that’s just such a naive understanding of public space. public spaces in liberalism are not literally lawless zones where anything goes. they are in fact tightly hemmed in and closely delineated spaces where what is considered civil and appropriate discourse is policed by the state. it’s there in kant and it’s there in habermas. the idea of ‘public space’ being some terra nulla is hopelessly utopian and naive. almost every theoretician of public space and liberal ideals, e.g. foucault, expends a great deal of effort to point out that these spaces are actually created and ensured by some originary state violence or threat of such.
‘just to make people connect and let them do what they will’. that literally ignores the entire value-making and commercial underpinning of facebook. it doesn’t consider at all their ad model. facebook does not make its money by blowing the dust off your high school year book and connecting you to dave, 45, who is now a plumber in poughkeepsie.
you are ignoring literally everything the site does with personal data.
zuckerberg’s attempts to reframe the history of facebook as some noble platform for free speech and perfectly open communications is deplorable. see, for instance, his recent speech given at some college commencement, in which he explicitly tied his vision for facebook to ‘resistance’ to the iraq war and voicing dissent. just to be fucking real, here: the network started as a means for college frat boys to perv on hot female undergraduates. it was a primitive dating app algorithm. cut the bullshit with this ‘free speech’ platform rhetoric.
facebook and companies like google want to cross over into being media platforms and organisations where people go for their news and information, closed ecosystems with their platform and paid affiliates, but they don’t want to be beholden to the regulations that (for good reason) govern good practice in those industries. a paper printing blatant lies on behalf of paying clients wouldn’t stay open very long. facebook thinks it can get away with it if it dissimulates and makes accountability sufficiently diffuse and complicated.
the problem isn’t that implementing the tech is just ‘too complicated, your honour!’: it’s that facebook in the first place wants to be not only a feed where you see social interactions with your friends and connect with colleagues, but also a great sifting and filtering mechanism that connects highly data-mined users with highly targeted ‘news’ and ‘content’... with a paid ads model funnelling cash into that underneath. this is precisely why these giant tech conglomerates need scaling back. you wouldn’t let a fully qualified surgeon try to branch out into dentistry and then complain that it’s ‘too complicated’ to adhere to dental best practice using a scalpel. it’s stupid. if there are too many complications and impracticalities with offering paid political ads on a network that has sorted and silo'd people into easily marketable little groupuscles, bait for pollsters, maybe, you know, they should stop taking money for and allowing political ads.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ … g-congressMany of Facebook’s third-party fact checkers have still not been told that the company now expects them to vet adverts as well as user content for misinformation – though, controversially, not political adverts.
Some fact checkers only found out that they should be vetting paid adverts after Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg described the new policy in Congress on Wednesday.
is this really how you run one of the most influential tech companies on the planet?
i have no sympathy for the little tyrant.
Last edited by uziq (2019-10-26 04:12:54)
