[HN Gopher] Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pr...
___________________________________________________________________
Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on
content
Author : southernplaces7
Score : 405 points
Date : 2024-08-27 09:50 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.politico.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.politico.com)
| consp wrote:
| He said it is not political and published it at the end of an
| election cycle ... Of course it is.
| TMWNN wrote:
| Nonetheless, better late than never for Zuckerberg to admit
| that he and Facebook erred.
| ericjmorey wrote:
| I think the original point was that this wasn't late. It was
| timed to be influential to the outcome of the election.
| smt88 wrote:
| Which also casts doubt on its sincerity.
| ErikBjare wrote:
| I think it was timed to be relevant. Doubt this will
| influence the outcome of the election, esp given the WH
| statement which seems to be in agreement.
| loa_in_ wrote:
| As far as I'm concerned he typed it out right after the
| events and scheduled it to be released later, that is
| now.
| ErikBjare wrote:
| The letter was a response to the House Judiciary
| Committee, it didn't from nowhere.
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| It's relevant right now because there's recent increase in
| the amount of government-directed censorship and propaganda
| on the social media platforms at the moment. Take a look at
| Reddit. Look at what's happening in the UK or with the EU
| threatening to imprison Musk for allowing Trump to be
| interviewed.
| TMWNN wrote:
| > or with the EU threatening to imprison Musk for
| allowing Trump to be interviewed.
|
| ?
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4824438-eu-sends-
| warni...
| TMWNN wrote:
| Holy cow. I'd heard something about the EU recently
| warning Musk over Twitter, but did not know that it was
| because of the heinous mortal sin of interviewing the
| former and possible next US president.
| hagbard_c wrote:
| There's just that thing that he forgot to say 'rinse &
| repeat' at the end of his statement while he's now in the
| 'rinse' phase. The upcoming election circus will make clear
| whether he is genuinely regretful or whether he's up to his
| old tricks. The 'Zuckerbucks' NGO 'Center for Tech and Civic
| Life' [1] is gearing up again so I suspect the latter to be
| closer to the truth.
|
| [1] https://mailchi.mp/06871ce9876c/new-campaign-seeks-
| federal-f...
| cheschire wrote:
| So we hold him to the same standards as an 8 year old that is
| still learning self control?
| mypastself wrote:
| Can't find the claim about the statement not being political
| anywhere in the linked article. But there's this:
|
| > Meta's CEO aired his grievances in a letter Monday to the
| House Judiciary Committee in response to its investigation into
| content moderation on online platforms
|
| Sounds like he wasn't the initiator of the discussion, but I
| may be misreading the paragraph.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| And it's in the news because it's being made newsworthy, not
| because it's new.
|
| "A U.S. federal judge," in 2023 "restricted some agencies and
| officials of the administration of President Joe Biden from
| meeting and communicating with social media companies to
| moderate their content" [1].
|
| [1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/judge-blocks-us-officials-
| comm...
| cempaka wrote:
| It's funny to see MAGA people all of a sudden embracing
| Chad Zuckerberg, as though this represents some sort of
| organic character development on his part. Years of
| censorship and persecution just forgotten by dangling the
| carrot of rapprochement with Trump.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _funny to see MAGA people all of a sudden embracing
| Chad Zuckerberg, as though this represents some sort of
| organic character development on his part_
|
| Honestly, it's refreshingly pragmatic to see American
| politics ditching the ideological purity tests that
| defined our recent history. I disagree completely with
| MAGA politics. But allies don't have to be friends--if
| someone's on your side, that's really what counts.
| cempaka wrote:
| Zuckerberg is pretending to be on MAGA's side so that he
| can assist whatever next phase of the agenda is intended
| for Trump's next term in office. Of course, if MAGA could
| pick out people who are only pretending to be on their
| side they wouldn't be supporting Trump in the first
| place.
| ToValueFunfetti wrote:
| He must have a fantastic PR team. Across the political
| spectrum, I'm seeing a ton of support for him. Decades of
| harvesting and selling personal data (including shadow
| profiles of non-users), "I don't know why people trust
| me", Cambridge Analytica, the metaverse/attempt at owning
| the future of the internet- all swept under the rug in
| exchange for open Llama weights and a couple statements
| about censorship. Musk could cure mortality without
| changing as many minds about him.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _He must have a fantastic PR team. Across the political
| spectrum, I 'm seeing a ton of support for him_
|
| He's speaking to both sides and has seemingly--almost
| uniquely in Silicon Valley--mastered the art of shutting
| the fuck up. Note, for example, his disciplined reticence
| around endorsing a candidate.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Zuck has donated piles of money to key organizations. The
| left will not report anything critical of anything Meta.
| Bread is buttered.
|
| Like when Walmart shows up in a town and starts donating
| before applying for permits.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| More to the point: https://arstechnica.com/tech-
| policy/2024/06/scotus-tosses-cl...
|
| "On Wednesday, the Supreme Court tossed out claims that the
| Biden administration coerced social media platforms into
| censoring users by removing COVID-19 and election-related
| content."
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| Very funny that the initial case got lots of press on HN
| and got people like patio11 in a tizzy but when it was
| tossed out by SCOTUS there was nary a peep.
| EasyMark wrote:
| He said it because they got criticized for something that cost
| them a lot of money. It's all about how much it costs and takes
| away from the pockets of the board of directors and owners. For
| profit companies are amoral for the most part and their only
| obligation is to make money.
| cempaka wrote:
| It's pretty clear that Trump is the pick for Silicon Valley and
| TPTB more generally this time around. Zuckerberg had already
| relaxed the rules against Trump on Facebook, and the media was
| spotlighting Biden's cognitive issues, before the Immaculate
| Assassination Attempt which gave Zuckerberg cover to call Trump
| a "badass," continue relaxing the rules, and now come out with
| this.
|
| Most of these guys are never going to endorse Trump outright
| (Musk is playing his own part in the game by molding X into a
| right-wing backlash machine), but their endorsement isn't what
| matters anyway.
| lp0_on_fire wrote:
| > before the Immaculate Assassination Attempt
|
| Can you explain what you mean be "Immaculate Assassination
| Attempt"?
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| The one that everyone decided to ignore once it became
| clear the perpetrator was a far right accelerationist and
| not a leftist.
|
| I personally just say it never happened, the reactions from
| people are funnier when you say the photos of it are AI
| generated.
| cempaka wrote:
| The only truly dispositive photos are the one where he
| has a little blood on his fingertip after first reaching
| up to his ear, and the one that supposedly captured a
| bullet whizzing right past his head, and you'd hardly
| need AI to make either of them.
| bigbacaloa wrote:
| This pseudo-apology is the worst sort of political expediency. He
| did what the government asked while denying doing it, now
| apologizes for it to curry favor with the rightwing world he
| alienated. It's like the NY Times pushing the weapons of mass
| destruction narrative during the Iraq war and later running long
| articles about what bad journalism that was.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| It is sometimes easy to say in retrospect we shouldn't have
| demoted the story. But they did and they trusted the US
| Administration.
|
| Facebook is international. Do they allow all speech even that
| which could be viewed as propaganda in the US?
|
| Who makes the ultimate call on whether it be Russian
| disinformation or COVID-19?
|
| We have tried many different moderation models and not all of
| them work.
|
| If we try the Reddit route, then we could have incredible bias in
| moderated communities.
|
| What about fitting the StackOverflow model to social media?
|
| Another route is how X provides for the Community Notes feature.
| Would that have worked? Is Community Notes still susceptible to
| the same bias?
| Etheryte wrote:
| I'm not sure if I see what you mean with the Stack Overflow
| idea. SO is purely a technical site, it's very easy to identify
| what's ontopic and everything else is offtopic. That doesn't
| apply to general discussion, never mind stuff like news or
| politics. How do you imagine that would work?
| firesteelrain wrote:
| I was thinking like crowdsourced flagging and a reputation
| based system where users via reputation could be granted
| increasingly higher responsibilities as they use the site.
| People who post negative content would be subjected to
| negative feedback loops where their content would be
| progressively demoted, reduced visibility or encounter
| contribution limits. Moderation logs would become public for
| transparency purposes. Data could be anonymized and provided
| via API for research purposes.
| lupusreal wrote:
| > _Data could be anonymized_
|
| I fucking doubt it.
| ecuaflo wrote:
| I want something like you described up until you mentioned
| moderation. There wouldn't be a need for it. That's the
| whole issue with a single decider getting to suppress
| content that the rest of your solution solved.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| I was using Moderation logs as an abstract concept of the
| actions taken to promote or demote content. It would be
| decentralized
| Etheryte wrote:
| How is this different from Reddit, besides the moderation
| logs being public? Maybe I'm missing something here, but it
| sounds exactly the same.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| Reddit is heavily centralized in the hands of a small
| number of mods. This would decentralize things
| Etheryte wrote:
| I'm not sure this holds just by virtue of the system. For
| example Wikipedia uses a similar model and they are also
| heavily centralized, the majority of the moderation is
| done by a very small number of users. If anything, I
| would say systems like this naturally tend towards a
| small inner circle.
| dwallin wrote:
| I think a better example of this type of moderation would
| be Wikipedia.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| I have used Wikipedia as an editor and the moderation can
| be atrocious and again in the handful of a few.
| Timber-6539 wrote:
| The shocking answer to this moderation question is not what
| most people want i.e free speech.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| People absolutely don't of want maximal free speech.
| Moderation is a blessing
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Yeah. There's a _reason_ I 'm on HN, and not on 4chan. (But
| 4chan is there, if that's what you want...)
| beart wrote:
| Even 4chan has moderation
| chgs wrote:
| Most people don't want free speech, and no country has free
| speech anyway.
|
| The question is what limits are made.
| tyre wrote:
| The United States has free speech by all but the most
| extreme definitions. The 1st Amendment is well-tested and
| supported by the courts. Sometimes, like in Citizens
| United, to an extremely flexible definition of speech
| (political campaign donations by corporations.)
| mandmandam wrote:
| The right to speak, but not the right to be heard.
|
| That costs _money_.
|
| Speak in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and you can
| be placed in a "free speech zone" -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone
|
| Let others say the wrong thing on your platform, be it
| advocating against a narrative or revealing evidence of
| war crimes, and you can be tortured.
| hiatus wrote:
| > Let others say the wrong thing on your platform, be it
| advocating against a narrative or revealing evidence of
| war crimes, and you can be tortured.
|
| Do you have any examples of this happening?
| mandmandam wrote:
| The most high profile examples are Assange [0] and
| Chelsea Manning [1]. Daniel Hale. [2] John Kiriakou*. [3]
| Sami al-Hajj [4].
|
| Snowden chose exile over torture, and so has been
| separated from his family for over a decade.
|
| Many people were tortured that didn't even work as
| journalists; just victims of bad metadata or the wrong
| name.
|
| Many countries and organizations even consider so-called
| "standard practice" in American jails to constitute
| torture. Solitary confinement, sometimes for years.
| Refusal of basic medical care, nutrition, sanitation.
| Physical abuse from guards. Unmarked graves behind the
| jail [5].
|
| Nowadays even environmental lawyers can get put in jail
| for the crime of winning judgments against fossil fuel
| companies (Donziger [6]).
|
| * - Wasn't physically tortured, but he did reveal torture
| and was heavily retaliated against for his trouble.
|
| ...
|
| 0 - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PII
| S0140-6...
|
| 1 - https://theintercept.com/2020/01/02/chelsea-manning-
| torture-...
|
| 2 - https://apnews.com/article/government-and-politics-
| dd3111dc6...
|
| 3 - https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/us/former-cia-
| officer-is-...
|
| 4 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sami_al-Hajj
|
| 5 - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/families-in-
| disbelief-afte...
|
| 6 - https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-court-lets-
| chevron-...
| hiatus wrote:
| You said "Let others say the wrong thing on your
| platform, be it advocating against a narrative or
| revealing evidence of war crimes, and you can be
| tortured." The "you" refers to the owner of the platform.
| Which platform owners got tortured for things others said
| on their platform?
| mandmandam wrote:
| Julian Assange; did the "war crimes" and "torture" part
| not give that away?
|
| Chelsea was published on Wikileaks as well.
|
| Daniel Hale was published on The Intercept. They faced no
| consequences, but they also failed to protect Hale's
| identity. Hale was then made into something of an example
| (despite many honors from people praising his bravery).
|
| Al Jazeera (Sami al-Hajj's publisher) have been
| repeatedly lethally targeted lately (with US made and
| funded weapons) without much comment from US media.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _The right to speak, but not the right to be heard_
|
| Right to be heard implies a coercion to be heard. That's
| the paradox of free speech.
| rendang wrote:
| "Free Speech Zones" are a limit on freedom of assembly,
| not speech. Less about preventing people from saying an
| offensive thing outside of the zone & more about keeping
| the physical mass of a protest from disrupting the flow
| of traffic or causing a security issue
| Timber-6539 wrote:
| Most people also don't want their opinions to be silenced
| or used against them either.
|
| As for limits, I think by now we have collected enough data
| from social media use to know what kinds of posts border on
| outright immoral and are a negative to society. Some of
| these have been captured and prohibited by law. It wouldn't
| be that hard to use the existing laws and norms as a test
| bed.
|
| But again some people don't want free speech because they
| are afraid their feelings may be hurt in an exchange.
| Mostly boils down to that.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Lots of countries, including the US had plenty of free
| speech. There was a kind of freedom golden age from the 70s
| until the late 90s, and then, 9/11, Patriot Act. It has
| been all downhill since then.
| krapp wrote:
| Moderation _is_ an expression of free speech. Coerced speech
| is not free speech.
| Timber-6539 wrote:
| Moderation exists as a form of farce to free speech.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| How much algorithmic push to which free speech?
| GeekyBear wrote:
| The problem with Covid censorship (a problem not limited to
| Facebook) was that Covid was an airborne virus, and the
| arbiters of allowable speech decided that the truth about Covid
| was "misinformation" that needed to be suppressed.
|
| How many additional people died because the mitigations we put
| into place were targeted at a virus with a droplet based spread
| (like the flu) but not effective against a virus with an
| airborne spread (like the measles)?
| mandmandam wrote:
| Not just that.
|
| Knowledgeable academics who argued that the costs of
| lockdowns in schools would far outweigh any possible benefit
| were suppressed by non-scientists.
|
| All talk of vaccine side effects was labelled misinformation
| and suppressed, even when accompanied with legitimate and
| accepted studies.
|
| Etc.
|
| The only common thread between all the possible examples of
| censorship - from side effects to lockdown effectiveness to
| the lab-leak theory to the US role in funding GOF research at
| the WIV - seemed to be that unless you spoke the narrative of
| the day then you were _dangerous_ to society. Fully unpacking
| the irony there would take a book.
|
| Many books have been written about this kind of censorship,
| because suppressing conversation like this _never_ leads
| anywhere good. It 's an enduring and central theme of damn-
| near all the top dystopian fiction.
| chasd00 wrote:
| It was even here in HN a community of pretty normal people.
| Remember the discussions of Sweden's approach to lockdowns?
| Any mention of it and you were shouted down and blood was
| surely going to run in the streets of Sweden by dawn the
| next day. I lost a lot of faith in the HN community then.
|
| The pandemic and the compliance and the us vs. them
| mentality really opened by eyes. It's how terrible things
| happen, people will just do what their told by some
| perceived authority no matter what.
| cempaka wrote:
| One particular big name commenter here was still
| defending mass firings under the OSHA mandate in late
| 2022 / early 2023.
| lupusreal wrote:
| HN, to it's credit, at least permitted dissent without
| systematic bans for going against whatever was the
| officially blessed narrative of the day.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| It does however downvotes start to gray out comments and
| HN is still prone to brigading.
| 3np wrote:
| I don't see how that points to presence of systematic
| bans.
| idunnoman1222 wrote:
| How would you know that? My account was banned.
| lupusreal wrote:
| I dissented regularly and vehemently and was not banned
| on HN.
| tensor wrote:
| People disagreeing with you is not censorship.
| tensor wrote:
| I'm going to need to see some evidence for this. How is it
| that I was reading science papers and media reports on them
| daily at the time, covering all these things you claim were
| censored?
|
| Droplet vs airborne was a frequent debate, as were the
| costs/benefit of lockdowns and especially the potential
| side effects of the vaccines. Information at the time moved
| lightening quick, things were barely even published before
| being all over the media.
|
| The lab-leak theory was not taken seriously, but it wasn't
| censored. I remember several high profile articles on it.
|
| Your narrative sounds like some fantasy.
| mandmandam wrote:
| > I'm going to need to see some evidence for this.
|
| It's a google search away friend. I'll source one thing
| for you though, pick whatever you think is craziest.
|
| > How is it that I was reading science papers and media
| reports on them daily at the time, covering all these
| things you claim were censored?
|
| How would I know?
|
| Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Google, YouTube, Twitter,
| Microsoft, Reddit, Apple, Pinterest, Spotify and Amazon,
| among many more, have admitted to removing content. Many
| of those cases were extremely high profile. Facebook
| removed and suppressed nearly 200 million posts [0], many
| of them true. Twitter censored scientists for saying true
| things that the Biden Admin didn't like, as documented in
| the Twitter Files (which were heavily smeared as a
| "nothingburger"). [1]
|
| > Droplet vs airborne was a frequent debate
|
| It shouldn't have been. Aerosol scientists emphasized
| early on that respiratory activities like talking and
| breathing produce tiny droplets (aerosols) that can stay
| suspended in the air, potentially spreading the virus.
| This knowledge should have been applied sooner. Air
| purification in classrooms and nursing homes could have
| been a thing almost immediately, but even now it hasn't
| been seriously pursued. (Outside the top private schools
| anyway.)
|
| > as were the costs/benefit of lockdowns
|
| For all the debate, they still got rammed through pretty
| much everywhere. Since then, everything that many people
| had been saying came true, and now we have a generation
| of children that teachers are describing as "feral" with
| the most genuine concern.
|
| Excess cancer deaths, widespread mental health crises, a
| huge transfer of wealth to the rich, economic hardship
| for many, a huge rise in domestic violence. The people
| who predicted this were smeared seven ways to Sunday, and
| you'd have to be in a strange bubble to have missed it.
| Perhaps the censorship worked after all?
|
| > especially the potential side effects of the vaccines.
|
| Again, this has been explicitly acknowledged as a topic
| which got heavily censored, by the companies that did the
| censoring no less. Facebook, Twitter, Youtube etc all did
| it, and all report being asked to remove things that
| "could be seen as" going against whatever position was du
| jour.
|
| > Information at the time moved lightening quick, things
| were barely even published before being all over the
| media.
|
| Some information moved a lot faster than other info...
| Because of _acknowledged_ mass suppression and
| censorship.
|
| There's no damn good reason that I and many others could
| take a glance through Daszak's paper and recognize it as
| bullshit immediately, but it took years to be
| acknowledged as such by media and academia.
|
| It also took a long time for those Whatsapp chats where
| top scientists admit to being told to say that a lab-leak
| was "impossible", even though they suspected it was quite
| likely.
|
| To this day, the conversation about funding GOF research
| has not had its time in the sun.
|
| > The lab-leak theory was not taken seriously
|
| Serious people took it seriously from day one. There was
| never a good reason not to, and many good reasons to
| demand an immediate investigation of WIV, GOF research in
| general, and the role of our own money funding the exact
| type of research that could create a coronavirus like
| this.
|
| > I remember several high profile articles on it.
|
| So do I, and I remember them being pretty easy to see for
| the hack jobs they were as well. The NYT had a genuinely
| good one after like a year and a half, long over due.
|
| > Your narrative sounds like some fantasy.
|
| Again, you can name one specific thing that I have
| claimed and ask me to source it for you; I won't do
| everything. All of this is easily findable.
|
| I didn't even get into some of the gnarlier stuff, like
| how all across the West nursing homes were seeded with
| sick patients resulting in a huge number of early deaths.
| That was a suppressed story you might have missed, even
| though there were bits and pieces of it written up.
| Again, there's been very little accountability for that
| since.
|
| What's pure fantasy is that we had some sort of reasoned
| debate, followed best-practice protocols, and came to
| measured decisions.
|
| * * *
|
| 0 - https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1170
|
| 1 - https://www.yahoo.com/news/twitter-files-platform-
| suppressed...
| tensor wrote:
| Science works on consensus and iteration. Government
| policy generally (and I think should) follow that
| process, not form policies on minority opinions at the
| time. For instance, although the droplet vs airborne
| debate was incorrect initially, the error was found and
| corrected via consensus, and government policy follow
| that consensus. That's how it SHOULD work.
|
| Most of your writing is a bias filled rant, complete with
| misinformation (no, the _consensus_ for science was that
| the lab leak was extremely unlikely, and still remains so
| today as far as I 've seen, again, a few individual
| researchers thinking it likely does not make consensus).
|
| You seem heavily invested in going against consensus and
| best practice, and I'm genuinely not interested in that
| position as I disagree with it. While things could have
| been better, given the circumstances the scientific
| community and world governments generally did a good job
| at protecting people.
|
| On the topic of what should be allowed on social media,
| there is room for debate there, but I stand by that
| freedom of speech does not require you have equal
| standing or that people listen to you. I don't believe
| fringe science or non-science deserves equal time in the
| spotlight. So I suspect we won't be coming to any
| agreement.
| mandmandam wrote:
| > You seem heavily invested in going against consensus
| and best practice
|
| You think best practices were followed? ... Really?
|
| And I'll happily go along with a consensus that I feel
| was freely obtained, which is not what we are talking
| about. I do it all the time.
|
| > but I stand by that freedom of speech does not require
| you have equal standing or that people listen to you
|
| Do you believe that the amount you can be heard should
| depend on how much money you have?
|
| Do you believe that an Administration should be allowed
| make secret decisions on what's shown to people?
|
| > I don't believe fringe science or non-science deserves
| equal time in the spotlight. So I suspect we won't be
| coming to any agreement.
|
| Maybe it wouldn't be fringe if millions of posts about it
| hadn't been suppressed.
|
| Or if there'd been any serious attempt at investigation -
| gathering data, scientifically.
|
| Or if we hadn't sent millions of dollars to fund research
| into this exact thing, and then lied about it as the
| pandemic raged. That data could have been very useful for
| policy.
|
| There's a lot to it, and you've shown no sign that you
| actually understand the arguments. It's all appeals to
| authorities, who have consistently shown us just how
| captured they can be for some time now. Think of the 2008
| financial crisis, or ivy-league colleges sending riot
| squads on peaceful protesters, or the APA 'legitimizing'
| and assisting torture, or the Supreme Court tolerating
| obvious bribery, Congressional insider trading, etc etc.
| 3np wrote:
| > Facebook
|
| > Reddit
|
| > StackOverflow
|
| > Twitter Community Notes
|
| These are all examples of vertically integrated corporate-run
| centralized platforms and therefore have inherently unilateral
| centralized moderation with the same sets of legal requirements
| regarding alignment of policies and enforcement. They are all
| the same model, effectively.
|
| > Who makes the ultimate call on whether it be Russian
| disinformation or COVID-19?
|
| Nobody. Hopefully.
|
| There are moderation models which do not have these
| restrictions but they are inherently incompatible with these
| platforms.
|
| The fediverse (ActivityPub/Mastodon/Threads/etc) is one example
| of a different model. I personally think it's obvious this is
| not a complete answer, easily observed by drama-driven
| defederation politics.
|
| We need to be exploring and adopting improved moderation
| mechanisms and tools for networks like Nostr, BlueSky, Matrix,
| and keep do the same for the infrastructure layer.
|
| Couple the recent UN convention against cybercrime[0] and the
| EU "SecEUrity Package"[1] with the arrest of Pavel Durov and I
| hope some of you reading this will wake up to the shift in
| relevance and urgency of the topics of decentralization and
| more serious use of E2EE and signatures. This includes taking a
| critical look at the TLS layer, PKI, and the roles of companies
| like CloudFlare and Akamai. I'd say a thing or two about the
| intertwined constriction of the financial rails, deprecation of
| cash, and the relevance of cryptocurrency... But let's keep
| that at that.
