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Top Communications Union Joins Group Pushing for Facebook's Breakup (bloomberg.com)
The top U.S. communications union is joining a coalition calling for the Federal Trade Commission to break up Facebook, as the social media company faces growing government scrutiny and public pressure. From a report: "We should all be deeply concerned by Facebook's power over our lives and democracy," said Brian Thorn, a researcher for the 700,000-member Communications Workers of America, the newest member of the Freedom From Facebook coalition. For the FTC not to end Facebook's monopoly and impose stronger rules on privacy "would be unfair to the American people, our privacy, and our democracy," Thorn said in an email.
Facebook disclosed July 2 that it's cooperating with probes by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Bureau of Investigation on how political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica obtained personal information from as many as 87 million of the siteâ(TM)s users without their consent. The FTC, the Department of Justice and some state regulators were already probing the matter, which prompted Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg to testify before Congress in April. Facebook also faces calls for regulation from many lawmakers and the public over the privacy issue, Russian efforts to manipulate the 2016 presidential election and the spread of false information on the platform.
Facebook disclosed July 2 that it's cooperating with probes by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Bureau of Investigation on how political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica obtained personal information from as many as 87 million of the siteâ(TM)s users without their consent. The FTC, the Department of Justice and some state regulators were already probing the matter, which prompted Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg to testify before Congress in April. Facebook also faces calls for regulation from many lawmakers and the public over the privacy issue, Russian efforts to manipulate the 2016 presidential election and the spread of false information on the platform.
If you don't like it, you can always go to MySpace or GeoCities.
Check your premises.
dude just stop using it.
You can walk away from Facebook at any time. Just turn off the computer, stand up, and walk away.
What are you supposed to break up and how will it help anything? Instagram and FB as two entities will probably just be even more effective at invading privacy. Working for a company that was a former Bell company... it really doesn't matter. We have a big huge weird metal desk in our courtyard that's AT&T's and a number of executives were from oldschool AT&T. Breaking a company up really just ends up making the executives more money and makes it harder to account for shenanigans.
Into two social networks. One for the cool people and one for the dorks.
Have gnu, will travel.
I'm having a hard time understanding how Facebook is a monopoly. Sure, Facebook has a lot of features that other services have, and it's difficult to bring users into competing services, but I fail to see how that constitutes a monopoly. Facebook isn't the only game in town, they're just the "best" one. That's like saying the NFL has a monopoly on American style football; there's the Canadian League, Arena Football League, UFL, and so on - it's just that the NFL is the only one that doesn't suck. Why not break up their monopoly? But that begs the question about how would they "break up their monopoly?" Shut down the service? Not allow advertisers? I'm having a hard time understanding how that would even be legal.
The larger problems of Getty Images, the RIAA/MPAA, Alphabet Corp, Microsoft, etc. Focusing on Facebook is making a mountain out of a molehill, and treating the actual mountain as a molehill.
Sadly, short of a great purge of narrowsighted idiots, I don't forsee an improvement in the human condition or globalized society this generation, or if they survive in future generations thereafter.
The biggest area of concern that would need to be broken up is the Facebook social network, and I fail to see any meaningful way of breaking that part up. Sure, you could make Facebook spin off some of its other brands, but Facebook itself would still likely be intact and a problem.
However, I'm not sure that Facebook even is such a great problem. Stupid people who believe everything they read on the internet are a much bigger problem. Facebook just provides a platform for sharing such junk, and I'd say any platform that allows stupid people will suffer from similar problems. Speaking of which, I just got a Facebook notification from a stupid friend that cars will explode if the fuel tanks are filled completely in the summer heat. I need smarter friends.
Sure there are other American-style football organizations out there, but none of them have immunity from anti-trust regulations, or have been granted the level of state and municipal largess that the NFL has.
Facebook, sure, OK. But so typical of humanity. We will charge at the red cape, and think we have achieved something. The real threat to us is companies like this which no one ever heard about and thus will never get called to testify to Congress.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
siteâ(TM)s
Really?
Fascists want to break up the fascists... I love it when the douchelords attack each other!
If you revoke the safe harbor, these sites will have to start policing their users' content better. This raises costs which they will pass on to users somehow (more ads, paid service tiers), or possibly drives them out of hosting user-generated content entirely due to the risk of damages from prosecution for hosting libel, hate speech, or facilitating sex trafficking and child pornography.
