The problem is Facebook is too large to moderate. The truth of the matter is what while regulation may help, the real solution is to eliminate the conditions in which Facebook can exist at the scale it currently does. Which is a harder proposition.
Breaking Facebook into baby Facebooks, perhaps Facebook for photos, Facebook for shopping, Facebook for groups. Or Facebook by regions. This is just a temporary measure until they congeal back into something basically identical. The problem is the conditions in which FB became FB
These conversations about what to do about Facebook feel stale because Facebook has no answers, it knows it cannot operate safely at scale... And it's critics?...
Most of its critics don't have the spine to say the truth: Facebook cannot be fixed without an enormous downsizing of its operation and restructuring of our economic guardrails specifically to make sure nothing like it can ever exist again.

There is no capitalist solution to FB.
Facebook has tentacles in so name nooks of the American economy & even a break up would almost def cause enormous economic impact to the rest of the economy. Its artificially depressed ad prices drive so much economic activity, & its role as a vector of data has no easy fallback
Solving the problem of Facebook would mean acknowledging the entire neoliberal experiment of the last 40+ years is a failure & fixing is more than a problem of a single co., it's about reforming the entire American economic system that allowed FB to become this in the first place
Critics are too trapped by the boxes Facebook has put around the conversation, along with similar boxes years of shitty economic advisers on both sides of the aisle have built for years around these types of conversations. I don't even think of Facebook as a big tech problem...
There is no technological solution Facebook can develop that will solve the ecosystem that created, encouraged and continues to shape it. Facebook is arguably barely a tech company anymore, by its own design its an economic, communication and social layer...
Facebook isn't a big tech problem.

Facebook is an *America* problem.

Fixing Facebook, actually fixing it and not putting a bandaid on, or kicking the can down the road, is intrinsically linked with fixing our failing national Great Experiment.
To be clear here: I'm not saying don't break up Facebook. I'm saying that's day 1 of a very long road we have to be willing to walk as an entire nation. I'm willing and we should get on it right away. But if we want it to stick, it's going to mean a lot more work than just that.

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More from @Chronotope

16 Jul
This is a very very big deal, and great news for user privacy, and the safety and reliability of the open web along with the ability of users to choose privacy and know that choice is meaningful. digiday.com/marketing/cali…
Particularly in context of CA AG statements this is a ridiculous statement by Alysa Hutnik. One of the reasons I worked on GPC was to ensure it was the simplest, most performant, & straightforward way to handle user privacy under CCPA. Nothing could be more helpful for compliance Image
The major CMPs already have GPC support, usually a literal single UI switch-flip away, which is how the majority of publishers handle compliance. For those that are rolling their own compliance systems, GPC's presence on-page and as a header makes technical adoption very easy...
Read 5 tweets
4 Jun
Look the ad tech industry is a garbage fire of technology most of which is not fit for the purpose of marketing, but is fit for invasive tracking and data collection for eventual sale and even if it manages to increase sales that would be reason enough to fundamentally change it.
Even if the invasive data tracking is a total failure at making coherent useful data profiles because the garbage fire fractures any user's identity by accident of dumb badly designed competition in the marketplace and fraudsters unchecked at any level that would be reason enough
Even if the data tracking can't build targeting in the middle of the system but is enough that one could track data points to understand a user's physical travels and make arbitrary assumptions on that basis about what to target people with, that would be enough reason to reform
Read 12 tweets
3 Jun
Lol not sure how or why the background music for my Spotify Only You was this, but extremely pleased with the outcome. Made the whole viewing feel rather epic. open.spotify.com/track/4UGOaZPk…
Alright, the first one I get, but I had to look up the 2nd genre and apparently "Second line" is brass-heavy upbeat parade music for dancing in the streets during New Orleans funerals. Which I didn't know was a genre, but I'm totally here for!
Wait... How is it possible no one is listening to a song named "Midnight Sky"... at night?
Read 6 tweets
2 Jun
Via today's QZ newsletter qz.com/emails/quartz-… :

"72%: Americans who worry that what they do online is being tracked by companies"

Yes, users do not want to be tracked.
"40%-60%: The (rather low) accuracy rate when two companies try to match the cookie data they have on the same set of consumers"

Ad tech's promises, even in current 3rd party cookie era, of truly addressable ads are bullshit b/c it is built on bad data!

qz.com/2000490/the-de…
"2.7%: Increased likelihood that a person will buy something from an ad that uses cookies vs one that does not, according to one study"

The status quo of cross-site tracking is not commercially useful and it's ethically corrupt so why are people defending it?
Read 6 tweets
18 May
Capitalism-based health care is the worst. I hate that it's only gotten worse and worse as time goes on, with more and more of the work of health care being put on to the individual and systems that you literally pay for becoming less and less helpful or useful.
For a lot of reasons I hate all ways to find doctors are gradually devolving to Yelp, which not only puts the work on you to find a good doctor but also inevitably undercuts your confidence in any doc you find b/c the wisdom of the crowds is a terrible gateway into medical care.
I do not blame ProPublica for this and am glad for this reporting, but everything has been magnified since I read this - propublica.org/article/top-do… & now search certifications I see in doc offices and the minute I see a bullshit "top doc" plaque I seriously doubt my provider choice
Read 11 tweets
18 May
Has any ad tech company ever had any consequences for any of their major public fkups? Even where it's a major failure of their core product? They just keep chugging along not doing anything properly, don't they?
Like, if I'm a brand, what do I even do as a reaction to stop this from happening again?
No one did anything from this other than shake a finger and say naughty as far as I can tell? digiday.com/media/ad-techs…
Read 7 tweets

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