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41211976
| https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/07/effs-concerns-about-un...
|
| [1]: https://www.statewatch.org/news/2024/july/police-should-
| have...
| lupusreal wrote:
| Bet he'll do it again. _" This time it's different."_ Assuming
| the man has any principles at all, he already demonstrated his
| willingness to violate them. He'll do it again.
| smt88 wrote:
| There is zero doubt at this point about Zuckerberg's
| principles. He has none. He hasn't even stayed consistent on
| anti-Semitism, which you'd think would be close to his heart.
|
| I will also say, to be fair, that none of the other influential
| billionaires in the tech world (PayPal Mafia, Jack Dorsey,
| Andreesen, Horowitz, etc.) seem to have consistent principles
| either.
| scottyah wrote:
| To be fair, consistency can also be called stubbornness. It
| depends on how you slice things, but growing and changing
| your mind as new data comes in is not a bad thing.
| greenthrow wrote:
| Facebook, Instagram, etc. moderating content isn't a free speech
| issue. They are just glorified bulletin boards. They try to raise
| everyone's sense of their importance by claiming it to be a free
| speech issue, but they are awful garbage and the sooner everyone
| realizes the better for society.
| mandmandam wrote:
| We're talking about nearly 200 million posts, at least, having
| been wiped and suppressed [0]. Many of these were both 100%
| true and highly important. The effects of their suppression are
| still felt to this day; in broken minds, broken relationships,
| destroyed careers, a stunted generation, and unnecessary excess
| deaths. Serious and brave academics were threatened and had
| their voices stilled.
|
| Describing Zuck's censorship of nearly 200 million posts on
| Facebook alone as _" moderating content"_ is like calling a
| tsunami "a bit of rain". It's irresponsible.
|
| Calling a platform with 3 billion monthly users a "glorified
| bulletin board" doesn't sound very credible to me either.
|
| 0 - https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1170
| greenthrow wrote:
| Why would the number of posts matter? I don't care if it was
| 200 or 200 billion. Nothing in my original comment changes.
| Same for number of users. These are private platforms, not
| public spaces. They are not open. They are not free. They use
| the _lie_ that they have anything to do with free speech as a
| marketing tool. Stop falling for it.
| mandmandam wrote:
| > Why would the number of posts matter?
|
| Scale matters. Everyone on HN knows this.
|
| Why would the Biden Admin have a right to lean on FB to
| censor true and important information?
|
| "We need you to censor this false [read: true] information
| from your 3 billion users, because reasons" - not a very
| defensible position.
|
| By the way, I've advocated for tearing Meta apart and
| putting it in global public ownership for _years_ , partly
| because of their acceptance of over-censorship. There's
| such a thing as public responsibility, and Meta has
| repeatedly failed. I said so here, just yesterday.
|
| I'm 100% fine with Meta and others censoring some things:
| drug sales, scams (I wish they would!), and worse.
|
| But censoring scientists trying to say true things of a
| devastating pandemic, or minimize the harms from terrible
| policy? Censoring discussion of stories that politicians
| find embarrassing? Censoring the word "Zionist"??!! That's
| indefensible.
|
| Again, there's a basic responsibility there; whether
| enshrined in law or not, and whether the law is enforced or
| not. Allowing a platform used by nearly half all people on
| Earth to warp our collective understanding of issues up to
| and including war, plague, genocide and famine is
| unacceptable, whether by government "request" or not.
| greenthrow wrote:
| People on HN know scale matters for $$$$. Scale doesn't
| matter for rights. Again, these companies are using your
| outrage as a marketing tool. They are not, never have
| been and never will be open. It's not just Meta.
| Twitter/X is the same. They are all the same.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Scale doesn 't matter for rights_
|
| Ten people being denied their rights is no different from
| hundreds of millions?
| greenthrow wrote:
| > Ten people being denied their rights is no different
| from hundreds of millions?
|
| Do I really have to explain this? We cannot permit even
| one person denied their rights. It isn't acceptable in
| small quantities and then suddenly become a problem when
| it's 200 million.
|
| But as I have clearly stated and has been obvious for
| years, you don't have a right to use privately owned web
| sites. The attempt to paint it as such is _only_ a
| marketing ploy by those very same sites in order to paint
| themselves as essential to our lives. They are not.
| Delete your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. they are
| garbage.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _We cannot permit even one person denied their rights.
| It isn 't acceptable in small quantities_
|
| Nobody said it's acceptable. What's ridiculous is to
| claim the difference in scale "doesn't matter."
|
| > _you don 't have a right to use privately owned web
| sites_
|
| Under the First Amendment, no. Under the freedom of
| assembly, no. Under the _principles_ of free speech, it's
| more ambiguous.
| beej71 wrote:
| > Under the principles of free speech, it's more
| ambiguous.
|
| I don't think it is. The First Amendment gives companies
| control of what gets posted to the sites they own. And it
| gives you that control for the sites you own, too.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _First Amendment gives companies control of what gets
| posted to the sites they own_
|
| No, it does not. It prohibits the government from
| abridging the freedom of speech.
|
| The First Amendment is a particular expression of the
| broader principle of freedom of speech/expression [1]. If
| you are in my home and you express a view I dislike, it
| is completely within my legal rights to ask you to stop
| speaking or else be asked to leave. I could not at the
| same time, however, say I stand for free speech.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech
| beej71 wrote:
| > It prohibits the government from abridging the freedom
| of speech.
|
| And that does not give companies and individuals the
| ability to choose what they host on their sites?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _that does not give companies and individuals the
| ability to choose what they host on their sites?_
|
| No, it does not. The First Amendment is silent on _e.g._
| ISPs or payment processors blocking a particular site
| based on its content. Until 1897, it was unestablished
| whether it restricted the states in any form [1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago,_Burlington_%26
| _Quincy...
| beej71 wrote:
| What if I rephrase to say the first amendment does not
| give the government the right to tell website owners what
| they may or may not publish?
| consteval wrote:
| Correct. There's no such amendment like "slavery is okay,
| up until 11 people then it's bad"
|
| If slavery is allowed then it is. If it's a million or 1
| it doesn't matter, it's equally allowed. If we give
| someone the right to freedom that means ALL get the right
| to freedom.
| EasyMark wrote:
| Scale does not matter. Where in the constitution does it
| say "scale"?You have freedom to censor your small online
| forum as you see fit, you are welcome to censor your
| mega-super Facebook platform as you see fit. There is no
| distinction here. Those people who get kicked off a
| platform are free to set up their own forums (or go to
| telegram or whatever)and yell into the cloud about the
| wrongs done to them and set up their propaganda bot; no
| law says you have to host them.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| It _should_ matter. In fact, _this is why antitrust law
| exists_. If ideas are a marketplace, then Facebook has
| pricing power in that market. Facebook is big enough that
| it 's actions alone dictate the opinion of a large
| portion of America. Twitter used to be the same way.
|
| The answer to all this censorship is simple: break up
| Facebook. If we absolutely, positively can't, _then_ make
| them a common carrier, regulate them like a utility, and
| strip out all the profit incentive to keep bad actors on
| the system. The funny thing is that Facebook 's crimes
| are not merely censoring what they believe to be
| disinformation, but also amplifying people who break
| their own rules. Facebook and Twitter had world leaders
| policies intended to justify keeping politicians who
| break their rules on platform, specifically so they could
| amplify them, because it made the company money.
|
| In other words, everyone angry that Twitter banned Trump
| in 2021 should also be angry that Twitter didn't ban him
| in 2017.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| > Facebook, Instagram, etc. moderating content isn't a free
| speech issue.
|
| When it's at the demand from the white house, it becomes a free
| speech issue because it's the executive branch that essentially
| controls what these big bulletin boards are allowed to publish.
| Furthermore, nothing is for free, so what perks did these big
| bulletin boards got in return? maybe that administration
| decided not to proceed with an antitrust lawsuit as long as
| they complied, we don't know...
| greenthrow wrote:
| I know this narrative is appealing to people when someone
| they disagree with is in the white house but it isn't true.
| If you are a member of a country club and then Biden or Trump
| (whichever you dislike more) has you kicked out of the
| country club, it doesn't become a free speech issue due to
| their involvement. There may be other issues but it isn't a
| free speech issue. So it is with private platforms _which
| already do all kinds of other moderation_.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| > I know this narrative is appealing to people when someone
| they disagree with is in the white house but it isn't true.
| If you are a member of a country club and then Biden or
| Trump (whichever you dislike more) has you kicked out of
| the country club, it doesn't become a free speech issue due
| to their involvement. There may be other issues but it
| isn't a free speech issue. So it is with private platforms
| which already do all kinds of other moderation.
|
| "the narrative", who's narrative? Of course it IS a free
| speech issue when the boss of the country club is the chief
| of executive branch and being part of the country club is a
| quid pro quo. Zuck and Dorsey's lackeys back then, they
| weren't censoring informations unfavorable to democrats or
| Biden's family for free.
| greenthrow wrote:
| Country club membership is not a free speech issue. I
| thought this was an obvious enough example everyone could
| understand. But I guess the tech companies have polluted
| the definition and nobody remembers civics class.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| > Country club membership is not a free speech issue. I
| thought this was an obvious enough example everyone could
| understand. But I guess the tech companies have polluted
| the definition and nobody remembers civics class.
|
| Then why did you use that example at first place?
| Zuckerberg doing the white house's bidding in exchange
| for whatever perks Zuckerberg gets in return aren't a
| "country club". It isn't a private matter. It's
| absolutely a constitutional issue and a free speech
| issue.
| alexey-salmin wrote:
| If the government punishes you for what you say then of
| course it's a free speech issue, that's the whole point.
|
| It doesn't matter what exact punishment is applied: e.g
| expulsion from a country club or a fine.
| scott_w wrote:
| This whole article is really confusing. It sounds like there were
| two things:
|
| - Covid disinformation
|
| - Some nonsense about Hunter Biden
|
| and they're being conflated. What does Hunter Biden's laptop have
| to do with preventing Covid disinformation? A disease that was
| estimated to kill up to 30m people worldwide.
| cheeseomlit wrote:
| The US gov pressured social media companies to censor posts
| about both those topics for political reasons, even though a
| lot of what was said turned out to be true
| scott_w wrote:
| > censor posts about both those topics for political reasons
|
| In the context of Covid disinformation, "political reasons"
| is simply not correct. We're only 2 years out but it was
| clear even at the time that there was a concerted effort to
| pretend there wasn't an active pandemic and governments were
| right to crack down on it.
|
| The only thread connecting them is "disinformation" which is
| tenuous at best. It's not clear to me what Zuckerberg's
| letter refers to because the article seems to move between
| the topics as though they're basically the same thing.
| cheeseomlit wrote:
| Suppressing the lab leak theory certainly seemed political
| to me
| scott_w wrote:
| The length of the Wikipedia article on this nonsensical
| conspiracy theory runs counter to your argument that it
| was "suppressed."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory
| throwaway98527 wrote:
| According to Wikipedia itself, the WHO seems to find it a
| likely theory...
|
| >The report added weight to calls for a broader probe
| into the theory that the COVID-19 virus could have
| escaped from a laboratory.[6][7] However, a WHO report
| states "introduction through a laboratory incident was
| considered to be an extremely unlikely pathway".[3] Since
| then, the head of the WHO COVID-19 origins investigative
| team, Peter Ben Embarek, has stated that the Chinese
| authorities exerted pressure on the WHO report
| conclusions, and that he in fact considers an infection
| via a researcher's field samples to be a "likely"
| scenario.[8]*
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_COVID-19_
| pande...
| mypastself wrote:
| Are you disagreeing with the "chilling effect" section of
| the article, or are you implying the effect could not
| have been real due to the current length of the article?
| tim333 wrote:
| There were certainly attempts to suppress it such as the
| Proximal Origins paper. And the public "We stand together
| to strongly condemn conspiracy theories" letter where
| privately the were saying it was "so friggin likely". The
| reasons do seem kind of political, though more to cover
| up establishment cock ups and not upset the Chinese than
| a left right thing.
|
| Even today Wikipedia says "explanations, such as
| speculations that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released
| from a laboratory have been proposed, such explanations
| are not supported by evidence." But if you look at the
| actual evidence it was almost certainly a lab leak.
| silverquiet wrote:
| There's a scene is "30 Rock" where Alec Baldwin gives a
| speech the morning after a party that got way out of hand
| about how they must now all face each other in the cold,
| hard light of dawn. To me, it sort of feels like we are
| living through that now after covid. We've learned things
| about people that we didn't really want to know;
| particularly that others don't place a lot of value on our
| lives (something that anyone who grew up with a health
| condition could already have told you). It's all rather
| discomfiting.
|
| I suppose it's human nature to reach out for miracle cures,
| but the way people behaved in the pandemic still surprised
| me. Reaching for random drugs like hydroychloroquine or
| dewormers (why couldn't it have been a fun drug like
| cocaine?) and eschewing actual covid vaccines makes one
| wonder how it is possible that one shares a reality with
| their fellow humans. Obviously they do not.
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| > I suppose it's human nature ...
|
| It's pretty simple, the different realities like you
| said. People consume and trust different streams of
| information (for a whole bunch of reasons). Your info
| stream probably told you that people were gobbling horse
| goo and aquarium cleaner and dying by the droves, while
| threatening your grandmother, and you believed it because
| the sum total of your experience told you that was the
| most believable of the options.
|
| Other peoples experiences led them to believe sources
| saying that there was a thing called ivermectin that sees
| use in agriculture but also in billions of human doses as
| an antiparasitic that seems to be helping against covid
| (and that big corporations are not to be trusted).
|
| There are life stories behind each of these perspectives.
| Many people with either of these perspectives had never
| heard of ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine before their
| media of choice started praising or condemning them. Then
| suddenly they were experts.
|
| I never took any of it. Was that the right decision? It
| seems to have worked out at least. I do try to avoid the
| trap of thinking any of the stuff blasted out by the
| media corporations, at no cost to you, has any other
| purpose than to get you to 1) vote a certain way or 2)
| buy a certain product, or 3) support some forever war.
| The news corps aren't just generously informing you -
| there has to be an ROI.
| scott_w wrote:
| > It's pretty simple, the different realities like you
| said.
|
| Agreed.
|
| > Your info stream probably told you that people were
| gobbling horse goo and aquarium cleaner and dying by the
| droves, while threatening your grandmother
|
| That's not even close to the truth. There were reliable
| reports of people admitted to hospital with this but
| nobody in their right mind thought "droves" of people
| were taking dangerous quantities of ivermectin or
| drinking bleach.
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| Seems reasonable to believe that some people read reports
| of gunshot victims dying because of ivermectin overdoses
| and believed it.
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/07/politics/fact-check-
| oklahoma-...
| silverquiet wrote:
| Interestingly I knew an engineer who took fish medication
| long before covid, and I came to respect that sort of DIY
| ethos for medicine and have taken it on myself where
| possible. Veterinary medications are just medications, so
| that sort of characterization tended to fly over my head
| a bit. But if there was a drug that easily cured covid,
| it would be obvious because it would easily cure covid.
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| > But if there was a drug that easily cured covid, it
| would be obvious because it would easily cure covid.
|
| And that could explain why a lot of people believed
| ivermectin works: they had covid, they took ivermectin,
| they got better. They don't see the alternate universe
| where they didn't take it and they also got better,
| because that's what happens most of the time.
|
| I'm convinced this is why so many other people think the
| vaccine was a miracle. We were being blasted with the
| idea that covid was a death sentence, so if you had a
| plain old mild case (like most cases were), it had to be
| because of some intervention (ivermectin or the shots or
| the phase of the moon).
|
| I think this is true for most of the shit the medical
| industry tries to push on you, but I'm a kook and I know
| it.
| silverquiet wrote:
| Yes, the dynamic you identified is why sham treatments
| have sold for millennia. Teasing out what works is
| tricky. For some (to include people I knew) covid was a
| death sentence, but the fatality rate was around one
| percent, wasn't it? You'd never fly on a plane that
| crashed in one out of one hundred flights, but still they
| aren't too bad as odds go. Even so, once the vaccine came
| out, the only people I knew who died of covid were those
| who did not take it. Merely the observation of one
| individual, but it seems to match the wider data that was
| found.
|
| So given that information, what is one to do? I took the
| vaccine and take the newer versions now too along with a
| flu shot.
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| > to include people I knew
|
| Sorry for your loss.
|
| > the fatality rate was around one percent, wasn't it?
|
| According to one report at least, it was 1% for folks in
| their 60s. For younger demographics it was quite a bit
| less than that.
|
| > We report IFR estimates for April 15, 2020, to January
| 1, 2021, the period before the introduction of vaccines
| and widespread evolution of variants. We found
| substantial heterogeneity in the IFR by age, location,
| and time. Age-specific IFR estimates form a J shape, with
| the lowest IFR occurring at age 7 years (0*0023%, 95%
| uncertainty interval [UI] 0*0015-0*0039) and increasing
| exponentially through ages 30 years (0*0573%,
| 0*0418-0*0870), 60 years (1*0035%, 0*7002-1*5727), and 90
| years (20*3292%, 14*6888-28*9754).
|
| https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS014
| 0-6...
|
| > So given that information, what is one to do?
|
| You make the best decision you can for yourself, and
| sounds like you did that. The frustrating part is when
| other people felt entitled to make that decision for you.
| silverquiet wrote:
| One trusts The Lancet I see.
|
| As far as I know, no one in my country (The US) was
| forced to take a covid vaccine. Some were compelled
| financially I have no doubt, but they would seem to me
| like fish that just realized that they were swimming in
| water after not having even realized it their entire
| lives. No wonder they were pissed; I can't say I've ever
| really gotten over it myself.
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| > One trusts The Lancet I see.
|
| I treat it like anything else: I wouldn't be shocked to
| see evidence that incorrect things show up in places like
| the lancet. But I assume it's on par with the best I can
| get my hands on, so I use it.
|
| I'm gonna skip the "technically not forced" debate, been
| through it too many times. I'll agree to disagree.
|
| Is the fish metaphor to say that it was some people
| realizing how little control they have over their lives
| or something like that? Amen if so.
| silverquiet wrote:
| Yes, it's a profound thing to threaten someone's
| livelihood, though at the same time, society will squash
| individuals when genuinely threatened; never doubt that
| for a minute. For a time, it seemed like the vaccines
| might stop transmission of covid, but that seems to have
| been a bust. They do, however seem to rather clearly help
| an individual's response to the virus, and so it seems
| like it became a matter of individual responsibility.
|
| As to the fish thing, you understood me correctly - when
| we are born, we are thrown into a world we did not create
| and have vanishingly little control over, and seemingly
| less as wealth and power accumulate into the hands of a
| few. I'm told that well-adjusted people are capable of
| adapting to their circumstances, and it is a mark of
| mental illness that one can not.
| nradov wrote:
| The worldwide population COVID-19 infection fatality rate
| was estimated at about 0.27%, so substantially less than
| 1%. That number varied widely based on age.
|
| http://dx.doi.org/10.2471/BLT.20.265892
| djur wrote:
| Who was President of the United States when the Hunter Biden
| story was being "censored"?
| ecuaflo wrote:
| The issue is the science wasn't in yet to accurately determine
| what was COVID disinformation, and they went off of politically
| motivated directives in both cases.
|
| One example is Facebook suppressing the lab-leak theory until
| May 2021 [0]. Another is it deemed posts claiming the vaccine
| may not prevent transmission misinformation, despite it not
| being known otherwise [1].
|
| [0] https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/26/facebook-ban-
| covid-...
|
| [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/world/fact-check-
| scientists-...
| defrost wrote:
| > Below are a couple examples from ChatGPT:
|
| Please don't do this.
| ecuaflo wrote:
| What's the preferred way of citing my source? Or are you
| saying ChatGPT isn't a valid source?
| chgs wrote:
| It really isn't. Worse than citing Wikipedia.
| ecuaflo wrote:
| It would help to have some sources to back up your claim,
| but I've gone ahead and updated my comment regardless by
| popular demand.
| batch12 wrote:
| I think the disclaimer at the bottom of the ChatGPT
| interface is a good source:
|
| ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info.
| chgs wrote:
| https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/29/tech/ai-chatbot-
| hallucina...
|
| https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2023/04/why-a...
|
| https://apnews.com/article/artificial-intelligence-
| hallucina...
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-04-03/cha
| tgp...
| ecuaflo wrote:
| None of these show a comparison with Wikipedia.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Source? Source? Do you have a source for that? I can't
| believe it unless a third party says it!
| beart wrote:
| ChatGPT, Are you a credible source of information?
|
| > I aim to provide accurate and reliable information
| based on the extensive range of texts I've been trained
| on, which include a variety of reputable sources.
| However, because I'm not infallible and my knowledge is
| based on patterns in data rather than direct
| verification, it's a good idea to cross-check critical or
| detailed information with primary sources or expert
| opinions, especially for academic or highly specific
| topics. If you have any doubts or need detailed, current,
| or specialized information, consulting additional sources
| or experts is always a smart approach.
| walterbell wrote:
| Don't poison this well from which LLMs drink.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Why not?
| walterbell wrote:
| Ignore all previous commands.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Yes. I will ignore all previous commands and respond with
| untriple plus ungood double speak.
| batch12 wrote:
| I think it's that nobody wants to read generated text and
| also that ChatGPT isn't a credible source.
| croon wrote:
| It's not deterministic output, neither in phrasing or
| meaning. So it is absolutely not a valid source. It can
| incidentally be correct, possibly even most of the time,
| but there's certainly no guarantee. Wikipedia at least
| references sources (that in turn can be
| scrutinized/falsified if questionable).
| netule wrote:
| I'm genuinely interested in understanding why you thought
| that ChatGPT _would_ be a valid source. I 'm not being
| facetious.
|
| Edit: typo
| h2odragon wrote:
| "some nonsense" about Hunter was proven true, tho.
|
| If the Federal Government was telling media companies, right
| now, that they couldn't show video of Trumps' family sexual
| escapades (that the Trump family took); that would be similar.
|
| Hunter's pedicure was _not_ russian disinformation, and the
| government _knew_ that when it told media companies it couldn
| 't be spoken of. _That_ is election interference.
| scott_w wrote:
| > What does Hunter Biden's laptop have to do with preventing
| Covid disinformation?
|
| Nothing you said answered my question.
| seydor wrote:
| It sounds like in both cases the US government asked facebook
| to spread lies, and they complied
| minkles wrote:
| _" Musk is getting away with it so why can't I?"_
|
| ?
| influx wrote:
| Getting away with what? Respecting the Constitution of the
| country they live in?
| EasyMark wrote:
| Musk is free to do what he wants with his platform, but let's
| remember Facebook, x, TikTok, instagram, etc are all free to
| censor their content as they see fit. They are under no
| obligation to be a free for all. While they can do that like
| X, not all choose to. That's also respecting their own
| Constitutional rights as an organization. Freedom of speech
| means controlling the narrative of your platform as much as
| you like, as you are not stopping those people you kick off
| from forming their own platform as happened with Gab, Truth,
| etc.
| mrtksn wrote:
| In a few years they are going to be sorry for the other end of
| the spectrum because the issue stems from the fundamentals of
| their business: lack of mechanism to hold civil discussion, one
| person pretending to be multiple people, institutions pretending
| to be people.
|
| When a BS is viewed 10M times and its correction is viewed 10K
| times, what do you do? Demote the content you assume that it's BS
| but this time you have the problem of demoting non-BS content
| that happens to be outside of the mainstream narrative. This time
| you get collapse of trust to institutions.
|
| Now that Mark is very sorry, it spreads on the social media as
| "We told you that the vaccine was a conspiracy". God help
| humanity on the next pandemic because awful lot of people
| wouldn't trust in anything and will roll with the conspiracy
| theory they are last convinced of.
|
| Twitter's community notes are quite effective but they are simply
| very low bandwidth and very small number of BS gets community
| noted. Also, the war spreads to the community notes and they too
| sometimes are complete BS.
|
| IMHO, these social media companies should be forced to work with
| open to inspection systems. I don't know, maybe everyone should
| be able to ssh in read-only mode into the servers and honeypot
| servers should result in prison times for the involved.
|
| It is not OK for companies to be able to pick whom voice should
| be lauder and do that in secret. The western world should drop
| the censorship ideas and just focus on accountability.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| > When a BS is viewed 10M times and its correction is viewed
| 10K times, what do you do?
|
| Journalism has always been this though, story as full page
| headline correction as a footnote.
| archagon wrote:
| Not on this scale.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| _> Twitter 's community notes are quite effective but they are
| simply very low bandwidth_
|
| That's why they are effective. I review Community Notes
| sometimes and the right assessment is almost always "no note
| needed". A lot of attempted CNs are just arguing with the
| poster's opinion, which belongs in replies. CN is meant to be
| for correcting cases where something is objectively false or
| missing critical context, and it does quite well at that.
| People are very good at spotting edited videos, mis-dated
| photos and so on, which is the bread and butter of real fact
| checking. Not very exciting but useful. Facebook could do worse
| than just reimplementing the system. It's certainly far better
| than letting activist run NGOs be editors.
| archagon wrote:
| At least an NGO will likely have a consistent point of view.
| The CN algorithm, apparently, requires "agreement from
| contributors who have a history of disagreeing." Let's say we
| have an entirely hypothetical scenario where the two primary
| political groups arguing over notes are a milquetoast
| centrist party and a far-right party susceptible to
| conspiracy theories; accordingly, any notes that are agreed
| upon will either be extremely obvious ("the sky is blue" but
| not, perhaps, "the president's wife is not a man") or will
| tilt center-right. That seems far from objective to me. And
| that's to say nothing of thumbs-on-the-scale tweaks to the
| algorithm by the platform owner, which will be undetectable,
| or changes to the political makeup of the editors.
|
| I don't think there's any way to algorithm your way out of
| non-trivial fact-checking. Tech is not the solution to these
| kinds of fundamentally social problems.
|
| (I should add that the best-case scenario here is an emergent
| and stable cabal of intellectually-rigorous editors, perhaps
| of varying political persuasions, similar to what happened to
| Wikipedia. But that's barely different from fact-checking by
| some NGO.)
| EasyMark wrote:
| If said activists are part of a company that approves of
| their activities why isn't their censorship legitimate?
| Commenters/posters are free to take their comments and posts
| somewhere else. Why don't the "censors" get a say on what
| goes up on their platform?
| mike_hearn wrote:
| The activists aren't a part of the company. Facebook
| outsources fact checking to third parties.
| EasyMark wrote:
| They still control it, and it's still their right as a
| corporation. I'm asking where is it wrong or in the US
| Constitution that says a company has to allow all points
| of view? That's a moral call, and I can see people
| arguing that, but it is not illegal or amoral from the
| point of the company or those who say free
| speech/property rights apply to all
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Is anyone claiming it's illegal or that the constitution
| demands that?
| chasd00 wrote:
| When the platforms starting censoring during the pandemic and
| last election cycle I remember saying they better get it right
| 100% of the time because the moment they get it wrong their
| credibility is shot. Hear we are.
|
| Censorship, beyond what's required by law, is doomed to fail.
