So, Facebook has been fined forty million dollars for inflating video statistics.
Sounds like a yawn, eh? Not a very big fine, for a not-very-big crime.
But it was a big crime. Newspapers, web sites, etc…pivoted to video. Facebook said that views were as much as 900 percent higher than they actually were (counting, among other things, three-second views as viewership.)
So companies hired video staff, got rid of writers and pivoted.
And revenues crashed, because there wasn’t actually viewership or a way to monetize that viewership.
Virtually the entire online humor industry, for example, went under.
Facebook and Google are parasites and predators. They don’t create sweet fuck all, but they take a huge share of the revenue that would go to actual content producers. They devastate entire industries. And in this case, Facebook did it by straight-up fraud. They made billions from their lies, and paid a tiny fine.
In other words, the fine is so small, that Facebook knows they should commit fraud again in the future.
This isn’t effective law, effective regulation, or anything approaching justice.
Facebook needs to be broken up into constituent parts, and they need to be regulated. As a place to connect to friends, with a chronological timeline, Facebook provides a genuine service. As surveillance capitalism and a gateway that skims actual producers’ profits, destroying producers wholesale, it’s a catastrophe.
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Herman
I would argue that even as a way to connect with friends, Facebook is not a good service. Facebook and social media in general have just enhanced the pressure to keep up with the Joneses as people tend to only post the highlight reels of their life which can make you feel down about your own life. Plus, I honestly do not want to connect with a bunch of people from high school, college or past workplaces. I am happy to not know what other people are up to and it is easy to keep in contact with my close family and friends by mail or telephone. Facebook also facilitates a lot of unnecessary drama. I am glad I left Facebook years ago.
People act like we need these services to socialize but most studies show that people were more civically engaged, went to and hosted more parties, were closer to family and friends and were generally more socially active in the past. Not all of the decline is due to social media and the internet (television had an earlier and perhaps even larger negative impact) but it certainly plays a role. This of course is not even getting into the surveillance aspect of social media or the way it has destroyed certain industries and jobs.
Sadly, the pressure to be on social media is huge, especially for young people. It is just another example of how technology is not neutral. Technology produces huge social changes that few can predict or control. Ordinary people just have to deal with the consequences like rats in an experiment. This is why I don’t think breaking up Facebook or other social media companies will do much good since I think the technology itself is the problem.
Ifsea
Sadly, the pressure to be on social media is huge, especially for young people. It is just another example of how technology is not neutral.
The social pressure started circa 2005 with a cross-media saturation-bomb promotion that lasted for over a decade. Then came the pressure from the actual authorities–not having a social media account can get one detained at border crossings. Before all that started up being on Friendster or Geocities was barely a rung up from having an AOL address as a mark of gauche net-newbiedom, and anyone halfway respectable self-hosted their web pages.
ponderer
The only issue is finding a political party who is willing to break apart their biggest donors instead of shielding them from accountability. That’s the root problem. You’d have to over throw the corporate wings of the corporate parties. Facebook is doing what it can get away with. Partisans not holding their own accountable are taking us towards anarchy.
Tom
Never got into Facebook, I prefer Twitter.
That said, fines need to be punitive and executives jailed for this. And the conditions of the fines are that it can’t be passed onto consumers.
Unfortunately the US is too far gone to save and time has ran out. The only way to clean house is for the entire US State Apparatus to collapse in flames and rebuild from the ashes.
450.org
I’d like to see Zuckerberg given the same treatment as Mussolini when the unwashed got a hold of Mussolini and his girlfriend directly proximate to Italy’s surrender in WWII.
I call it the Mussolini Treatment and it’s the treatment the ENTIRE wealthy elite deserve if there is any justice.
S Brennan
Once Microsoft got a federal judge willing to uphold anti-trust law replaced with a judge who felt anti-trust law was unconstitutional to judge an Anti-Trust case…it was game over. Until Bill is made to pay for subverting the law to his whim, their is no law, only the rich mans fiat.
It’s interesting that the robber barons of today have a “liberal” patina, work in “liberal” areas and have largely “liberal” workers engaging in the day to day thievery that is the SOP for “tech” industries…
Contrast & compare with liberals of the 1930/40/50/early-60’s with those of the post Clinton-Gen. One group values the collective social progress/freedom/fabric, their accomplishments unparalleled…The other group values their personal economic circumstance/freedom to the exclusion of all who fall outside their social milieu, the sum of their collective accomplishments are a few gadgets. Gadgets btw, who’s genesis & technologies are the result of the liberals of the 1930/40/50/early-60’s.
