Justice Department to Open Broad, New Antitrust Review of Big Tech Companies

I would hope we could catch up with the way Europe protects privacy rights but of course Trump is a piece of garbage and a complete political animal so this is probably more about how tech affects conservatism and their increasingly belligerent, racist, crazy agenda than the protection of our privacy rights. It's unfortunate.

 

I think the tech industry doesnt need anti trust regulation as much as more traditional industrial sectors because its still a place a good idea can go from living room operation to billion dollar company.

As big as Facebook is for example it doesn't squash other social media sites. The internet provides a broad open market

At the base level i guess there are limits to companies like isp's

 

Conservipedia is ****ING HILARIOUS! Are you sure it is not a parody site? According to the Obama page, he colluded with Russia in 1983.

 

They are not politically aligned against the GOP, or any party for that matter. They are only POLITICALLY aligned to their interest. That MIGHT very well be seen as politically aligned against the GOP, but it's doubtful that's their intention. It makes little sense.

Here is an example where it may look like they are politically aligned against the GOP. FB is significantly investing in ways to take down "fake" material and "hate speech". IF the GOP is a good source of "hate speech" and "fake" material, then it looks like FB is against them, but when in reality, they are simply against "fake" material and "hate speech". IF the DEM, instead of the GOP is the source for "fake" and "hate", then likewise, it looks like they are politically aligned the DEM.

FB isn't the SOURCE of swaying election (I expand this to spreading fake news, spreading hate speech, causing violent, recruiting terrorist, so on). They are the platform that enable those things, not the source of it. A source of that, for example, is the Russian active measure campaign to divide and sod division throughout western democracy. A source of recruiting terrorists, for example, is from terrorist organization such as ISIS, not FB. A source for the violence incitement in Myanmar, for example, is the Myanmar military targeting the Muslim Rohingya minority through FB, which led to murder, rape and forced migration of that population.

This is an evolving and new threat to society, world-wide society. FB and these social media platforms are open digital square with NO limit on time, space, or physical boundary. The platform, neutral at best, is vulnerable to the worse of human causing rapid and widespread harm to society. The world has never faced such a challenge and the old tools and thinking is really too primitive to combat these challenges. (we also know they are also NOT neural; they have already admitted openly that their alg, which was designed to keep attention and repeated viewing, has caused real harm; an unintentional consequence.)

FB, knowing these massive challenges and with the thread of regulation (initially EU), has come forth with a good public face (and that's where their current anti "hate", "fake" is coming from) hoping to be ahead of the game and shape regulation policy that benefit itself. Their ideas aren't to be discounted, but I've seen enough to also be concerned with their approach.

I don't know the answer to any of this, but I do know that we can't simply keep going as is and hope that these companies work it out on their own to the benefit of society. There is a need to have some balance between these companies right to make money, society protection and progress, and individual freedom of expression. There is a need for very smart people in government and in the public sector to do this hard work. One of the worse thing that can happen is a political party in power acting in the interest of not society, but for their own benefit. We really cannot afford to get this wrong for too long.

 

Fair question...will have to go over the report (and other data points) and highlight the answers. Personally, I was more concerned about the social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

Yet Facebook and Twitter CLEARLY do this. What would your explanation for that be?

See above, but understand that there are many indicating this is the cause for the perceived bias. Again, back to empirical evidence being needed. Which is what the DoJ will do. So, not sure what the qualms would be. They will either find due cause...or they won't. Either way, I don't see what the issue of investigating is. If indeed it shows, as you say, this is all just a matter of economics and merely following what user's request, search for, and click on...great! If not, and there is evidence that indeed the search results are biased, then also great! We would have uncovered what might be a fairly large problem, and taken steps to address it.

 

Do you have any evidence supporting this? Because there is a LOT of evidence indicating otherwise.

Normally, I would agree with you. But these companies are so big they seem to be acting differently than you describe. Consider the following scenario: You have a large company which controls huge amounts of social media. You are very incensed at the direction the company is going, and you see you have the ability to change that, using your platform. You feel you would be doing the country a disservice if you didn't do this. So, you direct your company to create its algorithms to filter out what you deem as bad for the country. This is all internal, and even if word does get out, you have billions of dollars to spend on lawyers...and you feel it is your duty to do this. Even if it has a negative financial impact, you're still rich beyond your wildest imagination.

What about that scenario do you find unbelievable?

Have you been following who has been banned, and who hasn't? It doesn't seem like it.

Except...it is.

Yes, I agree. But in a different manner than you mean.

This I do actually agree with, at face value. Likely the solution is to not have these companies do any filtering...that puts the 'right' to determine what is and what is not allowed on them. That's restricting free speech..and fraught with danger. Ultimate power corrupts absolutely. You put that kind of power in these company's hands, they are going to use it to what THEY think is the best answer. Refer back to my analogy above.

 

On evidence, the proof is on your part or on the party that claim Google, FB, or any other social media company is purposefully or is intentionally anti-GOP, or has swayed election. I'm doubtful anyone have the evidences. The alg these social media company uses are consider their secret source and they aren't willing to make them public. Without access to the alg, how they changed it, or access to some internal company or high level executive memo, you simply cannot know their motive. You can only guess based on the end-result. But the end-result doesn't tell you the motive or intention, especially when the end result is heavily dependent on machine. The default and accepted position is company are out there to make money, so there isn't really a need to prove that. (Also, there is only a few ways where I can think you can get to the data to try to determine intent - Court order to get their alg and what they have change, hackers obtaining that type of info illegally, whistle blower publishing the info ... I haven't seen any of these yet).

