Dan, I agree that we have to strike while the iron is hot. But unless advertisers go back to boycotting Facebook, there's little chance of change there. A bunch of leading civil rights groups organized the #StopHateforProfit advertiser pause back in July 2020, which got Zuck and Sheryl's attention, but they rode it out. Now the only initiative I see to organize pressure for change is TheFacebookLogout, which I'm (a small) part of and which I wrote about here yesterday https://theconnector.substack.com/p/its-time-for-the-great-facebook-logout. It's very hard to get individuals to take this action (Facebook is our de facto digital phone book after all, like a social utility you can't do without) so I don't expect the logout to last long, but it could help us organize the kind of broad grassroots base needed to pressure advertisers and also hold Congress' feet to the fire. Lastly, I don't think breaking up Facebook alone into its major parts would fix the problems that have been identified--we need far greater transparency into how these platforms work to amplify content and group formation, and with that, we can push for a bunch of guardrails to reduce or eliminate toxic effects.
I nominate Zuckerberg for the Fritz Haber award. That award was initiated today, and the winner each year is the person who most closely exemplifies this dilemma: when you weigh that person's life in the balance, good and bad, is it very hard to determine if the world would be better off had he or she never been born? To explain:
Haber was a very famous German chemist and inventor in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In 1905 Haber reached an objective long sought by chemists—extracting large quantities of nitrogen from the air. Nitrogen gas is abundant in the atmosphere, but its solid form is relatively scarce on earth. It is inert and does not react with other chemicals to form new compounds, and so the various methods to extract it failed miserably over the years. Haber invented a process using high pressure and a catalyst and was able to directly react nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas to create ammonia. BASF licensed the process, brought it to industrial scale, and thus developed the base material for artificial fertilizer. And the same ammonium nitrate was the basis for producing munitions for the German during WWI.
Haber’s breakthrough enabled mass production of agricultural fertilizers and led to a massive increase in growth of crops for human consumption. So important is his fertilizer, that agronomists today say that without it--relying solely on manure-based fertilizers--farming would not support a world population greater than two-and-a-half billion people, less than a third of today's population.
But... he and the institute he led next turned their attention to creating poison gas. Their first attempts led to Chlorine Gas, which Haber got permission to use against entrenched French and Belgian troops at the battle of Ypres in 1915. He supervised its use personally and was delighted with the results when it blinded and suffocated its victims. Haber was given a commission of captain in the German Army, and returned to his villa for a celebration. During the celebration, his wife, also a well-known chemist, continued their long-running argument about his increasing militancy. She committed suicide in their courtyard garden, in front of him (and unwittingly, also in front of their 10 year old son, watching from a window. Haber returned to the reception.
Haber won the Nobel in Chemistry in 1919. It is undisputed that 2 of 3 people alive today owe their existence to Haber. But he wasn't finished. In the early 1930s, Haber was invited to become a senior member of I.G. Farben. Following up on his process to create the raw materials for fertilizer, he and his team developed a pesticide based on the poison cyanide. It was powerful and cheap, and could be stored in crystal form, gasifying when exposed to air, perfect for delousing and decontaminating buildings, ships, etc. He named it Cyclone. Or in German, Zyklon. Haber died in 1934, but his invention, later improved and re-named Zyklon B, was used for mass murder of Jews and others in WWII.
Haber and his wife were both Jewish. Their son committed suicide in his twenties.
Why doesn't Congress pass a law that says that each person owns all personal data about themselves, wherever it appears, in whatever form. And that it can't be shared, sold or otherwise leveraged without written or electronic permission. Such data cannot be "anonymized" and shared. And that permission has to be a single, specific statement, not a small part of a very long end user license agreement. Misuse of a person's data results in a $10,000 fine, proceeds of which go to the person whose data was used.
And, by the way, fine companies for data breaches, $1,000 for each identity stolen.
I've recently changed jobs and in setting up my 401k, looked only at green funds. Many of them include facebook, so maybe they're green, but not kosher imo. Interestingly, a lot of them also include Home Depot, another big no-no. It's been difficult to find funds that meet any semblance of goodness, I could only find a few.
The list of anti-trust actions is good, though some are hard to hard to actually DO, But what is needed to fix Facebook/Instagram/Tic Toc/Twitter etc. is to tax the company's ad revenues in ways to disincentive "engagement." The more times a message is seen, the higher the tax rate.
I hope some smart, ethical, well-financed people somewhere are working to create a self-publishing platform with actual restrictions on what can be published. A platform not with the sole mission of making as much money as possible. I suspect this is a pipe dream.
Another excellent review. FB's algorithms can be strange. They emailed me a connectionless suggestion for a group I might like: Appalachian Hillbilly People. Oddly, another suggestion was for a group in a small place in FL where I lived decades ago and had never mentioned.
One positive aspect that hopefully won't be sacrificed is the use of FB in many parts of the world as a substitute for the Internet and expensive phone calls.