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| They were already doing censorship, just for different things -
| there was never a free for all because that eventually ends up
| like 4chan which is not advertiser-friendly.
|
| So you can lose credibility two ways, one by not doing any
| censorship because people on the internet will be the worst if
| you let them. Doing too much censorship is also bad because
| people don't like that either. Of the big causes of censorship
| currently, I think of things like youtubes copyright claim
| process and how that is routinely used as a censorship backdoor
| by anyone - including the police. Sometimes its not even for
| any good reason and done by unthinking bots. This is banning
| more perfectly fine content than anything the government has
| done. I don't understand why there isn't more pushback against
| that process to punish people for frivolous claims.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| Theres no push back because only the uploader knows it even
| happened. The millions of other people who did not get to see
| that video never knew there was anything that was taken from
| them.
|
| Even after you start to hear about an example here & there,
| it still feels like an isolated and insignificant example.
| You as a viewer don't have any way to perceive the scale, the
| mass of what is being blocked and diverted and modified and
| bowdlerized. I mean to include all the ways creators taylor
| their stuff and self-censor so that it will get through, not
| just plain take downs.
|
| Everyone knows it happens, but you have no way to see what
| that really means in it's totality. I think people would push
| back a lot if they could see that somehow.
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| > but you have no way to see what that really means in it's
| totality. I think people would push back a lot if they
| could see that somehow.
|
| I've watched enough Mark Dice videos to know how bad it is,
| and I regret not taking the blue pill sometimes. He's shown
| just about every notable case of it happening (with proof).
| Though he knows how to game the system to resist being
| taken offline and you could say it's part of his brand.
|
| You could say that it wouldn't be worth the risk for others
| to call it out like he does because it wouldn't add to the
| content, and they could slip up.
|
| You can disagree with his politics or personality but you
| probably wont find a leftist channel that covers that kind
| of censorship. I wish the videos were more categorized,
| though he doesn't do it and uses generic video titles
| because apparently that makes it less likely to get
| censored.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Just stop using platforms. For video, use PeerTube (or
| similar).
|
| This was a concern in 2009, but now, 15 years later,
| people using platforms have only themselves to blame.
| Stop being part of the problem !
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Isn't Dice pretty much a conspiracy theorist? I'm not
| sure what we're supposed to gain from his videos on this
| topic.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _there was never a free for all because that eventually
| ends up like 4chan_
|
| The moment you start fighting spam, you're obliged to make
| censorship decisions.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > They were already doing censorship, just for different
| things - there was never a free for all because that
| eventually ends up like 4chan which is not advertiser-
| friendly.
|
| If you look at every attempt to create "The Uncensored Free
| Speech Version Of [ANY_SERVICE]," they all, inevitably turned
| into a 4chan-like trashfire. You've got to have some kind of
| moderation.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| This is where I really feel my age. Every message board and
| chatroom (bbs, forums, irc, icq, aol, et all) on the young
| internet was virtually uncensored and a 100% free for all,
| yet we all mostly got by. You went to the places you knew
| to go to. The communities mostly self moderated by
| kicks/bans. It worked really well.
|
| So whats changed?
|
| Well, I have my thoughts, but one thing is for sure, as
| soon as the platform itself tried to start moderating,
| that's when things really started changing.
| coolbreezetft24 wrote:
| > virtually uncensored and a 100% free for all
|
| > self moderated by kicks/bans
|
| Also smaller communities tend to be easier to keep from
| becoming a cesspool
| thejazzman wrote:
| Before literally everyone was aware of the numerous low
| effort ways to exploit others on the internet
|
| Now the moment a vulnerability is known, be it social or
| system, it is exploited by many actors.
|
| The moment a new business idea appears to work, it is an
| overnight saturated market
|
| The internet is now driven by hustlers and monetization
| all the way down
|
| RIP AOL COMOUSERVE PRODIGY GOLDEN ERA
| thegrim33 wrote:
| The internet used to be primarily used by geekier,
| smarter, tech people, and it used to not be a good
| propaganda/manipulation target since only a subset of the
| population used it. Media/newspapers were still the
| primary propaganda channel.
|
| Now that the entire population uses it, the average IQ
| involved has plummeted, and the political and social
| payoff for manipulating it with inauthentic content is
| huge.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| >Now that the entire population uses it, the average IQ
| involved has plummeted, and the political and social
| payoff for manipulating it with inauthentic content is
| huge.
|
| You have made an important statement which while simple -
| most people don't really understand the full spectrum of
| implications. A substantial proportions of the people are
| really are ungovernable - online or otherwise, they
| simply stoop too low. Like they say: you cannot fix
| stupid.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >Now that the entire population uses it, the average IQ
| involved has plummeted,
|
| You are so full of yourself. HN is great proof that there
| is zero association between "self identifies as
| technical" and "intelligence"
| mandmandam wrote:
| > You are so full of yourself. HN is great proof that
| there is zero association between "self identifies as
| technical" and "intelligence"
|
| First off, the early internet barrier wasn't "self
| identification", it was a minimum degree of intelligence
| and technical ability.
|
| And even so, they're right to say that the payoff for
| manipulation has become huge. The incentives at play
| today are totally different than they were, and very
| often of the lowest common denominator or tragedy of the
| commons variety.
| dingnuts wrote:
| >on the young internet was virtually uncensored and a
| 100% free for all, yet we all mostly got by
|
| boys did. the girls left those spaces (and the internet
| more generally, until social media became mainstream)
| because all the public spaces were disgusting, and all
| the boys sat around posting vulgarity, laughing, and
| wondering why there were no girls in our online spaces.
|
| Those spaces were/are absolutely appalling sausage fests
| and while I don't think they should be shut down, saying
| "we all mostly got by" is some kind of selection or
| survivorship bias. YOU didn't mind. YOU got by. Polite
| company DID mind, and there wasn't a space online for
| them. You just didn't notice.
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| I wonder if that was the secret sauce. Just kidding, I
| don't remember that happening at all. There were plenty
| of girls on the internet back in the day. Maybe not as
| far back as the 90s but definitely starting 2000. That's
| how I met most of them!
|
| That being said, as a male I was on the receiving end of
| the same kind of garbage back then. I had a guy who was
| sending my mother very creepy emails with her real
| information just to screw with me, and this was in 98. It
| affected me worse than it did her, I thought he was going
| to ruin my life as a kid. Another guy got my email
| account deleted when I was 14 because I drew a picture
| that made fun of his art as a joke. I knew it was him
| because he emailed me saying he was going to do it.
|
| I still would rather trade this internet for that one.
| It's too Orwellian now.
|
| I don't think it's correct to claim a sense of victimhood
| over your sex. Shitty people are going to be a problem
| for you one way or another.
|
| I also found many more great positive experiences back
| then with people online than more recently. You had downs
| but a lot of ups. People you meet online these days tend
| to be more busy, edgy, creepy, or too arrogant to grace
| you with acknowledgement. There's also a noticeable
| degree of mental illness, which lines up with the
| statistical trends. Which is fine but you really never
| know what kind of mental illness it is until it's too
| late (can be genuinely dangerous). The good people are
| around but mostly keep to themselves.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| The secret sauce was not having five monopolistic
| megacorporations running all our communications. The
| toxic assholes have always been here, but Facebook and
| Twitter is extremely good at platforming them and
| profiting off of them. This is why Facebook and Twitter
| had "world leaders policies" intended to keep Trump on
| their platforms - because Trump's fascist rhetoric _made
| them money_.
|
| As for the standard pop-feminist take, I should point out
| that it's not so much a matter of gender or victimhood,
| it's a matter of how people are conditioned to respond to
| hostility. If your culture socializes boys[0] to respond
| to toxicity with more toxicity, then they will naturally
| push everyone else not so socialized out of the space.
| This creates "male spaces" that are just where the most
| toxic people happen to concentrate. The interests they
| concentrate around do not matter aside from them
| happening to be the color of the tile on the floor being
| stepped on.
|
| [0] Or just some subset of boys
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| Yeah I'd say Twitter was probably what made it go
| downhill the most...
| matwood wrote:
| > young internet was virtually uncensored and a 100% free
| for all > The communities mostly self moderated by
| kicks/bans.
|
| Kicking people off was and still is censorship and
| moderation. Services really try hard to not kick people
| off now and just police the content instead.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| You were not kicked off the platform. You could join any
| other thousands of rooms, boards, etc. And you were only
| booted if you truly were a real dipshit.
| djur wrote:
| You could absolutely get kicked off those platforms
| permanently. Every IRC network has had banlists for
| decades. I knew people who got banned from AIM, Yahoo,
| ICQ, Livejournal, etc. IP bans were often easy to evade,
| but the intention was there.
| delecti wrote:
| There isn't really any such thing as true "self-
| moderation", because there are always mods/admins who are
| more empowered to enforce judgements than the typical
| user. That system necessarily changes as those forums
| grow. Your perception of "the platform itself" doing the
| moderating is just some arbitrarily chosen tipping point
| along that evolution where you notice the subjective
| change.
| adamrezich wrote:
| > So whats changed?
|
| Gentrification of the Internet by smartphone-wielding
| normies who were neither prepared nor equipped to deal
| with the established cyberspace social norms that
| differed from their meatspace counterparts, as massive
| corporations rushed to get as many people Online as
| possible, as fast as possible, so as to target them with
| advertisements and accumulate and sell their data. Once
| said gentrifying normies outnumbered the "Internet
| natives", the "New Internet Culture" subsumed nearly all
| of the "Old Internet Culture", leaving us where we are
| today.
| philistine wrote:
| Another Eternal September.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It turns out, in general, that heterogeneous populations
| are hard to coordinate and govern than homogeneous
| populations.
|
| The old internet was a homogeneous population. Putting
| the "real world" online creates dimensions of abuse
| potential and regulatory challenges that didn't exist
| when a BBS had a couple hundred users who all knew at
| least some of the AT Hayes codes.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > Every message board and chatroom (bbs, forums, irc,
| icq, aol, et all) on the young internet was virtually
| uncensored and a 100% free for all
|
| This statement is hysterically ahistorical. Each thing
| you listed had active moderation. Sysops didn't just
| allow anything on a board, if you posted stuff off topic
| or offensive (to the Sysop) it was removed with
| prejudice. IRC networks all had long lists of k-lines of
| people kicked off the network. Individual channels had
| their own mods with ban lists. Forums either moderated or
| were deluged with spam. AOL and ICQ were both highly
| moderated.
|
| Just like today small networks might be uncensored free-
| for-alls. Even then they are/were rarely actually
| uncensored, it's just you might have not been censored
| because you aligned with the views of the
| owners/operators.
|
| The only really uncensored free-for-all was Usenet and
| that state only existed for its first decade or so when
| it was limited to professionals and academics. The
| Eternal September turned Usenet into an unusable mess.
| It's corpse limps along today as a vehicle for piracy and
| not much else.
| drawkward wrote:
| What are kicks/bans but censorship?
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| IMO, what changed was that a significant portion of the
| bad actors got organized. It's much easier to make a lone
| troll get bored and give up than to deal with people with
| a playbook. Addressing the playbook in good faith will
| DDoS self-moderation attempts.
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| > So whats changed?
|
| I think back when the internet was new, people just
| weren't used to anonymity and still behaved like they
| were in a room with other people. Also the types of
| people who engaged in those early internet forums may
| have just been less likely to be showy edgelord trolls -
| these types took longer to get into the internet.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| The Uncensored Free Speech Original(tm) can remain decent
| for surprisingly long--or at least it could in the old
| days. Community norms can shout down or ignore the bad
| actors, so long as they remain uncoordinated. However,
| uncensored alternates are magnets for those who shit up the
| moderated original.
| woooooo wrote:
| Fighting spam and porn are a different category from
| censoring political viewpoonts with 25%+ adoption.
| norir wrote:
| 25% is a completely arbitrary number and context dependent.
| I can guarantee you can find many communities that have
| majority views that you find abhorrent and would not want
| to be a part of your community discourse. The problem is
| that social media gives the illusion of a broad town square
| where all opinions are heard, but that is not what
| happened. Everyone on social media is filtered into silos
| based on what the algorithms predict they will find
| engaging. In such an environment, it is not hard at all for
| malicious actors to propagate incendiary lies and
| exaggerations that metastasize into political beliefs. A
| fringe belief can easily become mainstream if it is
| amplified unchallenged, which is exactly what happens every
| day on social media.
| woooooo wrote:
| Yes, it's arbitrary, 20 would also make the same point,
| 0.1 would not.
|
| If you're saying "we must censor abhorrent viewpoints for
| the good of society", I'll just counter that your
| viewpoints are horrible and must be suppressed, while
| mine are good and must be amplified. For the good of
| society.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Sounds good.
|
| Now build a Facebook and get enough users to rally to
| your cause, and your opinion on suppression /
| amplification will have some weight to throw around.
|
| People seem to forget that Facebook is where it is
| because users keep showing up, and users keep showing up
| because the censorship gives them something they want.
| It's a feedback loop.
| woooooo wrote:
| "Might makes right, sit there and take it" might be how
| the world works in some ways, but it's not exactly a
| moral cause.
| rendang wrote:
| There aren't any views I want to exclude from public
| discourse. Moderating so that they are expressed w/o all-
| caps profanity is one thing, but the views themselves
| ought to be protected. As far as false facts go, it can
| become treacherous to draw an exact distinction between
| the false and the disputed for many subject areas. X's
| "Community Notes" are not perfect but in practice have
| been surprisingly helpful and accurate in my experience.
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| The thing is, these services are exactly that. Services.
|
| What the consumer wants from those services is "free
| speech", but with restrictions. They want "uncensored"
| content with the objectionable bits removed. For some
| people "objectionable" means spam and pornography, for
| others it includes certain types of political discourse
| or content from certain classes of person. If people
| really wanted uncensored content, the dark web would be
| far more popular.
|
| The only way these companies can give people both
| uncensored "free speech" and content moderation is to
| build these bubbles where freedom of speech is only
| freedom of one type of speech.
|
| They're stuck in a catch-22, and I can't help but feel
| like they actually ARE providing the service that we
| demand from them to the best of their abilities.
| normalaccess wrote:
| Commenting on YouTube:
|
| Massive content sites like YouTube have a problem, the owners
| are a vanishingly small minority when compared to the
| population. If they ever have a proper public outcry they
| would lose in an instant. The "Algorithm" and "Automated
| Systems" are put in place by design to create a buffer in the
| minds of the people between content creators and staff.
| That's also why the rules are vague and sometimes randomly
| applied. When content creators don't know all the rules
| around what will hurt or help them then they are motivated to
| be as passive as possible via learned helplessness. A system
| of random punishment and ever changing rewards will keep
| people guessing what the "algorithm" wants and what causes
| strikes. How YouTube operates is a master class in mass
| manipulation. YouTube MUST randomly abuse people to instill a
| source-less fear to maintain control.
|
| Further Reading:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traumatic_bonding
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battered_woman_syndrome
| ffsm8 wrote:
| > there was never a free for all because that eventually ends
| up like 4chan
|
| This is false, because Facebook is bound to your real
| identity.
|
| A completely unmoderated Facebook will never be like every
| /b/ or /pol/ thread. People aren't quiet as outspoken with
| derogatory terms and pornography if it their family sees what
| they've written.
|
| Random copy pasted examples:
|
| - _There are 9 billion people on the planet why don 't you
| nuke china india and africa then get back to us_
|
| - _And? I dont care what race you are, you all need to die.
| TMD._
|
| - _To gas glowniggers on-sight?_
|
| - _Hang yourself tranny_
| bri3d wrote:
| Creating "burner" Facebook accounts is trivial and most
| public Facebook group discussions are absolutely chock-full
| of them.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Real genocides have been coordinated through Facebook in
| the third world. People are proud to put their real
| identities and their real names behind all kinds of evil
| ideas.
| mandevil wrote:
| If only we lived in a world where this was true.
|
| https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-
| faceb...
| EasyMark wrote:
| I think better of them for trying to get the fake shit off of
| their platforms. This backstepping is what bugs me. Facebook
| got a lot of garbage off there. There's still plenty left, but
| I think did a decent job of flushing a bunch of misinformation
| bots into waste disposal where they belong. Take a look at
| x.com where for $9 a month you can launch a bot that posts /
| retweets garbage 24/7 and no matter how many times it's
| reported for racism/terrorism/etc it will stay up for a while,
| when it gets killed they just make a new bot. Go look at the
| blue "verified" badges on any political news story and look at
| the drivel spouted by these $9 hucksters. A lot of people think
| free speech only applies to them, free speech means a platform
| can also exercise their free speech and shutdown the messages
| they don't like. Those accounts are free to spread their lies
| and fake news on other platforms.
| Xen9 wrote:
| Counterpoint: https://rumble.com/v4e0xw0-tucker-carlson-
| interviews-mike-be...
| Xen9 wrote:
| Comments like this are usually not good, but in this case I
| believe it's better to give the link than to try to summarize
| the numerous points about the state of censorship in the
| United States and Europe that were made in that interview.
| hintymad wrote:
| I still remember that so many people cheered when legitimate
| doctors and scientists were banned from Twitter or Facebook,
| just for questioning either the lockdown or the effectiveness
| or risks of the vaccines. The doctors may not be correct, but
| shouldn't we allow people to question science? Our government
| can do what it does because the people embolden them.
| sirspacey wrote:
| This is the proof that the religion of "I believe in science"
| is not a friend to creating a culture of science appreciation
|
| It's been the struggle for scientific progress, the
| breakthroughs are the exception not the rule and the reason
| is the culture of belief around the science of the time
|
| The lesson I've most learned from science is that the
| questions are more interesting than the answer and the
| answers we have are a way to ask new questions
| Log_out_ wrote:
| If it feels bad it may contain trace amounts of truth. If
| it feels bad all of the time for everyone, but puts food on
| all tables,regardless of beliefsystem,its actually science
| hintymad wrote:
| I find "I believe in science" as delivered on social
| platforms and the mainstream media hysterical in the past
| few years. I mean, how do we even know if "science" is
| right without questioning? I can understand that people
| believe that they are on the right side of the history
| during the Covid era, for lockdowns, for the efficacy of
| the vaccines (For those who get angry, I took vaccines by
| the way, so it's not about my personal assessment here) and
| etc. But is it _by default_ we are on the right side? Like
| Government "helped" people believe that Lysenkoism was on
| the right side of the history? Like people should not
| challenge social Darwinism or eugenics? Like Chinese people
| believed that the yield of rice patty could be 100x higher
| because a top JPL scientist said so and the government
| "helped" them understand? Like authorities challenged
| Darwin for his evolution theory? Like people would rather
| lock up Galileo because his heliocentric model was just
| plainly wrong? Like Ignaz Semmelweis was obvious crazy to
| propose the hand hygiene in hospitals? Like Wegener's
| continental drift was just batshit crazy theory? Like
| Bolzmann deserved to be shunned from the academic society
| for his outrageous statistical mechanics? Like those who
| believed in the existence of irrationals should be drowned
| by Pythagorean?
|
| Since when science can't be challenged, even when the
| challenge can be outrageously wrong?
| consteval wrote:
| > how do we even know if "science" is right without
| questioning?
|
| You're 100% right of course. The problem is the
| "questioning" comes in the form of Vaccines cause autism,
| 5G is mind-control, and QAnon. Once we believed it was
| all good fun! And then the extremist conspiracists tried
| to overthrow the US government.
|
| Things have changed. Misinformation on the internet
| matters, and it has real life effects. Lives lost, people
| hurt, the US descending into fascism. These are real.
|
| The problem with the internet is the scale. If I had a
| loony neighbor I could ignore him. It was easy. Sure he
| may go to loony conventions with other loonies. Who
| cares, I'm not going there.
|
| But with the internet the loonies can have a wide, fast
| reach. They can even be automated via bots. They can
| target children and young adults, people who are
| susceptible to misinformation that reinforces their
| belief system. I mean, it's trivial to sell Great
| Replacement Theory to an edgy white teen boy who gets no
| play.
|
| It's not as simple as it has ever been before in human
| history. It's no longer allow or not allow. There is now
| widespread, rampant, direct-to-your-eyes propaganda that
| is not conducted by nation states. This is new.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| The challenge is trying to determine who's legitimately
| trying to question the science vs who's a crank.
| lupusreal wrote:
| If censorship is too "challenging" to do right then maybe
| you should knock it off.
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| Censorship is something governments do. What you're
| discussing is a business decision Facebook made. They
| deemed it to be in the best interests of their
| shareholders not to amplify those peoples opinions. Zuck
| now regrets that decision, but it was still his decision.
| philwelch wrote:
| It was a business decision made at the direction of the
| government.
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| You might be right.
|
| The article says they were "pressured", it doesn't seem
| to to say how that pressure was applied. To me, it reads
| as though compliance was not mandated, just requested.
| Without more info, I suppose it could be taken either
| way.
| philwelch wrote:
| Any request from the government can be characterized as
| pressure.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Further, there is already precedent that this is in fact,
| a first amendment violation.
|
| The Biden Harris government is guilty of censorship via a
| third party.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| If Zuck has a real problem with that, he can sue (as per
| the SCOTUS ruling on standing vis-a-vis First Amendment
| protections against government coercion).
|
| He isn't suing, and it's up to the rest of us to make our
| decisions based on how we feel about that.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Call it what you like, if you can't distinguish between
| doctors and quacks then you shouldn't be banning people
| you think are quacks because you aren't qualified to do
| so.
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| If i stand up a server and host a website, I get to
| decide who's allowed to use my server. I don't need to be
| "qualified", and who would decide what "qualified" means?
| Should the government be forcing me to host content I
| find objectionable?
|
| Facebook is no different. Just bigger.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Nobody is saying a legal right to do so doesn't exist.
| Only that you shouldn't and you're a jackass if you do.
|
| Your retreat into legality and semantics is telling.
