Don't get me wrong, I hate Facebook as much as anybody, happily deleted my account a year ago. However imo they are a company free to make rules for advertisement on their platform as they see fit.
You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
Don't get me wrong, I hate Facebook as much as anybody, happily deleted my account a year ago. However imo they are a company free to make rules for advertisement on their platform as they see fit.
Yours is such a common response but it wrongly attributes basic rights to companies that simply don't exist.
Companies are not people and don't have ANY fundamental rights. They are completely creatures of statute.
People DO have fundamental rights (though many governments seem to ignore them at the moment), but when people use infrastructure created by the State they also have to follow rules.
Its like saying I'm free to drive on the road any way I see fit, even if it kills people.
As companies ARE infrastructure created by the State they are completely rule bound.
One rule they have to follow is not to make illegal cartel agreements with competitors.
Another is not to engage in anti-competitive activity.
As advertising is essential to the very essence of competition (discovery of market information) blocking a whole industry from its main modes of advertising is fundamentally anti-competitive.
well, to be fair my mom would understand a whole lot more about crypto if it was permitted on FB.
But to your points, well I might revisit my own the Barkeeper. He is a person and represents the company "the Bar" at the same time. However it would be illegal to not serve a customer based on their believes, religion (or skin color caugh). So I guess you are kind of right, it is discriminating against crypto (their users and companies included)
I just don't like hiding behind an anti-discrimination law when I would propagate that in the perfect world people (and companies) are free to choose if they want to discriminate, it just backfires so hard that people are not discriminating. In reality many seem to chose apartheid even in a world that claims to be past that.
Ok now finally back to your points, I disagree that companies are infrastructure besides actual state-owned companies. Companies are something that rose to prominence despite the state/the monarchy but they had to cut a lot of deals with the state leaving the common man poor and broken.
The more I think about it the more I think there should be no difference in what a person can do to what a company can do. After all Bill Gates just privately owns 269,000 acres of farmland, why should he be able to do more with this land than any company? Couldn't companies disguise their doings as that of a single person?
I know in reality there a lot of additional laws companies have to abide by, see the cut deals with the Monarchy thing, but I like to sometimes take the market extremist standpoint while I know that monopolies are inevitable. Have you ever heard about accelerationism?
Should they be allowed to use any amount of money or political influence to crush new ideas and potentially competetive tech or ideas?
On their own platform? Yes, absolutely. They should be forced to some level of transparency so that people can see their behavior and decide for themselves if they are fine with supporting this platform and their policies.
I don't like the argument that FB is so big that things like freedom of speech ought to be implemented. If you want civil liberties on a platform it needs to be created and supervised by the state. I know suggesting that social media would be better if it is state-owned is quite the foolish believe, but I think it is an option worth exploring.
As a company in a free market FB can kick me out for saying something they don't like, like any Barkeeper can kick me out of his bar.
However it happened, Facebook and Google together have functional monopolies in two main types of advertising. Do we just have to accept that they can do anything to protect that monopoly now they have it including forming a cartel?
Well we have a "ministry of cartels" (Kartellamt) and other laws that are supposed to prevent monopolies from forming. This never worked though.
Monopolies and Companies pretty much having the power of a state including their own laws, culture, etc. is one of the reasons I have been a socialist for a long time. However I think regulating companies with tight-nit laws, only for the big ones to maneuver through it without actually abiding by the law and small firms suffering because of all the legal hurdles.
Like I said, I think the solution has to be either the free market where facebook just gets replaced by a better competitor (like hive xD) or there needs be a state-sponsored and controlled social media, where freedom of speech is upheld and every citizen has a right to participate. The state controlled social media being in a fair competition with multiple other social media platforms would be my favorite outcome.
Still I wish you good luck with your endeavor even if I would chose a different path.