>At this point Meta doesn't even worry about these news and specially right now that it is trying to please the current adminstration
You may not agree with the current administration, but they won the popular vote. What would you rather them do, defy the current administration? Sounds pretty anti-democratic to me. Am I missing a deeper principle here or is it just a matter of "companies should do what I think is right"?
I would rather companies do whatever they thought was best with no regards to the current administration, unless forced by law to take some action. Large companies feeling like they need to take actions to please the current President is not great.
Any scenario in which a billionaire, with all their power and resources, is deeply scared of pissing off the President - to the point of doing a public 180 on everything - is one in which us much less powerful regular people should be very scared.
>defying an administration that you disagree with, within the rule of law, is just about the most American and democratic thing I can imagine.
Purdue Pharma caused the opioid crisis which killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. State and federal governments thinks it's liable for billions in damages. Perdue disagrees and is fighting it tooth and nail in the courts, which is within their rights. Would you characterize this as "the most American and democratic thing I can imagine"?
Having the right to attempt to defend yourself in court - even if you're a shitty person/organization - is very American, yes. Electing governments in part to try and prosecute said shitty people/organizations is similarly quite democratic.
>Having the right to attempt to defend yourself in court - even if you're a shitty person/organization - is very American, yes.
I'm not arguing they shouldn't have the right to defend themselves in court, only that most people wouldn't think that as being "patriotic". It's also not hard to find people characterizing Citizens United v. FEC as "undemocratic", even though it theoretically emobies the democratic principles of free speech and the supreme court acting as a check.
There's a pretty wide gulf between "abortion should be legal in at least most or all cases" and "ads for abortion pills on facebook". The company's spokesperson specifically mentioned it was taken down due to regulations relating to advertising drugs.
If the reason for the takedown was "we don't allow ads for drugs of any variety on the platform" or "regulations prevent us from allowing ads for medicines on our platform" then sure, I have no problem with that. I can complain about the quality or consistency of that enforcement, but sure, if that's the reason, that's fine.
If the reason for the takedown is that the popular will of the people, as manifest in the preferences of the current President, deems this thing bad, and therefore we're taking it down, then that's a) inaccurate and b) deeply out of step with American tradition, principle, and governing philosophy.
>If the reason for the takedown is that the popular will of the people, as manifest in the preferences of the current President, deems this thing bad, and therefore we're taking it down, then that's a) inaccurate and b) deeply out of step with American tradition, principle, and governing philosophy.
Is the implication here that any sort of proactive action by companies to dodge enforcement actions a bad thing? For instance, if after Biden appointed Lina Khan to the FTC, and M&A firms suddenly stopped doing deals out of anti-trust concerns, is that bad? Or is it somehow only limited to advertising?
So I'd started writing a response to this, but it got a bit long and abstract and it was a work day, so I kind of left it, but an article dropped into my lap today which was almost too perfect as a demonstration of what I was trying to get to:
> Now Mr. Trump is back in the White House, and many executives at CBS’s parent company, Paramount, believe that settling the lawsuit would increase the odds that the Trump administration does not block or delay their planned multibillion-dollar merger with another company, according to several people with knowledge of the matter.
In general, if an incoming administration signals a change in regulatory priorities or interpretation, and that causes businesses broadly to adjust their business plans, I think that's a reasonable reflection, after a relatively long chain and with all the caveats of the US electoral system, of the "people's will" as expressed in governance after an election. Lina Khan indicated that the FTC was going to take a much closer look at mergers with a renewed eye towards competition, not just consumer wellbeing, and that broadly changed the math on whether companies expected their mergers to go through. That's what I would expect - that's the point of government and regulation here, and the change in those priorities following an election fits broadly into "the government as the people's tool for constraining powerful actors."
However, a company changing its policies or plans specifically because it is concerned about the whims and wills of the president - in other words, companies specifically attempting to curry personal favor with the president to get better treatment - is not that. If Paramount was worried that recent changes to the law or changes to how the FCC or FTC interpreted regulations affected their chances of winning the lawsuit or getting the merger through in the same way that, say, NBC would be worried about it, that's normal. Paramount is worried that the president is angry at them and they are going to be specifically targeted, and so they're going to give the president a large cash settlement so he'll instruct the FTC to let them complete their merger. That's not normal - or at least, it's not good.