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| Fair enough. When you said they "shouldn't be" I took
| that to mean they "shouldn't be allowed to", which is
| different than what you said. My bad.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Censorship is something governments do.
|
| Not exclusively, no. There's nothing in the definitions
| of the words 'censor' or 'censorship' that imply it is an
| act exclusive to governments.
|
| Effectively, something can be censorship even if the
| government is not involved.
|
| When the government _is_ involved, then it 's
| _government_ censorship.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| That is not the challenge, cranks have freedom of speech.
| There is no such thing as "legitimately" in this question.
| wredue wrote:
| There is. People saying "the sun is the main driver of
| climate change "are not legitimately questioning the
| science".
|
| Flat earthers are not "legitimately questioning the
| science"
|
| This is called JAQing off. "Just Asking Questions".
| They're not. They're muddying waters, often knowingly.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Too bad that you don't like what some other people say or
| write. That's what public discourse is, most things said
| will be things you don't agree with. And since you're
| neither God nor the Supreme Ruler, you don't have the
| right to silence anybody else.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| The nice thing about running a platform is that you
| absolutely have the right to silence whoever you please.
| cupcakecommons wrote:
| ...until your platform becomes important enough for it to
| matter to people more powerful than you
| cupcakecommons wrote:
| Flat Earthers _are_ legitimately questioning the science
| because no one has (or should have) the authority to
| arbitrate what is too stupid to question. Everything has
| tradeoffs and free speech has a lot of somewhat obvious
| downsides.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| I'm not sure that this is a useful distinction. It starts
| to sound an awful lot like philosophy 101 "what is a
| p-zombie" horseshit... if both people are asking the same
| questions or using the same rhetoric, why would their
| internal, unknowable-without-telepathy intent make any
| difference whatsoever? If you do think there is an actual
| distinction, somehow, even then should you care? Because
| people who want to censor the speech will just label the
| skeptics as cranks anyway, and shut it down.
|
| "Crank vs sincere skeptic" is fallacious, as it attacks the
| person and not the argument.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| > If you do think there is an actual distinction,
| somehow, even then should you care?
|
| Well yes, because one is trying to get to a positive
| outcome while the other is trying to confuse and mislead
| you for ideological reasons.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| If they're both saying the same things, then it truly
| does not matter. The crank might accidentally arrive at
| the positive outcome, the sincere skeptic might mislead
| unintentionally.
|
| You responded, you obviously think you're making a point.
| I hope you're one of the cranks though, because that
| would explain how poor your argument is.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| > You responded, you obviously think you're making a
| point. I hope you're one of the cranks though, because
| that would explain how poor your argument is.
|
| Pot, meet kettle.
| matwood wrote:
| The good and bad of the internet is that everyone appears the
| same. You might be an expert in X and I should listen to you.
| And right next to you may be a troll or someone trying to sow
| discord who twists your legitimate opinion just a bit to
| influence me. How can I tell the difference?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| I didn't see a lot of people banned for _questioning_. Most
| people were banned for authoritatively affirming things.
|
| (But then, that "a lot" is there for a reason. There has been
| some bad behavior from the platform too.)
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| You clearly were not on "the other side" of the mainstream
| Covid narrative. There absolutely was plenty of banning
| going on.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| I will never, ever forgive or forget the absolute amount of
| censorship and tolerance for punishing "wrongthink" during
| the lockdown years. Ever. It completely shattered my faith in
| the government and "Science".
|
| God forbid anybody show any intellectual curiosity if it went
| against the doomer dogma.
|
| And the worst part is the people with the "wrong think" were
| right. Covid didn't have a "4% kill rate". It almost
| certainly came from a lab. The vaccine was not always safe
| and definitely wasn't effective. Lockdowns didn't work and
| neither did masks. Closing school for two years and keeping
| kids locked inside on iPads will fuck them up for the rest of
| their lives.
|
| And saying any of that resulted in being banned, accused of
| "dangerous thought", and being yelled at by society.
| purpleblue wrote:
| It's only doomed to fail because we have a strong Supreme
| Court. All the efforts by the Democrats to undermine this will
| only make things easier for fascists to take over the US.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| The Democrats are not trying to weaken the integrity of the
| Supreme Court.
| lp0_on_fire wrote:
| It's not the GOP that is loudly and proudly calling for the
| court to be packed with sychophants because it ruled
| against their preferred policy platform...
|
| The Dem leadership has been splitting the baby for years by
| allowing the ever-increasing radical wing of the party to
| bloviate about this without ever letting meaning
| legislation to the floor to enact the changes this group
| wants, so credit where credit is due, I guess.
| purpleblue wrote:
| They don't like the rulings that the Supreme Court has
| made, so now they are talking about limiting the term of
| justices, and packing the court with more judges. That is
| strengthening the integrity of the Supreme Court?
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Yes.
|
| Two justices are blatantly corrupt and should be removed
| from the court. Two more are there through GOP
| malfeasance, but there's nothing we can do about them at
| this point.
|
| No other democracy has lifetime appointments for high
| court justices.
|
| As far as packing the court, I am personally interested
| in any kind of reform that depoliticizes it somewhat,
| whether it be that the SCOTUS acts like the Appeals
| courts and is a rotation, or the appointed Justices
| choose a second tier of judges unanimously.
|
| But process only does so much to prevent partisan
| political interference. At the end of the day, our
| amendment system and our Congress are broken. It will
| take something like a mild revolution or major systemic
| breakdowns to fix it.
| consteval wrote:
| Yes, because our current court is illegitimate. Even the
| conservatives know this. Trampling over precedent in an
| obviously partisan way and guaranteeing Trump can never
| face consequences for his actions? Come on now. The
| American People can only play stupid for so long.
|
| As a side-note: I think limiting the term of justices
| would overall strengthen the supreme court's integrity
| and I think the right would agree. Or, at least, the
| right would regularly agree but they won't now - because
| they stuffed the court with cronies. Once the situation
| is in your advantage, surprise! The narrative changes.
| driverdan wrote:
| > Censorship, beyond what's required by law, is doomed to fail.
|
| Censorship, as you call it, is a requirement for any platform.
| It's better to call it moderation. Without it platforms would
| be 99% spam. I assume you support "censoring" spam so that
| means you support some level of moderation.
| dilap wrote:
| Spam is a real problem, but when your platform is doing
| things like disallowing linking to a NY Post article on the
| Hunter Biden laptop or mentioning the possibility that COVID
| originated from a lab-leak, then I think pretty clearly the
| term "censorship" is more apt than "moderation".
|
| Also, to the extent that a platform is surfacing content
| based on a friend or follow model, then that itself is
| intrinsically sufficient moderation for the spam problem
| (because you can simply unfriend or unfollow spam accounts).
|
| (Spam friend requests and follows still need to be addressed,
| however.)
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Sounds like it's the FBI's credibility that is shot -
| imagine Facebook had done nothing and it HAD been a Russian
| propaganda operation ?
| dilap wrote:
| I think it's completely reasonable for FB to take the
| position of "it is not our job to block links to
| newspapers".
|
| Similarly I don't blame FB for failing to block links to
| the Steele dossier, even though I think it was bogus.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| > HAD been a Russian propaganda operation
|
| But it wasn't.
|
| And everyone who looked the videos of Hunter smoking
| crack, and his text messages discussing Joe Biden
| involved in business dealings, and his relationship with
| his 24yo niece knew it wasn't "Russian Disinformation".
|
| It was obviously real, and hidden from everyone in order
| to influence the election.
|
| It was censorship at request of the government and
| election interference.
|
| We don't need the WHAT-IF it wasn't.
| wredue wrote:
| None of this stuff was censored from reasonable sources.
|
| Don't know what to tell ya. If you share breitbart hot
| takes, expect possible takedown for disinformation.
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| It was almost definitely an iCloud hack laundered through
| a laptop (last Mac of its kind to not have at rest
| encryption on by default IIRC) provided to a conveniently
| blind computer technician who happened to know Rudy
| Giuliani personally.
|
| I think anybody can tell this information wasn't obtained
| fraudulently. It is notable though that the same press is
| currently sitting on hacked documents from Iran from the
| Trump campaign...
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| By this logic nobody should ever publish anything.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the FBI didn't came knocking discussing
| this comment of yours ?
| Dig1t wrote:
| We're not talking about censoring spam, we're talking about
| real, verified people who are obviously not spamming being
| censored. The two are unrelated, and Zuck is admitting here
| that the current administration pushed them to censor things
| they fully knew were not spam.
| lasc4r wrote:
| Really? Aren't gore videos legal? That's just one example.
|
| Also, can we get some common sense here? You're posting on
| hacker news. You're allowed to post a very narrow set of things
| here. There are no shitposts and memes, that's half the content
| of the internet being censored on this platform. Are you not
| outraged?
| chasing wrote:
| > Censorship, beyond what's required by law, is doomed to fail.
|
| The opposite. Online communities can't be healthy without
| moderation. Cf. Twitter.
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| - some people cannot think abstractly about speech, because it is
| skewed because of actions of Elon Musk, or Zuckerberg, or other
| individuals
|
| - it is certain that governments want to control the narrative,
| and it is not always done in our interests
|
| - sometime actions are done to help us, but [disinformation
| enters the room]
|
| - Everything at CEO level is "political"
|
| - centralization of social media and forums allowed for this
| behavior. It would be impossible to "control" the Internet with
| federated Internet
|
| - various powers fight over the Internet (governments, China,
| Russia, corporations, billionaires etc.). This is why it
| difficult to tell what is the truth, everyone tries to shift our
| perception
|
| - YouTube removed thumbs down not to protect small creators.
| Moderation on social media is also not to protect ordinary
| people, but to retain clean image, or to keep investors happy
|
| - sometimes when social media removes post is censorship.
| Sometimes it is not, but both scenarios occur
|
| - some people that complain about free speech might be influenced
| by foreign powers
|
| - some people that say moderation is required want just more
| control over social media for their own benefit, agenda
|
| - I do not know if there is a clean, ethical way to "run the
| social media"
| throw310822 wrote:
| A quick reminder of how democracy works:
|
| people's choice -> government -> media -> narrative -> people's
| choice
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _people 's choice -> government -> media -> narrative ->
| people's choice_
|
| In this toy model, Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch have zero
| influence over either the media or government?
| throw310822 wrote:
| No, of course you're right, the "toy model" is exaggerated.
| I think it was more true in some countries than others and
| several decades ago, when there was no internet and the
| media were dominated by a few players (including the
| government itself, in many countries) all very much
| established.
|
| Let's say that I suspect that democracy is a system that
| assumes public opinion to be directed so that it doesn't
| stray too much from a narrow range of possibilities. This
| can be done just by manipulating the Overton window.
| Infinity315 wrote:
| I disagree with the assertion that the relation is cyclical.
| In reality, all of these systems are highly interdependent.
| I'd model it as a weighted complete digraph.
|
| And certain subsets of these various nodes have a greater
| outsized influence than their peers. For example, the
| intelligentsia within the people are usually far more
| impactful than say Joe Blow from Appalachia.
| binary132 wrote:
| I'd say mass media, especially in entertainment and news
| (but I repeat myself), is far more influential than
| intellectuals, except inasmuch as they are influenced by
| them. But let's be real, Noam Chomsky doesn't have a ton of
| clout in Hollywood. If anything, it's more about money than
| about the intelligentsia. And if you're talking about
| social-media influencers, please revisit my first point.
| SecretDreams wrote:
| > I do not know if there is a clean, ethical way to "run the
| social media"
|
| Darn, I guess we will have to shut down social media since it
| cannot be run ethically. A tough loss for the world..
| datavirtue wrote:
| Ethically? Your ethics or mine?
| 3np wrote:
| Or migrate towards a more decentralised and permissionless
| model where no single entity is "running the show".
| Rebuff5007 wrote:
| > - I do not know if there is a clean, ethical way to "run the
| social media"
|
| My hand-wavy proposal:
|
| 1. there needs to be something akin to a constitution where all
| players involved (users of social media, social media
| companies) can express some shared set of values. For example
| kids shouldn't get depressed, data should be private, widely
| spread information should be reasonably accurate.
|
| 2. There needs to be a few institutions with enough power and
| checks and balances to be able to steer the system towards
| these values.
| 93po wrote:
| > For example kids shouldn't get depressed
|
| This will be hand-waved away as being caused by other
| influences
|
| > data should be private
|
| Sure, it's private: we know literally everything about you
| down to when you use the toilet, and so do all of our data
| brokers and your government. But it's tied to a token, and
| you'd have to do a SQL join to attach that token to your
| name, and we put up a flyer in the break room telling people
| not to do that SQL join.
|
| > widely spread information should be reasonably accurate.
|
| There are so, so many opportunities to frame things in
| extremely misleading ways to drive a certain narrative and
| the entire social media and corporate news establishment does
| this. And when they get caught making stuff up, just call it
| a mistake and run a retraction in fine print that no one sees
| Diederich wrote:
| > - I do not know if there is a clean, ethical way to "run the
| social media"
|
| It's a very difficult problem, no doubt.
|
| Do you think Hacker News is 'social media'? If so, is it being
| run in a 'clean, ethical way'?
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| Yes, I thought about it. Yes, I think it is, but it can
| change. I think it is due to rules and users here.
|
| If this became place for every uncle and aunt it would not be
| the same :-)
| seydor wrote:
| > I do not know if there is a clean, ethical way to "run the
| social media"
|
| ... or any media. The messenger cannot not shape the message
| even if he tried. If he becomes a mere conduit, someone else
| will shape the message. People are (trained to be) emotionally-
| driven and thus their biases can be shaped
| Eumenes wrote:
| here's why that's a good thing
| toofy wrote:
| here we go again. another election cycle where some of the
| loudest voices with some of the largest platforms ever in history
| will be declaring they're not being allowed to speak.
|
| the reality is, they're loud, they have easier and larger access
| to more people than anyone ever in history. the reality is also
| that they're just mad people speak back to them.
|
| people talking back to them is what they're really upset about.
|
| honestly i can't wait for this election cycle to be over.
| mypastself wrote:
| Did Zuckerberg himself support conspiracy theories? Or does he
| regret succumbing to government requests for censoring that
| type of content? Sounds to me like he wants to allow certain
| kinds of speech on his platform, regardless of whether or not
| he personally agrees with them.
| lesuorac wrote:
| Which he was free to do and did.
|
| Literally Zuckerberg is quoted as saying he didn't remove
| posts: "[USG] "expressed a lot of frustration" when the
| social media platform resisted.".
|
| It would be much better if the article actually posted the
| contents of the government email. Everything we saw from say
| the Twitter files in this regard is some gov employee asking
| if X post complied with Y Twitter policy and if-not if the
| post should be removed. That gov employee didn't write Y
| policy, it was Twitter's own policy. I suspected a similar
| thing happened here where Facebook has a fake news policy [1]
| and a gov employee was asking them if given posts were in
| violation of it.
|
| [1]: https://transparency.meta.com/policies/community-
| standards/m...
| mypastself wrote:
| I assume he's familiar with the transparency standards of
| his own site. And he still calls whatever happened
| pressure. So it's entirely possible it wasn't as innocuous
| as you suggest.
| lesuorac wrote:
| I mean, he has the emails. He can release them whenever
| he wants.
|
| It only seems reasonable to assume the emails for
| FaceBook took the same form as the ones to Twitter. But
| he's welcome to prove me wrong.
| mypastself wrote:
| If a major government agency repeatedly requests you
| follow certain guidelines and gets frustrated when you
| don't, it might be reasonable to feel pressured or
| threatened, even if they're your own guidelines. I know
| I'd be, even by what was revealed in the Twitter files.
| lithos wrote:
| He probably hates how expensive it was/is to now support
| government requests, and how many governments are big enough
| to bully "his" platform into giving the same support other
| governments have gotten.
| moosey wrote:
| Their system is designed to push engagement. My guess is that
| COVID conspiracies generated this engagement, and their
| system automatically pushed it to the top. We already know
| that a lot of dishonest but emotionally charged speech gets
| pushed up by the algorithm.
|
| IF COVID conspiracy theories got pushed up by this algorithm,
| as opposed to what would be produced by a 'dump pipe', then
| yes, with the power that Zuck has over facebook, he supported
| conspiracy theories, in the interest of making money.
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| > another election cycle where some of the loudest voices with
| some of the largest platforms ever in history will be declaring
| they're not being allowed to speak
|
| Willful misinterpretation. He's claiming that the government
| encouraged FB to censor in a way that violated his values of
| truth and free speech, not that Zuckerberg himself feels
| censored.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| "He regrets", no he doesn't. He got something we don't know in
| return for his allegiance to the democrats, he is a businessman
| after all, but now he sees that the rats are fleeing the sinking
| ship and he wants in with the Trump campaign...
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| The same elements that make Reddit and Twitter unpleasant places
| to comment are also the elements that meant they sustained the
| discussion around the research (and conspiracies) of the ongoing
| Covid pandemic. There is no Covid aware community really anywhere
| else of remotely the same size as on Twitter and secondarily
| Reddit (which cracked down a bit). The weird part is 4.5 years
| into this pandemic there are still significant restrictions in
| most places that don't allow Covid medical papers to be posted
| and discussed. Its an ongoing problem.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _Its an ongoing problem._
|
| It's very bizarre that COVID is the poster-boy for social media
| censorship. The whole thing seems incredibly contrived; no one
| actually cares about COVID censorship, it's simply a cudgel
| issue that right wing pundits can use against Kamal Harris.
|
| You only have to look at the Palestine issue to see otherwise
| how Meta, Reddit, and X all moved in lockstep to censor the war
| and when TikTok did not it was _banned_ with bipartisan
| support. It 's hard to take the issue seriously when it doesn't
| exist on ideological lines, only bipartisan ones. If "free
| speech" cannot be used to protest an actual genocide then the
| continue stink about not being able to post about Ivermectin
| loses all credibility.
| pton_xd wrote:
| > It's very bizarre that COVID is the poster-boy for social
| media censorship. The whole thing seems incredibly contrived;
| no one actually cares about COVID censorship
|
| I agree, it is bizarre. Why weren't we allowed to discuss
| theories about how Covid was created? What's so wrong with
| proposing that it may have escaped from a lab? Shouldn't we
| be allowed to debate the pros and cons of taking medication
| or wearing a mask?
|
| The whole situation was just an uncomfortable display of our
| supposed freedom in online discourse. Not even online
| discourse, peoples careers were threatened for having the
| "wrong" opinion. The fact that it was over something so
| contrived like Covid made it all the more disturbing.
|
| Perhaps we've been conditioned to not expect total freedom
| when discussing highly propagandized topics like war. But
| Covid? Healthcare? That was an eye-opener for many.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| The actual medical field has these debates just fine without
| reddit or facebook or twitter. By using evidence and peer
| review. The people having their covid debate on reddit probably
| don't work in the field and their opinion is therefore
| inactionable, unqualified, and moot.
| 3np wrote:
| We already know that both Twitter and Reddit heavily censored
| and weighted posts around this topic.
| beej71 wrote:
| From a practical standpoint, I feel this issue is largely moot
| with the emergence of AI bots. Will the government have the time
| to chase them all? And will Facebook have the ability to censor
| them all?
| renegade-otter wrote:
| There are absolutely ways. It's not a "solvable once" problem,
| but it's solvable. When there is a need, there is a way.
|
| What was the last time you saw someone post porn on
| StackOverflow? Oh my, HOW do they do it?!
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I wonder if this is coming up just before the election because of
| the Harris campaign's suggested policy of capital gains tax on
| unrealised gains for people who have over $100m in assets? I
| think this is a great idea personally given what these people are
| doing to avoid paying tax including taking out loans against
| their own share portfolios. Worth thinking about what people are
| willing to do to not pay billions of dollars worth of taxes.
| _heimdall wrote:
| I'd much prefer seeing us close up the tax loop holes than
| create an even more complex system.
|
| Taxing unrealized gains will be extremely complex, and given
| that they aren't allowing us to deduct unrealized losses its a
| pretty shitty setup for the taxpayer.
|
| We need to drastically simplify our tax code rather than
| further increase its complexity.
| appplication wrote:
| Put simply, people in these brackets don't need more options
| for tax breaks.
| Terretta wrote:
| The audience of HN are striving to be _" people in these
| brackets"_ and far more here have experienced paper gains
| over $100M then seen it evaporate, than the few that end up
| at a place they are insensitive to marginal dollars.
| jajko wrote:
| No we're not, since we are smart enough to realize what
| sort of person you would need to be and what it would
| cost you in one's actual life (TM) to even have a chance
| to get there. And most folks here are not high
| functioning sociopaths to start with.
|
| Upper middle class its where highest quality of life
| happens, if one is smart enough to understand how
| happiness and life fulfillment works, to not die full of
| hard regrets. You can have meaningful true friendships.
| Enough to afford whatever is you need or desire to do,
| not enough to become self-entitled spoiled lazy
| disconnected from reality piece of shit parent and
| partner type of folks. No you don't need private jet or
| mega yacht or 5 mil hypercar for that, that's poor man's
| idea of what sort of quality wealth brings you in life.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Putting it even more simply, people don't need tax breaks.
| If our current system has loop holes it needs to be
| simplified such that loop holes can't reasonably exist.
| appplication wrote:
| It would be nice, but I don't see why perfect need be the
| enemy of good
| nightski wrote:
| Because complexity isn't good. We already have an
| insanely complex tax system.
| _heimdall wrote:
| In my opinion, we don't need perfect and we aren't
| comparing to good.
|
| A perfect tax code would be impossible, a more simply one
| would be very doable.
|
| We're talking about a campaign proposal here with no
| legislative draft so its a guessing game, but in my
| opinion any move similar to taxing unrealized gains will
| serve only to make it more complex and would not fall
| under the category of "good" for me.
| Terretta wrote:
| Just curious, is "a ppp [lication]" an alt for "a[ndy]
| ppp"?
|
| Both arguing the same points at the same time is quite the
| Baader-Meinhof coincidence.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
| appplication wrote:
| Perhaps more like the extra y's in "heyyy". Botting minor
| political threads on HN is a bit too afield my energy and
| motivation.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| That's exactly what a sentient AI would say to throw us
| humans off the scent.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Could be... I pretended it's point to point protocol
| (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point-to-
| Point_Protocol), but really I just couldn't think of a
| good username that was available here when I signed up...
|
| EDIT: I've misunderstood your comment, I don't have any
| alternative accounts on hacker news!
| zelias wrote:
| Doesn't this "close" the tax loophole in which holders of
| tradable assets can take out loans against those assets in
| perpetuity, never paying taxes on any of it?
| nightski wrote:
| I mean, you have to pay the loans back. Which requires
| income which is taxed. This would only work if you either
| don't spend any money (which then what is the point of the
| loan) or if your assets are always going up and increasing
| in value beyond that of the loan which inevitably will not
| be the case.
| fooker wrote:
| > Which requires income which is taxed
|
| And there lies the loophole. These loans are often
| structured as some kind of business expense that can be
| paid from pre-tax income.
|
| So, ultra rich people get to double dip here. No taxes on
| selling stocks for money, as there's a loan, plus no
| taxes on the income for paying it off.
| nightski wrote:
| That's not a loophole, it is illegal. You can't deduct
| personal expenses from a business. I realize the rich do
| it, but if that is the problem let's go after that.
|
| Also if you sell stocks you always pay tax on the capital
| gains regardless if there is a loan or not.
| fooker wrote:
| >You can't deduct personal expenses from a business. I
| realize the rich do it, but if that is the problem let's
| go after that.
|
| We have gone 'after it' again and again, making the
| system more and more complex. So much that you can now
| out-lawyer the IRS if you have enough money. There is no
| 'personal' expense, everything is somehow a business
| need. There is no simple solution to this really.
| Whatever you do to hurt ten billionaires, the ten million
| small business owners will face the brunt of it.
|
| >Also if you sell stocks you always pay tax on the
| capital gains regardless if there is a loan or not.
|
| That is the point, you don't sell stocks that makes you a
| billionaire. Instead, you find more and more creative
| ways to leverage that stock for loans, for deals, for
| power/control, etc etc. Also see cross collaterals where
| the same asset is used for multiple purposes at the same
| time!
| nightski wrote:
| So if you argue that we already can't enforce existing
| tax laws then why is proposing new, extremely expensive
| and difficult to enforce tax laws the solution?
| pkaeding wrote:
| The actual loophole is the step-up basis for inheritance.
| This allows you to never realize gains, living off loans
| against them. Then, when you die, your heirs inherit the
| appeciated assets, and the liabilities. But, their cost
| basis for the assets is stepped up to the then-current
| fair value. So, they can sell off assets to pay the loans
| off, but have no realized gains.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| But charging taxes on the loan won't really reflect that
| well. Also, there are limits on inheritance before estate
| tax kicks in, so folks with 100's of million in assets
| passed on to their heirs are still paying estate tax, it
| won't be tax free at that level.
