[manjushri]

The definition you cherry picked still seems to describe the management of Facebook. What specific part of the definition do you think excludes FB from being called a government?

>nobody ever uses the word "government" to describe, such as the football club.

FIFA manages football teams, and it describes itself as a government:

>The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA; French for "International Federation of Association Football") is an association which describes itself as an international governing body of association football, futsal, and beach soccer.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIFA

[pluto9]

I picked that definition because it's precise, whereas yours was vague. Not all definitions are of equal quality, and choosing a good one over a poor one is not "cherry picking".

Specifically, Facebook is not managed by a "political unit". It's managed by its owners, who have authority over it because it is their property and they have property rights. Governments do not own their citizens. They only have authority because citizens agree, whether voluntarily or through intimidation, to respect that authority.

And no, FIFA does not call itself a government. It calls itself a "governing body" in the text you just quoted. That is not the same thing, and their choice of wording is deliberate. I will concede that they are much, much closer to being a government than Facebook, though, by virtue of their organizational structure and how they derive their authority.

Not that that's relevant to my previous example of a football club. We both know I meant a group of people who get together after work to play for fun, and that the people "in charge" of that are obviously not a government. Claiming that that's false because it's not 100% true for FIFA is a pretty egregious straw man.

[manjushri]

>Specifically, Facebook is not managed by a "political unit". It's managed by its owners, who have authority over it because it is their property and they have property rights. Governments do not own their citizens. They only have authority because citizens agree, whether voluntarily or through intimidation, to respect that authority.

You're comparing apples (FB code) to oranges (citizens). A fair comparison would be users to citizens, or platform code to national territory.

Facebook does not own it's users just like a government doesn't own it citizens. A nation owns the land within it's boundaries just like FB owns the code on it's platform.

>And no, FIFA does not call itself a government. It calls itself a "governing body" in the text you just quoted. That is not the same thing

Again, a government is literally defined as governing body, even thougg you don't like it. Do you think there is a government that doesn't have a governing body?

>We both know I meant a group of people who get together after work to play for fun, and that the people "in charge" of that are obviously not a government. Claiming that that's false because it's not 100% true for FIFA is a pretty egregious straw man.

Claiming that we cannot call Facebook a government because a local football club is not typically called a government is itself an egregious strawman; apples to oranges again. FIFA is a far more comparable to an international entity like Facebook, isn't it?