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@gp @pluralistic If you're into something you're afraid to walk away from, you should never have joined.

@profdc9 @gp What a remarkably callus and meanspirited way to think about billions of people who merely did what everyone they knew had done, assuming they would be protected from predatory corporate conduct.

"Caveat emptor" (AKA "sucks to be you") is no way to live your life, much less run a society, much less respond to a global technology crisis.

@pluralistic @gp Explain the precedent for that! I am not saying people get what they deserve, but for example I use Gmail, and I totally realize that today Google could nuke my account or make the contents of the email public. What's the law regarding social media or other free internet services? Why not propose a law requiring social media companies to adhere to a code of conduct? I bet they would then charge for their services. And people only use these services because they are free.

@profdc9 @gp "adhere to a code of conduct" is a completely unadministratable remedy. It would require:

a) Agreement on what should be in the code of conduct;

b) Adjudication of whether a given action adhered to the code;

c) Forensic technology analysis to determine whether the firm had been negligent in an adjudicated violation of the code.

You're talking about years - maybe decades - for every user's grievance to be processed.

It's a useless proposal, the mere performance of toughness.

@profdc9 @gp

If you want to help people on social media, don't ask SM companies to wield their power more wisely - take away their power.

Consider a reg that requires platforms to stand up interoperable gateways between services (as the EU's 2024 DMA does), and that guarantees your right (under data protection laws like the GDPR and CCPA) to have legacy SM firms point the people you communicate with to a new platform after your departure.

@profdc9 @gp

Here's a wireframe of how that would work:

eff.org/interoperablefacebook

Such a rule would be trivial to enforce. "Do you have an API that works" is an easy question to answer. Indeed, you can even let the system answer it itself - just legalize reverse-engineering in furtherance to federation on these lines. If new SM firms prefer to hack their way into, say, FB, then you know that FB's API isn't fit for purpose.

Electronic Frontier Foundation · Interoperable FacebookIn this video, we discuss the forces that keep us using services like Facebook long after we stop enjoying them (hint, it's not because social media is "addictive") and we present a short "design fiction" explaining what it might be like to use social media in the near future, after big companies...

@pluralistic @gp The vulture capitalists and equity holders don't provide services out of the kindness of their heart. It is wishful thinking to believe anything but contractual obligation or legal coercion would be required to not have them maximize their profit and exploit the consumer. That is why enshittification occurs and goodwill is just another asset to be exploited for profit eventually. Interoperability would be great but users must be willing to shun services that don't provide it.

@profdc9 @gp

You've missed the point. VCs don't order their companies spy on you because they're sadists. They do so because it's profitable.

If spying were illegal (e.g. if Congress had updated federal privacy law since 1988, when they passed the Video Privacy Protection Act), then services wouldn't spy on you, irrespective of whether they were VC backed or not.

Daniel Marks

@pluralistic @gp How do you write such a law? For mobile phone providers, bandwidth allocations limit competition and justify regulation. For internet providers, obtaining the rights of way limits competition. How about social media? What is a social media site, does it just pass third party traffic? Is the barrier of changing to another service limiting competition sufficiently to justify regulation? Is every online forum or chat room a social media site? I don't see how this works.

@profdc9 @gp

Market definitions of social media exist. They are present in the antitrust investigations into Facebook in the EU, UK and USA, as well as the private and public litigation that followed from those investigations.

Some definitional questions are, indeed, difficult.

This one isn't.

As to whether it's "sufficient to justify regulation," this question is also already settled, in that the EU passed the DMA and DSA with broad support, two years ago.

@pluralistic @gp Is Mastodon and the fediverse going to be regulated? It does not seem that the DMA and DSA have been that effective at limiting the influence of US-based social media companies in the EU, probably because these laws don't have the teeth to cut off access to Facebook and X from the EU. Will the EU do to these what the USA has done to Tiktok? Regulation will not fix social media's fundamental flaw: it rewards impulse mob clickbait attention. Are you prepared to regulate that?