My parents run a business on Facebook and they have so many horror stories about the times Facebook has completely held their livelihood hostage. Or cut their revenue 10x with a single algorithm update.
My parents run a business on Facebook and they have so many horror stories about the times Facebook has completely held their livelihood hostage. Or cut their revenue 10x with a single algorithm update.
Everyone on Facebook is on there voluntarily. People don't get to choose where they are born.
Don't get me wrong. I don't use Facebook, and I don't think anyone else should either. I would love if there were a (decentralized) replacement for it, and I think Facebook is on the way out.
I think you should elaborate on your definition of coercion here and what does and does not lie within its boundaries.
Facebook exercising their power over their own platform is not coercion. People do not own their Facebook pages.
People absolutely own content they post to facebook.
You own the content, in the meaning of the sense that you can prevent the public at large from seeing it.
You don't own the content, in that you never have physical control over deletion, whether or not facebook employees see the data, or whether or not facebook licenses the use of your data for profitability purposes. All of those strongly detract from any strong concept of ownership.
It's muuuuuuuuch worse than that. They actually hire people (20000 if I trust my local media) to actually "clean" facebook. So it means that facebook defines what is socially acceptable and what is not. And, contrary to the law, the definition is not written, not shared. I'd prefer physical coercion (normally attributed to police) any time.
Facebook exercising their power over their own platform is not coercion. People do not own their Facebook pages.
You can say, well they chose to use Facebook's platform, they can leave if they don't like the rules. But I can also leave my country if I don't like the rules (incidentally, I did this!)
Maybe coercion isn't the right word, but the power is absolute. Greater inside their own platform than the power of the state, because you have no legal recourse with Facebook's exercise of power. At least with the governments in the West you can write your congressman, lobby, sue them, etc.