😓 Facebook blue

harm for whom +how?

Vass Bednar

Dec 14, 2020

Hlayaley @geology_rocks

Here is my yearly roundup of headlines I screen shotted in 2020.

🤷‍♀️ Sometimes it seems weird that Facebook has such a loyal user base and a surging stock when we know the platform consistently manipulates the very same populations that it promises to connect. Am I right, ladies?

hattie @hattiesoykan

capitalism breeds innovation <3

🗞️ I wrote about the FTC’s Complaint for Injunctive and other Equitable Relief in the Globe and Mail. You can read it here. Yes, I 💯 need a new headshot.

Report on Business @globebusiness

Breaking up Facebook may not solve its greatest harms

Opinion: Breaking up Facebook may not solve its greatest harmsIt often seems as if the problem with Facebook is more around what the firm doesn’t do, including: provide consistent content moderation, remove offensive, violent and pornographic posts, intervene when users seek to incite terrorism, or post appropriate warningsdlvr.it

There is no doubt that people around the world are being harmed by this digital product that is offered for free.

This antitrust suit is best understood as an intervention to take on the global consequences of Facebook’s monopoly and reclaim our democracies using traditional policy tools.

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Gilad Edelman @GiladEdelman

I have identified the most explosive part of the antitrust filings against Facebook

The Smoking Gun in the Facebook Antitrust CaseThe government wants to break up the world’s biggest social network. Internal company emails show why.wired.com

Tim Wu @superwuster

Three mistakes that the Press keeps making in its reporting on the Facebook antitrust case -- by myself and Professor Scott Hemphill of NYU Law School

Three things the press keeps getting wrong about the Facebook antitrust caseLaw is complex and antitrust law is even more so. Nonetheless, the business and the tech press keeps making the following repeated errors in their coverage of the Facebook antitrust case: In 2012 and…superwuster.medium.com

Anand Giridharadas @AnandWrites

We can have democracy or we can have Facebook, but we can't have both. 🚨 A special issue of The Ink, on what the new antitrust case means. Featuring @matthewstoller. the.ink/p/we-can-have-…

We can have democracy or we can have Facebook, but we can’t have bothA conversation with Matt Stoller about the new antitrust case and the real reason you should care about corporate monopoliesthe.ink

There is a dimension of the suit that I didn’t quite have the word count to explore in the Globe and Mail piece, and that’s the specifics around how they unevenly limited developer access to their APIs. I am most interested in the idea that this is “okay” because “other companies do it.”

Below some excerpts from the suit (which is worth reading).

That Facebook maintained and enforced anti-competitive conditions for platform access to deter competitive threats to its personal social networking monopoly.

Olivia Solon @oliviasolon

With today’s antitrust lawsuits it’s a good time to revisit this story

Thousands of leaked Facebook documents show Mark Zuckerberg as ‘master of leverage’ in plan to trade user dataTop executives at Facebook, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg, used user data as a bargaining chip despite saying privacy is a priority, according to documents from 2011 through 2015 obtained by NBC News.nbcnews.com

*RE: purchasing the surveillance company Onavo in 2013.

75. By acquiring Onavo, Facebook obtained control of data that it used to track the growth and popularity of other apps, with an eye towards identifying competitive threads for acquisition or for targeting under its anticompetitive platform policies. As a December 2013 internal slide deck noted: “With our acquisition of Onavo, we now have insight into the most popular apps. We should use that to also help us make strategic acquisitions.” Facebook also used Onavo data to generate internal “Early Bird” reports for Facebook executives, which focused on “apps that are gaining prominence in the mobile eco-system in a rate or manner which makes them stand out.” Facebook shut down Onavo in 2019 following public scrutiny; however, it continues to track and evaluate potential competitive threats using other data.

77. Likewise, Facebook’s imposition of anticompetitive conditions on APIs— punishing and suppressing some promising threats (e.g., Path, Circle, and various messaging apps) and preventing and deterring others from even becoming threats in the first place—continued until recently suspended in the glare of attention from governments and regulators around the globe. Facebook will resume those policies or equivalent measures unless enjoined from doing so.

136. Facebook uses this power to deter and suppress competitive threats to its personal social networking monopoly. In particular, to protect its personal social networking monopoly, Facebook adopted conditional dealing policies that limited how third-party apps could use Facebook Platform. Specifically, between 2011 and 2018, Facebook made Facebook Platform, including certain commercially significant APIs, available to developers only on the condition that their apps neither competed with Facebook (including, at relevant times, by “replicating core functionality” of Facebook Blue or Facebook Messenger), nor promoted competitors. Facebook punished apps that violated these conditions by cutting off their use of commercially significant APIs, hindering their ability to develop into stronger competitive threats to Facebook Blue.

The filing goes on to show that Facebook’s enforcement of its anticompetitive conditions deterred emerging threats, and summarized that their actions to enforce these policies by cutting off API access were generally directed against apps in three groups:

personal social networking
promising apps w/ some social functionality
promising apps that offered mobile messaging services.

Sopan Deb @SopanDeb

only one court left to appeal to

I was struck by this reasoning from Zuckerberg regarding the social media platforms presumed obligation to allow equitable access to Facebook APIs - “LinkedIn, The New York Times, Pinterest and Uber, to name a few, all have similar policies.”

The finger pointing! If/as this is a common practice, it’s worth also looking into from a competition standpoint. Flagging for follow up.

Vass Bednar is the Executive Director of McMaster University’s new Master of Public Policy in Digital Society Program.

regs to riches