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Comment by axiosgunnar | Hacker News Reader

If you are too big, you should be broken up

In what way was the incorrect algorithmic take-down of the MP's Christmas message due to the size of FB?

If Facebook were forcibly broken into several federated social networks, then ones that kept making "mistakes" like this one would lose all of their users to ones that didn't.

If DOJ broke up FB, it would be split along business units. There is no possible outcome in which the core FB product would be split into "several federated social networks," which is a different technology and business altogether.

Why not? Isn't that what the Baby Bells were?

The phone system was already a large collection of inter-operable regional system. Facebook (the core product) exists as a monolith. They would have to invent, built out, and scale up a completely new technology stack to support federation. That's not on the table.

The potential break-up of FB would be along business units (Oculus, Insta, Ad Network, etc).

"Oops the algorithm did it" cannot be an excuse for everything. Oh the algorithm did it? Then hold the people who developed/pushed for it responsible then.

Oh it's hard to make algorithms that don't make terrible decisions? Maybe then you should remove those algorithms and, say, have an ad review team.

"Break up FB" still doesn't directly fix the problem. Breaking up FB would be a punishment but not actually a fix for the problem.

False negatives and positives are just a reality that every content moderation system is going to have.

How does bad algorithms relate to size?

Isn't approximately half of the Facebook workforce doing manual content moderation already? I was under the impression that it's an enormous time suck and morale killer that lets a ton of awful stuff through, hence the desire for automated solutions.

In which case there is something fundamentally wrong with the platform.

If they’re producing more diarrhoea than they can shovel, maybe they should go easy on the laxatives.

> In which case there is something fundamentally wrong with the platform.

This is my take as well.

Not every business/platform has a right to exist, and if something is fatally flawed in this manner, don't let it keep crawling along, kill it.

Even if that were the case (it does not seem to be), that would probably still be too little vs the number of users.

https://onezero.medium.com/facebook-is-too-big-to-moderate-9...

In that case FB doesn't have enough workforce. If it's impossible to have enough workforce then scale down FB. It's not heating or water, if it goes away tomorrow as a Christmas present we can easily do without it as we always did. Actually we'll be better off IMHO.

Because it's just another example of the decade-long trend where the former middle class is being gradually turned into corporate drones priced out of having a family, house ownership, savings or retirement, and all things that were associated with the good old middle class days are being carefully erased under various noble guises.

and then the broken up parts just collaborate with each other and you get the same result with some extra paperwork

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