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Comment by tlb | Hacker News Reader

It was established long ago that the phone company isn’t guilty, legally or morally, if two people use telephones to organize a crime. Stopping crimes was the police’s job, who could wiretap phones with a court order if necessary.

Current public opinion is divided on whether internet communication services should take it upon themselves to detect and prevent crime. It may be the best solution, but there are pitfalls and we really have to decide as a society how to change the system.

So your point of view may be the best, but the way you present it as self-evident is misplaced.

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> It was established long ago that the phone company isn’t guilty, legally or morally, if two people use telephones to organize a crime.

In this case, Facebook is not a neutral communications provider. They are selling and displaying the ad. They are a party to the transaction.

> Current public opinion is divided on whether internet communication services should take it upon themselves to detect and prevent crime.

Yes, there is debate as to how involved Facebook should be if two independent parties are, say, coordinating crime on Facebook messenger. That's a totally different case than what we're discussing.

And they are also curating who’s phone calls get through. The phone call never edits or bans content on their lines (generally.) Facebook as a utility is a false idea: they are a publisher whether they say so or not. A neutral platform doesn’t have nebulous “community standards” nor algorithms to determine the visibility of content.

It's the same word games as the "sharing economy".

Yeah, Uber drivers are "independent contractors" rather than employees because they have to buy their own cars and are totally free to do what they want (as long as they strictly follow the terms and conditions while being under close supervision of their performance).

Yeah, Facebook is "just a platform" because users provide the content and Facebook just decides what content to show, whom to show it to and charges users to show it more prominently or to show it to very specific groups of people.

I can't see how any of that is remotely related to what facebook has been accused of.

More in line, is a newspaper responsible for ads they print? Do they have a responsibility as to what information they sell about their users?

Yes, they are on both counts.

We can discuss what the law should be all week long. By that time the barn door has been open and the horse is miles away. This isn’t just solved by regulation.

What we need is OPEN SOURCE ALTERNATIVES like https://youtu.be/pZ1O_gmPneI

And the "phone company" is now a highly regulated utility that was broken up by the government, to include those surveillance capabilities. FB doesn't get to be Ma Bell and I doubt they would welcome the comparison.

The question here isn't even if FB should be regulated or broken up like the phone company. People are simply realizing the consequences of something like FB even existing. The market seems to be taking corrective actions on its own.

Are phone companies and facebook equally regulated?

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