Is it really that bad that they apply slightly different sets of rules to accounts with more notoriety?
For example, do we (as facebook consumers) want newly created accounts with @hotmail email treated the same as a new account with @doj.gov, as the same as a Celebrity with a million followers?
Do we want the same set of rules for a suspected Russian troll account to be applied to a major politician? (well..some here might, but I don't).
I think as your account age, status and popularity grows, you should be given *some* flexibility under the rules. Imagine a points system behind the scenes, where bad things get you points, and other things remove points. At a certain point threshold you are banned, suspended, etc.
The system is not simply based on notoriety, as some kind of aggregate of follower count or likes, which would be sane and fair step in the right direction. But rather on a case by case basis, where according to the article "whitelist status was granted with little record of who had granted it and why, according to the 2019 audit.".
It easily ends up being a case of "im a moderator at facebook, and i like this person, and i put them on xcheck". Terrible ofcourse.
The larger problem at hand is that companies like Facebook are given such a gigantic power over discourse and politics because of their gatekeeping. We would often laugh at policies in China which bans people talking about Tiananmen Square, while seeing more or less the same happen in the west about our own controversial issues.
[sarcasm not directed at you]
But it's ok. In the west companies are doing this, and companies are allowed to do business with whoever they want. It is not censorship therefore.
[/sarcasm not directed at you]
> The system is not simply based on notoriety, as some kind of aggregate of follower count or likes, which would be sane and fair step in the right direction. But rather on a case by case basis, where according to the article "whitelist status was granted with little record of who had granted it and why, according to the 2019 audit.".
This was my takeaway as well. I 100% agree rules cannot be applied evenly across every user. A person sharing posts with their 300 "friends" and someone blasting messages at their millions of "followers" are frankly engaging in completely different experiences. The regular person might expect none of their comments to ever get reported and any report could be cause for something actually bad. A popular politician on the other hand might see every single thing they post reported a ton every single time.
And rather than applying rules based on say the reach (which Facebook knows) or any other metric, it seems that they just chucked people into the special people list and that's that. The article stated there are millions on that list. A catch all for all the people who are having the greatest impact seemingly. The fact that the list had considerations for potential blowback to FB is even worse. I get that in percentage terms of 2.8 billion users a multimillion person list is in outlier territory by most measures, but that group is also wildly influential and thus shouldn't be in the "too weird" category.
I'm not even opposed to a general whitelist, some people (like a President of the US) truly are gonna be really weird to apply any broader ruleset to. But a free for all and catch all bucket for anyone of "notoriety" is really bad. It should be a very special remedy that is not done lightly. The article made it seem like the policy for this particular remedy was non-existent.
Part of me thinks the solution is just to cap it. If the central conceit is "connecting people" then no person realistically knows more than say 10,000 people and shouldn't need the microphone scaled to global proportions. That'd never happen, but it seems like a root answer.
For example, do we (as facebook consumers) want newly created accounts with @hotmail email treated the same as a new account with @doj.gov, as the same as a Celebrity with a million followers?
Do we want the same set of rules for a suspected Russian troll account to be applied to a major politician? (well..some here might, but I don't).
I think as your account age, status and popularity grows, you should be given *some* flexibility under the rules. Imagine a points system behind the scenes, where bad things get you points, and other things remove points. At a certain point threshold you are banned, suspended, etc.