Facebook needs to be nationalized and regulated as a public utility. It's outrageous that this hasn't already happened.
How much more election meddling do they need to get away with before everyone understands that this is necessary?
At this stage, all remaining Facebook investors are deeply immoral individuals. All the reasonable moral individuals have already cashed out.
The government should just screw over the remaining shareholders. They deserve it.
The BBC, our nationalised TV producer, has now been explicitly politicised by the government. It's very hard to have a state-owned media enterprise that doesn't end up propping up the status quo.
I would say the BBC is biased towards people holding long-term political office, i.e. the bureaucratic class, not the incumbent party. They're pretty good at bringing the hammer down on representatives.
They were explicitly anti-Brexit, and arguably anti-Corbyn. They're fairly anti-Boris. The common factor is bias against threats to the bureaucracy. It always puzzled me that they could get away with criticizing the people who held power over them, but I think it's just that MPs don't hold much power over them. They're more worried about the branches of government that don't change between elections.
It is way better that way. As someone who lived outside of the UK, I have been watching BBC news, documentaries, series and films for over a decade online. The BBC is probably the most wholesome source of mainstream media that I can imagine.
To point to the BBC as an argument against nationalization makes a very weak case.
Very few media organizations have the kind of international reach as the BBC has. Frankly, that says something about its quality and wholesomeness.
I'm not a US citizen but the only reason I ever watch Fox news and CNN is to get a sense of how bad things are going in the US. They're more like reality shows than news.
Important is that the BBC isn't nationalised, at least not in the typical sense. The government is prohibited from direct intervention[0] and the safeguards (surprisingly) seem to work. It's much less nationalised than e.g. Russia Times.
I agree with you. I don't really like media organizations but as media goes the BBC is great.
Railways and telecoms worked out just fine.
Sure, in many countries, train tickets have been getting overly expensive under government control but high costs are not such a huge concern in the grand scheme of things. On the other hand, the break up of AT&T in the US had huge benefits for consumers in terms of lowering costs.
If Facebook is nationalized, at least they will not manipulate people to serve corporate interests (that is the main threat).
Sure, in the worst case, under government ownership, social media might be used to manipulate elections to give preference to the incumbent party over the other, but that is infinitely better than manipulating elections based on the financial interests of a tiny minority and allow it to drive an increase in surveillance and restrictions of public freedoms. Eventually, even the tiny minority of shareholders (the smaller ones) will end up being harmed at the expense of the bigger shareholders. It's not going to stop at non-shareholders.
> Sure, in the worst case, under government ownership, social media might be used to manipulate elections to give preference to the incumbent party over the other, but that is infinitely better than manipulating elections based on the financial interests of a tiny minority
I totally disagree. They look like the same thing today, but this is merely a consequence of the fact that everyone is under Facebook's thumb and Facebook works in the interest of corporations/big money who pay for their ads.
If you shift the control to government, the dynamics change fundamentally. The power will once again start at the government (like it should) and not at the corporations. Money will still influence things, but not nearly as much as it does today.
We need to take steps to decouple money from political power, decouple state from economics.
Like guns, Facebook is not inherently evil. It mostly depends on who is holding it.
Government intervention is unavoidable. It's just a matter of choosing the right kind of intervention.
Facebook wouldn't exist without government support and expansionary monetary policy.
We can go to an extreme and point out that to properly decouple state from economics, we'd have to abolish corporate personhood first.
We would need to abolish 'limited liability' legal entities; the real purpose of these entities is to allow individuals to repudiate responsibility for their actions by deflecting blame towards these abstract legal entities. This doesn't make any sense aside from facilitating criminal activity.
Whenever a corporation commits a crime and isn't shut down (which is 100% of the time), that is government interference of the worst kind.
> Railways and telecoms worked out just fine. Sure, in many countries, train tickets have been getting overly expensive under government control but high costs are not such a huge concern in the grand scheme of things. On the other hand, the break up of AT&T in the US had huge benefits for consumers in terms of lowering costs.
If Facebook is nationalized, at least they will not manipulate people to serve corporate interests (that is the main threat).
You should read up on:
1. The history of railroads and regulation in the United States, including their collapse and resurgence in the 20th Century.
2. The history of Bell as a government-sanctioned monopoly, their breakup and subsequent industry consolidation.
3. The disastrous environmental damage caused by state-owned energy companies.
> Facebook needs to be nationalized and regulated as a public utility.
That is the wrong solution. The threat to _democracy_ because of _advertising_ is a US phenomenon.
It says something about social values if journalism and public education/discourse, which are essential to democracy, depend for their survival on _advertising_.
At this stage, all remaining Facebook investors are deeply immoral individuals. All the reasonable moral individuals have already cashed out. The government should just screw over the remaining shareholders. They deserve it.