Facebook is larger than most world governments.
It is more akin to a nation-state than it is to a “private business.”
Plus, they have engaged in bait-and-switch by allowing competing viewpoints to prevent the growth of rivals, then censoring those viewpoints as a crucial election approaches.
It’s called illegal election meddling.
From Facebook's IPO Prospectus dated May 3, 2012 (emphasis mine):
Our mission is to make the world more open and connected.People use Facebook to stay connected with their friends and family, to discover what is going on in the world around them, and to share and express what matters to them to the people they care about.
Developers can use the Facebook Platform to build applications (apps) and websites that integrate with Facebook to reach our global network of users and to build products that are more personalized, social, and engaging.
Advertisers can engage with more than 900 million monthly active users (MAUs) on Facebook or subsets of our users based on information they have chosen to share with us such as their age, location, gender, or interests. We offer advertisers a unique combination of reach, relevance, social context, and engagement to enhance the value of their ads.
We believe that we are at the forefront of enabling faster, easier, and richer communication between people and that Facebook has become an integral part of many of our users’ daily lives. We have experienced rapid growth in the number of users and their engagement.
[snip -- the following emphasis is Facebook's from the prospectus]
How We Create Value for Users
Our top priority is to build useful and engaging products that enable you to:
- Connect with Your Friends. With more than 900 million MAUs worldwide, our users are increasingly able to find and stay connected with their friends, family, and colleagues on Facebook.
- Discover and Learn. We believe that users come to Facebook to discover and learn more about what is going on in the world around them, particularly in the lives of their friends and family and with public figures and organizations that interest them.
- Express Yourself. We enable our users to share and publish their opinions, ideas, photos, and activities to audiences ranging from their closest friends to our 900 million users, giving every user a voice within the Facebook community.
- Control What You Share. Through Facebook’s privacy and sharing settings, our users can control what they share and with whom they share it.
- Experience Facebook Across the Web. Through apps and websites built by developers using the Facebook Platform, our users can interact with their Facebook friends while playing games, listening to music, watching movies, reading news, and engaging in other activities.
- Stay Connected with Your Friends on Mobile Devices. Through the combination of our mobile sites, smartphone apps, and feature phone products, users can bring Facebook with them on mobile devices wherever they go.
Foundations of the Social Web
We believe that the web, including the mobile web, is evolving to become more social and personalized. This evolution is creating more rewarding experiences that are centered on people, their connections, and their interests. We believe that the following elements form the foundation of the social web:
- Authentic Identity. We believe that using your real name, connecting to your real friends, and sharing your genuine interests online create more engaging and meaningful experiences. Representing yourself with your authentic identity online encourages you to behave with the same norms that foster trust and respect in your daily life offline. Authentic identity is core to the Facebook experience, and we believe that it is central to the future of the web. Our terms of service require you to use your real name and we encourage you to be your true self online, enabling us and Platform developers to provide you with more personalized experiences.
- Social Graph. The Social Graph represents the connections between people and their friends and interests. Every person or entity is represented by a point within the graph, and the affiliations between people and their friends and interests form billions of connections between the points. Our mapping of the Social Graph enables Facebook and Platform developers to build more engaging user experiences that are based on these connections.
- Social Distribution. Over time, people are consuming and creating more kinds of information at a faster pace across a broader range of devices. The growing volume of information makes it challenging to find meaningful and trusted content and to effectively make your voice heard. Facebook organizes and prioritizes content and serves as a powerful social distribution tool delivering to users what we believe they will find most compelling based on their friends and interests.
That is what Zuckerberg sold to investors when he went public with Facebook. Is that what is happening now? Doesn't the prospectus describe "a public forum where all viewpoints are equally tolerated?"
I agree with the thought that Facebook feigned promoting an open sharing of ideas in order to stifle the growth of competing platforms. Now that are the dominant player, they are reneging on the open environment they promised to investors.
-PJ