Ok, you've heard all the reasons why you shouldn't invest in Facebook, the over-valuation of the stock, the information hidden from investors, the fat VCs getting their cut early and other investors having to queue up to sell, etc. etc.
But there's a more intrinsic reason we've just heard about from the Wall Street Journal, which should have been plain, given Mark Zuckerberg's brand of Better Worldism which I've critiqued in the past.
And it's what Zuckerberg tells us himself:
To Mr. Zuckerberg, regulatory and legal threats miss the point. "Facebook was not originally created to be a company," he wrote in the company's public offering documents. "It was built to accomplish a social mission—to make the world more open and connected."
There's a number of bad things about this.
There's the obvious attempt to shirk responsibility for regulations by implying Facebook has a high social mission -- regulations like privacy policy monitoring -- "a Federal Trade Commission settlement last year that calls for the government to audit Facebook's privacy policies for 20 years," says the WSJ. Good! this is why you want government regulation of rapacious social media platforms in the interest of civil rights. "Progressives" and the libertarians that ape them can't get their heads around this obvious fact -- the government is not the problem; even corporations aren't so much the problem; unethical hackers are the problem.
And this gets me to the other bad thing about what Zuckerberg is saying here, which is actually worse -- because I think the privacy thing is really over-stated (because if you don't want your privacy violated, you yourself can decide not to put crap on Facebook).
And that bad thing is that he sees that Facebook isn't a company -- it's not a business, that should have rules, regulations, a charter, fiscal responsibility, a board of directors, company policies -- all those things that go into making an institution. It's not a company, that would have to think of things like "the customer is always right" or at least make sure that it doesn't kill off the customer or harm those that are addicted users.
Instead, Facebook is a revolutionary movement -- something with a social mission. Bolsheviks, really, because they wanted this social mission to be fast, radical, everywhere, and to their advantage.
Remember how Facebook the non-company social-mission got started? It was called The Face Book and it was about putting up faces of women in a "hot or not" pair for men to rate them -- a sophomoric thing that Zuckerberg conceived as a college student. It wasn't really about connecting, it was more about ogling and hating.
Then, when there were only 69 million of us an not nearly a billion, Zuckerberg let us know he had more ambitious goals of stopping terrorism by making disaffected young men "connect" more.
Making the world more open and connected? Well, who gets to decide what opens and connects? It should be the user -- and again, I think the user has to take more responsibility for this. But the company is doing a lot of opening and connecting, too, by shoving into your view people you might like to friend -- friends of friends -- without any awareness, of course, that these may be your enemies...
And, open and connected is a good thing? For what purpose? Can we prove that if people are more open and connected that they kill each other less? Are you sure about that?
While admittedly extreme cases, some people are so open and connected that disconnected social misfits without a date though they may be, they can concoct fantasies of mass murder based on MMORPGs and movies like Batman, order ammunition online, and go on a murderous shooting spree.
To me, the trouble really begins with this revolutionary cadre stuff, the Better World notions. Who says these people should make Better Worlds?! They are like revolutionary movements, grabbing VC cash, grabbing the attention of the masses, and creating these hollow structures that burn up like the Burning Man...
The sooner all these platforms drop their "social mission" notions the better. They strike to be more useful and neutral and let users pursue their social missions with them, rather than trying to weld their oppressive social missions into the tools themselves.
Say, I wonder if those schools in Newark, NJ that got a large gift from Zuckerberg for educational innovation got that gift in the form of stocks or actual cash?
The libertarian author at WSJ, L. Gordon Crovitz, unfortunately, doesn't see the Bolshevik problem inherent in the quote he cited from Zuckerberg, and focuses on "the individual and the state":
The best way for Facebook to fend off regulations is to be more transparent about how it uses data and to give users easier controls over privacy settings. The company could be more explicit about its offers of new services in exchange for expanded access to personal information. Above all, letting people determine their own trade-offs is in the spirit of the Internet more than the alterative of one-size-fits-all rulings by regulators or judges.
No. The best way for Facebook to be brought in line is for it to face 20 years of monitoring by the FCC, just like video games or television. That's ok and that's a good thing. That's what liberal governments do, they monitor media to see that it does not cause public harm. Facebook isn't special.
The libertarian and the "progressive" wants Facebook to voluntarily be "more transparent" but it won't do that. It can't do that, because it can't make money then as a social-mission non-business.
A one-size-fits-all ruling on privacy standards is more than fine.
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