What an empty world today’s “liberals” will bequeath to those that follow…
metamars
Was surprised to find out many years ago that US still had good anti-trust laws on the books, but they weren’t being enforced. Fortunately, we now have a President who will “clean up the swamp” /s
Facebook has invaluable health information. Unfortunately, the social media giants have targeted not just conservatives and anti-war progressives, they’ve also targeted alternative health groups.
But, for now, you can still find out lots of info, and get support, doing an Andy Cutler mercury detox, e.g. https://www.facebook.com/groups/acfanatics/permalink/1887842921314104/?hc_location=ufi While problematic ( I think protocols by Chris Shade of quicksilverscientific; and by Dr. Pompa are safer and more effective) the Cutler protocol is very cheap to do.
Good luck finding an MD, even at mucho $$$ dinero, that even recognizes mercury fillings as potentially very health destroying.
Ten Bears
Fifteen and more years ago I was teaching people amongst other things that logging on to Ashley Madison dot com with your spouse’s credit card really isn’t a good idea, and Zuckerberg’s Famous Pig – Facebook – is not your friend … and was gotten rid of by a religiously racist, misogynous, homophobic, old testament authoritarian, dominionist no doubt Trump voting sure as hell looks, sounds and smells like it Micro$oft goon with half my education and half my experience but none-the-less in a position to get away with harassing and ultimately forcing me to quit the hostile work-space career I had worked fifteen years and invested tens of thousands of dollars in educational expenses to have. Son of a bitch is retiring next year.
Exercise in critical analysis: if you were to censure an educational facilities’ mission, within what would be the best position to place said censor, said saboteur?
450.org
And who protects the wealthy elite as they continue to rob us blind and maintain the course of total annihilation of the living planet?
That’s right, the cops. Glorified criminals with badges.
This is just a coincidence, I’m sure. In the mouth and in the heart. No example-setting symbolism there.
Key Witness in Murder Trial of Former Dallas Police Office Shot Dead
Temporarily Sane
The ‘service’ Facebook provides is the data it hoovers from its users in ever more intrusive ways, which it sells to whoever has the money to pay for it. Anyone who uses it to “connect to friends” is subjecting themselves to the biggest psychological manipulation experiment ever undertaken.
The free and open internet was binned in a massive bait and switch scam and replaced by a handful of platform capitalists who not only control the means humans use to communicate, but also the actual content of their communication. Every word you utter on the “internet” is owned by a parasitic company that monetizes your content by selling it to data brokers (and handing it to the government upon request).
It’s a bit pathetic watching people plead with neoliberal governments to break up and regulate big tech every time their devious business practices are revealed. That’s like citizens of the USSR petitioning the Politburo to allow private enterprise every time there was a shortage at the grocery store. It ain’t gonna happen. You have to change the system first.
nihil obstet
I like knowing what old schoolmates are up to these days, and so I still scroll past the endless ads, in case Facebook has decided to show me what my “friends” have posted. Same goes for current friends that I don’t see every day. It takes a few minutes that I usually spend right after finishing the newspaper.
The other thing that Facebook is virtually necessary for is managing publicity and communicating with different groups. When is the peace group meeting to put together materials to distribute at the state fair? Anyone interested can search Facebook, go to their page, and find the info. Yes, each group could decide to set up their own separate website which everyone would be expected to know about, but that isn’t realistic. And we have all been told of at least five other services that we could use. Just learn and join the other services and check each of them out whenever you want to know if the pet store is running a charity dog wash this Saturday. Or maybe Sunday.
Hugh
As S Brennan notes, we can go back to Microsoft as the archetype of a tech company that starts out getting treated as the whiz new kid on the block quickly morphing into the evil monopoly and corporate villain. Google, Amazon, –Apple I think did it twice. Zuckerberg and Sandberg are evil. To them, the idea that they own, and should own, all your data and everything they can extract from it is as normal as air. All your data are belong to us may be a fairly common attitude in the tech world. I remember about twenty years talking with an undergrad who had already been recruited by a major tech firm for his work in monitoring keystrokes. I said wasn’t that intrusive, didn’t that invade people’s privacy. None of that even registered as a blip in this guy’s world. His attitude was if you don’t want your keystrokes monitored don’t get on the internet. Perhaps it’s just Hitchhiker’s Guide “normal paranoia,” but I have noticed recently that if I am on a site, haven’t clicked on anything but just lingered a moment on part of a screen, setting down a drink or saying something to someone, later I will see ads pop up that relate to the screen I accidentally lingered on. To me, it’s plausible, like the keystroke monitoring, that we are tracked not just for which sites we go to or what we click on, but even how we navigate a site, what we seem to linger on, what we pass over quickly.
