- Internet god and would-be humanoid statesman Mark Zuckerberg took to the Washington Post’s op-ed page to unveil some exciting new rules that should govern our sense of self worth and hasten our evolution into politically reflexive, image-obsessed automatons.
- Purporting to have learned, Mark (friends use his first name) calls for regulation in four areas: harmful content, election integrity, privacy, and data portability.
- Harmful content: Facebook is setting the standard. An even more standardized approach that brings the world closer to our example could be spearheaded by “third-party bodies” that set parameters for regulators to enforce.
- Election integrity: Facebook is a model of transparency and democracy, it’s true. But the laws we apply so valorously to protect Americans from undue influence don’t apply everywhere all the time. We need more standardization to ensure we can protect everyone — all the time.
- Privacy and data protection: Facebook is absolutely killing it. And while we’re applauding regressive speech regulations, the EU’s freedom-stifling General Data Protection Regulation should be expanded to apply to the entire world — starting with the United States, which let’s be honest has given voice to free expression for far too long, allowing (in Mark’s own legendarily self-affirming words) “a generation of entrepreneurs to build services that changed the world and created a lot of value in people’s lives.”
- Data portability. It’s so easy to give Facebook your data. And when you give us your data, we want to make sure you haven’t left anything behind. It’s all welcome, and we want to make sure we get all of it. New standards should ensure people don’t have to rely on individual companies to enforce total information transfer. Rather, it should be done expeditiously according to exhaustive regulations and feel like a breezy dream at the beach.
- Mark, we know you’re reading this — please be gentle.
