Facebook Says It Is 'Absolutely Not Threatening' To Leave Europe After Many Welc...
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Facebook Says It Is 'Absolutely Not Threatening' To Leave Europe After Many Welcomed the Move
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There's probably half a dozen small, free social media platforms that would be perfectly adequate replacements for Facebook. "Allo" comes to mind, but there's others. All they lack is subscriber numbers. If Facebook creates a giant vaccuum in Europe by pulling out, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of Europeans will flock to them...and in the process drag along millions more friends, relatives and acquaintances from all over the world.
Given how hated Facebook is, it will be the beginning of the end for them. They know this.
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I hate you for making me search this. The top Wikipedia (my first base for learning about web trivia or obscure initialisms like TDS) search result for Allo is Google Allo [wikipedia.org], yet another discontinued Google project. So I had to Go Dig Deeper and use an actual search engine (DDG). The best result I can find, using the search words "allo social" is allo.io [allo.io], a self-described "remote workspace for whiteboarding and team collaboration", more like a Linked-In clone (sorry) than FB. Is this it? It's also built in Ca
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Oops, a bit dyslexic there. The Hippo favicon belongs to Allo.io, not Allo.Solar, which has a favicon that looks like a house, so most likely a Tesla Energy competitor. I'm also adding a further DDG friendly auto-correction hit. There's actually a social networking site called Ello [wikipedia.org]. This one's described as being an "ad-free alternative" to FB, "the betamax of social media: superior to its competitor but failing to win popular traction".
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I did. I've apologized for wasting the poor guy's time.
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My bad. I'm genuinely sorry for wasting your time. I meant Ello.
I plead human error...I was chatting with a French Canadian friend of mine at the time,and it's their equivalent of "Hello", often when answering a phone.
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Worm: Ello
Sarah: Did you just say Allo?
Worm: No I said "ello," but that's close enough.
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Bluff called; Zuck's nictitating membranes were said to have blinked.
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Why not join two networks and start comparing them? No loss at all for users.
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Speaking of what they know, I'm curious; do you think the hate is Too Big To Fail too?
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My friend, that is an excellent question. Seriously, it's one of those questions that makes you really stop and think.
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In Tech No one is Too Big To Fail, Ask Myspace, Altavista, AOL, wordperfect all were leaders and the biggest in their respective market at one stage. In Tech the fall can be very fast to
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We are in a different era of tech now. Let's take your largest example on that list; AOL never threatened democracy or free speech, and never stood a damn chance to do so either.
The same, certainly cannot be said about today's social media that serves many politician, leader, and President. And if they're more left than right in the political spectrum, they are quite dependent on it. Dependent enough that they cannot afford to have the ideology controlling that social media platform, switch against the
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Remember kids, when it's helping the Arab Spring or protests in Hong Kong, fomenting revolution is good. But when it's a few AM Radio jackoffs and Aunty Whitebread spreading crappy memes, it's A Danger to Democracy and Must Be Stopped... no matter the cost.
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Not sure that holds anymore, the Facebook tentacles reach too deep. People use it even when they don't realize they use it. It was always clear when myspace et all were being used.
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"Facebook Bad" has legs of its own own now. Once every desperate freelancer out there is scouring your every word for something to spin into some misleading headline, which then reliably proceeds to get several thousand of the same "Facebook Bad" posts on reddit for the Nth time, it's safe to say you're going to have a hard time getting that horse back into the barn.
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by larwe ( 858929 ) on Tuesday February 08, 2022 @02:36PM (#62250419)
This was absolutely a case of Facebook saying "We'll take our ball and leave, and your businesses who rely on Facebook advertising and exposure will all wither and die and you'll lose tax revenue"... Followed by the EU calling that bluff and collectively saying "We have plenty of other balls here, trust me, life will go on if you leave. The door is over there---".
The most annoying thing for me will be that I have friends in Europe whom I can only contact over FB Messenger at the moment. Of course this doesn't earn FB a dime, so it's irrelevant to the conversation:)
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I thought that too. I sincerely dislike Facebook’s business model, as well as their attitude towards misinformation (and ethnic cleansing). but on this one they were innocent. They are stuck between two absolutely opposite US and EU laws. If the current laws/regulations aren’t adjusted somehow, they will have no choice but to pull out. That’s the point they were trying to make.
