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Comment by vineyardmike | Hacker News Reader

From the article:

Amazon.com, Inc. [twitch], ByteDance Ltd., which operates the short video service TikTok, Discord Inc., Facebook, Inc., Reddit, Inc., Snap Inc., Twitter, Inc., WhatsApp Inc., and YouTube LLC.

The FTC is seeking information specifically related to:

    how social media and video streaming services collect, use, track, estimate, or derive personal and demographic information;
    how they determine which ads and other content are shown to consumers;
    whether they apply algorithms or data analytics to personal information;
    how they measure, promote, and research user engagement; and
    how their practices affect children and teens.

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>how social media and video streaming services collect, use, track, estimate, or derive personal and demographic information;

Facebook can definitely figure out your race , and the race of who you've dated.

I told this story here before but back in the early days of facebook, I had dated a Korean girl for a brief period of time and then the moment we broke up via facebook messenger, I start getting spammed with ads for dating websites featuring Asian women ( maybe the algorithm wasn't advanced enough to figure out my ex was Korean specifically).

I think a lot of this is just posturing, I don't see Joe Biden being as harsh on social media as Trump has been. This might be a final hurrah against social media as conservatives have been very upset with them lately.

This is not posturing. The FTC is independent of any given administration.

Doesn't each administration appoint the chairman? That seems similar to saying the Supreme Court is independent. Maybe on paper, but certainly not statistically or in practice.

The commissioners are appointed for seven year terms, there have to be at least two members from each party, and both Democrats voted yes on this action. So while you're right that it's not entirely independent, in general (and definitely in this specific case) it's not right to see it as an extension of partisan politics either.

I'll admit when I was wrong, let's hope this does lead to some actual change. I do think social media is absolutely cancer but I've sort of accepted it's going to be with us.

So then not Independent. if it was independent it would not have members of either party.

it is a bipartisan political entity used as a weapon by both corrupt and morally bankrupt political parties

It is “independent” not of partisan politics, which is impossible for any organ of government, but independent of direct Presidential control despite operating within the executive branch.

> there have to be at least two members from each party

Not true. There must be at most three members of any political party. There aren't required to be at least two of one party, and nothing in the law requires members of either major party. In practice, it's always 3-2 with either D or R being 3 and the other 2, but that's practice, not law.

It could be 2 Republican Party, 2 Libertarian Party, 1 Constitution Party, under the law.

Of course, if a President nominated toward that pattern, even if they had a friendly Senate to confirm them, they'd need a majority strong enough to be able to hold together without defections on other legislation, because the breach of convention would be punished mercilessly by even the least ideologically opposed members of the opposite major party.

Absolutely true, and I guess it is important to distinguish between established conventions and legal requirements these days.

The FTC is a model of what bureaucrats should be. They are principled, patient, and protective in nature.

Interestingly the commissioner that dissented is a Trump appointee.

I don't think you need to be Trump or a Trump supporter to find personalized ads offensive and unwelcome. I think there's pretty bipartisan agreement it's getting a little out of hand. For instance, when I was under 21, I often got ads for alcoholic beverages, even though those services knew my exact date of birth. Why was I given those ads? At the time I had no way of learning why.

The example you give seems to be an ad that wasn't sufficiently personalized. Was that also "offensive and unwelcome"?

Everyone should just use uBlock Origin and be done with it.

I'm with you on adblockers at least. I believe it was mobile youtube ads, which I've seen be highly personalized before. I do remember the video was one that minors were more likely to watch (gaming). My concern is that the alcohol companies were actually targeting an underage demographic, which is actually not illegal, since their industry "self regulates" their advertising.

What has trump achieved on social media?

Mostly making a fool of himself.

You call it making a fool out of himself, I call it winning the Republican primary, getting 63 and later 74 million people to vote for him, winning one election, and coming within 100,000 votes of winning a second one, despite being a walking embodiment of anti-democracy. If it weren't for COVID-19, he might well have won.

You shouldn't be laughing at him, and people like him. You should be scared of them.

It's certainly scary, especially all the threats.

Yes, that is the country we live in, where someone like Trump can actually get that many people to vote for him. It's mind blowing to me and very shameful.

>You shouldn't be laughing at him, and people like him. You should be scared of them.

I'm both laughing and terrified at the same time.

He's a would be dictator through and through and it stems from his pathological personality. He's straight up dangerous.

Bypassing the traditional media. That's the real reason they hated it. They were no longer gatekeepers of the narrative.

Of course, but haven't Trump and especially the more rabid of his followers like Alex Jones and Steve Bannon proven why there is a need for at least some form of gatekeeping?

Someone needs to filter out demagogues from public discourse. Otherwise you'll end up with a population where large parts believe that the election was "stolen" or "fraudulent", with all the consequences (like the potential for open, massive violence) that entails.

> proven why there is a need for at least some form of gatekeeping

And that's the motivation. Without gatekeepers, they believe they can more successfully push their misinformation.

Using normal peoples' dislike of various aspects of social media as a lever to achieve that is what this is all about.

I'd like to agree with you since I dislike the current president, problem is the gatekeepers have used 4 years to prove they are almost as bad:

from blatant misquoting of Trump via the whole Russian collusion on one side to mindless glorification of Trump and misquoting of Biden on the other side they've (almost?) all managed to make fools of themselves.

Quite a lot of Trump associates were jailed for Russia-related activities. The only thing that was never proven was collusion between Trump himself and Russian agents.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/18/us/politics/trump-russia-...

"While the Senate report established broad bipartisan agreement about what happened in 2016, Democrats and Republicans could not agree whether those facts added up to collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government."

... Obviously the republican side were never going to conclude there was collusion, but the alleged go between Manafort did indeed go to jail.

I agree with a sibling comment written by vkou, but I also want to add that Trump's social media strategy is to make people believe that they are smarter than him. He leverages this strategy to get consistently free advertising on pretty much all of the news agencies of the US. News agencies leverage him as a cash cow, because people love to read about stupid things done/said by public people, hence more ad revenue.

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