microsoft Windows.
hate Facebook that's a stupid idea.
... does it have to be said that "You cannot (successfully) legislate morality"? If you want to go that route, it could be argued that junk food, caffeine, and porn are all addictive to an extent and should be "regulated". But people need to take & accept responsibility for their own behavior.
Kids these days are especially stupid with their Tide Pod challenges and the like, time to get kids off the internet once and for all.
Seems to me like salesforce wants to spin up its own "social media" platform. They did attempt to buy linkedin.
Sounds like they are just looking for a way to divert eyes from facebook to something else they might be working on
http://www.businessinsider.com/salesforce-really-wanted-linkedin-2016-7
Obviously we have people so addicted to cell phones that they are rather useless. Cell phones are also a cause of numerous drug sales. For drug addicts making calls for hours each day to inquire into who has drugs to sell or trade is in itself a real life stopper. They can spend as much time getting hooked up as they do under the influence of the dope that they seek. Obviously we can't stop cell phones and should not try to strangle the use of computers.
In this case 'addictive' is really 'fun to use' - and maybe he is right, maybe he should take the lead and start telling his programmers and designers to start making his own products 'less fun to use', so they can all go back to the old way that was used before salesforce, right?
Because good education and better living standards are too costly to make a better society... I can also hear politicians say: "But all that money... and all this godly and holly and beautiful money that I have taken will be meaningless with everyone being as well as me".