The next step in this devolution is people go back to hosting their own content on standalone websites they pay for out of pocket. Then they're individually liable for the content they post, and the data is not aggregated by any corporation for abuse.
Of course, it's ripe for the CWA to complain of this, since they are employed by the very owners of the dumb pipes who resent that Facebook collects far more information than they could ever hope to since anyone can choose to use (or not) Facebook or Google services, but no one can avoid paying the local wired/wireless providers for access to the internet.
Facebook is useful and popular precisely because everyone in the world with any interest in social media is on it (well, except for places that restrict free access to the Internet, like China). You can't "break it up" into 20 different social-media sites, because then it won't be useful any more.
Sure, you could force them to spin off Instagram or whatever as a separate corporate entity, but as brucekeller observes-- what difference would that make? You'd still be left with a core platform that has billions of users. That makes the core platform bigger than any news outlet in the history of the world, and means that it will always have enormous power to influence political opinion.
With that said: I'd love to migrate from Facebook to a different social media site, one which still retains the basic functionality of Facebook. I'd be OK with doing this even knowing that most of my friends would *not* be on the new site, at least initially. But I tried looking for Facebook alternatives a few months ago, and the results were... not encouraging. Maybe someone here can post a suggestion.
Instead of focusing on a single company, why not target the crux of the problem instead ?
Get some serious privacy laws enacted so that NO company is allowed to obtain or collect private information from individuals without their express knowledge and consent. ( No, burying it on page 212 of a EULA doesn't qualify, nor does tying the right to spy on us for a discounted price for a service ) Obtaining it without consent is basically theft and should be treated as such.
Companies get a fucking slap on the wrist for surreptitiously obtaining data on us and / or losing it in a breach. Why is it I can get hit with a $150K fine for downloading a music track ( per infringement ) but companies stealing OUR personal data is perfectly legal ? Imagine if companies had to pay a $150K fine for every customers data they obtained without consent. ( Or on a per customer / account basis during a data breach ) That would be one impressive fine if you have several million customers data in your possession. . .
Additionally, some harsh laws ( at least on par with HIPAA laws ) need to be enacted to protect said information and force companies to take this matter seriously.
The only way you fix this is if you hurt them financially.
Breaking up and regulating Facebook would be a good start. But they're only in this mess because they're incompetent. The corporations that hold the most personal and intrusive data on us are the telcos. They also know exactly who we are, i.e. no anonymous or fake accounts when they have our home address and bank information. I wonder who they sell that data to? How could we find out?
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
Two more shall take its place!
Hail Zuckra!
not until comcast, disney, at&t, clear channel, sinclair broadcasting, charter, verizon, google, amazon, walmart, and apple are. and that's not even close to all of them that should be broken up or otherwise forced to divest some assets.
Hmmm.... i don't recall any republicans killing in the last 100 years....
But the Socialist Democrats and the International Counterparts account for over 500 million murders in the same time period.
So F'k off commie a-hole.
Burn the whole thing to the ground. Go 'connect' with people the old fashioned way: in person.
I made one just to watch my kids in events that are live streamed on Facebook.
Have to say it seems pretty useless otherwise. It's illogical in design, shit you dismiss keeps coming back, they keep suggesting "friends" for my fucking fake person.
It's actually a bit creepy.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Break up a company that provides a free service? How does that work? More like the feds aren't getting their cut and business could get "difficult" in the future.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
OK, in my ideal consumer-first world, we'd both:
1) Break up monopolies or any company large enough to get more than a third of a market
2) Outlaw unions that could disrupt public transportation/services (like this AT&T union), artificially drive prices (or the price of government services) up, influence elections, or drive companies out of the city/state/country
As a side benefit, this might also have the effect of removing a lot of money from politics (e.g., https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php?cycle=2016)
Every article about Facebook mentions Cabridge Analytica, but few mention that the Obama team did essentially the same thing, except in that case Facebook came to the Whitehouse and agreed to ignore it.
https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/facebook-data-scandal-trump-election-obama-2012/
One can argue that Cambridge Analytica was less truthful to the initial facebook user, but in both cases user's friend's data was also harvested, and in the case of Obama, fake messages were sent claiming to be from the initial user. Shady either way.
Both are unacceptable privacy breaches and illustrate that too much information is retained by many of the social media companies.
Consumers are benefited by centralization of a sort. In order to have that without having a monopoly, standards must be forced. What good would phone system competition have been without a telephony standard?