They didn’t. They won 49.8%. But I’ve got to be honest, any logic along those lines rings very hollow these days. We’ve been told over and over about the “tyranny of the majority” being why a number of sparsely populated states get a disproportionate vote on the country’s destiny. To pivot just because the popular vote flipped to the other side (which, again, it didn’t) feels very… convenient.
I don't have a horse in this race nor a particular interest in US elections but I don't think your definition of popular vote is the commonly used one (i.e. candidate doesn't have to have more than 50% to win it).
I definitely think it's better for companies to do what's right than what's wrong, and I'm not sure I follow your implication that this is a shallower principle than calibrating what I think companies should do against the winner of the most recent federal elections. It would be a harder question if there were a law which requires Instagram or Facebook to block and hide posts from abortion pill providers, but there isn't.
Ideally, each individual, with society deciding via laws and regulation when people disagree.
> Does this boil down to just "I don't agree with what meta is doing"?
No, this boils down to "it is bad for even billionaires to be terrified of opposing the new President". Who has, for the record, previously called for Zuck's imprisonment.
>No, this boils down to "it is bad for even billionaires to be terrified of opposing the new President". Who has, for the record, previously called for Zuck's imprisonment.
That's a total 180 from the OP and most of this comment thread, which was seemingly about excoriating meta/zuck's behavior.
Everyone who makes a decision has the responsibility to judge whether it's right.
It would be one thing if Meta content teams sat down, thought about it, and decided that abortion pills aren't something they're comfortable having on their platform. But then they wouldn't have restored accounts when the New York Times started asking. It looks a lot more like an unprincipled decision to make their lives a bit easier by putting their thumbs on the scale against views the government doesn't like. (It's not like they've never done that before!)
> You may not agree with the current administration, but they won the popular vote
A republican candidate narrowly won the popular vote for the first time in 20 years, a metric that has no value in our system of government. And somehow you think this factoid puts the current administration in a position where they dare not be defied? Give me a fucking break.
>A republican candidate narrowly won the popular vote for the first time in 20 years, a metric that has no value in our system of government.
I can't tell whether you're trying to make a nitpicky point about how the president is elected, or you're trying to claim the concept of political legitimacy doesn't exist.
I think they're claiming that the popular vote has no real relationship to political legitimacy in the US, which is true, because the electoral college/FPTP system is explicitly designed to render the popular vote essentially meaningless through layers of abstraction and gatekeeping. It's only really useful for propaganda, and not even that useful - Republicans claimed a sweeping mandate from the masses even in 2016 when millions more people voted for Hillary Clinton.
Political legitimacy isn't static, but it is primarily demarcated by hard numbers in our system. And going by the hard numbers - the ones actually referenced in binding documents - the Republican Party currently has one of the weakest grasps on power of any ruling party in our country's modern history. A rational administration would appreciate that fact and govern accordingly.
> You may not agree with the current administration, but they won the popular vote. What would you rather them do, defy the current administration? Sounds pretty anti-democratic to me.
Does this concept of yours apply to, say, the Heritage Foundation, Musk's Twitter, Fox News, etc. during the Biden presidency?
>Does this concept of yours apply to, say, the Heritage Foundation, Musk's Twitter, Fox News, etc. during the Biden presidency?
The Heritage Foundation and Fox News are basically advocacy organizations so their remit includes criticizing the government. For that reason they get a pass. I don't know what you're referring to with "Musk's Twitter [...] during the Biden presidency", so you're going to have to elaborate.
The roles are entirely reversed here. Rather than the company voluntarily complying with the administration, musk alleges that biden administration officials illegally try to pressure twitter. I agree that if trump tried to illegally pressure zuck into censoring abortion pills, that would be improper on the part of trump, but at the same time I wouldn't fault zuck for caving.
>Yes, that was and is explicitly legal.
>(Morally shitty. But that's freedom!)
The question is whether it's "democratic", not whether it's illegal. The fact that you think it's "morally shitty", suggests think that you agree it's antidemocratic.
> I agree that if trump tried to illegally pressure zuck into censoring abortion pills, that would be improper on the part of trump, but at the same time I wouldn't fault zuck for caving.
He is clearly caving to pressure, either present or expected.
> The fact that you think it's "morally shitty", suggests think that you agree it's antidemocratic.
No. Democracy and shittiness are not mutually exclusive.
You may not agree with the current administration, but they won the popular vote. What would you rather them do, defy the current administration? Sounds pretty anti-democratic to me. Am I missing a deeper principle here or is it just a matter of "companies should do what I think is right"?