I cant believe Im saying it, but Facebook seems to be right on this one.-
You can just incorporate an EU facebook entity separate from US facebook with no feeding of data between the two. No leaving necessary.
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False, because US laws don't forbid what EU laws require. They merely don't require it. FB could absolutely align it's US data policies with EU requirements, then it'd be in compliance with the law everywhere. It's just that if they did that they wouldn't have much data from their users to sell to their customers and there goes their nice juicy revenue stream.
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Not quite. The Cloud act makes that far less black and white than you make it seem.
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But then that makes Facebook less useful and more annoying for everyone. Letâ(TM)s only keep the consequences of stupid anti-internet laws to the people that passed them.
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Privacy is hardly anti-Internet, a right to control your own data has been around since the early 90s and has caused absolutely ZERO disruption or harm to the Internet. Honestly, if you're going to start throwing out bogus complaints, at leat make it a bogus complaint people might believe in.
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I think that's what he means by "less useful and more annoying." Suppose you ran a slaughterhouse and the government passed a law saying that you can't harm livestock. Don't you see how that would be less useful to your customers? Sure, it wouldn't disrupt or harm the internet at all, but what about people who want to infect you with ads?
Won't someone please think of the assholes?!?
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It's not just about the data requirements, it's also about the tax loopholes being used. If you can't shift data shift data freely between the EU and the US then you can't headquarter your business in Ireland while dealing with US customers.
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And the point EU tried to make is no one cares, it's a free country, you can leave at anytime.
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I don't see how you reached "FB is innocent". They have a business model that relies on access to user data, and that is designed around very very loose US privacy laws and (explicitly) an attitude of "move fast and break things" - use the data in profitable ways, and deal with any incoming lawsuits as they arise, dial back data usage as necessary. US laws do not apply in the EU; the EU has stronger standards (still, arguably, way too weak - but way stronger than US standards). Basically FB is analogous to
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The sane move is to adopt the most restrictive rules and move on.
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> The most annoying thing for me will be that I have friends in Europe whom I can only contact over FB Messenger
E-mail isn't a thing in the EU or something?
I have to assume you're at least old enough to remember how people stayed in touch before 2004... or possibly old enough to remember before the internet.
So I guess it's annoying that you have to use FM Messenger, but not as annoying as doing something else...
=Smidge=-
E-mail isn't a thing in the EU or something?
What a helpful and well-reasoned reply. I am old enough to have run a multiline Fidonet BBS (ZWSBBS 3:634/396), so I have at least the curmudgeon chops of anyone who would post a response like this - your troll attempt meets my natural 20 and is deflected for 0 damage. Email isn't instant messaging. (Also I do not, currently, have the email addresses of most of my EU friends, since I've communicated with them over FB exclusively for the last decade or more).
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With Fidonet chops, then surely you remember how to use a phone. I encourage trying it sometime. It's refreshing how quickly you can communicate intricate nuances over the phone as compared to text / email. And, if you use a landline, how good the audio quality can be.
Yes, it might take the effort of actually discovering the phone numbers of your friends. Believe me, it's worth the effort. You might think you're staying in touch via chat and text, etc., but it's nothing compared to how much closer you'
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I'm almost literally shuddering at that thought. I HATE making phone calls and would go to great lengths to avoid them.
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Send a text message. Or there's Signal or many other options including FOSS.
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>With Fidonet chops, then surely you remember how to use a phone.
The time zone difference is a bitch though.
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Fidonet was late 80s, right? Five years after I moved from TBBS to using IPSS. So there's lots of greybeards here. Now that's a shock. A whole 1.5v 4 milliamp shock.
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Facebook competitors. I mean before FB buys them of course. But there's a Democrat in the Whitehouse making token gestures to enforce anti-trust. You've got at least 3 or 4 years of modest competition (oops, mentioned a political party, -1 down mod).
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But not only the EU but a shitload of the comments on European Reddit subs and other social media were very anti-Facebook...comments like nothing of any value lost, we'll be better without it etc.
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>This was absolutely a case of Facebook saying...
