Slashdot Mirror
CNN Contributor Urges: Stop Calling Facebook a Tech Company (cnn.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a CNN opinion piece by Stanford business school lecturer David Dodson:
"Senator, we run ads." That's what Mark Zuckerberg told Senator Orrin Hatch earlier this year during his congressional testimony when asked to describe Facebook's business model. The 84-year-old senator was later mocked on social media for not understanding modern technology. But I'd argue that the wily senior senator understood Facebook's business quite well. Hatch was simply getting Mark Zuckerberg to say it out loud. Sometimes it takes an old guy to call out a youngster....
For media companies that run ads, especially ones that use public networks, we tell them that they can't lie or mislead, that it's not okay to advertise cigarettes to children or push prescription drugs without including the risks. We have laws governing deceptive advertisements and Truth in Advertising laws. Companies that run ads can't say a car gets 40 miles per gallon unless it's true. They can't say a movie won an Academy Award unless it did. If you say the wool comes from New Zealand, it must.... When nearly half of Americans get their news from Facebook, its newsfeed should be subjected to the same standards of fairness, decency and accuracy as newspapers, television and other media outlets....
Calling Facebook a tech company is how we got into so much trouble. It's also why, when Zuckerberg answered Hatch, the 34-year-old billionaire smiled in a way that was interpreted by many as smug. As if the senator was too antiquated to grasp the complexities of Facebook's revenue model. I see it differently. The company founder was offering a grin of acknowledgment. The jig was up. Facebook places ads just like most media companies do and should be held to the same overall standards.
For media companies that run ads, especially ones that use public networks, we tell them that they can't lie or mislead, that it's not okay to advertise cigarettes to children or push prescription drugs without including the risks. We have laws governing deceptive advertisements and Truth in Advertising laws. Companies that run ads can't say a car gets 40 miles per gallon unless it's true. They can't say a movie won an Academy Award unless it did. If you say the wool comes from New Zealand, it must.... When nearly half of Americans get their news from Facebook, its newsfeed should be subjected to the same standards of fairness, decency and accuracy as newspapers, television and other media outlets....
Calling Facebook a tech company is how we got into so much trouble. It's also why, when Zuckerberg answered Hatch, the 34-year-old billionaire smiled in a way that was interpreted by many as smug. As if the senator was too antiquated to grasp the complexities of Facebook's revenue model. I see it differently. The company founder was offering a grin of acknowledgment. The jig was up. Facebook places ads just like most media companies do and should be held to the same overall standards.
Users are the product! Facebook doesn't need to run ads, the companies and political parties already know to come to Facebook to buy users!
You can argue all day about whether a creative work has merit, but arguing about whether it's art is ridiculous. Facebook sure as hell isn't in the hospitality business, or manufacturing. Their technology is all in advertising, but technology has been used in advertising as long as there's been advertising. Of course Facebook is a tech company, just like an advertisement in a magazine is art.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Google is an ad company too. That's where they make their money.
Facebook is not a newspaper. Its more like a town square where people are going about browsing in various shops, gossipping with their neighbors and hanging out. To shout fire in such a place and cause a stampede which leads to deaths is not an exercise of the first amendment. We need to go after Facebook with public order laws not just truth in advertizing laws
**Life is too short to be serious**
... personal data whore.
The other big box data stores like Apple, Google, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter are particularly pleased that Facebook is at the lead of the media and legislation bow shock.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Of course FB is an advertising company that tries to hide behind the fiction of "we're just connecting people!" Isn't that the BS that every marketer since the snake in the garden has pushed?
Wake up sheeple, our economy, our nation (and every other industrial nation), and our very existence depends on consumerism, and therefore marketing. This is a doublethink that makes it nearly impossible to perceive the true insidious nature of marketing -- lies for profit.
Big tech should have stayed an ad company.
Let the users be the "publishers" and have the full protection of been a "utility".
Now that big tech wants to ban, report, detect and curate users they have become more than just an ad company.
Wonder when the full protection of the Communications Decency Act stops when a platform becomes a publisher?
Want art great Section 230 to stay? Just let your users content pass.
Start to publish and take political sides? Become a partisan censor?
What was government protected allowed platforms to grow.
Try for algorithmic and human political censorship and the gov free expression legal protections stop as the "ad" company is now just another publisher.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Think of all the Christmas Markets which get setup around this time. They need permits and its the job of the organizer to provide security (or pay the police dept for it). Facebook has setup the largest Christmas in the Park and not spent anything on security. So yeah we need to take their permit away and shut them down till they spend enough on security to ensure the safety of the general public attending.
**Life is too short to be serious**
Do you disagree with the relevant studies? Or are you just unable to read them?
Free speech should not include fraud and misrepresentation, which is what Fox delivers under the rubric of "News." We are cutting our own throats as a society by allowing them to do that.
So did significant improvements to HBase, PyTorch, Haxl, PHP compilers, and much more.
And Facebook is inventing sophisticated AI hardware (https://code.fb.com/ml-applications/the-next-step-in-facebook-s-ai-hardware-infrastructure/) including semiconductor design (https://www.networkworld.com/article/3268974/hardware/is-facebook-looking-to-build-its-own-data-center-chips.html). and is the primary contributor to the Open Compute Project's work on more efficient data center hardware (https://www.opencompute.org//
TL/DR: The only reason they are able to invade our privacy that effectively is that they really are an impressive technology company.
The Facebook Dilemma
That's an excellent documentary, especially Part 2. The Facebook system is seriously flawed, Part 2 says. In several countries people have died because of Facebook posts by destructive people.
When nearly half of Americans get their news from Facebook, its newsfeed should be subjected to the same standards of fairness, decency and accuracy as newspapers, television and other media outlets....
OK, first of all, "newspapers, television and other media outlets" are not in any way synonymous with "fairness, decency and accuracy".
That said, Facebook is nothing like those things anyway. A Facebook feed is a crazy quilt mix of stuff your friends posted, ads, random crap FB thinks you might be interested in, random crap that pushes their political point of view, etc.
None of this can end well. There is no way that regulation can ensure "fairness, decency and accuracy".
With a hat tip to Winston Churchill, free speech is the worst way of handling this ... except for all the other ways.
What does being trusted have to do with facts?
Huh? Mad magazine is well known for not having ads so as to satirize without fear. To quote publisher Bill Gaines, "We long ago decided we couldn't take money from Pepsi-Cola and make fun of Coca-Cola."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Never seen an actual Onion magazine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Big banks & financial firms develop tons of cutting-edge tech as a platform to support their core business. Not to mention governments.
Does that mean banks and the gov't are tech companies?
(Open sourcing is an unrelated matter. Note that plenty of true "tech" companies don't open source anything, but the US government does so big-time.)
Suggestion: Look around you. Most people aren't as logically-minded as you.