We do know a few things and we know quite a bit on the potential abuse. As I said before, we know that these companies are cracking down on "fake" and "hate", which should impact individual that post "fake" and/or "hate" content, and collectively that could impact one political party more than other political party. We also know that they manipulate (rank) what you see. We do NOT know how they rank, how they detect "fake" and "hate". We do know that their AI based alg is in infancy and can guesstimate that it likely has many errors (see FB dev presentation for example on what they are doing with their AI platform and you can get a sense of how early in the game they are with development and research). We also know that these are powerful tool that used in the "wrong" way, can have damaging impact on society, including changing public policy for worse, and swaying vote - but we do NOT know that that indeed is what the social media companies themselves are doing (except that we can also guess that they may be ranking their own services above others - this is an area EU is heavily looking at over the past years).

Again, no idea on the solution. I think I would like to have filter, that I can control from my device (eg. I want to see no picture of "cat"), but just having that ability can open up the ability for government to dictate what filter get installed and if we have an option to disable it. Maybe we need to slow some things down and not have always instantaneous content. Maybe we need to be more regional and local. Don't know.

 

So what Facebook gathers data about you to make a dollar. You're one in a billion persons.

None of these companies gove a damn about you that much. Relax. The end result is just somebody trying to sell you something. Seriously

Edit: who doesn't live with the understanding that entities like FB have recorded what we click.

We all understand that. So if they monetize that info so what. All the purchasers of that info are just trying to sell you something. No one is purchasing that info to do something devious to some random one in a billion Facebook user

 

Facebook doesn't even hide the fact that random pages pop as suggested sites. We know where the suggestion comes from, our clicking. Do they really bother anyone other than being annoying?

 

I would agree with this in general, but if a poster claims various things as facts, the onus is then on them to provide evidence supporting that. Which is why I requested it.

You can examine empirical results, and you can look at internal memos.

The internal memos do exactly that, though.

This is what they CLAIM to be doing...the impact doesn't jibe with the claim. There are lots of examples of this. At best, they are examples of why this is a bad idea to start with, as it makes them the determiners of what is 'hate' or 'fake', which is rife with potential for abuse. Someone with a liberal bias, as the owners of these companies all are, might consider various right centrics posts and posters 'fake' or 'hate', when many others might not. Which, even if not intentional bias, is bias nonetheless. At worst, they can be doing it intentionally, in order to sway elections. Either is bad, the latter is much worse. The DoJ investigation should determine if either is occurring, and why. So, again, I don't see why anyone would have a problem with the investigation.

Exactly...which again is why the DoJ investigation should help clarify.

Individual filters are fine. Consider the 'ignore' feature in this very forum. Self filtering is fine...the platform doing it for you is a problem. Maybe website filtering algorithms rely on feedback--if enough users flag something, it gets filtered out. But when others try to do it for you, they filter out things they shouldn't. For example, many medical articles or emails get filtered out for offensive language, as they mention private body parts. False postives---indications that it's REALLY REALLY hard, if not impossible, to create algorithms to do this effectively.

Probably a separate topic, but how many false positives should we as a society accept? Is just one one too many? ie, if lots of actual 'fake' is filtered out, but some non fake is also filtered...is that acceptable? I would argue that no, it isn't. Filtering out false positives goes against free speech, and it would be preferable to allow the others to prevent incorrect filtering.

Consider the medical example. If the USER sets the filter, this is fine. Those in the medical community could set their filters to allow necessary traffic, even though they may also then get inadvertent inappropriate emails. Their choice. Companies doing it for you takes away your choice. I'm not really sure why anyone would argue that losing this freedom would be a good thing. Again, consider this forum. If it set up algorithms to filter out 'hate' or 'fake', how many posters here would have content filtered out, or be banned outright? Particularly if such algorithms seemed to have a bias against certain types of posts or posters. Would anyone here be in favor of that? If so...please elaborate on why, and on how you think the result would be a good thing. If not, then social media companies shouldn't be doing it either, as it would be the same thing, only on a massive scale.

 

For profit company intention is to make money isn't something we need to evidence for. That's self evidence. For profit company is intentionally anti-GOP is a claim that need evidence to backup.

What internal memo?

 

Here you go... another "conservative" voice being "silenced" by evil big tech overlords...

 

republicans...

 

Another high tech company targeting a right wing...

 

Most telling parts of this trump tweetrum... trump saying how much the google exec likes him and what a great job he is doing, but... lou dobbs and fox news convincing him that google is out to get him.

 

Google is developing some health care technology to crunch data it gets from healthcare providers they're partnering with to suggest different treatment plans, flag strange care, prevent overprescription of opioids, etc. In order to do that, they obviously need to have that data.

HIPAA restrictions mean they can't share that data with anyone else or do anything else with it that isn't for the purpose it was shared with them for. If Google uses it for any other reason, they'd get huge fines and criminal penalties. If the health care providers gave info to Google for any reason other than assisting in providing health care services, they'd get huge fines and criminal penalties.

This is normal for tech companies involved in health care services. It's not breaking any laws, and they aren't mining your data for any reason other than providing health care that they were asked to provide by health care providers. If any of that is found not to be true, people do go to jail.

 

One day Google is working with the Chinese government, the next their milking our healthcare system for all the info they can get. Surprised?? No...

 

How can they milk this exactly without violating HIPAA? I would love someone to actually explain what they think is the violation here.