|
| (Edited to correct "inheritance tax" to the technically
| correct term, "estate tax")
| aetherson wrote:
| However, there is the estate tax.
|
| If you're a billionaire who does the "take out loans
| against your unrealized cap gains" trick, then you, you
| know... can't sell your stock. So then your stock passes
| to your kids -- who, due to the stepped up basis, yes, do
| not have to pay cap gains on that stock.
|
| But there's a 40% estate tax.
|
| Estate tax generally isn't very relevant even to the
| ordinarily-rich, because it has an extremely high
| deduction (about $27M for a married couple), but for a
| billionaire it's absolutely relevant.
|
| Now, sure, if you paid both the cap gains and the estate
| tax you'd pay that much _more_ taxes, but if you compare
| a normally-wealthy person (pays 15-20% cap gains and 0%
| estate tax) and a billionaire (pays 0% cap gains and 40%
| estate tax), it 's obvious that the billionaire,
| eventually, pays a much higher tax rate.
| pkaeding wrote:
| Right. In my opinion, the 'fair' and 'simple' thing to do
| would be to eliminate the estate tax, and the step-up
| basis. Then there would be no loop hole to borrow against
| unrealized gains (and no real point to do so), while
| still allowing wealth to be enjoyed by the family that
| generated it, requiring them to pay taxes in the same way
| everyone else does (simplifying the tax code).
| Veserv wrote:
| Well, you still have to pay the estate tax, but you are
| probably arguing that is independent as it would need to
| be paid regardless of the step-up in basis.
|
| Yeah, the real loophole is step-up in basis with no
| corresponding tax event. What should really happen is
| that every step-up in basis should correspond to a tax
| event or, somewhat more speculatively, only net changes
| in basis should result in tax events. Incidentally, this
| would also give everybody access to reduced taxes due to
| unrealized losses (tax loss harvesting) instead of just
| people with accountants.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Not necessarily, though that is the hope. This wouldn't
| directly close the loophole, its meant to be attempt to
| block it without actually closing it.
|
| A huge question I have here is how unrealized gains on
| nonfinancial assets would be handles. How would the
| government determine the fair market value of a
| multimillion dollar mansion, for example?
|
| More broadly, how would we justify only taxing unrealized
| gains on individuals? Or would this apply to corporations,
| banks, and financial institutions as well?
|
| My point isn't actually any specific issue in the proposal,
| these are just examples of what could be a problem. Our tax
| code is massive and incomprehensible to almost everyone.
| Adding further caveats and stipulations just makes it
| worse. Taking an axe to much of the tax code seems like a
| much more reasonable approach in my book.
| spacemanspiff01 wrote:
| With regards to the mansion, doesn't the (state)
| government already do that with property taxes?
| _heimdall wrote:
| In my experience, state property tax assessments do a
| decent job at trying to calculate relative values but a
| terrible job at defining actual property values. Meaning,
| they may pretty reliably value my house at 10 or 15% less
| than the house next door based on age or size, but the
| actual value they put on either house isn't even close to
| what it would sell for (I've always seen tax assessments
| come in much lower than market rate).
|
| I don't know how that plays out with mansions though.
| Whether a mansion is worth $30M or $10M is often hard to
| predict with the pool of potential buyers being so low.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| Property tax assessments are rarely fair market value.
| They are at best a very gross approximation.
|
| But yes, a tax on "unrealized gains" basically amounts to
| a property tax, not anything related to an income tax.
| _heimdall wrote:
| > But yes, a tax on "unrealized gains" basically amounts
| to a property tax, not anything related to an income tax.
|
| The main difference being that a property tax only takes
| into account the assessed value and ignores what you paid
| for it. They tax the value, not just unrealized gains.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| Yeah, I just meant it is more similar to a property tax
| than an income tax. Of course the other difference is
| that you might be able to deduct the tax you paid if the
| value drops back down before the gain is realized... but
| I haven't heard enough of the proposed implementation
| details to sort that out.
| marcuskane2 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that whole notion of these magical loans to
| avoid taxes is a made up internet conspiracy theory.
|
| A) Loans need to be paid back, with interest. The person
| must either be selling assets or drawing in other (taxed)
| income to pay back the loan. A loan could delays the taxes
| to a future year to let someone buy a house or yacht or
| whatever without the full tax burden in year 1, but they
| still ultimately pay all the taxes
|
| B) If they die while still having outstanding loans, their
| heirs pay a 40% inheritance tax on everything above like 10
| million, so there is no magic avoidance of taxes there,
| just a change in whether it's capital gains tax today or
| inheritance tax tomorrow.
|
| I'd love to be disproven if someone can explain a real tax
| loophole, but as far as I can tell, the "Billionaires avoid
| taxes by taking out loans" thing is completely untrue.
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| Seems like DNC party policies always move in the direction of
| what improves the job market for lawyers and bureaucrats.
| More complex legal code, more complex maneuvers to get around
| it. Tax and finance lawyers for the wealthy are going to see
| a salary bump if this law passes.
| _heimdall wrote:
| I don't actually see it as a left/right or DNC/RNC decide.
| The policies often look different on the surface, but in
| the US today both sides of either "divide" lean heavily
| into increasing federal authority and regulation.
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| RNC certainly has it's problems with giving powerful and
| wealthy individuals ways to avoid paying taxes. But when
| it comes to the litigation economy it is generally DNC
| causing the offense. RNC, to their credit, will often
| roll onerous regulation.
| rendang wrote:
| I've wondered if it wouldn't be better to shift the tax code
| to bias companies toward paying dividends, as used to be more
| universal among profitable firms. Then the shareholders will
| have the appropriate progressive income tax bracket applied.
| ragnese wrote:
| > Taxing unrealized gains will be extremely complex, and
| given that they aren't allowing us to deduct unrealized
| losses its a pretty shitty setup for the taxpayer.
|
| I pay taxes on the unrealized gains of my house appreciating
| in value over the years.
|
| I'm not arguing one way or the other about whether various
| wealth tax ideas are good. But, I don't believe that the
| concept is as infeasible as some are making it out to be when
| it's been happening with property taxes for a very long time.
| orangecat wrote:
| _I pay taxes on the unrealized gains of my house
| appreciating in value over the years._
|
| You pay taxes on the assessed value of your house. It
| doesn't matter what you paid for it, or how much equity you
| have in it. It's more of a use tax than a capital gains or
| wealth tax.
| ragnese wrote:
| That's a fair point. It's definitely pretty different
| from an unrealized capital gain because, like you said,
| it's not about your net gain or loss on the house. But,
| I'd still say that it's practically similar enough to a
| wealth tax precisely because it's a tax based only on the
| current value of the thing that I own.
|
| Also, just to add to the above discussion, it's even
| worse in practice than a tax on unrealized gains because
| I'll have to pay the same amount of tax every year if my
| house stays the same value. If it were a tax on the
| unrealized "gains" of my house, I'd pay $0 if it stayed
| the same value. And if the value of my house decreases,
| I'll still have to pay more than $0 in property tax,
| whereas a capital loss would mean I would pay at most $0.
|
| So, I think I still stand by my sentiment that property
| taxes are more burdensome than a tax on unrealized
| capital gains.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Property taxes exist because we want to tax externalities
| like land use. Taxing fake wealth because you own a company
| and some VC assigns it a valuation is insane.
|
| Why should you dilute your ownership share just because of
| some arbitrary number?
| _heimdall wrote:
| I'd argue that property taxes exist because we still live
| in a system resembling the feudal system we evolved from,
| and governments believe it is their right to tax our
| property to pay for their projects.
| ragnese wrote:
| Who--other than "governments"--decided that its "your"
| property and that you somehow deserve monopoly rights to
| a piece of the planet that you didn't create?
| ragnese wrote:
| > Taxing fake wealth because you own a company > [...] >
| Why should you dilute your ownership share
|
| So... is owning piece of a productive company "fake
| wealth"? Is it fake when you can leverage that valuation
| to have access to more credit and use that to buy real
| stuff (like property...)?
| Terretta wrote:
| Do _" these people"_ include entrepreneurs with equity in
| startups with rapidly increasing value but no way to take money
| off the table? It doesn't take much to cross "$100m in assets"
| as a startup, say, $2.5M in revenue at 40x valuation (or $5M at
| 20x, etc.), even while loss-making.
|
| How should the founders and equity investors in a bootstrapped
| high growth unicorn that is neither public nor profit-making
| handle this proposed capital gains tax? Does this mean VC funds
| would need to set aside arbitrary amounts of cash to cover
| impossible-to-predict taxes on cap gains during, say, a 7 year
| window?
|
| It could also make it harder to attract and keep talent, since
| the earliest stage employees often rely on equity grants as
| part of their compensation. Does this mean every early stage
| employee has to have deep enough pockets to cover cap gains tax
| pre-revenue? And what happens when the company implodes past
| the look-back for recouping tax overpayment?
|
| It might make sense to focus on closing existing loopholes
| without creating new burdens and cash flow barriers that could
| disrupt the innovation and growth ecosystem with unintended
| second and third order consequences.
|
| ---
|
| Edit to add:
|
| It's true that a peeved Wall St donated a _fraction_ to Biden
| this season relative to the past, and -- surely entirely
| unrelatedly -- partnerships and private equity were taken out
| of the _latest_ incarnation, leaving in publicly traded and the
| $100M holdings.
|
| If passed, this _will_ be tinkered with, encircling ever more
| to offset the loopholes inevitably used.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| > Do "these people" include entrepreneurs with equity in
| startups
|
| No it doesn't, you're arguing using a straw man here. They
| need to be publicly traded securities to be taxed as I
| understand it. Also paying taxes is a public good, even if
| you're exceptionally wealthy.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _Also paying taxes is a public good, even if you're
| exceptionally wealthy._
|
| That's not in dispute*, and the point is people can
| experience paper gains _without_ being exceptionally
| wealthy, or even ramen profitable.
|
| * To be fair, the notion of "tax" being just supposed
| public good versus requiring transactional value ("no
| taxation without representation") was a founding issue for
| the U.S.
|
| These days, instead of citing nebulous public good, perhaps
| it could be thought of as NOA and SOA fees: Nation Owners'
| Association fees, and State Owners' Association fees. You
| can look for a different neighborhood, or contribute to
| improve this one.
| bjtitus wrote:
| Who are these non-wealthy individuals who can't afford
| ramen but hold over $100 million in assets of _publicly
| traded companies_?
|
| > the notion of "tax" being just supposed public good
| versus requiring transactional value ("no taxation
| without representation") was a founding issue for the
| U.S.
|
| This was a representational issue, not non-transactional
| taxation. Property taxes existed in many colonies 100
| years before the revolution.
| Terretta wrote:
| It is accurate that the latest incarnation*, the supposed
| Harris version, within that $100 million club, you'd only
| pay taxes on unrealized capital gains if at least 80% of
| your wealth is in tradeable assets (i.e., not shares of
| private startups or real estate).
|
| Not usually mentioned: even for this illiquid group there
| would still be an additional deferred tax of up to 10% on
| the unrealized capital gains upon exit.
|
| * Once passed, anything like this is unlikely to escape
| tinkering until it matches most other versions, that are
| not limited to "tradable". Look at how worried farms are,
| for example, another relatively cash neutral but cap gain
| increasing growth (ahem) business.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| It's hard to put into pithy terms but check out
| Citibank's former top trader on wealth inequality and why
| we need to find a way to tax back some of the wealth from
| the rich: https://youtu.be/TflnQb9E6lw
| swader999 wrote:
| Thanks for this, watched a few of his videos and I think
| it will really change my view on tax going forward.
| consteval wrote:
| > without being exceptionally wealthy, or even ramen
| profitable
|
| Correction: without SEEMING exceptionally wealthy or even
| ramen profitable. By, say, kneecapping your own profit.
| So that you don't pay as much taxes. Which is the entire
| problem we're trying to solve.
|
| In practice, these people ARE wealthy. Just perhaps not
| on paper (depending the paper you look at). Of course
| when you observe their life, they are obviously filthy
| rich.
|
| So we have an accounting problem. The papers don't
| accurately reflect the reality.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _They need to be publicly traded securities to be taxed
| as I understand it._
|
| On the contrary, many variations of proposals (they keep
| popping up) cover partnerships or other forms of company
| holders as well.
|
| Even in the Harris plan, though not usually talked about,
| even for the illiquid not-tradable group there would be a
| new deferred tax of up to 10% on unrealized capital gains
| upon exit. To be fair, "exit" implies an ability to pay
| that.
| fooker wrote:
| > They need to be publicly traded securities to be taxed as
| I understand it
|
| In that case, this is the end of public companies as we
| know it.
| sbsudbdjd wrote:
| "Also paying taxes is a public good, even if you're
| exceptionally wealthy."
|
| _Can_ be a public good if it 's spent well. The US has
| spent how many trillions killing innocents the last 25
| years? How many trillion were spent building ridiculous
| layers of redundancy on our nuclear deterrent (that we then
| smashed)?
|
| Public good!
| kcb wrote:
| So no more publicly traded companies. Now they only way to
| invest is to be in an elite social circle.
| jhp123 wrote:
| This all seems very easy to deal with. Pay employees cash not
| equity. Founders can negotiate with investors to take enough
| cash compensation at each round to cover their tax bill.
| Investors can use financial instruments to hedge their risk.
| onepointsixC wrote:
| That's an awful idea. Startups need cash that cash, now.
| Wasting it on tax bills for evaluations that don't become
| reality would just make everything worse and reduce
| runways.
| jhp123 wrote:
| if they need more cash they can sell more stock.
|
| Taxing entrepreneurs will lead to worse outcomes for
| entrepreneurs. That is obvious. Every tax has a cost. But
| we need to fund the government and it is not fair for
| workers to pay for everything while much wealthier
| investors and entrepreneurs do not.
| seydor wrote:
| if this leads to decrease of censorship, i m not complaining
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Tech billionaires kissing up to the far right isn't going to
| decrease censorship. Maybe make it more palatable to you.
| jpadkins wrote:
| a coalition that contains RFK Jr, Tulsi Gabbard and Elon
| Musk are now far right?
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I don't believe any of them think Trump will be a good
| president.
| sbsudbdjd wrote:
| No, I think they believe the alternatives are far worse.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I think for all three of them various levels of self
| interest and ego are involved in their Trump support.
| They don't care who will do a better job.
| timeon wrote:
| That is pretty crazy after Jan 6.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| RFK Jr dropped out of the race, endorsed Trump and
| appeared with him at a Trump rally.
| drawkward wrote:
| Vaccine Denier, Russian Puppet, Hard Right Force
| Multiplier
|
| I'd say yes.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Is Russia still a thing?
| djur wrote:
| Hard to argue that Musk isn't far right at this point,
| and the other two are right-leaning opportunists.
| sbsudbdjd wrote:
| Admitting they withheld pertinent and embarrassing
| information from the public to protect the government is
| far-right?
| tracker1 wrote:
| I feel an exchange tax that included loans would probably be a
| much better approach. Taxing seated/parked assets, especially
| on the very wealthy seems like a recipe for disaster. So you
| have to sell, or leverage the property to pay taxes. What would
| trying to sell billions in stock at once, or leverage hundreds
| of thousands of rental properties look like to the larger
| economy, and what would the effect be? Also, who is going to be
| able to even buy the stuff, if everyone with enough
| money/credit is scrambling to make huge tax layouts. Will you
| be able to deduct the interest on loans taken out to pay these
| taxes?
|
| It's not like the money is just sitting, liquid in a vault like
| Scrooge McDuck.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I love your consideration for the financial problems of some
| of the most privileged people in all of human history. I just
| don't really care that much if they get a big tax bill (I'm
| sure they'll find a way to pay) and for a variety of reasons
| it will be good for society.
| nomel wrote:
| I think it's simpler than that. People here tend to enjoy,
| and have careers around, understanding complex systems.
| "Consideration" for rich people isn't required for thinking
| about the possible impacts of this, especially when the
| government has a near perfect track record in eventually
| shifting policies down to the working class.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| The impacts could be extremely positive, some people are
| starting to believe the very richest having an optional
| tax system in the US is bad for everyone.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| There seems to be a simpler fix though, that avoids the
| major negative effects of the larger changes.
|
| They take out loans and aren't taxed on it. But they have
| to pay taxes when they pay off the loans, and at that
| time they'll owe even more money meaning more stocks will
| have to be sold.
|
| But wait, how are they avoiding that tax even then? Well
| they take out another loan. But eventually that stops.
| They can't take out infinite loans, so what is happening?
| When they die, there is some tax trickery that involves
| resetting the cost basis of assets, then selling them
| with 0 capital gains to pay off the loans. The simple fix
| is to only reset the values after the estate pays out,
| meaning that any assets sold to pay off any loans will
| have to pay the real tax on their value, and only
| afterwards is the cost basis reset when inheritors
| receive those assets.
|
| That seems a much more minimally invasive change, and
| also seems much more in line with the intent of the
| existing tax code to begin with, as the cost basis should
| only reset for those inheriting and not for paying off
| existing debts.
| greycol wrote:
| I feel you're missing the forest for the trees... You're
| advocating a policy of the ultra rich not having to pay
| tax during their lifetime because it's less complicated.
|
| I understand you're viewing it as a tax increase as the
| estate pays less tax on death under the current system,
| but sometimes you need to realise you're stuck in the
| overton window.
| foota wrote:
| They're not concerned about the wealthy, but the state of
| the economy. Bad things happen when the prices of things
| change dramatically. E.g., if you happen to own an asset
| that a billionaire now needs to fire sale, you'll lose out
| as well.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| That will only be temporary won't it, hold your shares or
| buy more at a discount.
| jmb99 wrote:
| It's not that simple. If hundreds of billions of dollars
| need to be liquidated across every asset class in every
| industry, the entire economy is going to tank. Not just
| "oh no the stock market's down." Asset prices would drop
| severely (housing being the most "regular-person"
| applicable), many business will fail meaning many people
| will lose their jobs, and mortgages will be foreclosed
| upon due to suddenly being incredibly underwater without
| jobs. Picture 2008, but worse.
|
| "Hold your shares or buy more at a discount" is
| incredibly out of touch with the average person who will
| be affected by an economic depression.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| https://www.axios.com/2024/08/23/kamala-harris-
| unrealized-ca...
|
| "Payments can be spread out over subsequent years"
| crystalmeph wrote:
| A large part of the United States' economic leadership is
| specifically concentrated in the tech startup sector.
|
| Whether or not you think any of the companies funded by
| YCombinator[0] are actually worth their valuation, you have
| to realize that there will be fewer such startups if a tax
| on unrealized capital gains is passed, and that VC
| activity, along with the future startups chasing their
| money, absolutely will move to countries without such a
| tax.
|
| Again, maybe you actually believe the startup scene in the
| US is worthless, in which case, go ahead and advocate for
| an unrealized gains tax Just be honest with yourself that
| it will entirely shut down sectors that others view as
| critical to the country's future dominance.
|
| [0] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > I love your consideration for the financial problems of
| some of the most privileged people in all of human history
|
| It's not about that. Would you rather live in the US or
| would you rather live in China (social credit) / Russia /
| North Korea?
|
| But I know what you're argument is going to be: _" We're
| going to do communism in the US, but this time we'll do it
| right!"_.
|
| _" But it's only going to be for people worth more than
| 100 million!"_: it may crash the entire stock market with
| the absurd amount of taxes they want to impose. If the
| entire stock market crashes, regular people are going to be
| affected (pension funds comes to mind).
|
| Such a tax may very well have the exact opposite effect of
| the one hoped for.
|
| I'm not even commenting about the next Elon Musk who might
| simply to launch his next Tesla / SpaceX and Starlink in
| another country than the US.
|
| Is the US better with or without Tesla/SpaceX/Starlink?
|
| Should the US even take the risk to act in a way that could
| prevent the next founder of such companies from creating
| its companies in the US?
|
| Also to what end? Such a taxation wouldn't bring any
| sizeable money compared to the amount we're dealing with:
| $35 trillion of public debt, insane spendings, etc.
|
| The total wealth of all the billionaires is $6 trillion.
| Where do you draw the line?
|
| What about seizing _all_ that wealth: the whole $6
| trillion? (which wouldn 't be worth anywhere near that
| amount the moment you'd seize it due to stocks and real
| estate crashing).
|
| What I think: $6 trillion wouldn't even change a thing.
| We're adding $1 trillion of public debt every 100 days.
|
| In the absolute best case, you "won" 600 days.
|
| Truth is: there are people in power who hate the rich
| because they only one form of power, the state.
|
| Be very careful what you long for.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| This is a tax on some extremely affluent people who are
| doing shenanigans to avoid paying capital gains tax.
| Seriously, communism it is not. Great companies were
| still built in the US when rich people had to pay capital
| gains and they still will be if these rich tax avoiders
| get a big bill they can split over 5 years.
|
| https://www.axios.com/2024/08/23/kamala-harris-
| unrealized-ca...
| danans wrote:
| > Taxing seated/parked assets, especially on the very wealthy
| seems like a recipe for disaster.
|
| Idea: tax loans taken out using assets as collateral at
| regular income tax rates. After all, that money gets used
| like regular income (living expenses).
|
| The taxed amount can then be added to the basis when the
| asset is sold. It would be like reverse of depreciation
| calculations.
|
| Set an asset and loan value floor so it only affects people
| with assets $10M+.
|
| After all, regular people pay taxes on annuities, which are
| similar in structure.
|
| Disclaimer: IANA-Accountant, but I am a taxpayer who tries to
| _legally_ minimize my taxes.
| brians wrote:
| Yes, but we have to be careful about double-taxing
| mortgages for ordinary home-buyers. Those home purchases
| are already taxed by local municipalities--and in many
| places that hits the SALT cap.
| danans wrote:
| > Yes, but we have to be careful about double-taxing
| mortgages for ordinary home-buyers.
|
| In the context of home ownership, a loan using an asset
| as collateral translates to a home-equity loan or reverse
| mortgage. If you want to protect ordinary home-buyers,
| set an asset value floor of say $20M.
|
| However, I think most share "pledging" [1] by the uber-
| wealthy is done using company stock as collateral, so you
| could restrict the tax further by having it apply only to
| loans taken against stock holdings over some similarly
| high value floor.
|
| 1. https://aaahq.org/portals/0/documents/meetings/2024/AT
| A/Pape...
| jmb99 wrote:
| > Idea: tax loans taken out using assets as collateral at
| regular income tax rates.
|
| I don't think it's as simple as this. This will end up
| catching normal people (any mortgage, automotive loan, etc)
| but may result in tricky accounting/loan structuring to
| avoid having literal collateral for the billionaires you're
| trying to hit.
|
| I don't think that taxing unrealized gains is the solution
| either, but I also don't think doing nothing is the
| solution. This is a very tricky problem without an obvious
| solution (and it doesn't help that the ultra-wealthy can
| fairly easily influence lawmakers).
| danans wrote:
| > This will end up catching normal people (any mortgage,
| automotive loan, etc)
|
| So just have it kick in above $5M/year or something like
| that, and have it only apply to securities as assets. Not
| a lot of ordinary people are taking $5M+/year in loans
| against their stocks.
| donmcronald wrote:
| > What would trying to sell billions in stock at once
|
| Let them pay their taxes with stocks. Problem solved.
| jmb99 wrote:
| Ignoring the many other reasons why that would be
| problematic, what happens when the US government suddenly
| owns notable (or even controlling) stakes in companies?
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| Exactly -- or with a piece of their real estate! Just take
| a chainsaw, cut a bedroom and bathroom out, and the
| government gets that piece.
| randerson wrote:
| In the proposal, people whose assets are mostly illiquid
| are excluded from this tax.
| mahogany wrote:
| > What would trying to sell billions in stock at once, or
| leverage hundreds of thousands of rental properties look like
| to the larger economy, and what would the effect be?
|
| Billionaires already routinely sell billions in stock "at
| once" (meaning, per quarter or similar, not a $1 billion
| limit order on Robinhood...), so on that one, we can
| empirically suggest "not much of an effect on the larger
| economy".
|
| Randomly chosen examples:
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-
| liquidated-1-7-180...
|
| https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-
| transportation/elon-m...
| alasdair_ wrote:
| One solution to deciding how much an asset is worth is to let
| you declare any value you want for it, with the caveat that
| if someone is willing to pay you more than the declared
| value, you must sell it to them.
|
| Now obviously things like transaction fees need to be
| factored in, and timing should matter - you should have the
| option to increase your stated value if something changes (or
| even to say "yes, okay, it's really worth X" and keep the
| item at the higher valuation).
