Zuckerberg’s proposals to regulate Facebook are self-serving and cynical | Roger McNamee

The Facebook founder’s proposals for how to regulate the social media platform are self-serving and cynical

Mark Zuckerberg’s recent opinion piece in the Washington Post is a monument to insincerity and misdirection. The essay offers proposals to address four important issues – harmful content, election protection, privacy and data protection, and data portability – but each proposal is transparently self-serving. The popularity of internet platforms cannot obscure or justify the harm they enable. The time has come to address that harm, to consider if and how internet platforms can operate without undermining civil society. While I applaud Zuckerberg for trying to engage policymakers, I do not think anyone should take these proposals seriously.

From the time I first reached out to Zuckerberg in October 2016 with my concerns that Facebook’s business model and algorithms allow bad actors to harm innocent people, the company has denied and deflected responsibility for the consequences of its choices. A cascade of evidence has undermined that strategy, enlarging the scope of criticism and forcing Facebook to adopt a more conciliatory tone. That tone stands in stark contrast to that of Google, which is guilty of many of the same business practices and harms, yet has received far less attention for them.

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from US news | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2FHvc1N