No. It was Facebook putting in worst case scenarios into the financial risks section of their SEC filing, as they are required to do. Anybody reading that and not seeing it for what it was is not familiar with reading company reports.
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"Facebook Says It Is 'Absolutely Not Threatening' To Leave Europe" And I had hopes they'd close here in the US. A World without Facebook will get an IQ pop.
I just had to listen to a relative tell us how Facebook won't let you type the word "fat" because of hate and divisiveness filters but that was OK because she and her friends just typed "f@t". I just kept my mouth shut and listened.
Social Media is such a wasteland.-
the future i look forward to is tom and zuck sitting in a bar sipping appletinis lamenting about how the ride is never as long as you want it to be.
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Quote: "But the simple reality is that Meta, like many other businesses, organisations and services, relies on data transfers between the EU and the US in order to operate our global services."
The kind of data Facebook/Meta hoards? FALSE.
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"between the EU and the US" read this and wondered why would they want to pay to transport all that data between the target areas? mmmm Unless all data goes to the market with the friendliest laws and regulations for long term asset storage and monetization.
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I can think of a number of reasons why storage would be distributed and replicated. Like not having to make a query across the atlantic every time I see the profile picture of an author I follow who lives in Northern Ireland.
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Northern Ireland isn't part of the EU.
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Meta definitely indicated that it could not comply with requests to keep data in the EU.
https://www.socialmediatoday.c... [socialmediatoday.com]
As mentioned, this is the same issue Tik Tok has with US data. It seems very cumbersome to keep data locked into geopolitical regions, and I understand why Meta would want to flee the EU. OTOH, doing so would give other countries a simple method for ridding themselves of the scourge.
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This is a non-fact. It is ABSOLUTELY possible to comply with the request, the factual statement is that it is 1) costly in terms of datacenter isolation, and 2) it cuts FB revenue. I mean, you don't need to have any technical knowledge to know that one way to comply is to have completely separate services - Facebook (EU) and Facebook (non-EU), which share no connections. That's obviously the ad absurdum approach, but you can build up from that to a model that has separate datacenters connected by a filtered
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Sarcasm detector broken? IMHO GP was mocking Facebook for what he considers fake problems.
Of course FB could have completely separate services. This might be the worst case from their point of view, but their business model would still be viable.
What they would presumably lose is some targeted ad revenue from EU users that frequent US Facebook groups and vice versa. If FB is not allowed to exchange data about these users, it is difficult to sell ads targeted based on their' browsing habits. -
Given that the entire purpose of a social network like Facebook is to share personal information, I fail to see how someone in the EU can be Facebook friends with someone in the US and not have their personal data transmit to US servers.
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Totally bogus claim by FB and Tik Tok.
They just want to spy on you and store the data they get in China where they can use it to harass you.
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... every possible risk to our investors.
That is why we say in our filings, We could do a totally stupid thing, and try to threaten to leave a market segment in what we thought would be a under the radar communication channel. But some pesky gadfly, completely could disregard our privacy, and could blabber it all over the place attracting lots of bad publicity. We might be forced to make a public retraction of our imagined confidential threat communication.
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Uh... there's nothing private (express or implied) about SEC filings. They are very much public information, and read by thousands of people. No one even imagined this to be confidential, though they might have wished it were (but probably not even that).
I imagine they did it more to try to get it noticed, in the hopes the EU would relax the rules for them.
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Reportedly this has been in the last several filings, too.
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Filings are not private nor confidential. But it is usually ignored by all. Then some "investor" would approach the law makers asking for help to mitigate the risk, conveying the threat in a roundabout, deniable way. Too bad they had to publicly retract what they hoped will be a sort of veiled threat.
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Ignored by all? I'm pretty sure that's not the case. When I log into my brokerage account there's a news feed which shows most if not all the SEC filings related to the companies I have stock in. It's right there for anyone interested, and there are several companies for which I pretty regularly browse through the filings to see what information might be relevant to me as an investor.
Ignored by the majority of Robinhood play-investors? Sure, I'd believe that, pretty easily. You may also ignore them, an
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Is that their business model is incompatible with the privacy laws in Europe. This is very insightful: there is no business case for them, unless they abuse every possible private aspect they can obtain from you. Crappy.