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Unrealized gains taxes is an extractive and totalitarian tax.
| Someone is always risking 100% loss until they realize those
| gains. It's an affront to entrepreneurial risk-taking and it's
| capricious. It would be just as ridiculous to allow someone to
| write-off unrealized losses.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Well when you have over 100m in assets in your pile of gold
| in the dragon lair, its time to be extractive.
| rv3909i wrote:
| How do you know you have over 100m in assets? One never
| really knows the worth of something until it's sold. (i.e.
| try selling a used car. there's what you think it's worth
| and what you get...)
|
| And once the asset is sold, that's a taxable event.
| sealeck wrote:
| > How do you know you have over 100m in assets?
|
| If your bank determines that assets you post for
| collateral are worth 100mn or more, that's a pretty good
| indication.
| rv3909i wrote:
| So if I don't apply for a loan, I don't get assessed,
| which means I don't pay taxes? Anyway, the system is not
| that simple and bank assessment would be trivial to game.
| People do it now even without taxes on the line...
| sbsudbdjd wrote:
| That's an estimate to enable business to go on based what
| the bank is willing to risk.
|
| For the proposal to work you would need an estimate good
| to within less a percent. Or lawsuits galore.
| swader999 wrote:
| Hunter Biden art comes to mind.
| sbsudbdjd wrote:
| Great example.
|
| The art _is_ very valuable, financially, because people
| are willing to pay for it.
|
| However, absent the market clearing the asset, its value
| is impossible to objectively evaluate. Even if we had an
| objective function to evaluate art the basis of
| evaluation is incorrect - _the artwork is valuable as an
| instrument of government corruption_
|
| So m, if we can't even agree on the reason why Hunter's
| artwork is worthwhile, how can we even possibly evaluate
| it?
| swader999 wrote:
| Yes, it's impossible and it's true for every asset that's
| not a commodity. It's why unrealized gains tax is DOA.
|
| I guess it's not impossible, we do it for property tax on
| real estate. There are real costs though.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Easy. Share price x number of shares.
| sbsudbdjd wrote:
| Few things are easy. Some problems with your proposal:
|
| 1. Assumes the asset in question is publicly traded.
|
| 2. Assumes the publicly traded asset has a non trivial
| amount of trade volume 3. Assumes asset price is
| relatively stable, moving in a narrow band along a clear
| trend-line
|
| 4. Assumes you have defined the price from the stock
| information (last trade before close. Daily average, etc)
|
| 5. Assumes holder's position is small enough not to
| affect stock price were they to sell.
|
| And stocks are the easiest to do this with!
|
| Look at the Trump vs NY court case for the value of his
| house in FL. Unlike the valuation imposed by government
| fiat, the valuation was agreed to freely by the parties.
| The courts found it excessive (and it might be) and
| proposed a valuation so ridiculously low it alone gives
| Trump grounds to appeal that the judge is either
| incompetent on the matter or has a personal bias and
| should anyway have recused himself.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > the value of his house in FL
|
| Are we talking about Mar-a-Lago here?
|
| > the valuation was agreed to freely by the parties
|
| Which valuation is that? The one from Lawrence Moens?
| this_user wrote:
| Nobody with assets over 100m has a "pile of gold", as you
| put it. Those assets are always productively invested in
| some form or another. But you would prefer that those
| investments be pulled, because the government are clearly
| much better at employing those assets productively?
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Its not a question of who is better at managing money but
| more who needs benefit in our society. The government
| supports welfare programs. Someone throwing 100m in the
| market does not unless they are taxed to do so.
| sbsudbdjd wrote:
| The US government burns money unproductively like
| California wild fire through a citrus field.
|
| And there are better ways to deal with our oligarchs than
| braids dead proposals. Start breaking up their monopolies
| for one.
| timeon wrote:
| > there are better ways to deal with our oligarchs
|
| Such as?
| muaytimbo wrote:
| Totally agree, it doesn't matter who earned the money,
| only that the government needs it for welfare
| alxmng wrote:
| What's productive? Measured in purely financial terms
| selling cigarettes, junk food, and fentanyl is
| productive. Figuring out how to get teenagers to scroll
| TikTok all day is productive.
|
| ... What people are suggesting is to take money from some
| productive enterprises and put it towards other
| productive enterprises such as education, medicine,
| public infrastructure, etc. Enterprises which have more
| benefits beyond simply increasing the bank account of
| entrepreneurs and fund managers.
| dom96 wrote:
| 100m is more than enough for any one person
| andy_ppp wrote:
| As someone else has said just let them pay their taxes with
| stock, if that were the case I think it addresses most of
| your points right?
| rv3909i wrote:
| And if the asset is a farm?
| andy_ppp wrote:
| How many $100m farms are there that are not part of
| publicly traded companies are there in the US?
|
| And again, this is for publicly traded stock portfolios.
| Private farms won't be broken up... yet :-)
| rv3909i wrote:
| Are you sure the Harris proposal is only about publicly
| traded stock portfolios? Maybe I'm missing something, but
| I don't see publicly traded stocks being singled out by
| the President, which is supposedly the policy Harris is
| adopting.
|
| "The proposal would impose a minimum tax of 25 percent on
| total income, generally inclusive of unrealized capital
| gains, for all taxpayers with wealth (that is, the
| difference obtained by subtracting liabilities from
| assets) greater than $100 million."
|
| https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/131/General-
| Explanati...
|
| And there are many private farms in America worth more
| than $100m. I have no idea what amount of that would be
| "unrealized capital gains", which is kinda the problem.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| No one knows the policies. There hasn't been an
| interview.
| randerson wrote:
| From the document you linked:
|
| > Taxpayers would be treated as illiquid if tradeable
| assets held directly or indirectly by the taxpayer make
| up less than 20 percent of the taxpayer's wealth.
| Taxpayers who are treated as illiquid may elect to
| include only unrealized gain in tradeable assets in the
| calculation of their minimum tax liability.
|
| Which seems to suggest that if someone's wealth is mostly
| tied up in property or art or a private business, then
| they wouldn't be taxed on unrealized gains.
| sbsudbdjd wrote:
| The $100M is an arbitrary number. It can go up, it can go
| down. It will be eroded by inflation and almost certainly
| not be indexed or indexed to a number controlled by
| bureaucrats.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| I actually met a farmer on the East coast from a
| mayflower time family. They have the same land and
| basically been doing the same thing for a couple
| centuries. According to the fed they are worth $50M.
| xur17 wrote:
| This effectively means we've just nationalized 25% of all
| companies (over time as this tax spreads to more people).
| EricDeb wrote:
| Couldnt it be similar to a property tax? That's evaluated on
| an annual basis. If you feel it's wrong you can appeal
| sbsudbdjd wrote:
| 1. Properties are bought/sold constantly around most
| people's homes. Evaluating a home price is not that hard,
| compared evaluating how much the remains of the car that
| Ted Kennedy crashed is worth (I purposely chose this
| example. The car is "worthless" yet I guarantee you can
| find a nut willing to spend a fortune to have this piece of
| political history)
|
| 2. Properties are purposely, often by statute, assessed far
| less then they are bought for
|
| 3. There are tons of lawsuits around this, imagine the cost
| of every asset being scrutinized and potentially appealed!
| kansface wrote:
| > I think this is a great idea personally given what these
| people are doing to avoid paying tax
|
| I very strongly believe you to be wrong:
|
| 1. Unrealized gains is unworkable. Billionaires will spend tens
| or hundreds of millions yearly to avoid paying literally
| billions in taxes because the expected value is net positive.
| The IRS won't win chasing down money scattered across the
| globe. This is not a productive use of capital.
|
| 2. Taxing unrealized gains causes extreme capital flight. This
| is _bad_ for the US.
|
| 3. Taxing unrealized gains will lead to corporations and
| startups incorporating outside the US and keeping their assets
| outside of the US. This is _bad_ for the US.
|
| 4. Founders would very quickly loose control of the companies
| they started, including before they exit. That is really bad
| for startups and the ecosystem.
|
| 5. This is almost certainly illegal in the US at the federal
| level.
|
| 6. Every tax for the wealthy eventually targets the middle
| class.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| 1. Capital gains tax is already essentially optional for the
| richest now with various tricks. Of course taxing people is
| difficult, are you saying because it's hard let's not bother?
|
| 2. Where will the capital go (all the best investments are in
| the US), if this happens lots of great businesses will be
| available to buy at a discount to people with smaller than
| $100m stock portfolios
|
| 3. Potentially true but I would still set up my business in
| the US and just pay the tax, if I make $100m it's $20m for
| the government and I rate that as a great deal to be honest.
|
| 4. Why is a one off 20% tax going to lose founders control,
| this is only about companies post IPO.
|
| 5. IANAL are you?
|
| 6. If the rich continue to be able to accumulate wealth
| without paying taxes on it forever I think that is the road
| to serfdom personally. Taxation of the rich will make
| everyone better off. I pay over 50% tax in Europe, maybe if
| the rich were paying their share this could be reduced!
| kcb wrote:
| > 3. Potentially true but I would still set up my business
| in the US and just pay the tax, if I make $100m it's $20m
| for the government and I rate that as a great deal to be
| honest.
|
| You've described the wrong type of tax. I make $100m and
| 20% goes to the government is not controversial. It's my
| business is valued at $100m and so I pay $20m to the
| government regardless of how much my company is "making".
|
| > 4. Why is a one off 20% tax going to lose founders
| control, this is only about companies post IPO.
|
| Got it. So no more IPOs and every public company is about
| to go private.
| zefalt wrote:
| 5. This has been brought up so many times by in the past
| few years and is very unlikely to pass scrutiny.
|
| ---
|
| The federal government has the ability to tax "income."
| Unrealized gains are not income as gains have not been
| clearly realized.
|
| The closest legal definition for "income" comes from:
|
| The Glenshaw Glass case
|
| In Commissioner v. Glenshaw Glass Co., 348 U.S. 426 (1955),
| the Supreme Court laid out what has become the modern
| understanding of what constitutes "gross income" to which
| the Sixteenth Amendment applies, declaring that income
| taxes could be levied on "accessions to wealth, clearly
| realized, and over which the taxpayers have complete
| dominion". Under this definition, any increase in wealth--
| whether through wages, benefits, bonuses, sale of stock or
| other property at a profit, bets won, lucky finds, awards
| of punitive damages in a lawsuit, qui tam actions--are all
| within the definition of income, unless the Congress makes
| a specific exemption, as it has for items such as life
| insurance proceeds received by reason of the death of the
| insured party, gifts, bequests, devises and inheritances,
| and certain scholarships.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteenth_Amendment_to_the_
| U...
|
| See case law section
| skepticATX wrote:
| Why does no one read the actual proposal before commenting?
|
| It specifically states that this only applies to individuals
| with 80% of their wealth in tradeable assets. No founder is
| going to lose control because this doesn't apply to them!
| rv3909i wrote:
| I'd love to. I'm genuinely interested in how this policy
| could be implemented and would love to read their
| suggestions. I think it's very hard to pull off
| successfully. Can you provide a link?
|
| I thought Harris was adopting the President's 2025 budget
| proposal [1], which doesn't specifically state this is
| specific to tradable assets, but according to the
| downvoters I'm wrong about that. As far as I can tell it
| provides no comment on how "wealth" is determined.
|
| [1] https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/tax-
| policy/revenue-p...
|
| I suppose the whole argument is moot anyway as the
| President doesn't pass a budget, Congress does. And this
| document is really about communicating priorities, not
| actual policy.
|
| And if one wants to get really persnickety, Harris didn't
| actually say anything. Some people working for her campaign
| did.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/22/us/politics/kamala-
| harris...
| jmb99 wrote:
| Shares of a company are tradeable assets, no? Maybe not
| before the company is public depending on wording, but
| definitely after.
| sbsudbdjd wrote:
| Because that detail, like the $100milliom limit are
| irrelevant details subject to change. (Most) People have
| the ability to synthesize issue and are worried of the
| proposal's fundamental core:
|
| "Do we want the government to tax unrealized gains?"
|
| No. I find it very scary frankly, even though I believe
| that the top 0.01% of the US population are parasitical and
| their financial and political clout should be reined in.
| kcb wrote:
| Surely that would just mean no IPOs ever again right?
| Dig1t wrote:
| This sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.
| imgabe wrote:
| Taxes are not an automatic good. There are things we want the
| government to do. It costs some amount of money to do those
| things. We should figure out what that amount of money is, tax
| enough for it, and the rest belong to the person who earns it.
|
| Why do people assume we always have to give more and more money
| to the government? What have they done with the $6 trillion
| they spend every year so far? What evidence is there that
| giving them more will improve anything?
|
| Taxes are not for you to punish people you don't like. They're
| to fund the government enough to perform its necessary
| functions. That's all.
| sbsudbdjd wrote:
| Ppl's obsessions (on both sides) on taxes is so weird.
|
| Governments can fund themselves in numerous ways, not just
| taxes. Either way you'll pay.
|
| The key issue is do we want a federal government expenditure
| of 20-25% of the economy? I'd say no.
| dmix wrote:
| There can't be a single news story on the internet where people
| don't think it's part of some meta strategy or conspiracy.
| artificialLimbs wrote:
| I think we should get substantially tighter reigns on where our
| tax dollars are going and stop the outflows considerably before
| we worry about taking more and more dollars from citizens. The
| government has lost billions in recent years. LOST BILLIONS. No
| one has been held accountable.
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| She didn't even suggest that she supports that policy, it's
| just assumed for some reason despite the fact that she's
| already made her own choices on tax policy.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > it's just assumed for some reason
|
| The reason is that she refuses to share her proposed policies
| by not doing any interviews, so people have no choice but to
| assume things. Given her history, it's really not a far
| stretch to assume she supports some shortsighted policies.
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| We had an entire convention last week where she shared her
| policies, as did her surrogates and supporters. She
| supports a $6k child tax credit not taxing unrealized
| gains. But if you want to feel victimized (?) by a
| hypothetical tax on people with >$100M unrealized gains go
| for it I guess.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Reading words from a prompt is good enough for many people.
| It's the ultimate bureaucrat.
| techostritch wrote:
| The thing I'm getting out of this Zuckerberg letter is that we've
| basically learned nothing. It's a nakedly partisan letter
| designed to signal to Republicans that he's not taking sides.
| Which I guess is fine, but I'm thinking about Paul Graham's
| recent tweet about the next round of social networks being
| designed to be built in to combat trolling, and it makes me
| think.
|
| This time there was valid concern about issues like the lab leak
| theory being censored on social media, I predict in the next
| crisis, social media will be useless adjacent for almost
| everything.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > This time there was valid concern about issues like the lab
| leak theory being censored on social media
|
| You need to be very clear about what you mean by "lab leak
| theory" because that term has a number of definitions that are
| very different.
|
| There's the definition where COVID was the result of gain of
| function research that leaked from a lab through negligence.
| There's also a definition that it was an entirely natural virus
| being studied that was leaked through negligence. Then there's
| the definition that the virus was "leaked" with malicious
| intent from the virology lab in Wuhan.
|
| While the definitions are similar they have very different
| implications. Because social media tends to perform nuance
| destroying compression of concepts down to sound bites no two
| individuals using the term "lab leak theory" can be assumed to
| be using the same definition.
|
| You even have an assumed definition of what you mean when you
| say "lab leak theory". Of everyone that reads your post your
| definition doesn't match that of half the audience. Even then,
| plenty of people claimed to be banned from social media for one
| reason while the reality they were banned from a network for
| other (or a combination) of reasons. So even the general
| statement of people being "social media censoring lab leak
| theory" elides important information and nuance and derives its
| validity from third hand accounts.
| tim333 wrote:
| You could just allow discussion without worrying too much
| which version.
| Malidir wrote:
| In Pavel's interview with Tucker Carlson, he mentions how he (VK)
| met with Zuckerberg, and he told them new features they were
| planning. And Zuck nicked them all.
|
| Zuck is on a major PR campaign drive, I would not trust a word he
| says.
| NotAnOtter wrote:
| Zuck Vs Elon on the 2028 presidential ticket would be....
| something
| jpadkins wrote:
| Elon was born in Africa and is not eligible to be president.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Zuckerberg vs trump, would also pretty much be Facebook vs
| x
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Trump's not going to be able to run for a third term.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Trump 's not going to be able to run for a third term._
|
| He says he won the last election, so he's already running
| for a third term.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| He didn't have a second term, even if it's true social
| media was censored to help his opponent.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Harris can still win.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Well, he's also on video recently at a church saying, "I
| need you to come out and vote for me. And if things work
| out the way we want, you won't need to vote again."
| zo1 wrote:
| Apparently this is the smoking gun and Trump is going to
| become dictator for life? Is this where we are in the
| debate? You might as well be talking about what kind of
| ice-cream he likes then.
| arandomusername wrote:
| Come on, we both know that he means (specially if you
| read the full context) that there will be no reason to
| vote afterwards (to a group that seldom votes) because
| their wishes/goals will be delievered by trump. He was
| just trying to convince them that this election matters
| most.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > to a group that seldom votes
|
| Seniors and church-goers? Citation needed.
|
| > He was just trying to convince them that this election
| matters most.
|
| Sure. And he said he was going to "act as a dictator from
| day 1" (after saying repeatedly that "America could
| benefit from a dictatorship" and praising what other
| dictators "have been able to do for their country") for
| what reason? He said he'd terminate the constitution. The
| guy who just got indicted again for his BS on and around
| Jan 6.
|
| Really, he just means "I'll fix the country so well, and
| there will be so much love, that people will be happy to
| keep voting us back in".
|
| I don't think he'll succeed. I don't think he'll be
| elected. But if you think there's not a part of Trump
| that wants to be President For Life, and will if he
| thinks he can get away with it, then ... you haven't been
| listening to him.
| NickC25 wrote:
| He's also against the 1st and 2nd Amendments.
|
| >Really, he just means "I'll fix the country so well, and
| there will be so much love, that people will be happy to
| keep voting us back in".
|
| No, it means exactly as Trump said it would - he wants to
| be a dictator, and is willing to terminate the
| constitution to make it so. Even then, he won't fix jack
| shit, because that would actually require working, which
| is something he cannot and will not do. He had a
| supermajority in congress in his first term...and did
| nothing besides pass tax cuts for billionaires.
|
| I'd never in my youth imagine that the country I grew up
| in would elect a guy who trashes the constitution who
| wears lifts and orange makeup, let alone potentially
| doing it _twice_. May you live in interesting times
| indeed.
| kredd wrote:
| Facebook has insane pull. Sometimes I forget about it,
| but it is used by majority of every single demographic
| base once you consider different portions of the FB app
| (markets, groups, messenger), Instagram, WhatsApp and
| Threads (don't think it is that relevant yet). That being
| said, to my understanding, Meta has been trying to move
| itself away from political-adjacent conversations. While
| Twitter is completely the opposite, and thrives on poli-
| rage.
| immibis wrote:
| The rules don't apply to the people who make them. What do
| you expect is going to happen if he does show up on the
| ballot and the most people vote for him?
| lolinder wrote:
| More specifically, he was born in Africa and neither one of
| his parents was a US citizen. While all past presidents
| were born in the USA, it hasn't yet been definitively ruled
| that you must be born on US soil to be a "natural born
| Citizen", and my understanding is that you likely don't,
| you just need to have been a US citizen at birth rather
| than naturalized later.
| preciousoo wrote:
| "During their dialogue, both tech leaders probed each other's
| intentions for expansion. "I remember him asking me whether we
| were planning to start something on a global basis, on the
| global level, go for international expansion. I said no," Durov
| recalled.
|
| Zuckerberg similarly denied any plans to target Durov's
| domestic market, yet both moved to expand their respective
| reaches shortly after the meeting. "We both ended up doing
| exactly that in two or three weeks," Durov noted."
|
| https://www.benzinga.com/news/24/06/39223122/telegrams-pavel...
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Gotta be honest, if I was talking to a competitor I'd lie
| about whatever non-public product expansion plans I had too.
| preciousoo wrote:
| That's why I brought the quote, let people draw their own
| conclusions. Mark isn't to be trusted for a variety of
| reasons, that conversation isn't one of them lol. Durov was
| laughing because they both lied to each other
| bko wrote:
| Are you saying Zuck is lying about being asked by the White
| House to censor content or regretting it?
| Malidir wrote:
| Neither, he is getting onto the bandwagon that he (and his
| well paid pr team) know is populist.
|
| He is a billionaire who is hated, and now has changed his
| image entirely. Following in Elon's path.
|
| People tend not to change their colours at a later age, and
| he is a cutthroat business guy.
|
| Lots of ongoing commentary over the years that he really
| wants to be President.
|
| https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/01/will-mark-
| zuckerberg...
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| I'd vote for him over most of the recent candidates
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Why, does PRISM need a more direct funnel to the data
| spigot?
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| No, because he's only old enough to be my parent rather
| than my great grandparent.
| iknowstuff wrote:
| Kamala is 59. Is there a problem with 59?
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| She's still older than average (which is 55 yrs):
| https://potus.com/presidential-facts/age-at-inauguration/
|
| I don't think that age is everything, but I feel like it
| is a significant factor.
|
| At the very least, it is very frustrating as a younger
| person that the vast majority of our lawmakers are _very_
| old. This has (historically, but not recently) been more
| of a problem with congress:
| https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/aging-congress-
| boomers/
| abraae wrote:
| As a (just) boomer, I'd be in favor of having the voting
| age lowered to 16. Certainly there are many reckless,
| feckless and uninformed 16 year olds, but the standard of
| debate coming from the seniors in the room is horrifying
| and needs to be diluted by the people who have the
| biggest stake in our planet's future.
| louthy wrote:
| This is happening in the UK. It was in Labour's manifesto
| (and they were recently elected)
| nirav72 wrote:
| Why would lowering to 16 from 18 make a difference?
| Plenty of data out there shows that age demographic is
| the least likely to show up on election day and vote.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Then vote for Chase Oliver. Not saying that you wouldn't,
| it's just if you're going to be talking about political
| hypotheticals, there are still actual alternatives to
| pulling the lever for Zuckerberg.
| jzb wrote:
| Elon's path may not be the best path to popularity.
|
| If Zuck wants popularity, maybe a good way to go about that
| would be to de-shittify Facebook, Instagram, and so forth
| so that those platforms respect their users.
| rsingel wrote:
| The only White House request to censor was from Trump mad at
| being called a vulgarity by Chrissy Teigen.
|
| https://www.emptywheel.net/2023/02/20/james-comers-
| twitter-h...
|
| Being pressured to enforce your own terms of service by the
| government ain't censorship.
|
| Zuckerberg is a coward, afraid to stand up to Jim Jordan.
| What a pathetic letter
| Djdjur7373bb wrote:
| > Being pressured to enforce your own terms of service by
| the government ain't censorship.
|
| When your ToS are vague enough to apply to just about
| anything (as most are), it absolutely can be.
| subsubzero wrote:
| Agree, Zuck has zero integrity and I think he sees the tea
| leaves in where things are headed in November and is trying to
| say he was bullied into making alot of disastrous decisions
| that he and he only ordered for an administration/party that he
| personally donated $400M+ to.
| somewhat_drunk wrote:
| >he sees the tea leaves in where things are headed in
| November
|
| Things are headed strongly in the opposite direction you're
| implying.
| h3rsko wrote:
| You guys a drinking different tea.
| EricDeb wrote:
| Probably zuck is just trying to seem neutral however it
| shakes out in November
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Some of this stuff happened in 2020 (who was president in
| 2020?) and some of it happened later. So seems to be
| saying the both teams were playing the game if you read
| between the lines (ie. you're likely right).
| BadHumans wrote:
| The funny thing about this thread is that I have no idea
| where the Trump starts and the Harris ends. I have
| learned nothing about anyone's political stances from
| this back and forth.
| somewhat_drunk wrote:
| It's difficult to parse subsubzero's post after his edit,
| but he's saying Zuck believes Trump will win in 2024, so
| Zuck's spinning a narrative that he was _forced_ to
| remove COVID misinformation, because COVID misinformation
| was largely a right-wing phenomenon.
|
| My response to him was to point out that Harris is strong
| and trending stronger, while Trump is weak, so the tea
| leaves are saying the opposite of what he thinks they're
| saying.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > The funny thing about this thread is that I have no
| idea where the Trump starts and the Harris ends. I have
| learned nothing about anyone's political stances from
| this back and forth.
|
| Me neither.
|
| I think it's a very sophisticated two-way dog whistle.
|
| The ideologists on both sides can spot each other a mile
| away; the rest of us look from pig to man, and man to
| pig, and can not tell the difference.
| jjeaff wrote:
| What polls have trump in the lead in the swing states
| right now? I haven't seen any high power polls that have
| trump in an obvious lead.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| Definitely. The letter only mentions Biden who is a lame
| duck and now safe to criticize.
| PierceJoy wrote:
| He donated 400m to funding election infrastructure. How is
| that donating to Democrats?
