[governance] About Facebook blocked and content removed in Brazil

[Jacqueline Morris]

On Tue, Jun 5, 2012 at 10:59 AM, Marilia Maciel <mariliamaciel at gmail.com>wrote:

> When Obama called Twitter to postpone the maintenance of their website, so
> that protesters were not deprived of the platform on a crucial moment of
> the revolution, everybody seemed to be ok with the intrusion of the
> political interests of a particular government in the work methods of a
> private company.
>

Actually, I wasn't.  But if the owners were willing to comply with his
request, and the US govt didn't strong-arm them into making the decision, I
didn't think that I had any standing to protest too loudly about the
interference of government in the running of a private business. I did
grumble, though.

>
>  Zuckerberg and his best friends should not be entitled to make crucial
> decisions all alone and to enforce regulation that touches upon privacy and
> FoE, to name a few, as they do, across-borders. There should be mechanisms
> of accountability.
>

Why? They created it, they own it.  It's theirs. They could shut it down
tomorrow, if they wanted to walk away from it.  This is the problem with
people allowing themselves to grow dependent on privately owned networks.
Of course, if it's so vitally important to communication, do like
governments do when they want something private to be used for the national
good - nationalise it. It can be bought.


> FB grew in importance and owners' bank accounts grew in zeros. This
> success comes with a price: higher standards of transparency and
> accountability.
>

Again, why? Bigger companies have higher standards of transparency and
accountability? Not really. A billion dollar company is subject to the same
laws of transparency and accountability and disclosure as a million dollar
company. At least in my country. There's laws for public companies, no
matter the size.


> As was said on the other thread, the more the platform becomes widely used
> for worldwide communication, the narrower should be the freedom of FB board
> to do whatever they like without democratic ways of discussion.
>


But again, why? It's a platform owned by a publicly traded company. Unless
they break laws, under what authority can anyone tell the Board - "you
cannot run your own company as you see fit"? What would the investors do,
if the Board says - well, this step is in the shareholders' best interest,
but these people say we cannot do that, so we won't act in the best
interests of the company and its shareholders. As far as I know that's
reason for shareholders to remove the Board!
Facebook has its own "democratic ways of discussion" - there's
"consultation" going on now on Facebook about the new terms of service and
privacy policy.

>
> When it comes to unilateral contracts, free will to negotiate is hampered.
> And when it comes to platforms of strong monopolistic tendency, such as FB,
> accepting these unilateral contracts (terms of use) can be far from being
> an option, but a pre-rquisite to fully engage on communication in the
> public sphere.
>

Yep, it's a take it or leave it proposition. Just like Windows, or Office
or pretty much any software, service, association, club, etc. Either you
agree to their terms, or you don't join/use/participate. And I don't have a
problem with that.
I know many friends and family who have left Facebook, or never joined, and
engage in communication quite happily on many of the other social networks,
as well as via other tools. One does not HAVE to be on Facebook. Billions
of people aren't. A good 70% of my students each semester aren't, I make
them join as it's part of the class, but many delete the account after the
class. They just don't want to be on. And that's fine.

Jacqueline A. Morris
Technology should be like oxygen: Ubiquitous, Necessary, Invisible and
Free. (after Chris Lehmann <http://twitter.com/chrislehmann> )
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