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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

I hear your point. He should ignore both sides.

Samson shouldn't tell Delilah about his hair.

So does everyone. But ignoring can go both ways here, and would provide an elegant solution. The right and left can whine at FB, and then it can ignore them instead of whining about them whining about FB. Everybody is ignored and people can be left to sort out what is and isn't true on FB, as informed adult users of the site should be compelled to do.

Like Samson, who is less a real person than a parable, Facebook is incapable of quietly and ruthlessly exercising market power to dominate the world, like Amazon before Jeff Bezos's affair. Like anyone who ever put their picture on, well, Facebook, Facebook really wants to be loved.

I do. He should not be regulating anything. He has terms of service that ban certain things (the ludicrous ban on display of female nipples comes to mind). But if he wishes to call himself a platform, he cannot start sifting content for truth and banning what he deems untruthful. That's a journalist's job.

Maybe it's a platform's job. You have this rhetorical trick where you pronounce that things fall into categories and just are the way they are. It works for you about as well as when Esquire does it, which is to say not very well. (Let's just ignore that having terms of service that ban certain things (like nipples) is regulation. For these purposes, lies are like nipples. And when I say that let's just ignore this, I mean, let's just accept it as true, and then move on, as we do with our nipples.) We have these other platforms called newspapers. They don't run just anything.

I hear this from the left and right. The right says he is somehow burying conservative content. How, I have no idea.

Exactly. It's nonsense.

The left says he's allowing Russian bots to flood FB with untrue content about Democratic candidates.

Oddly, you say you hear this from left and right, and you debunk the right-wing nonsense, but something keeps you from just saying that the left (and center -- I'm pretty sure that the center is skeptical of Facebook too) is right. Facebook basically announced a new policy of permitting politicians to lie in ads. Who do you think is most interested in lying in ads? Whose campaign has been lying in Facebook ads?

First, if you'll let FB posts inform your voting decisions, I have no time for you. You're an idiot who should be removed from the gene pool.

That's a lovely sentiment, but you live in a country that gives all of those people the vote too, so your fate is bound up in how they get their information.

But putting that aside, FB is simply a connective device. You don't punish the bullhorn manufacturer for the ramblings of maniac using it to scream awful things on the street corner.

That's not what Facebook is. The power of Facebook is in the switches, not the wires.`

He does. But you're asking him to play "god of content."

I see you using quotation marks, but that's not something I ever said.

What criteria shall he use to determine what's true and what's not?

How about the same ones he uses for commercial speech? Why not have terms that say that Facebook won't accept money to runs ads that mislead, and then decline to run ads that Facebook thinks will mislead?

Real, actual media can barely do that effectively. FB is supposed to sift through billions of posts and eliminate that which it deems lies? There's a Flat Earth Society on FB. Should that be banned because it's clearly untrue? How about creationists? What about gold bugs predicting economic collapse?

Oh, enough. We're not talking about whether Facebook can enforce its own rules perfectly. We're talking about whether once someone points out to them that they are taking money to spread lies, they continue taking money to spread lies.

What about politicians who lie? Shall we ban Warren's FB ads promising student loan forgiveness because we know she can't seriously think she can actually deliver it -- that it's clearly just an empty promise?

I think there's a difference between a lie and an unrealistic promise.

The suggestion there are 37 genders which exists on FB is untrue. It's scientifically unserious. Should that be banned? Some doctors think fibromyalgia is a made up disease. Ban that? Aspergers has been removed from the DSM-IV. Remove all references to it?

I have much less of a problem with all of that speech if it's not trying to get someone to spend money or make a vote.

And more broadly, how should he deal with opinion pieces? Should he establish spheres of deviance that he likes and ban opinions that he deems to be based on sketchy facts or misunderstanding of facts?

No. I see your slippery slope and decline to slide down it. The fact that Facebook -- like many others -- has chosen a spot partway down the slope is an indication that it's not all that slippery.

TV runs ads filled with lies all the time. If I had to list all of the snake oil pitches one sees on TV, I'd need a room full of servers to hold them all.

The fact that there is under enforcement of existing law does not mean that existing law is worthless.

It taught me that there are arrogant people in the country with the temerity to say the following:

I think it's unfair that a lousy candidate lost an election because dumb people were manipulated. I think we should put safeguards in place to make sure dumb people cannot be manipulated, and I think my view of what is and isn't worthy of voters' eyes should be used as the measuring stick.

Channeling Hitchens in reply to a ludicrously arrogant critic (and I've seen him do this in the flesh): "To that, sir... Uh, fuck you. Fuck you."

Then you learned the wrong thing. The real problem is not that some people in this country are arrogant. The problem is the people who were manipulated in various ways to vote for Trump. That is, unless you are more bothered by the arrogant people who voted for Clinton than the fact that Trump won, something you creep around but don't quite say.

One lesson I take from the last election is that a lot of people now get their news from social media instead of traditional media, and that as a democracy we have a strong interest in making sure that works well. A system in which social-media companies make money disseminating lies doesn't seem to fit that bill.