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C'mon. They tried to trigger a user based groundswell of backlash against the EU government and it failed. That says a lot about the value of FB. Its hilarious that everyone invited them to leave the EU instead of getting upset about it.
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It's not like they are Office365 or something. Facebook dies, users scramble to next chat program by the billions per day. I hope institutional investors are shying away from Facebook by this point. Take your profits and plow it into good old Microsoft or Snowflake.
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Businesses too, they all maintain a presence on whatever popular social media platforms are deemed worthwhile. Our company doesn't have a MySpace account for instance. If FB followed in it's footsteps you can be sure we'd remove our presence when it became more costly than it brought in.
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Facebook presume the EU should cave, instead the said "OK, go ahead".
A threat is only any good when you are willing to do it, and the other person cares.
In this case Facebook was not willing and the EU did not care. -
And Joe Rogan was just joking all those times he made racist comments.
I'm sure in the insular world of the Facebook C-Suite they genuinely expected there to be a massive outcry by addic... users and when the opposite happened, they were left scrambling to come up with some kind of explanation.
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Joe Rogan is hardly a racist. You're an eager victim of creative editing.
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The
“Powerful combination genetic wise. Right? You get the body of the Black man and then you get the mind of the white man altogether in some strange combination.”
comment did need some apologies, it’s not all hard Ns taken out of context.
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DOOO ITTTT!!
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Well, sort of the comment I was looking for, but all the way at the bottom.
But perhaps a more pointed Subject, such as "Please, pretty please with sugar on it! Leave already. And don't let the door hit your arse on the way out."
Whoops. Too long for a Subject. But sometimes it needs more characters.
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are prick and tease, though not necessarily in the same sentence,
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I'm okay with facebook actually being gone.
I know, I could just never use it, but so many other people do. So I'm not willing to not use it to keep in touch with people and local information if everyone else is using it, but I'm also completely fine with it being gone for everyone.
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... threatening to not leave Europe.
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Please FecesBook - PLEASE PLEASE shut down!! Please!!!!
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As a german citizen, I would not have the faintest objection to the idea getting rid of all services provided by Meta!
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At the very least, stop posting shit about Meta when what you really mean is Facebook. Of Alphabet for Google.
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Just like Neil Young was totally not trying to get himself pushed out the door of a car at 90mph over Spotify...
He pulled his own music down. You used to call that voting with your wallet./shrug
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Again. He pulled his own music down again. The problem is he's turning into the musician who cried wolf. He's already abandoned and re-joined Spotify, and abandoned and re-joined Tidal, and now he's abandoned Spotify the only question is for how long.
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Heâ(TM)s not known for his consistency. During the 2016 election he called Trump a friend and asked to borrow money from him for a project then complained about Trump licensing his music to use at rallyâ(TM)s.
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Would that be the “just give him a chance” the right was whining about actually being given and now still complained about for actually doing it?
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Again, he didn't own the music.
He sold it off several years ago.
So, technically, he didn't have the right to do so.-
I guess you're referring to the deal he made with Hipgnosis? Afaik the exact terms of that deal isn't public. To me it seems very unlikely that he sold the ownership of the songs as Hipgnosis is a publicly traded company and would need to inform the market (see recently posted meta/facebook stories). A more likely scenario imho is that he has sold a share of future profits to those songs while retaining ownership. But perhaps you have more information?
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And yet here we are. He says jump, the record industry says "how high?" Now even if you come here and publish the contract of the sale it doesn't make your point any more valid as evident by what actually happened and the fact that his music is currently not on spotify.
What rights he has (or you think he has given I suspect you have not actually read his sale contract) is irrelevant given the influence he demonstrates over his catalogue.
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I dunno if causing a platform to just dump you, rather than silence the person you're trying to silence is "influence".
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Which likely accounts for very little. The real money is live performances. If this PR stunt gets a few more to show up for the ext nostalgia tour the Spotify loss will be more than compensated for.
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This is hardly a recent development for him. Southern man don't need him around anyhow.
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It wasn't HIS music.
He sold it off a while ago.But he presented Spotify with an ultimatum.
Rogan was simply worth more than all the nobodies who jumped ship.
