Grado de dificultad: 3 (Por el idioma).
Columnista: Roberto
A bad written White Paper
Facebook just issued a “white paper” about the “Online Content Regulation”. It is supposed to dissert about the governance issues.
You could read the whole document:
“Charting a way forward: Online Content Regulation”
It is rather short: 22 pages, and it is a pdf file you could download, so that you could annotate it with an adobe file reader.
Or you could simply read the article that presents it on Facebook blog:
“Charting a Way Forward on Online Content Regulation”
This one is much shorter and says basically the same thing, in a more concise way.
I did both (starting with the article).
It is pretty shallow, and annoying at the same time. At almost every line I wanted to ask:“Care to elaborate?”
We all know who Facebook’s boss is. TMN gave several examples, among which the following post:
“Zuckerberg knows about manipulation”
So, it doesn’t matter if this text is directly from his hand or not, this is what he thinks.
It would be funny to ask academics (in philosophy or simply literature) what they think of this prose. It wouldn’t be worth an “A” or a “B”.
A “C minus”, I would guess (the arguments are too far-fetched).
What is it really about?
It is, however, relatively good at diverting the central issue, all the time.
- Talking of Internet. Do they know, at Facebook, that Internet exists for 50 years (“in the past decade”)?
- Talking of the governments, some of which already answered FB to F… off:
- And, of course, whining about this libertarian thing they call “free speech”.
The word “governance” is, however, repeated 7 times.
The fact is that this whole document says the same thing, again and again:
“See? We have 2.3 billion users.
They are scattered over the entire planet, and we have no clue on how to do what you are asking”.
Try to understand: we only wanted to have more of them, so we removed every guardrails.
If we put some, now, like you ask, we will lose some of them and that means money.
What are we going to say to our stakeholders?”
Facebook has a huge population, but it is no community at all.
No one voted to elect Mark Zuckerberg, and it is clear to everyone that there is no governance in Facebook.
That is exactly why they raised the issue: they advocate for what they are missing, and cry for help.
Clumsy way to ask for it …
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