Mark Zuckerberg's Mentor 'Shocked and Disappointed' -- But He Has a Plan (time.com)

Early Facebook investor Roger McNamee published a scathing 3,000-word article adapted from his new book Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe. Here's just one example of what's left him "shocked and disappointed": Facebook (along with Google and Twitter) has undercut the free press from two directions: it has eroded the economics of journalism and then overwhelmed it with disinformation. On Facebook, information and disinformation look the same; the only difference is that disinformation generates more revenue, so it gets better treatment.... At Facebook's scale -- or Google's -- there is no way to avoid influencing the lives of users and the future of nations. Recent history suggests that the threat to democracy is real. The efforts to date by Facebook, Google and Twitter to protect future elections may be sincere, but there is no reason to think they will do anything more than start a game of whack-a-mole with those who choose to interfere. Only fundamental changes to business models can reduce the risk to democracy.
Google and Facebook "are artificially profitable because they do not pay for the damage they cause," McNamee argues, adding that some medical researchers "have raised alarms noting that we have allowed unsupervised psychological experiments on millions of people."

But what's unique is he's offering specific suggestions to fix it.

• "I want to set limits on the markets in which monopoly-class players like Facebook, Google and Amazon can operate. The economy would benefit from breaking them up. A first step would be to prevent acquisitions, as well as cross subsidies and data sharing among products within each platform."

• "Another important regulatory opportunity is data portability, such that users can move everything of value from one platform to another. This would help enable startups to overcome an otherwise insurmountable barrier to adoption."

• "Given that social media is practically a public utility, I think it is worth considering more aggressive strategies, including government subsidies."

• "There need to be versions of Facebook News Feed and all search results that are free of manipulation."

• "I would like to address privacy with a new model of authentication for website access that permits websites to gather only the minimum amount of data required for each transaction.... it would store private data on the device, not in the cloud. Apple has embraced this model, offering its customers valuable privacy and security advantages over Android."

• "No one should be able to use a user's data in any way without explicit, prior consent. Third-party audits of algorithms, comparable to what exists now for financial statements, would create the transparency necessary to limit undesirable consequences."

• "There should be limits on what kind of data can be collected, such that users can limit data collection or choose privacy. This needs to be done immediately, before new products like Alexa and Google Home reach mass adoption."

Comments

A solution that will not solve the wrong problem

[taustin]

The problem isn't unregulated social media, the problem is lazy, disengaged, gullible, and frankly, stupid voters. Regulating social medial won't solve that. Banning social media won't solve that. Banning the internet won't solve that.

Nothing he proposes will in any way affect the ability of social media to manipulate lazy, disengaged, gullible, stupid voters, it will only change (if it even does that, which is unlikely) who gets to decide how.

I cannot help but wonder if that's the real goal.

A couple of good ideas

[WolfgangVL]

But he does off the deep end with the government subsidies silliness.

I think many of the problems we've created with social media can be solved by simply educating users about the internet a little better. Half the reason misinfo spreads so easily is because a large subset of users don't know how this thing actually works. We made it too easy, and now every lowthinking knuckledragger can connect to the net and consume..... consume whatever gets served up to em. For good or ill.

Safe internetting should be taught in grade school through high school. We already provide K-12 students with computing platforms in many districts, but it seems like actual computer use education is just assumed.

My Son was issued a Chrome-book in 1st grade, and it's followed him into middle school. I certainly don't like the way Alphabet gets a direct line to the entire districts worth of student academic marks by default, and I would feel a lot better if some effort was given to educate the students in how to safely navigate the net, how to recognize different phishing attempts, and the value of personal information. Those are just the start. I think Alphabet aught to take the lead on this one in trade.

Our own advertising complex has grown really really good at targeted manipulation, and we already have a real good idea how easily foreign actors can manipulate people online. With that in mind, I feel social media has a social responsibility to educate users in how to use their platforms safely. If it takes government regulation, then so be it. This is one of the few places where I feel it's actually necessary.

Here's a portal to the internet kids. Go nuts.

Just kill Facebook, Twitter, and all social media

[Rick Schumann]

It's all cancerous garbage and humanity would be better off without it.

I'm typically opposed to heavy govt intervention

[Beeftopia]

I'm typically opposed to heavy government regulation and intervention. I believe that simple regulatory frameworks which create a system of rewards and punishments which loosely cover self-organizing (free-market) systems is optimal.

BUT... the scale of large companies can rival governments. The Founders banned an official church because they knew a church was a competing power center. Very large companies, on the scale of the East India Tea Company, or groups of companies, like the Military-Industrial complex which Eisenhower called out, can grow to rival government - elected government - power. The Founders did not foresee this development, as far as I can tell.

So, for that reason - the power reason and less so the monopoly reason - that government has an interest in looking into how much power these companies have, and to bring that power under control.

Another issue we have nowadays is that politicians dance for donors, and politicians also shake down donors. It's a symbiotic relationship which undermines elections. That issue is a deep-seated root cause, a symbiotic relationship which also must be addressed. It gives too much power to large donors. Power to control the government, rather than people in elections' power to control government.

As far as the monopoly angle goes, I suspect these big web companies may be - MAY be - something of natural monopolies, like railroads or utilities or other infrastructure providers. Limiting acquisitions by these companies sounds like a good idea to encourage competition though. But then, this points to money in politics - limiting acquisitions doesn't create as much "virtual gold" - high stock prices. And it seems to me that "making money now" supersedes pretty much any other concern in American politics today.