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So... Democratic capitalism?
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Actually its called a PR stunt. A PR stunt by someone struggling to remain relevant many decades after their fame. Neil is a 1960s/70s star, even in the 80s he dropped to 2nd tier. He's a real musician and all, not a one hit wonder, he's just not timeless.
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The guy's a multi-millionaire. A cynic might say he wanted his stuff off Spotify because they pay like crap. An optimist might say he's taking a stand against vaccine misinformation getting folks killed. I can't think of anyone who'd say he got pushed out of a car by anyone. He made this decision himself, it doesn't really hurt him in any noticeable way and he drew a lot of attention to the cause in question (we're talking about it aren't we?).
Seems to me like he won. Hell, Rogan's press people had to d-
Again, Young sold off his catalog a while back.
He technically didn't have a say in the allocation of his music. -
Musicians make so little from Spotify, even if they control their own music, that there's no significant economic penalty to ask to have their music taken off; insofar as it raises their profile it's probably a net benefit.
Spotify doesn't pay artists so little because it's particularly evil; it pays them so little because its business model is wildly unprofitable.
That was the whole point of getting into exclusive podcasts: it's a lot more profitable for them to be content owners than content distributors.
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Not really. The controversy caused various stories that backed Rogan's questioning of the consensus of the day. For example a story about Oxford and a Tokyo university doing covid19 trials of ivermectin became part of the conversation.
Be careful when people start tossing around words like "misinformation" and "disinformation", a lot of it is political. It used to be considered scientific to be skeptical and want to see the evidence, want to investigate alternatives, etc. Now the "scientists" are saying "-
because the right wing dominates the media (they own it, seriously, go look into who actually owns your favorite media outlet).
And I don't need to be careful with those words. Not here. You're trying to hide behind science. Jimmy Dore does it too. Rogan's too dumb to do it, so he just yells a lot and if that doesn't work kicks people off his show and stops inviting them and others like them. That's why for every 1 left wing commentator on Rogan you'll find 10 or 20 right wing whack-a-doodles.
The left wingers are there to debate and educate. The right wingers are there to propagandize. So while they left wingers push back against Rogan's misinformation and lies, the right wingers encourage it.
And go look up Rogan yelling at a literal expert in primates about Bonobo monkeys. Rogan gets real mad, real fast when he's proven wrong. He's super easy to manipulate. Just make him feel good about himself.
Is that really the kind of guy you want to Stan?-
I'm as lefty tree hugging liberal as the next West coaster. But I've listened to Rogan for years and he's not overtly political. His shows lean in the direction of the politics of the person he's interviewing and that goes in multiple directions. Often politics is not in evidence since he gets a lot of academics on who are there to discuss their academic thing. The piling on of anti Rogan sentiment is at least as misinformed as the off-piste covid misinformers he's had on his show for a tiny fraction of the
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The media in America overwhelmingly is leftist. There's no doubt about this. And that "who owns the media" bit has the ugly stench of antisemitism about it.
You've obviously never listened to Joe Rogan. He's an all around mensch. The rest of us know him though, that's why we can see right through your weird characterization.
Hey, why is it you're presenting the pro-regime case in public? Aren't you leftists supposed to be on the side of the little guy?
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The big question is why would so many governments not latch onto ivermectin if it actually helped people without roundworm infections. Democratic governments want to be re-elected and cheaply handling the pandemic would be a win and they'd be scared of the opposition pushing it and even dictators want to make a good impression.
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>why would so many governments not latch onto ivermectin if it actually helped people without roundworm infections
Some have. Specifically ones in Africa that lacked affordable access to covid vaccines. Ivermectin is an anti viral and shows moderate benefit for covid victims. It doesn't come close to vaccines in terms of efficacy, but it's cheap, safe (when properly dosed) and available.
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Better advise would be to be careful when you start hearing yourself contorting into a logical pretzel to defend misinformation and disinformation. Usually it's a good indication that you believe a bunch of bullshit.
You're a little confused as to who the skeptical ones are here. Hint: it's not the people hawking "cures" that have no evidence behind them. No one is saying that scientists shouldn't investigate alternatives. What they're saying is that doctors shouldn't be prescribing alternatives that have no
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