I understand the feeling, but these weren’t random people that had nothing to do with a company action. These were all individuals who took part in the act.
I agree it’s petty, and yes this is what many free market proponents want (unless free market is just a convenient guise to get what they want).
The pettiness isn't the problem, the extra-legal power that consolidation of capital and media enables is. Competition in the market ceases to be about the best product at the best price, and becomes a game of strategic alliances and power abuse instead.
Edit: To clarify once more: Facebook may have a legitimate interest in keeping this company off Instagram. What it does not have is a moral right to use unrelated properties for retaliation. This is what I meant by "extra-legal" - it's using its market power to punish a company, instead of the courts. If Instagram was independent, it could not engage in this sort of business-warfare.
This wasn’t competition though. This was straight up theft of resources/services.
What? “extra-legal”? Don’t mix this with other behaviors Meta/Facebook/Instagram engage in, I hate them for all the bullsht they get away with too. However, this isn’t that, this is someone trying to build a platform on top of someone else’s platform explicitly against their terms of service and without reimbursing them.
The argument has been made before, that adblocking is a form of theft. I don’t disagree with it, and when a site blocks me for using ad block I accept it and either forgo the content or disable my Adblock.
Years ago there was an effort to allow users to pay a monthly fee to avoid ads. The idea was that this specific ad network would distribute those funds to the sites you visited in place of ad revenue, and the users would instead see a placeholder of their choice (like a grey block, cat pictures, etc).
I signed up for it, unfortunately they could never achieve market penetration compared to google Adsense, eventually the product died.
Unfortunately there is more money in collecting your behaviors, habits, and using that for targeted advertising than most people are willing to pay for content in aggregate.
YouTube and other platforms have seem some success in ad free options, but only on those targeted platforms where the value-add is clearer to the consumer.
p.s. If I have to go out of my way to evade anti-adblock measure then the answer is a clear yes to me. Otherwise, if no clear block is placed before me I view it as a moral grey area. Sites that I want to support and regularly visit I disable ad block for. I am one of those people who don’t have adblock on YouTube.
I’d like to see an internet that didn’t need ads or ad blockers. Give me a better way to help you monetize your content.
It's hard to be sympathetic to a company that operates morally dubious amounts of data harvesting. If a program enables you to gain more privacy while using the internet, it's a moral good.
I don't consider it to be stealing any resources or services. It's little different than an ad and tracker blocker on a browser. Any client-side user agent should have the right to act on behalf of the user. If it's not illegal to build this kind of program yourself to protect yourself, it shouldn't be illegal for another company to build it and profit from it. A company like Facebook shouldn't have the right to strategically stifle innovation and improvement, in a way that makes the market better for the consumer. That undermines the entire point of capitalism, which is to benefit maximally for the consumer by forcing companies to out-do each other. It reads more like anti-competitive behavior to me, and Facebook refusing to try to properly adapt to somebody making their product better than they can do themselves.
If Ford produced an on-board tracking device that tracked your use of the car to sell to advertisers, and another company sold a device that disabled the tracker permanently, there would be no good reason for Ford to be able to forcefully ban the company from buying their cars. Even if the car was sold at a loss because the ad revenue subsidized the remainder and then some.
People are hungry for privacy and a better experience. Facebook needs to learn to adapt for the good of the consumer, or die by letting other companies eat their lunch. This is good capitalism. It sucks for Facebook, but it's good for the public.
I’m with you almost all the way. I’m just not going to say that any of us our entitled to the resources of someone else.
I believe in what’s best for the commons, but not at the expense of stealing what’s not mine. Sure, take possession of what’s yours, your information, your privacy, your property. But don’t give it all away to receive some benefit, then insist on seizing it all back and keeping the benefit.
The transaction you make with Meta is that you’ll give them a piece of your property, in exchange you get to use their machines. If you don’t want them to occupy your property, stop using their machines.
I choose not to use Facebook/Instagram because I’m not so self important as to share my daily life with “friends” I only talk to out of convenience and lack of something better to do. I don’t feel like the benefit Facebook offers is worth the toll they exact. I don’t want my land to be part of their machine, and similarly I don’t feel entitled to it.
When someone sends me a Facebook or Instagram link and I’m asked to login, I just let them know I can’t view that link. If I’m blocked from Instagram content, or increasingly Twitter content, because of my adblocker, then I just accept that the content isn’t available to me.
I host content I want to share with friends and family on services that I either host or pay for so that I don’t have to subject them to that. So they don’t have to sign away their privacy to view my kids having fun at the park.
If a comedian is deplatformed should they ban the production team, ban Alex Jones' sound guy maybe, what about the people who voted for Trump, willing participation?
I could imagine certain protests being demonized and their attendants removed from meta for violating terms of service.
The real question is do they virtually round up the avatars for public deletions, or do they just disappear them?
I think a lot of people would enjoy virtual public executions, if anyone from meta is listening.
I was careful in my choice of the word participated. I chose to use that word as I intended it to only include people who worked on the product. If anyone at the company who did not work on the development of the product was banned then I wholly disagree with their suspension.
Also, while I enjoy your alliteration, it’s also an extremely steep “slippery slope” argument. It’s certainly not an argument I was trying to entertain.
p.s. to entertain your comedian argument, I think there are some situations where that may be correct.
If a comedian tells vile racist jokes, I believe the writer of the joke, the talent manager who knew the comedians content, the person who booked the comedian knowing the content, and the venue who knowingly provided the platform for the content should all be similarly shunned.
The kind that realizes that government is not the only threat to a functional free market, that does not devolve into feudalism. I am pointing out the failure of lack of antitrust enforcement, not claiming that an unrestricted free market is the ideal, no matter where it leads.
Agreed about antitrust enforcement, Instagrams marriage to Facebook should have never been allowed to proceed. At some point we let “free market” supersede a market with competition. When you become large enough that you can leverage non-tangible assets to borrow enough money to buy out all your threatening competition. Or when you become large enough that you can secure patents for every little obvious development, original or not, and litigate every potential competitor out of existence. At that point I don’t think it’s a free market. Throw in some lobbying, protectionists policies, and now you have a captured market.
I'm not saying it is. I'm saying that today, social networks are an oligopoly and lack meaningful competition. That makes it not a free market, which means the social media companies shouldn't get to do everything that companies in a free market can, and should instead be regulated like other things that aren't free markets, e.g., utilities.
Social networks are by no means an oligopoly. There are a LOT of social networks out there. There is a lot of competition. There are few, if any, real barriers for an end user to switch to a different social network – beyond convincing their friends to do so.
