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Pauline Denning's avatar

When Zuckerberg announced that FB would no longer monitor content, leaving it to AI and its "Community Standards" to decide what stays up and what comes down, I closed my account. I am sickened by the power of the oligarchs in this county and by the harm that Instagram inflicts on young people. I am currently reading "Careless People". It's clear that Zuckerberg is thrilled by power and really doesn't care about those he has harmed in the past and will harm in the future.

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Jack Harich's avatar

"The more important question is: Why have we allowed any one individual to accumulate enough unchecked power that they could put their finger on the scale of our election?"

Excellent piece. Yes, it is the more important question. This is one more case of regulatory inaction. Facebook has been around long enough that regulatory capture may be in play. But with the Republicans in control, stronger corporate accountability regulation is out of the question.

But as you say, there's more to it than that. "As she describes it, Kaplan, now president of Global Affairs, thought politicians who saw Facebook as critical to their campaigns would not want to regulate the company. She describes Sandberg as saying that politicians indebted to Facebook would be good for the company. Part of that strategy involved embedding Facebook teams in the Trump campaign ahead of the 2016 elections, helping them use the platform and its targeting tools to spread what we now know was a torrent of mis- and disinformation."

Wow. Didn't know that. Thanks. That's more than regulatory capture. It's politician capture.

Then you ask "What now?" and suggest pushing lawmakers to enact accountability legislation. If that fails, which it already has, "we can vote with our feet" and leave social media companies. I'd like this to work, but realistically, consumer boycotts seldom work. In this case, the percentage of social media users who would be activist enough to leave is very small. Most are unknowingly addicted and couldn't leave if they wanted to. Plus there are many more issues of greater importance to social media users.

Yael, I wonder if you and perhaps others at Cybersecurity for Democracy have applied root cause analysis to this problem? That would require some time and thought, but it should take you further than this piece has been able to go with the question of "What now?" Looking at your website, I see "Cybersecurity for Democracy is a research-based, nonpartisan, and independent effort to expose online threats to our social fabric – and recommend how to counter them." I have some expertise here. If I can help, let me know.

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