We can have democracy or we can have Facebook
What a bizarre set of beliefs and claims.<p>1. That Facebook is maliciously and mostly singlehandedly responsible for the death of the newspaper and journalism.<p>Except newspaper readership has been on the decline since the 90&#x27;s. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pewresearch.org&#x2F;fact-tank&#x2F;2017&#x2F;06&#x2F;01&#x2F;circulation-and-revenue-fall-for-newspaper-industry&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pewresearch.org&#x2F;fact-tank&#x2F;2017&#x2F;06&#x2F;01&#x2F;circulation...</a> - the article frames Facebook&#x27;s grand plan as taking money from newspapers, but Facebook&#x27;s revenues in 2019 were nearly twice what the whole newspaper industry had as revenue in 2008. In that same window of time the ad industry grew 50%. Facebook makes money by making products that engage people and then presenting them with ads that are of interest to the individual in question. That makes them in the broader attention market but the framing of &quot;Facebook versus newspapers&quot; seems peculiar here.<p>2. That &quot;monopolism&quot; is rampant and anti-democratic.<p>Besides the fact that this is poorly defined in the article (perhaps as incentive to purchase his book?), it sure is an curious turn of phrase that there are &quot;endless numbers of monopolists&quot; in healthcare. Perhaps one could say there are millions of monopolists in music because each work is copyright? Over what does the author claim Facebook have true monopoly? On attention? On information dissemination?<p>3. The thread of conversation implies that breaking up Facebook will somehow help, for example, the decline of the newspaper industry. It&#x27;s not clear how any of the author&#x27;s goals will be accomplished by this and the OP alludes to this in &quot;there&#x27;s a lot more you need to do than just break them up&quot;. But what?<p>If the point of the article is to claim Facebook&#x27;s present mode is a threat to democracy (claimed in title) they A: need to actually articulate this case and B: ought make an argument for how they&#x27;d propose to remedy the situation. Instead the former was done barely at all and the latter was omitted.