Facebook's political problems stem from its goal to connect people and its focus on growth, and are societal issues, not antitrust ones
the ability to access a broad consumer base, and thereby decrease the cost of consumer acquisition for new businesses. Not obvious the resulting connectivity is helpful though. https://stratechery.com/... https://twitter.com/... Nick Heer / @nickheer : And it misses the ethical point entirely. The problem is not so much that a Facebook engineer or a third-party could read through your dossier. The problem is the persistent surveillance. Sam Bowman / @s8mb : This is a very good post summarising the political problems (and non-problems) Facebook has as the “social infrastructure” of the internet. https://stratechery.com/... Nick Heer / @nickheer : “It is exceedingly unlikely that Facebook could even make the data about any one individual readable by a human [...]” is a weird claim to make when Facebook shows users which precise advertising buckets they fall into and external website data collected. https://stratechery.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Ben Thompson's argument lands four years after his own reading of Zuckerberg's connectivity manifesto warned that Facebook's power needed checking — but where that earlier critique pointed at unchecked scale, this piece redirects the diagnosis away from antitrust entirely: the harm comes from what connecting everyone at growth-at-all-costs speed does to society, not from market concentration.
The reframing runs against a documented record critics keep citing: Zuckerberg's team reportedly shelved internal research on polarizing effects, and outside analysis of a quarter-million posts showed how hard politically-motivated misinformation was to police ahead of the midterms. Nick Heer's objection sharpens the ethical line — the problem is persistent surveillance itself, while Sam Bowman treats the post as a fair summary of what is and isn't actually a Facebook political problem.
First-order effects
- If the diagnosis is societal rather than antitrust, the remedy toolkit changes: breaking up Facebook would not address harms rooted in its connect-everyone, grow-fast mission, so pressure shifts toward product-design and accountability measures instead of competition enforcement.
Second-order effects
- Regulators and legislators face a fork — competition law versus surveillance/content rules — and platforms beyond Facebook get pulled into the same frame, since persistent-surveillance business models are structural to social media rather than unique to one company's market power.
Third-order effects
- If the 'societal, not antitrust' framing holds, oversight of social infrastructure consolidates around design obligations and disclosure of internal research — the kind Facebook already resisted when it buried polarizing-effect findings — rather than around market structure, leaving the surveillance model intact unless ethics-driven rules reach it directly.
The trend: The policy debate over dominant social platforms is shifting from antitrust remedies toward societal and design-level accountability for connectivity built on persistent surveillance.