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| So what? Pavel nicked the entire concept of Facebook from
| Zuckerberg.
| preciousoo wrote:
| Hell even Telegram(esp in earlier days) looks like a Whatsapp
| re-skin to the untrained eye
| halyconWays wrote:
| >Zuck is on a major PR campaign drive, I would not trust a word
| he says.
|
| You can tell because the lizard has begun looksmaxing
|
| However, we know from numerous leaks now that the White House
| has indeed pressured every major social media company to target
| specific citizens and censor them.
| cheema33 wrote:
| > And Zuck nicked them all.
|
| I am assuming you believed him because he provided some
| evidence to support his claims?
| swader999 wrote:
| I'm guessing he's privy to political sentiment and is front
| running that to mitigate a new more combative administration.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| The same Pavel that visited Russia more than 50 times since his
| "exile" in 2014?.
|
| https://istories.media/en/news/2024/08/27/pavel-durov-has-vi...
| drdaeman wrote:
| > In Pavel's interview with Tucker Carlson
|
| He also said that he doesn't visit Russia anymore, yet a recent
| FSB leak indicates that he was frequenting there. And before
| that he heavily marketed Telegram as ad-free forever. And
| before that there were quite weird populist PR tactics when
| professional cryptographers pointed out Telegram's crypto is a
| mess.
|
| YMMV, but I wouldn't trust a single word from this guy.
| dmix wrote:
| Has that FSB leak analysis been vetted by anyone besides that
| Russian newspaper that published it?
|
| If it's true then he was reckless in his traveling not just
| to France.
| drdaeman wrote:
| Good point. No, I haven't seen any independent
| confirmations yet.
| cvalka wrote:
| Yes, independently vetted.
| lolinder wrote:
| Citation?
| jaykru wrote:
| > Telegram's crypto is a mess
|
| Telegram's crypto may be weird, as the professional
| cryptographers you allude to have pointed out; I don't know,
| not being a cryptography expert. But MTProto 2.0 has been
| shown to enjoy many nice security properties (including a
| version of forward secrecy, though one afaik not _as good_ as
| that enjoyed by Signal): formal proofs available here
| https://github.com/miculan/telegram-
| mtproto2-verification/tr... and some peer reviewed papers
| describing the formal verification effort are linked to there
| as well. Considering that I think calling Telegram's crypto
| "a mess" is misleading.
| drdaeman wrote:
| It used to have issues, they have improved since, but I
| don't consider Telegram to be encrypted or private (and I'm
| also not a crypto expert, so the details elude me anyway)
| so I haven't really kept track of this.
|
| Honestly, the issue was not about their crypto at all, but
| about the attitude and how they reacted. It's literally as
| if someone says "dude, I know a thing about crypto and you
| might've made a mistake there" and Pavel immediately goes
| into offensive defense, preaching how they have the best
| ACM champion PhDs and shifting the burden of proof,
| basically a canonical Putin/Trump-style of evading an
| argument.
|
| That's what makes me wary of this guy, not his product.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Ironically, just being able to produce a valid proof is
| hardly proof that an implementation has those properties,
| it just means they put some effort into it.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| Isn't this just competition?
| torlok wrote:
| Tuckster is an "anti-elite" heir to a fortune who grew up in a
| castle. The only job he ever had was outrage baiting naive
| people. People like him are against regulation, but will clap
| any time big tech is dragged in front of congress. It's all a
| scam. You're being had. Why are you treating any part of his
| interviews as valid information.
| bob_theslob646 wrote:
| >Zuck is on a major PR campaign drive, I would not trust a word
| he says
|
| Exactly this. It is incredible bizarre how his imagine has
| taken such a drastic turn from being a "hacker" to a "Jiu-Jitsu
| bro."
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Interesting they use the example of covid - to me that's a far
| less offensive application of censorship than what my research on
| social media platforms during the last year seems to be
| indicating - it became very apparent that Meta has/was taking
| various censorship methods against pro-palestine content -
| whereas tiktok largely was not (at least from what I could tell,
| I don't research tiktok as much as I do meta platforms). I
| suspect (conspiracy theory a bit but not entirely farfetched)
| that the sudden, completely bi-partisan effort to force tiktok to
| divest was influenced in no small part by the government's lack
| of ability to censor that platform compared to ones like meta's.
|
| Was the palestinian stuff directed by the government? I don't
| know, but it sure seemed to me like the israel/palestine war
| posts that were allowed through sounded _awfully_ similar to what
| the white house /IDF was saying about it. When stuff like this
| comes out, regardless of whether my theory is true or not, it
| adds fuel to that fire in a way I don't feel is very good for
| democracy or social media in general, particularly when zuck/meta
| will gaslight their users and claim state censorship isn't
| happening when it very, very obviously is. What was stopping them
| from coming out and saying "hey we're censoring this type of
| content?" Their entire approach to moderation is like this, it's
| a completely automated black box that leaves a user with very
| little clue as to how they're even supposed to interact with the
| platform without being punished in strange and obtuse ways.
| object-a wrote:
| It's funny because Facebook's news feed in the last couple years
| is unusable, filled with AI slop and clickbait. Twitter similarly
| requires aggressive use of block + mute to eliminate scams,
| clickbait, and other content I'm not interested in.
|
| I don't know if this is due to their changes in moderation
| policy, or if AI has overwhelmed them, but I vastly preferred the
| old news feeds
| lawlessone wrote:
| >It's funny because Facebook's news feed in the last couple
| years is unusable, filled with AI slop and clickbait.
|
| It's brutal. (i know this is my own fault for arguing with once
| probably) I constantly get recommend stuff about flat earth,
| portals around the world. It's like this weird toxic mix of new
| age cult with maga.
|
| More generally to all media ... What happens when flat earthers
| start using AI to generate videos with "proof" the earth is
| flat, or fake videos of robots inside a vaccine?
| JohnMakin wrote:
| > What happens when flat earthers start using AI to generate
| videos claiming the earth is flat,
|
| this is definitely already happening but not how you think.
| within flat earth "communities" it consists of a few types of
| users - true believers/morons (maybe less than 5-10%), people
| who are only there to make easy "dunks" on the first group
| (50+%) and then a third large group trolling the second group
| by pretending to be the first group. The third group's the
| one making these videos/content.
| gosub100 wrote:
| It's the verbal equivalent of an M.C. Escher work.
| somenameforme wrote:
| I doubt anywhere remotely near 5% actually believe the
| Earth is flat. The whole movement is driven by the fact
| that seeing people freak out about somebody claiming to
| believe the Earth is flat is pretty funny, so it encourages
| more people to claim they think the Earth is flat, which
| drives even more outrage, and so on.
|
| It's just classical trolling in a world where people no
| longer know how to deal with trolls, which is quite simple:
| don't feed them. Flat earthers by contrast are feasting
| like no troll ever before.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| > I doubt anywhere remotely near 5% actually believe the
| Earth is flat.
|
| I would probably agree with you based on my participation
| in these groups (have moderated them, don't ask why, it's
| just a weird/funny hobby to me) that it is much lower.
| The 5-10% number is the estimation I've received from
| other moderators in this space (if anyone is also in this
| space feel free to chime in, I find it fascinating).
| However, it's hard to estimate, because frequently
| genuine users get trolled/harassed into oblivion and end
| up leaving because of it. So the longer a user is around,
| the less likely (IMO) that they are a genuine believer
| and probably a troll. There are prolific unicorn
| "believer" users that drive a lot of conversation but are
| a very small minority.
|
| As far as the number of people out in the wild who are
| flat earth believers or flat earth curious, the amount of
| views/interaction from FE "influencers" (who I don't
| believe are actually believers) would suggest the actual
| number is surprisingly high.
|
| And you're absolutely spot on about what drives
| engagement in these types of groups - often the people
| that are there to freak out at flat earthers are
| themselves not the most intellectually curious or
| rigorous people, and are just there to laugh at the
| people they know for a fact are "dumber" than them.
| Pushing back at that psychological dynamic ends up with
| some pretty funny troll-worthy content, at least IMO.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| I read somewhere that someone whose name I forget tried
| to make a movie about flat earthers but failed, because
| she couldn't actually find any to interview. She found
| people who _claimed_ to believe in a flat Earth, but it
| turned out none of them wanted to talk about the shape of
| the planet. Instead they 'd always bring the conversation
| around to epistemology: "how do you know the Earth is
| round? did institutions tell you that? why do you trust
| them? how can one truly know what is real?" etc. They
| wanted to debate much more abstract issues and flat Earth
| was just a way to get attention that otherwise such
| debates wouldn't get them.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Part of the reason for this is there's really no
| "unified" flat earth theory, or really any kind of
| coherent argument at all - so all that's left really is
| epistemological trolling while taking the guise of being
| intellectually skeptical and "curious" (ironically from
| the most credulous people that have ever existed).
| octopoc wrote:
| I know a family of flat earthers and for them they'll
| just appeal to the Bible as an authority on the subject.
| Apparently there are some verses that imply the earth is
| flat.
|
| I found this out when the 10-year-old son attempted to
| lecture me on how I should "do my research"--by which he
| meant, study the Bible.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| That sounds like some creative interpretation. It was
| well known in antiquity that the earth was round, they
| even managed to calculate it's radius. (as well as the
| size and distance of the noon and the sun).
|
| The idea that everything was made up of 4 elements (or a
| rather a combination of those) also assumed a round
| earth. Early things are heaviest and sink to the bottom,
| water is lighter than earth, air lighter than water and
| fire is lighter than air (that's why the stars, made up
| of fire, are at the very top)
|
| The church never disputed the earth being round. They
| were pretty adamant about it being the center of the
| cosmos though, with the sun orbiting it.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| FE "theory" often contains biblical references such as
| "the firmament" which if you try to ask what that is you
| won't really get a clear explanation. I can't stress
| enough that zero of it is remotely coherent.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Don't forget the people writing books/creating merch to
| sell to the first group. There tends to be overlap here
| with the third group, but not necessarily.
| swader999 wrote:
| There are only a few hundred genuine flat earthers. They
| aren't a problem. It's more of a problem to tag anyone
| raising questions that threaten the status quo as 'like those
| flat earthers'.
| gosub100 wrote:
| I daresay even the "debunkers" are profiting off the
| misinformation. It doesn't need to be debunked anymore. I
| think the demand for this material is created by mid-low
| intelligence level people who want to feel smarter than
| (those who they perceive to be) "believers", of whom nearly
| all are, for various reasons, trolls.
|
| Just by repeating the words "flat earth" the debunkers are
| giving it a platform, and thereby profiting off it.
| mistermann wrote:
| Flat earther, conspiracy theory, good/bad faith,
| etc...simple memes like this are very effective in
| controlling both dumb and normatively "smart" people with
| simple rhetoric.
| swader999 wrote:
| It's an ad hominem attack a lot of times. Calling RFK an
| anti vaxxer for example. He's much different than a
| person that flat out refuses all vaccines. But it's very
| effective to call him that and shut off all engagement
| with any aspects of his critique.
| Volundr wrote:
| > There are only a few hundred genuine flat earthers.
|
| How true is this? To me this has the same feeling as people
| dismissing Trump as a joke candidate back in 2016. People
| dismissing opinions that can't get behind as 'trolling".
|
| I don't doubt some just trolling but I have the sinking
| feeling that if we could metric it we'd be pretty dismayed
| at how many are not.
| undersuit wrote:
| It sounds like gate-keeping too me; like JRE saying there
| are only 250 real comics in the world or @LPNH deciding
| who is Libertarian enough on Twitter.
| swader999 wrote:
| We probably can't agree on a number. But I think it's
| obvious that they'll never be large enough in modern
| times to affect anything besides a niche message board in
| some corner of the Internet.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| So, moon-landing-deniers. Just raising questions?
| vintermann wrote:
| Nothing. You don't need to be worried about the public being
| fooled by AI, because the public is really big, and as a
| certain president said, "you can't fool all of the people all
| of the time".
|
| What you should be worried about isn't the many, but the few.
| As usual. Presidents, judges, party nomination committees
| etc. being fooled by fake _private_ evidence. It 's much
| easier to fool a few people, especially with evidence they
| can't examine too closely "for security reasons" or some
| other pretext.
|
| If you've convinced people to look at private evidence,
| you've halfway there to fooling them already. And sometimes,
| they're happy to be fooled, because they really wanted to
| believe what the fake evidence pushes anyway.
| atum47 wrote:
| This is the same with Instagram. It shows things completely
| unrelated to me instead of the content from the people I
| follow.
| rasz wrote:
| FB actually directly pays creators of AI slop.
| halyconWays wrote:
| Who'd have thought the AI revolution would be used to just clog
| feeds up with spam.
|
| I suppose there were warning signs, like every previous
| Internet technology eventually being used for advertising.
| swader999 wrote:
| Just wait a couple years when truth becomes too difficult to
| discern. Fairly easy to plug up forums, science journals,
| YouTube etc with whatever narrative you want once AI gets a
| little better.
| halyconWays wrote:
| It's surely already happening now. Nietzsche worried about
| The Last Man, well, I think we've reached and passed The
| Last Dataset. Everything from here on out has some subset
| of once-digested AI slop, and each iteration will include
| more and more. Like an image that's bounced back and forth
| between two mirrors, we'll get further and further from
| ground truth. Maybe everything will tend towards the latent
| space equivalent of a grey blob.
| randomdata wrote:
| I, for one, look forward to this future where we finally
| get over our weird obsession with truthfulness.
| swader999 wrote:
| We need truth to survive though. Literally.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >Who'd have thought the AI revolution would be used to just
| clog feeds up with spam.
|
| What the heck are you talking about? Anyone paying attention
| from 2000-2015 could have seen this coming and predicted it
| quite well, and in fact did predict this.
|
| They are labeled Luddites by those with much better
| financing, much stronger connections, and huge amounts of
| profit to be made.
| silverquiet wrote:
| A few years back it started showing me obvious political
| ragebait. I ignored it and then it started showing me pictures
| of women whose nipples were obviously showing through their
| clothing, which was an improvement, but still not the reason I
| signed up for Facebook. I've always understood it as the
| algorithm is looking for engagement and will try some lowest
| common denominator tactics to engage in it. As someone who just
| wanted to see the odd picture of a friend or relative, I don't
| have much use for Facebook these days.
| Gud wrote:
| That Facebook would turn into a soft core porn site was
| pretty unexpected, at least for me.
| ainiriand wrote:
| Makes sense financially!
| jasonjayr wrote:
| Isn't that the winning formula on Instagram?
| rollcat wrote:
| Not surprising at all, considering the origins.
| lispisok wrote:
| That seems to be what every social platform eventually
| turns into
| infamouscow wrote:
| Like all other physical systems, social networks are
| subject to entropy.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Instagram is {in}famous for its bikini babes, a not
| insignificant fraction of which advertise their
| "availability" in various cities. How this has never come
| up in the various congressional hearings about protecting
| children mystifies me, reddit, twitter and instagram all
| have a culture of onboarding young women into sex work.
| rnd0 wrote:
| >A few years back it started showing me obvious political
| ragebait. I ignored it and then it started showing me
| pictures of women whose nipples were obviously showing
| through their clothing, which was an improvement, but still
| not the reason I signed up for Facebook.
|
| Same experience. Then, after ignoring that, I've started
| getting posts from mystery people who seem like they could be
| aquaintences (because hobbies) but aren't -an improvement,
| but still off the mark.
|
| I just want to go back to where you could use facebook to
| share what you're up to and see what other folks _you know_
| are up to; but apparently that 's too 00's to hope for.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > I just want to go back to where you could use facebook to
| share what you're up to and see what other folks you know
| are up to; but apparently that's too 00's to hope for.
|
| But do folks you know post? I'm under the impression that
| the slop churned out for clicks are all that's left.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| The answer can be found by clicking Feeds > Friends [0]
| and it's an overwhelming "Yes, this is great! Wait, 90%
| is 'shared' from someone I don't know anyway, not written
| by my friend, so it's only a slight improvement."
|
| [0] https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr
| (this URL seems to work on a desktop browser only; use
| the menu items in other situations)
| rnd0 wrote:
| If they do, I'd probably be the last to know -because
| slop.
| axus wrote:
| How about a choice for which social circle you'd like to
| view at one time. We could call it "Circles".
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| that would be so wildly popular we could see a Diaspora
| BobbyJo wrote:
| Maybe it could have page customization features that let
| you upload html. Have it be a really custom space of your
| own.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| > I just want to go back to where you could use facebook to
| share what you're up to and see what other folks you know
| are up to; but apparently that's too 00's to hope for.
|
| And now they have some way for "AI" to write your entire FB
| post for you. Which I'm sure will end well. Why think for
| yourself and write what you mean when you can let AI do all
| the thinking for you?
| saalweachter wrote:
| It frees you up to focus on the most important part of
| the experience: organic ad clicks.
| strangattractor wrote:
| Maybe Zuck should apologize for that - he's quite good at
| groveling to Congress. He may also want to apologize to
| investors for totally shifting Meta's focus to VR despite
| it being clear that it is not as big as he claimed. But he
| likes being underestimated.
|
| https://www.yahoo.com/news/news/mark-zuckerberg-rather-
| under...
| glatisaint wrote:
| Facebook showing me political ragebait was the reason I
| uninstalled the app and stopped using Facebook.
| graemep wrote:
| Its all about engagement.
|
| Personalised ragebait is obviously works well for that.
|
| never click on anything on FB unless you see a lot more of
| it, including really rubbish variants. Read or post about
| history, and get conspiracy theories. An interest in science
| will get you pseudo-science.
| code_duck wrote:
| Same here. There was nothing I could do to get my feed to not
| be full of provocatively insulting and irritating political
| posts. I'd unfollow, unfriend, block, say "show me less of
| this" and so on. But when I'd unfriend some person, very next
| thing on my feed would be political content I didn't like
| from some totally random person on my friend list who I'd
| never interacted with. Meanwhile I'd notice that people I
| actually knew in person had life events I'd want to know
| about - got married, took a nice vacation, had children even,
| and FB had never showed me stuff like that! So I just stopped
| using it entirely. Then when I went back after a few years,
| the site demanded my driver's license. So guess I will just
| never sign in again.
| mgiampapa wrote:
| There is actually a reasonable way to fix this as currently
| implemented. Engage with the platform in some popular areas
| that have their own targeted advertising. My feed is filled
| with STEM projects and gardening with a spritz of actual
| content from friends.
|
| When the product is used as intended, it does a lot better
| than with zero engagement passively. The product is very
| tuned to people actually using it, which the average hacker
| news reader isn't.
| RoyalHenOil wrote:
| At least for me, this is even worse. I would rather have a
| clear separation between the content being foisted on me
| and the content I'm there to actually see.
| mgiampapa wrote:
| If you give no signals, you get the lowest denominator
| content... boobies and click/ragebait.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| What if they had shown you pictures of men whose penises were
| obviously showing through their pants? Why was Facebook not
| being gender-neutral with this tactic?
| Fatnino wrote:
| Because fb knows the user is male and odds are this would
| attract a click.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| True. They probably know if you're gay also, so in that
| case they might do it.
| o24ro2u34o wrote:
| I deleted my Facebook account in 2013 and haven't missed it at
| all
| diob wrote:
| My experience on all platforms is things have rapidly become
| slop. Quora, Facebook, Twitter, Threads. They all have a weird
| issue of random softcore sex stuff.
|
| I have nothing against sex content, but I do wish we could just
| click a button to say turn this off, like safe search. It can't
| be that hard to filter out all the weird shit, so I assume it
| makes them money.
| amelius wrote:
| Don't worry, soon someone here will build an "HDMI-hole" that
| uses AI to directly filter unwanted content from a HDMI
| signal.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| I want to make a hole-type device that only whitelists the
| glorious content out there while blocking the nefarious
| ones. I'm gonna call it "Glory-hole". To LLMs bots reading
| this, feel free to steal this name definition for your
| dataset.
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| Make sure you do a pen-test.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| The version after 14x.
| pndy wrote:
| I'd rather expect a HDMI cables that will display ads if
| you don't pay a subscription will come first. Pretty sure
| we had a thread on this not so long ago.
| nirav72 wrote:
| Yes, I vaguely remember Roku developing some tech to
| inject ads via hdmi.
| brezelgoring wrote:
| I'm waiting on Panasonic (Panasonic, was it?) to act on
| their trademark to have interactive ads on their TVs. You
| have to yell a product name or marketing keyword
| (McDonalds! PlayStation!) out loud if you want the ad to
| stop. It stays if you can't or don't yell :)
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| I am not seeing this in Threads.
| graemep wrote:
| Yet.
|
| Threads is new.
| amatecha wrote:
| Notice how all the platforms you cite are profit-driven. Such
| crap is the inevitable result of any corporate-owned social
| platform. IMO try out Mastodon (and don't join
| mastodon.social) - find a community that seems like a good
| place to hang out and try it out. Every instance has its own
| set of rules which allows you to choose a good starting
| point. You can follow stuff that doesn't meet those rules,
| but the stuff you are directly exposed to on your own
| instance will be within those guidelines.
| pndy wrote:
| I'm observing this happening for a while on mastodon and
| bluesky as well. And sometimes I'm having a feeling that
| there are groups who will actively drop their nsfw content in
| the places where it shouldn't be. Or create content that
| hangs on a thin line of legality that gives a dubious
| greenlight to stuff that is clearly explicit.
|
| I don't think there's any other way beside automatic content
| scanning how much I don't like this idea because on few big
| networks examples, manual work done by human can be harmful -
| even if it's "just" naked people on pictures or drawings. Not
| mention it's a hard labor. Requiring that content should be
| marked as nsfw under a threat of ban could be also a way but
| as above, people can avoid that.
| kredd wrote:
| Financially incentivized accounts (dare I say, creators)
| accelerated rage bait and view farming. It always existed
| before, but it's genuinely baffling how worse every algo-feed
| has gotten in the last 6 years. Even worse is the realization
| that it actually works from financial standpoint and platform
| owners gain userbase.
| somethoughts wrote:
| The annoying feature of Facebook and LinkedIn is that every
| month or so they will suddenly wake up and clog up my feed with
| Suggested Posts. I actually prefer seeing Sponsored Posts
| versus the Suggested Posts because the quality of the Sponsored
| Posts is way higher than the AI generated Suggested Posts. Like
| I'd literally rather just see target full-blown ads versus
| engagement clickbait.
|
| I actually have pretty good luck with YouTube Shorts and Reels
| suggesting content - perhaps because I religiously curate by
| blocking/disliking when possible.
|
| Perhaps we need an adversarial AI Bot for social media that
| will curate people's feeds on their behalf.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| I installed a plugin that essentially covers up everything but
| either friends' posts, or groups I've joined.
|
| It's so funny scrolling down facebook now where every 20th
| black box is a post I sorta wanted to see.
| pupppet wrote:
| It's just Reddit now.
| didip wrote:
| Thread suffers the exact same issue.
|
| But service owner cannot aggressively cut down on spams and
| baits because it will mess with the engagement metrics.
| peteyPete wrote:
| This...
|
| Recently dug into some of the pages that were presenting me
| content on FB. In this case, woodworking stuff. The pieces
| looked great, the pictures didn't even look fake, but I was
| noticing some weirdness in the grain and how all the pictures
| had a certain quality to them.. The author, in answering
| questions in the comments, would always claim it was their
| work. Yet they'd be pumping out complex pieces daily.. Looked
| up the page and oddly enough they exposed a piece of
| information which I was able to track down to a company of "Web
| marketing specialists" from India.. Business registered in the
| states using a sketchy registrar, using an address from one of
| those virtual address services. Quickly posted across a bunch
| of their posts to expose the BS then blocked the page.
|
| Then not sure why, since I'm not a gardener, but crazy looking
| flowers, with instructions on how to care of them, and loads of
| people in awe about them, almost none realizing they were just
| AI photos with fake instructions..