Dan, I agree that we have to strike while the iron is hot. But unless advertisers go back to boycotting Facebook, there's little chance of change there. A bunch of leading civil rights groups organized the #StopHateforProfit advertiser pause back in July 2020, which got Zuck and Sheryl's attention, but they rode it out. Now the only initiative I see to organize pressure for change is TheFacebookLogout, which I'm (a small) part of and which I wrote about here yesterday https://theconnector.substack.com/p/its-time-for-the-great-facebook-logout. It's very hard to get individuals to take this action (Facebook is our de facto digital phone book after all, like a social utility you can't do without) so I don't expect the logout to last long, but it could help us organize the kind of broad grassroots base needed to pressure advertisers and also hold Congress' feet to the fire. Lastly, I don't think breaking up Facebook alone into its major parts would fix the problems that have been identified--we need far greater transparency into how these platforms work to amplify content and group formation, and with that, we can push for a bunch of guardrails to reduce or eliminate toxic effects.
I nominate Zuckerberg for the Fritz Haber award. That award was initiated today, and the winner each year is the person who most closely exemplifies this dilemma: when you weigh that person's life in the balance, good and bad, is it very hard to determine if the world would be better off had he or she never been born? To explain:
Haber was a very famous German chemist and inventor in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In 1905 Haber reached an objective long sought by chemists—extracting large quantities of nitrogen from the air. Nitrogen gas is abundant in the atmosphere, but its solid form is relatively scarce on earth. It is inert and does not react with other chemicals to form new compounds, and so the various methods to extract it failed miserably over the years. Haber invented a process using high pressure and a catalyst and was able to directly react nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas to create ammonia. BASF licensed the process, brought it to industrial scale, and thus developed the base material for artificial fertilizer. And the same ammonium nitrate was the basis for producing munitions for the German during WWI.
Haber’s breakthrough enabled mass production of agricultural fertilizers and led to a massive increase in growth of crops for human consumption. So important is his fertilizer, that agronomists today say that without it--relying solely on manure-based fertilizers--farming would not support a world population greater than two-and-a-half billion people, less than a third of today's population.
But... he and the institute he led next turned their attention to creating poison gas. Their first attempts led to Chlorine Gas, which Haber got permission to use against entrenched French and Belgian troops at the battle of Ypres in 1915. He supervised its use personally and was delighted with the results when it blinded and suffocated its victims. Haber was given a commission of captain in the German Army, and returned to his villa for a celebration. During the celebration, his wife, also a well-known chemist, continued their long-running argument about his increasing militancy. She committed suicide in their courtyard garden, in front of him (and unwittingly, also in front of their 10 year old son, watching from a window. Haber returned to the reception.
Haber won the Nobel in Chemistry in 1919. It is undisputed that 2 of 3 people alive today owe their existence to Haber. But he wasn't finished. In the early 1930s, Haber was invited to become a senior member of I.G. Farben. Following up on his process to create the raw materials for fertilizer, he and his team developed a pesticide based on the poison cyanide. It was powerful and cheap, and could be stored in crystal form, gasifying when exposed to air, perfect for delousing and decontaminating buildings, ships, etc. He named it Cyclone. Or in German, Zyklon. Haber died in 1934, but his invention, later improved and re-named Zyklon B, was used for mass murder of Jews and others in WWII.
Haber and his wife were both Jewish. Their son committed suicide in his twenties.
Why doesn't Congress pass a law that says that each person owns all personal data about themselves, wherever it appears, in whatever form. And that it can't be shared, sold or otherwise leveraged without written or electronic permission. Such data cannot be "anonymized" and shared. And that permission has to be a single, specific statement, not a small part of a very long end user license agreement. Misuse of a person's data results in a $10,000 fine, proceeds of which go to the person whose data was used.
And, by the way, fine companies for data breaches, $1,000 for each identity stolen.
I've recently changed jobs and in setting up my 401k, looked only at green funds. Many of them include facebook, so maybe they're green, but not kosher imo. Interestingly, a lot of them also include Home Depot, another big no-no. It's been difficult to find funds that meet any semblance of goodness, I could only find a few.
The list of anti-trust actions is good, though some are hard to hard to actually DO, But what is needed to fix Facebook/Instagram/Tic Toc/Twitter etc. is to tax the company's ad revenues in ways to disincentive "engagement." The more times a message is seen, the higher the tax rate.
I hope some smart, ethical, well-financed people somewhere are working to create a self-publishing platform with actual restrictions on what can be published. A platform not with the sole mission of making as much money as possible. I suspect this is a pipe dream.
Another excellent review. FB's algorithms can be strange. They emailed me a connectionless suggestion for a group I might like: Appalachian Hillbilly People. Oddly, another suggestion was for a group in a small place in FL where I lived decades ago and had never mentioned.
One positive aspect that hopefully won't be sacrificed is the use of FB in many parts of the world as a substitute for the Internet and expensive phone calls.
the remedies (anti-trust, shareholder deceit) do not seem to have anti-evil properties. How's this going to help?