Absolutely, of course, the leftist article from Facebook co-founder, Chris Hughes.
For starters, Chris makes a fair claim to both Facebook as a whole and Mark personally: the platform has accumulated such opportunities to influence American society, which no one has ever had, and Mark’s ambition to “dominate” (direct quote) is not the best motive to use such power.
Secondly, and this of course just recently seemed to be utterly insane, Hughes proposes to split FB into separate companies, removing at least WhatsApp and Instagram from the management of Zuckerberg and his team.
Thirdly, Chris calls for the creation of a government agency dealing with user privacy issues that would do something like a European GDPR. And there would be nothing strange in this, such initiatives can be welcomed, that is when everything ends on completely awesome notes.
> Finally, the agency should create guidelines for acceptable speech on social media.
Starting from this part of the article, Hughes encourages the creation of guidelines for free speech. Say, the Internet is filled with Haight, let's protect democracy.
So hello. State censorship at its best. Once Mark can not cope, you need to intervene.
And the article ends with a passage in the best traditions of the authoritarian regimees statements:
> Mark Zuckerberg can't fix Facebook, but our government can.
My personal attitude to this story, of course, is twofold.
Privacy must be protected. FB really turned into a monster.
Encouraging the government to create "norms of freedom of speech", which in itself contradicts the freedom of speech as a concept - nonsense. And it is also proposed to turn on the "regulator" and play back all earlier decisions when FB allowed to conduct WhatsApp and Instagram deals and grow into principle.
State, help.
Unfortunately, Chris, in my opinion, is missing the point: the state as an institution, in its current form, should go to the dustbin of history. The farther, the more obvious that only decentralized, self-governing systems are ways to transfer civilization to a new stage of development. Centralization at one time was the answer to the crisis of manageability - but information technologies now allow to solve these issues.
Following any technological revolution, there is a revolution in government and state institutions.
Industrialization led to the collapse of empires.
What will lead informatization, we will see in our age.
Not Mark or any other person, and not the state should be involved in regulation.
Community. Only the product / service / platform community itself has the right and should deal with the regulation of its ecosystem.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/opinion/sunday/chris-hughes-facebook-zuckerberg.html