We should create a distributed data standard for social networking and force all providers to start using it, open up their data to all other providers, and not be able to mandate any client. Build privacy control into the standard and force compliance. Users should be able to say that the providers have no right to do anything other than store the data and allow normal clients access to it in the way the standard describes.
The free market will then work in the way that it should and take care of the monopoly aspects.
Is Facebook getting targetted because they don't pay off politicians? I would support breaking up Facebook, but there are a hell of a lot more important companies that need to be broken up. Comcast, anyone?
See subject: Your MASSIVE FAIL in this life is you're nothing more than a chattering little do-nothing "ne'er-do-well" online & you know it...
* Is that the best your "phantasyland FAKE NAME" (for your fake lie of a so-called 'life') can manage?
When a FAKE NAME do nothing like YOU does better than I have? Then talk (you're all talk & no action)...
You can't help you're an immature little BUTTHURT no-mind, lol! I blew you away in TONS OF PLACES and easily dust your no-mind bullshit blatherings.
APK
P.S.=> The TRUE PRICE of your UNIDENTIFIABLE FAKE NAME do-nothing selves like you that I can ALWAYS CASH IN ON (lol) is that I can use FACT/TRUTH on them to SHATTER their all TOO fragile delusional egos that they actually know A DAMN THING in computing, lol... apk
sure the communications companies would love it if there wasn't a neutral forum to discuss and spread awareness of all their underhandedness, why dont they break up google into 2 search engines while they're at it, or would they like to be like china, and break up the companies by country with the top "communications" firms (cough att comcast) having a final say in what goes? .... ya..... its for the people ....
Next then need to stop companies tracking us all like we are animals on safari. The info they can glean is just to personal itâ(TM)s creepy as fuck.
I donâ(TM)t want advertisers building pshyc profiles on me based on what news I read, movies I watch, sites I frequent, or purchases I make.
All of that is recorded and all of that will leak. No one cares about me, but how many lawyers, judges, and congressman can you blackmail with all of that? Not to mention knowing exactly how to psychologically attack or manipulate them.
That level of surveillance has no place in society for any reason.
(citation needed from non breitbard, infowars sites)
Heh. There's no way an FTC with a chair nominated by a Republican president would think about splitting up Facebook (or most any corporation, for that matter).
It could be beneficial if some of Facebook's vertical integration could be split apart (e.g. messenger, Instagram), which might provide room for competing services to fill those tasks. But there's just zero chance the current FTC will be interested in bothering.
wants them broken up is because they want to unionize them.
Just like how "breaking up" Microsoft made so many people switch to Linux and MacOS, right?
If labor unions are against Facebook, then I'm FOR Facebook.
What in hell do unions have to do with Facebook? Some union slug must have awakened at his desk and came up with this anti-Facebook idea.
I don't get the concern over this. What are you a member of some primitive tribe that thinks your soul will be stolen if your image is take and then posted somewhere online? It's a photograph. If you appear in the background of a photograph I take it's not like it matters or anyone cares. People spend too much time worrying about this shit. Just go live your life and quit worrying about who posted a picture you happen to appear in on facebook and what nefarious bullshit some imaginary supervillain is planning to use it for.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
... Let's break up all of the media conglomerates. Times corporation? Your times has come! AT&T? Let's try A, and T, and T. Comcast? I'm out of jokes, but you're on the list, along with Time Warner, Sinclair, I Heart Media, and so on and so forth.
Google, who I have been a big fan of although that fandom has been waning in the past year or so, is in a much more intrusive position.
They literally know everything about you and have been collecting your habbits, inclinations, locations, searches, etc.. long before facebook even showed up.
See subject: "Imitation=sincerest form of flattery" PROVING u WISH u were ME & poor imitation = u.
* GROW UP LOSER!
APK
P.S.=> What are you trying (& failing) to accomplish? Trying to "make me look bad"?? I have to ask as it's EXTREMELY DIFFICULT for me to "think like 'your kind'" (no-mind do-NOTHING "ne'er-do-wells" that can't think, lol) to even TRY to understand your "mental processes" (none obviously that are up to any good)... apk
"We should all be deeply concerned by Facebook's power over our lives and democracy," said Brian Thorn
We should actually be far, far more concerned by the US Government's power over our lives. Also, fuck the evil, collectivist nonsense you call "democracy"!