Wednesday, November 20, 2019

Regulating Facebook

There is talk about doing something about Facebook.  They complain that Facebook is canceling posts, and closing accounts of posters they object to.  I dunno what to make of this. Both right wingers and left wingers are calling out to do something. 
   Me, I am a medium speed Republican New Hampshire politician.  I created a Facebook page to support my campaign for NH Senate.  It was very useful, every post I made got read by nearly 100 people.  I got elected.  Facebook never interfered.  I did try to be fair in everything I posted, largely because I believe my voters want a fair minded representative.  It may be that my fairness kept Facebook from interfering.  Anyhow, I consider my Facebook page to have contributed my election.
   Should we decide to "do something" about Facebook, (I am not convinced that this is necessary, but you never know what CongressCritters may do) the only effective thing we can do is use the anti trust laws to break Facebook up.  What actually happens at Facebook is controlled by software.  Only a very few people who write the software really know what is happening, and these people are Zuckerburg's people.  Doesn't matter what a regulator might demand, the software programmers control what really happens, they work for Zuckerburg and will do what he tells them to.  And the regulator's people cannot read the code to know what is really going on.  For instance Facebook recently promised to stop logging some users data and selling that data.  I bet that somewhere in the software that data is still being logged out to some obscure disk file.  And I am sure they back up all their data onto CD-ROMs or flashdrives and store them off site, just in case of fire or flood. 
    A breakup would create two companies to compete with each other for advertisers and users.  We divvy up Facebook's computer centers, users, advertisers, workers, stock, office buildings 50-50.  Then users and advertisers would migrate to the company with the policies they like best.  Assuming both managements were competent,  both companies would adopt policies about privacy and political correctness and other things that the users and advertisers like.  Because if they did not, they would dwindle down and go out of business.  Like Yahoo did.

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