💭 Friday discussion: The Facebook government

This week Facebook announced a limited ban on political advertising in the week before the US election. Facebook also instituted a change to Facebook Messenger which prevents messages being overshared. A similar modification to Whatsapp had drastically reduced the virality of misinformation across that network.

Nature abhors a vacuum. In the absence of proper regulation or agreed controls, firms find themselves stepping in. Their code and their policies became the de facto law.

For today’s discussion, three questions:

• Given the risks arising from false or dangerous claims or micro-targeted political advertising and given that the legislation that surrounds these is not clear in many jurisdictions, how should Facebook decide what its policies ought to be?

• What is the obligation for Facebook and other platforms to tackle active programmes of disinformation, including those enacted by bot networks? From where does that obligation arise? (No Western country has deemed such obligations, that …