Hugh
Oh, forgot to add this, but I thought this line was hilarious:
“Facebook’s global affairs chief [their new PR guy] Nick Clegg has revealed that he wrote Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg a brutal letter before joining the company last year.”
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/nick-clegg-mark-zuckerberg-letter-facebook-sullying-trust-2019-7
I guess all that outrage has a price. In Clegg’s case that would be a salary of $5-9 million a year from the Zuck.
Who is Nick Clegg you might ask? From wiki,
“Sir Nicholas William Peter Clegg is a British former politician who served as Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2010 to 2015 and as Leader of the Liberal Democrats from 2007 to 2015.”
Well, despite having driven the Liberal Democrats into the ground in 2015, I suppose Clegg still had sufficient governmental cachet that Zuck and Sheryl decided he was worth buying.
Stirling S Newberry
There is a remedy. Turn it off.
Eric Anderson
Deleted years ago. Didn’t miss it for a second.
I quickly found it’s just a distillery of everything I hate about the human race. Which, me being me, meant I had to go and tell everyone who posted stupid inane sh$t about how stupid and inane their sh$t was.
What killed me the most about it was what an incredible tool for GOOD it could be — but given human nature, what in incredible cesspool it actually is. The capitalist instinct can turn strawberries and orgasms into nettles and erectile dysfunction.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Mike Barry
Human nature seems to ruin everything – for instance, television. Contrast the dung heap it is now with what an old 1949 promo song envisioned it to be:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=781I6b0WlZQ
different clue
If people want a social media service-platform which doesn’t harvest and sell their data . . . and doesn’t sell their eyeballs, time and attention to advertisers . . . people will have to be willing to pay their own selves up front for a no-advertising no-data-harvesting social media platform site.
How many people would be willing to pay, either by subscription or per log-on or use-minute or some other way, to have a non-contaminated social platform service? If it did search engining too, it could be called Shinola Search and Social. Would enough people pay their own money for such a service to keep it in bussiness?
nihil obstet
@different clue
A public good has to be created and maintained through public means. If you need all individuals to sign on and pay individually for it to serve its purpose, you’ll never get it. Sort of like health care, but not as pressing.
different clue
@ nihil obstet,
But what if that sort of Shinola Search and Social Service were to be launched as a private for-profit bussiness; the difference from Facebook being that Shinola Search and Service would settle for the small profits possible through subscriber support. It would be a private service,not a public good, but it would be a good private service. But how many people would have to be willing to pay money to subscribe to a zero data-harvesting zero-advertising Search and Social company only available to those individuals who subscribe to it? Enough to allow such a company to exist and function for its subscriber-customers?
If there are too few people willing to support a private for-profit Shinola Search and Social for such a thing to make money and stay in bussiness, then there are too few people willing to support a tax-funded Federal Search and Social either.
NoPolitician
> If people want a social media service-platform which doesn’t harvest and sell their data . . . and doesn’t sell their eyeballs, time and attention to advertisers . . . people will have to be willing to pay their own selves up front for a no-advertising no-data-harvesting social media platform site.
It doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing. Online advertising worked just fine before companies like Google and Facebook, and plenty of others that you’ve never heard of, decided to build demographic profiles of site visitors. Maybe it didn’t generate as much revenue, but it still worked.
The problem extends far beyond social networks. I suggest you read this article:
https://medium.com/join-scout/the-rise-of-the-weaponized-ai-propaganda-machine-86dac61668b
It will horrify you. Basically, there is, in place, all the mechanisms that are needed to manipulate the world’s population, en masse, using propaganda and psychological operations, and it is actively being done. That sounds as implausible as a conspiracy theory, but it isn’t.
As the article points out, Cambridge Analytica harvested information from Facebook (which may have been, wink-wink, done without Facebook knowing) and then used other data-based companies to assemble dossiers on the majority of adults in the USA (and elsewhere), and then correlated that with voting information. This allowed them to microtarget them with psychologically hot-button campaigns, often false or misleading.
A simple law such as “it is prohibited to assemble dossiers on individuals, either anonymous or identified, beyond X, Y, and Z (added so that a company can have a mailing list)” could solve this problem, couldn’t it?