Tim Wu Explains Why He Thinks Facebook Should Be Broken Up ⇥ wired.com

I thought this was a well-articulated perspective on the dangers of unchecked industry domination, and a firm rebuttal of Facebook’s familiar talking points.

I’ve been saying for a while now that I think Facebook’s inability to keep obviously objectionable materials off its platform — whether through traumatizing human moderators or relying upon automated filters — is a symptom of a broader design flaw. The sheer scale of the company’s products exacerbates this, too. I’m not saying that a company with a few hundred million users would be easier to moderate — Twitter proves that in spades — but I do think that trying to police materials of all types across virtually every country on Earth is an impossible task. Furthermore, globe-spanning monopolies are incentivized to avoid moderation.