No turning back: Facebook reckons with a post-2020 world

Regardless of who is president, “as long as Republicans or other groups are spending millions to advertise on on Facebook, they will be slow to regulate," she said.

Yep. You'll never make a man understand something if his paycheck is contingent on him not understanding it.

And all without mentioning the first amendment - that stuff about free speech. Apparently, online, it can simply be overridden by terms and conditions. At which point GAFA becomes your global and national censor, on behalf of governments, angry mobs and vocal minorities.

We seem to have forgotten that Facebook is social media - it is about friends connecting with friends. So why are people reading hate? Their friends are not sending it to them, presumably. Anyone else can be blocked by an offended user, who could even block the abusive poster's friends' posts as well. None of this requires censoring someone else from posting content amongst their friends.

There seems to be such an ardent desire nowadays to ban people from doing things or saying things, when we could simply block what they are saying from our feed and never see anything they post again. They could carry on saying things to their friends, but we wouldn't see their posts. The first amendment was all about that. Allowing people to say unpopular things, whilst reserving our right not to listen to them. Perhaps users should focus more upon blocking what they personally don't want to see from their own feed, than the fascistic desire to silence other users.

As for vaccine misinformation. Anti-vaxxers are not a big problem. Some people cannot be jabbed for medical reasons. Despite both groups, We should still get the required numbers for herd immunity. However vocal, anti-vaxxers will face peer/family pressure and restrictions on holidays. Quite a few will eventually get jabs. We also need to remember that mainstream science can be wrong. Thalidomide, DDT and plenty of other examples stain the history of scientific progress. Good science, like a healthy democracy, needs to permit dissent. And adults do not need what they see to be censored. The state is not our parent, our teacher nor our prison guard. The demand to censor 'misinformation' will globalise Chinese-style censorship.

As it is not commercially viable to use humans to censor web 2.0 content, tech companies will use machine learning. Unfortunately, 'AI' is really not very good. And what of anyone without the resources of GAFA. Will they do the 'safe' thing and axe web 2.0? Disqus vanished from the Japan Times website. Web 2.0 may not be long for this world. Enjoy these comments whilst you can.

There is a plan B. GAFA only have to censor things they see and control - messages that pass through or are held on their servers. They monitor them as they harvest user data to personalise adverts. I'm not convinced that this is actually much of a value-adding model, as none of the adverts I've seen on these services have ever been particularly relevant. 'AI' is really bad at contextualisation and may add much less value than it once promised.

Using a different means to target users with ads would allow social media to flip to a distributed system, where users are connected to other users by Facebook, but not via Facebook. Facebook would never see their posts. Censorship by Facebook High Command would not be possible. Users would be sharing with each other, using encryption. If they didn't like something, they could just block it from appearing on their system. Third party filters could be implemented voluntarily by users to autoblock things that they disliked, from hate speech to Brexit. Each user would have their own personal shield and could decide for themselves what they did not want to see.

None of this is difficult. None of it requires new hardware. It's just a different way of doing things that permits us to do and say all the things we want to do, without seeing the things we don't wish to.

Resistance may come from governments, that wish to use GAFA to censor Web 2.0 on their behalf whilst spying on us. But tech is tech. Anyone competent can write the code. A distributed social media system will come. If Facebook don't build it and transition to it, they face becoming obsolete.

So although it looks like Facebook is about to become chief censor in an Orwellian dystopia, it is just as likely that tech will evolve again, and give us social media services that we ourselves can censor, as we wish, without silencing anyone.

"It's becoming increasingly clear that for Facebook, there is no returning to its habits of the past."

"Take his approach to Trump, who until January enjoyed special treatment on Facebook and other social media platforms, despite spreading misinformation, promulgating hate and — what finally got him banned — inciting violence."

Facebook only took action against Trump when he lost the election.

It is obvious that FB will curry favor with whoever is in power, they do the same in my country by grovelling before the government and acceding to government requests to take down profiles which raise uncomfortable issue while doing absolutely nothing against profiles spreading hate against minorities sanctioned by the idiot in power.

Lies. NYTimes is spreading propaganda for FB all over the world now. Zuckerberg is not to be trusted and is anti-American

We now live in a society where giving private tech companies the authority to be the arbiters of truth is considered a good thing. May a nonexistent deity have mercy on us all.

FB needs to own up for all the hate groups and Trump-butt-kissing they have allowed. It's time for them to get their heads out of their asses.

Do any of you actually use FaceBook?

My older children all closed their accounts and moved to Instagram. FaceBook to them is what we think of MySpace - old, stodgy. I predict by the end of this decade few people will actually use its original sharing features, though they may still return to the platform because of its other applications (unless some other entity or new entity comes along and steals all their business.)

Sal AffistToday  08:32 pm JST

Do any of you actually use FaceBook?

My older children all closed their accounts and moved to Instagram. FaceBook to them is what we think of MySpace - old, stodgy. I predict by the end of this decade few people will actually use its original sharing features, though they may still return to the platform because of its other applications (unless some other entity or new entity comes along and steals all their business.)

In the 90s there were these 'alt.' channels with all kinds of funny, funky,esoteric titles like 'alt.devilbunny' or 'alt.beatles,anthology' or 'alt.barnie.purple-dinosaur.die.die.die'. People would blog instantly there before your eyes and flamers would start up stupid flame wars on threads.

There were later similar instant posting blogs online for every news article you read and especially around 2016 there were instant flaming wars started by Trumpanistas who would instantly plant the most violent hateful and racist stories, lies and twisted rhetoric about Native American history, Jews. gays, 'PizzaGate' and all that other 'QAnon' conspiracy crap. After Dirtbag Donald was installed, msn and other sites cut the chats altogether but it was too little, too late. After that, FB became the place for these scummy cyberbullies and hate groups until recently. And the FB founders now have egg on their faces because they have kissed TrumpChump's fascist ass.

Will FB be passe by the end of this decade? Maybe. If it's going to survive they need to clean up their act or else they will meet the fate of the Alta Vista and galaxy.com search engines.