The increasing pressure coming from the US Congress is just one example of how governments all over the world are starting to fight back against the power of Facebook. The company is facing fines, regulation and even calls for it to be broken up. The company also possibly faces fines of further billions in Europe for violating data protection laws. The UK Competition and Markets Authority is also carrying out a market study into online platforms and the digital advertising industry.
In Germany, Facebook is fighting an anti-trust action in the courts. More generally, the EU has taken anti-trust action against several other big tech firms. Its recently re-appointed competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, said that data use by tech companies may need further regulation. Their goal is to examine the impact of social media, and particularly Facebook, on democracy.
Facebook is now the primary medium for political advertising and targeting. The firm has rolled out stricter rules and recently took down a UK Conservative Party ad for breaching them. In fact, Zuckerberg himself has called for legislation in this area. New rules have been introduced this year in Australia and Canada.
A large and growing body of research confirms what probably ought to be obvious: Spending a lot of time alone, disengaged from other human beings, staring at your phone, and clicking on little buttons on a platform obsessively engineered by some of the smartest people on the planet to keep you staring and clicking is not good for you. Holly Shakya and Nicholas Christakis conducted one of the best studies on this , partnering with Gallup to use a sample of thousands of people across three waves and looking at self-reported physical health, self-reported mental health, self-reported life satisfaction, and body mass index.
But fundamentally, thanks to network effects, it is hard to quit Facebook. I need to use Facebook to promote my work on Facebook. In an ideal world, I would have no activity on Facebook other than self-promotion via my Facebook brand page, but in order to do that, I have to have a Facebook account.
Since the account is there and since many other people use Facebook, that means I sometimes get messages on Facebook. And because almost everyone is on Facebook even me! He likes to do annual personal challenges, and they are normally sensible.
One year, he set about to learn Mandarin. Another year, he challenged himself to run miles. He visited all 50 states and met and spoke face to face with people in each state he visited.
He committed to reading a book cover to cover every two weeks. This year, his challenge is to try to fix Facebook. But he ought, instead, to think harder about those other challenges and what they say about what he finds valuable in life — sustained engagement with difficult topics and ideas, physical exercise, face-to-face interaction with human beings, travel.
This suggests a healthy, commonsense value system that happens to be profoundly and fundamentally at odds with the Facebook business model. To simply walk away from it, shut it down, salt the earth, and move on to doing something entirely new would be an impossibly difficult decision for almost anyone. Nobody walks away from the kind of wealth and power that Facebook has let Zuckerberg accumulate. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding.
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By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. The case against Facebook. Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. Featured Products. Apr 7, We know people want to see accurate information on Facebook — and so do we. False news is harmful to our community, it makes the world less informed, and it erodes trust.
It's not a new phenomenon, and all of us — tech companies, media companies, newsrooms, teachers — have a responsibility to do our part in addressing it.
At Meta, we're working to fight the spread of false news in three key areas:. When it comes to fighting false news, one of the most effective approaches is removing the economic incentives for traffickers of misinformation. We've found that a lot of fake news is financially motivated.
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