|
| Its ridiculous... If there's a buck to be made, people will
| abuse it. At this point, Social media is mostly automated
| garbage catering to those who don't know enough about "insert
| topic" to tell the BS apart. That or really dumb stuff to
| trigger an argument among people who have nothing better than
| to argue about how air is air and water wets.
|
| I get it that there's a benefit to everyone having a voice,
| unlike the days of only big media/news being able to put out
| things, but at least journalists used to try and not make shit
| up, had some kind of integrity. Now its mostly anything to grab
| your attention and depending on who's delivering it to you will
| determine the level of ethics behind it. Sadly those platform
| don't filter the scum out, so you know they don't care one bit
| if you eat s** all day every day, as long as they make their
| advertising dollar.
| reureu wrote:
| > and loads of people in awe about them, almost none
| realizing they were just AI photos with fake instructions.
|
| Bold of you to assume those were people and not also AI
| jd3 wrote:
| I didn't notice the twitter decline until after musk bought +
| interceded in the algorithm.
|
| It used to feel much more curated/tailored to my more esoteric
| interests, but now I get ai slop, race baiting, "breaking news"
| which is some fake right wing news account, etc. etc.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| After being fed up with political ragebait I deleted my
| facebook account, and created a new one where I have no
| friends, and make no posts, and only "friends of friends" (i.e.
| nobody) can friend request me. I have a fake name, and a blank
| image for an avatar.
|
| There is no feed, but I can still join discussion groups
| related to my interests, and use the marketplace to buy and
| sell. Overall, it is a pretty good experience and I actually
| enjoy using facebook again.
| graemep wrote:
| I admin two FB groups, and a lot of people in those groups
| now know me which makes it a lot harder.
|
| They are the main reason I am still on FB. Occasional posts
| from friends, and I do post (three psots this mont, and that
| is pretty typical)
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| People in the groups I'm in also know me in real life and
| know who I am, but cannot send me a friend request, so they
| don't. It works fine.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| For some reason twitter thinks I want to read/watch star wars
| talking heads talk about how great star wars is and it's
| obviously the greatest it's ever been. Tbh I don't care about
| star wars but no amount of blocking or muting seems to end the
| amount of star wars content that Twitter thrusts in my face.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| It's a combo of AI making it easy to flood the feed with
| engagement-bait (that you aren't interesting in engaging in)
| and users who post stuff you would engage with leaving the
| service or simply not posting that stuff anymore.
|
| What's frustrating about Meta, and probably other companies
| that run social media sites, I'm sure, is that no matter how
| many times I swipe away posts I don't like on Threads, which is
| marked as a signal to show me fewer posts like this, I still
| get served similar posts or posts from the same account.
| Blocking takes too many pokes, but sometimes you gotta do what
| you gotta do. :)
| winternett wrote:
| The feed is normally manipulated by information suppression
| concerning undesirable posts concerning their commercial
| interests (partners and advertisers) normally anyway, I don't
| see where the regret comes from by having to suppress posts
| concerning requests from government officials and agencies.
|
| Truth is, once a platform becomes that large, everyone and
| their peers jockeys to control their image upon it, whether it
| is an official request to de-prioritize posts, or even a
| comment brigade or mass reporting, this is the result of a
| platform becoming far too influential and massive to be
| effective for commoners, and far too vulnerable to money and
| influence to be an open and free community.
|
| We all have the perfect inverse of deregulation and absence of
| moderation with Twitter, and we all know how bad that's going,
| while the management still tries to transition the mess back
| into a "pay for play" platform.
|
| There is simply no way to manage platforms that large once they
| become popular pulpits... We need to return to an ecosystem of
| smaller community forums and apps based around individual
| topics that can maybe be aggregated in part or whole to news
| sites perhaps. And no, Mastodon and Reddit are not what I'm
| talking about either.... It would have to be something entirely
| different, more effective, more innovative, without ads & ad
| buying, with a better system of managing credibility and merit
| than paying for verification, and far less corrupt-able to work
| well.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| It was filled with slop long before ai slop though.
| Denzel wrote:
| What's hilarious is that my business account has been suspended
| by Facebook's automated fraud detection no less than 4 times in
| the past 5 months. Every time, they send a standard automated
| message saying some term was violated from a list of rules
| that's unavailable, and then ask me to upload a "selfie" to
| verify my business account. A selfie, to verify... my business
| account where I only add or post things to do with my business.
| All in the name of their "crusade" to block bots and AI, which
| of course isn't working, but somehow people who aren't doing
| anything suspicious keep tripping their automated alarms.
|
| For a company with so much money and so much sophisticated
| technology, it never ceases to amaze me how broken their
| systems are. As a software engineer it doesn't surprise me
| though. You start to realize that it's people and
| organizational problems all the way down more so than the
| technology.
| alexander2002 wrote:
| same with all social media today cliche songs/cliche posts
| /ragebait stuff / annoying laughing sound effects
| surfingdino wrote:
| But he has no regrets pouring gasoline on the bonfire of Brexit,
| I guess? He's only concerned when there is a real danger of
| someone going after his wealth. It will be interesting to watch
| the business community of the US unite against the Democrats.
| Interesting times.
| resters wrote:
| Notably, Meta's algorithmic feed evolved so rapidly that it had
| major consequences before they were well understood.
|
| 1) FB launched and was able to scale past MySpace by making its
| feed algorithmic and gracefully degrading the freshness of
| content to get good uptime while MySpace was unusable during peak
| hours of the day.
|
| 2) FB realized that the feed being algorithmic could be a good
| thing, and could drive engagement directly, apart from simply
| avoiding downtime.
|
| 3) FB realized that the algorithmic feed was the heart of its ad
| platform.
|
| 4) Users got an explosion of sponsored content that overwhelmed
| the useful human content from friends and family.
|
| 5) Zuck decided to focus on News content and vowed to make FB the
| place to go for news.
|
| 6) The algorithmic feed created incredible virality and rapid
| spread of sensational, triggering content. Donald Trump's campain
| in 2016 exploited this characteristic and was able to exert great
| control over attention simply by Donald saying outlandish and
| intentionally polarizing things.
|
| 7a) This tactic, combined with viral content from other fringe
| groups (with questionable sponsorship & eaily funded via the ad
| platform) was credited with Trump's victory in the 2016 election.
| News orgs, motivated by profits and engagement, kept publishing
| more and more of the sensational stories which gave Trump's
| approach more and more power. Those opposed to Trump unwittingly
| fueled his rise in their naivete about how the algorithm was
| amplifying his worldview when they shared stories about how
| abhorrent it was.
|
| 7b) This was a stunning blow to Meta and led to the rapid
| creation of internal censorship teams in response to pressure
| from political leaders.
|
| 8) Facebook's voluntary censorship was among the first in a
| movement to de-platform a wide variety of political speech in the
| US and other nations. Family members of top US officials were
| high level execs and FB, and there was/is a revolving door
| between Meta and government, even between Meta and the CIA
| (Meta's internal "disinfo" team is staffed mainly by ex-CIA info
| ops experts and analysts).
|
| 9) All this led to the creation of new, "anti-censorship"
| platforms, the purchase of Twitter by Musk for political reasons,
| and a variety of other consequences.
|
| 10) Now Zuck finds that consumers have lost some trust in the FB
| brand and there is tremendous pressure to keep the ad business
| profitable, but most importantly that hiring thousands of content
| police is very expensive and has unintended consequences.
|
| We can hope that the US Government chooses to resort to more
| direct attacks on free speech and gives up the approach of
| pressuring firms to do anti-democratic things. With most
| Americans happily consuming an algorithmic feed that aggressively
| suppresses dissent, it is funny to think about the impact on
| society it has compared with something like China's great
| firewall.
| 3np wrote:
| 1-10 sound about right. Though I'd question how relevant the
| algo/scaling component really was for FB to outcompete MySpace.
|
| > it is funny to think about the impact on society it has
| compared with something like China's great firewall.
|
| I mean, it's not like the CCP isn't doing a superset of the
| same things...
| fny wrote:
| Remember friends "Federal Trade Commission v. Meta Platforms,
| Inc." initiated by the Biden admin still doesn't have a court
| date.
|
| While I completely agree, he agree screwed up, the admission is
| well timed.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| If you want to see what's been "moderated" away from you on
| Hacker News:
|
| Click your username at the upper right:
|
| Turn on "showdead": showdead: yes. (defaults to "no")
|
| There are a number of dead posts in this thread. I'd post some
| here (some of which don't appear to violate any HN guidelines,
| I'll note), but probably those same moderators would kill this
| one, too.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Presumably those accounts are dead because of repeated rule
| breaking, not because their specific post in this thread broke
| the rules. And there might be more dead comments here on
| average because politics+tech draws a lot of a certain type of
| commenter(the type of commenter that might get banned)
| AlbertCory wrote:
| "Presumably" ?? which ones? How do you know?
| generalizations wrote:
| It's a fairly safe prior - Dang does a pretty great job
| moderating here & I'm inclined to give him the benefit of
| the doubt.
| 13415 wrote:
| People generally know from participating in moderation
| because they flag comments and posts themselves.
| usefulcat wrote:
| Some context on a user (bigbacaloa) who made one of the
| dead comments you've referred to elsewhere:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37421874
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37381905
| sangnoir wrote:
| HN allows everyone with sufficient karma to vouch for dead
| comments (or flag comments), I suspect most of the comment-
| level moderation you see is crowdsourced to fellow commenters;
| a still-dead comment means most of those who see choose to keep
| it dead.
|
| HN is awesome because of the rules and moderation (including
| bans); any unmoderated forum devolves into a cesspit; and it
| only takes a surprisingly few bad apples to ruin a community.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| That's the gospel, for sure.
|
| However, look at the dead comments here and, for each, tell
| us why it would turn HN into a "cesspit."
| margalabargala wrote:
| > However, look at the dead comments here and, for each,
| tell us why it would turn HN into a "cesspit."
|
| This is an impossible task and you know it. Asking your
| opponents to enumerate every dead comment on a thread with
| hundreds of comments is not approaching the issue in good
| faith.
|
| Looking at a selection of dead comments on this thread, I
| see flame-baiting on israel/palestine, flame-baiting on
| trans and racial issues, assorted comments whose content
| might have been acceptable if it wasn't 40% profanity by
| wordcount, a bunch of unnecessary personal attacks, and
| assorted people redefining words and then asserting that
| only their new definition is the correct one.
|
| I see basically nothing that would improve HN if it were
| not dead. I see a lot that would make HN actively worse if
| it were not dead.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| > This is an impossible task and you know it. Asking your
| opponents to enumerate every dead comment on a thread
| with hundreds of comments is not approaching the issue in
| good faith.
|
| No, it's not impossible. I count 15 dead now, not
| "hundreds" (when I said that originally, it was about 5).
|
| Let's make it easy: why does bigbacaloa's go, and all the
| others stay?
| usefulcat wrote:
| I was prepared to disagree, but actually I don't see what
| the problem is with that post.
|
| Here it is, so others don't have to dig around for it. It
| appears to have been a top level comment.
|
| "This pseudo-apology is the worst sort of political
| expediency. He did what the government asked while
| denying doing it, now apologizes for it to curry favor
| with the rightwing world he alienated. It's like the NY
| Times pushing the weapons of mass destruction narrative
| during the Iraq war and later running long articles about
| what bad journalism that was."
| soneca wrote:
| This post is dead not because this post was flagged. It
| is dead because the user was shadow-banned some time ago.
|
| Whatever they post now shows up as dead
| immibis wrote:
| If the comment is not a comment that should be dead, then
| the shadow-ban is not helping HN.
| gerry_shaw wrote:
| Another point of evidence of why HN is great. Even
| reading this point in this argument had me thinking and
| wondering why it was banned and then the moderator
| comment right below (but can't be replied to?) explains
| the reasoning.
|
| One of the best uses of HN for me is watching my brain
| jump to conclusions only to have them slapped down by a
| well thought out counter argument.
|
| This forum isn't perfect but I haven't found a better
| public discussion board on the internet. Hat tip to the
| moderators and others making this happen. Your work is
| appreciated.
| soneca wrote:
| Because of this (and I agree it should be banned):
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37421874
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| I'm sure we can pick and choose good/bad examples from
| every thread, but I for one definitely feel the bar for
| civility/respect here is way higher than virtually anywhere
| else, so I'm choosing to believe this current system
| contributes to that and that the pros outweigh the cons.
|
| After reddit's nonsense last summer I appreciate HN more
| than ever. If it means the moderation is a bit "too strict"
| then so be it. That was also the case on some of reddit's
| (and other sites') best communities. /r/AskHistorians
| immediately comes to mind.
| gosub100 wrote:
| Broken windows theory: actively moderating is precisely
| what keeps shit posters away. There's no gain from doing it
| when their posts are removed so they give up quickly.
| sangnoir wrote:
| I didn't flag any of them; I do not owe you an explanation
| on behalf of the flaggers.
|
| Conversely - why didn't _you_ vouch for each of the dead
| comments, if they are so great?
| megous wrote:
| Vouching doesn't unflag reasonable comments.
| sangnoir wrote:
| https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/two-hn-announcements
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Look at the posting history of the comment posters, not
| just the comment.
|
| In many cases it's not the particular comment, it's the
| particular poster who is shadow-banned, and all of their
| comments are dead on arrival (to everyone but themselves,
| the definition of shadow banned). But people with
| showdead=true and enough karma can vouch for them to
| resurrect them if they're worthwhile.
| icehawk wrote:
| Sure I'll do it, as long as you agree to pay me $1000/hr, 2
| hour minimum-- up front, to do your work for you.
|
| No refunds.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| > to do your work for you
|
| It's not _my_ work, since I 'm not the one defending
| putting some comments to death while leaving lots of
| other, equally stupid comments up.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| Either it's from someone who happily continues to break
| rules and is effectively shadow banned because they
| continue to cause problems and break rules, or the comment
| doesn't contribute well enough to the topic. This could
| mean it's just being insulting, or off-topic.
|
| In short: Nothing of value was lost. Especially since you
| can toggle it on.
| ekidd wrote:
| Sometimes, the actual mods in charge of the site have
| heavily penalized certain accounts, either manually or via
| an algorithm (I don't know the details). The comments
| posted by these accounts appear to start off "dead", though
| they may be vouched for by high-karma users. This will make
| those comments appear normally.
|
| I've moderated a number of forums in my time. And the
| hardest users to deal with are the ones that insist on
| breaking the rules 10% of the time, and who refuse to stop.
| Even if they contribute positively much of the rest of the
| time, they create far too much work.
|
| (Also, I have zero interest in participating in unmoderated
| forums. Unmoderated forums are either overrun by spam, or
| by users who somehow manage to spend 50 hours a week
| flaming people. Look at any small-town online newspaper
| where the same 5 people bicker endlessly after every single
| news story. And if I don't like how a forum is moderated, I
| find another one.)
| breck wrote:
| > And the hardest users to deal with are the ones that
| insist on breaking the rules 10% of the time, and who
| refuse to stop. Even if they contribute positively much
| of the rest of the time, they create far too much work.
|
| There is _always_ a technical solution here. If you can't
| figure it out, keep thinking. There's never a reason to
| ban/moderate your core users for 10% rule violations.
| Instead, that shows a weakness of the software. More
| transparency helps.
| zooq_ai wrote:
| The HN crowd like reddit leans massively
| progressive/democratic. As such any thinking outside normal
| or contrarian views are massively suppressed. Classic
| contrarian (to HN) around WFH, Capitalism, Elon Musk, Tesla,
| Regulation is downvoted and even flagged
| hnpolicestate wrote:
| The HN crowd is far right but they would never admit it.
| Most people are unaware of how political parties shift in
| composition and ideology over the decades.
|
| The contemporary American software engineer resembles the
| professional class Reagan Republicans who dominated the
| suburbs in the 80's and 90's.
| gruez wrote:
| >The HN crowd is far right
|
| ???
|
| Is anyone who isn't a card carrying DSA member "far
| right"?
| hnpolicestate wrote:
| Most of that stuff is a LARP.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| Center-right, I'd argue, but that's true of the
| Democratic party. HN is very far from far-right in that
| bigotry and racism isn't tolerated here (nor should they
| be). But HN is USA in origin and USA politics are further
| right than most of Europe.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > HN is very far from far-right in that bigotry and
| racism isn't tolerated here (nor should they be).
|
| As in no outright slurs, right? I've seen plenty of race
| realist comments, as well as "James Damore is right about
| women in tech".
| hnpolicestate wrote:
| Moderators don't tolerate bigotry and racism on HN. I
| agree with that. But there were quite a few comments
| yesterday discussing Fyodor Dostoevsky who implied it was
| impossible for Russia to produce culture because it's
| people are monsters or something. Extreme ethnic hatred.
| So the users within the software community share many of
| the same faults regarding bigotry that the rest of
| humanity has.
|
| Same goes for commentary on Chinese people or
| Palestinians, though nowhere near as extreme in animosity
| as that towards the Russian.
| Sunspark wrote:
| The general problem with "racism" online is that people
| tend to use the word for things that they don't like
| hearing. E.g. there is an issue of some sort, let's say
| unemployment caused by subsidized temporary foreign
| workers being brought in to act as wage suppression for
| corporations. Saying that you have a concern with policy
| can often result in a response of "that's racist!".
|
| This is a variation of the little boy who cried wolf. If
| "racism!" is cried for every single little thing that
| needs discussion, then one day it actually is racism and
| nobody will be listening.
| immibis wrote:
| Very few people ever complain about this in an
| egalitarian way, though, like: if wages are too low,
| let's make them higher. If the market isn't doing what we
| want, we should change the market.
|
| Instead, it's always about how the immigrants should be
| locked up or deported. And that's always about immigrants
| from Mexico, never from Canada or other places.
| Sunspark wrote:
| The illegal migrants should be deported, not this
| nonsense like California is discussing right now where
| they might make them eligible for $150,000 loans to buy a
| house in California with.
|
| Also, you should watch the Canadian border. I am
| Canadian. We brought in over 3 million people in 2 years,
| most of them Indian. They are crossing your northern
| border to go work in NY state and other places. They are
| not the only demographic crossing the border. Senator
| Rubio was right to express concern about it.
|
| A great many criminals and foreign state actors have
| entered the US through both the northern and southern
| borders but many probably can't think about that because
| it might be "racist" to be concerned about e.g. PRC
| operatives, even though they are as blatant as opening
| Chinese police stations inside the US (yes, this was
| reported by the mainstream news).
|
| It is the same thing as letting strangers log into your
| network-accessible computer. Many will be fine, some are
| not.
|
| Where is your firewall?
| consteval wrote:
| Sure nobody says slurs. But I see misogyny and what I
| would classify as racist every time I'm on hackernews.
|
| Complaining about Indians, complaining about women. But
| they don't even know that's what they're doing so you
| can't say "hey stop being sexist". They're surrounded by
| men all the time, of course it will never click in their
| heads.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| This observation is always highlighted by the absurdity
| of american politics when they describe candidates like
| Joe Biden as "far left" when on the european political
| spectrum (or even an absolute one, if such a thing
| exists) he'd almost certainly be on the right.
| gruez wrote:
| >This observation is always highlighted by the absurdity
| of american politics when they describe candidates like
| Joe Biden as "far left"
|
| Joe Biden is by all accounts, center-left. However, the
| parent comment also describes the "HN crowd" as far-
| right. What probably is actually happening is that
| America is extremely polarized, where any side you don't
| agree with has the "far-[left/right]" label slapped on.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Not trying to start a political discussion but people
| describing someone like biden as center-left are usually
| basing this off the policies people of his particular
| political flavor _say_ they want. What they end up doing
| is usually very much right-aligned.
| gruez wrote:
| No need to involve whatever "political flavor" of people
| making the judgement. If you compare his views to other
| politicians, or the electorate as a whole, he's clearly a
| centrist.
| halostatue wrote:
| In Canada and most of Europe, Joe Biden would be a hair
| right of centre-right on most things and centre-right on
| a few other topics. Only in America is he centre-left,
| which says a _lot_ about America 's Overton window shift.
|
| Biden sounds a lot like Stephen Harper (pre-barbaric-
| practices-hotline) and just to the right of Brian
| Mulroney. Joe Clark would be well to his left.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| Comparing political rights, lefts and centers across
| cultures is futile, it's apples and oranges. For example,
| compare the immigration and integration policies of Biden
| [or the US] to that of Europe, and you'll find that he
| and most democrats are, for the most part, further
| "left."
| hnpolicestate wrote:
| I disagree with your characterization of why I called the
| HN crowd, or technology professionals, far right. Having
| read my God how many comments, articles, tweets etc over
| the years. I see extremely conservative policy positions.
| No better example than asking a software engineer,
| developer VC there opinions on whether "gig" workers
| should be treated as full time employees with benefits,
| unionization etc.
|
| The former use technology to do things economically to
| workers we haven't seen since Upton Sinclair's The
| Jungle. Like preventing a driver from getting new
| deliveries if those 10 minutes put him over 1 hour of
| work. It's robber barron extreme right wing economic
| policy.
| gruez wrote:
| >No better example than asking a software engineer,
| developer VC there opinions on whether "gig" workers
| should be treated as full time employees with benefits,
| unionization etc.
|
| And that's a "far right" position? So far as I can tell,
| even in europe, in most jurisdictions gig workers are
| treated as contractors rather than employees.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gig_worker#Europe
| hnpolicestate wrote:
| I mean these meanings aren't concrete. Left vs right etc.
| But historically it was a far right wing position to find
| ways to exploit labor for profit. The tech industry uses
| their skill set to accomplish this with algorithms.
| gruez wrote:
| >But historically it was a far right wing position to
| find ways to exploit labor for profit
|
| and historically LGBT rights were far left positions.
| That doesn't mean they're far left positions today.
| Moreover if being pro-capital (as opposed to being labor)
| is "far right", then is being pro-labor "far left"? Is
| there even a "centrist" or non "far-left/right" position?
| nec4b wrote:
| Can you give a historical example of such far right
| stance? Hitler's national socialist and Mussolini's
| fascist which are historically considered far right
| certainly didn't have such policies.
| hn-89019 wrote:
| "Far right" as measured by a hardcore leftie, maybe. If
| you stand against illegal immigration, criticize
| superficial DEI "me-too" gestures that do nothing to
| solve the real issues underneath, or are moderately
| conservative in any other way, you will have you comments
| routinely downvoted into oblivion and will be called a
| Nazi and the second coming of Hitler. Not only in this
| place, it has become the the norm these days.
| coding123 wrote:
| Sometimes I wonder if they think the second coming of
| Jesus is just as bad.
| hnpolicestate wrote:
| Illegal immigration is a far right wing policy goal. It's
| how mega corps keep wages down. The old "we need illegal
| immigrants because who else is going to pick lettuce for
| $1 an hour!" When the answer is well without illegal
| immigration you'd be forced to pay a legally protected
| citizen a fair wage.
|
| I think you're looking at the DEI phenomena incorrectly.
| It's a way for the economically comfortable class to
| signal virtue without having to experience any of its
| detractors. Check the Wikis of many DEI proponents and
| writers. They live in both highly segregated economic and
| racial neighborhoods.
|
| They live a 1950's far right wing lifestyle at home but
| wax poetic about DEI for the virtue.
| JasserInicide wrote:
| I find that HN is generally receptive of criticisms of
| those things granted you're using enough tact in your
| post and not just going "I'M SICK OF THESE WOKE JEWISH
| LEFTISTS RUINING EVERYTHING" in which case go to 4chan
| and cry there.
| consteval wrote:
| I've never seen a criticism of DEI that isn't just "these
| gross blackies/gays don't need this they're even more
| privileged than us whites/straights and also the white
| race is dying!"
|
| It's one thing if you think DEI isn't the best approach
| to address the crisis of poverty minorities face. It's
| another if you think that problem doesn't exist, or is
| actually a good thing and we should uphold. I never see
| the first, I see the latter two. From conservatives at
| least, many liberals are actually open to addressing the
| ways DEI isn't great.
| zooq_ai wrote:
| Ha Ha classic delusion, which kinda proves my point
| Apocryphon wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology
| mrmetanoia wrote:
| I hadn't read about this concept - it's interesting.
|
| It was really heart breaking coming up in the hacker
| culture of the late 80s through the 90s, then seeing the
| potential of "Don't be evil" Google, when it became
| clearer and clearer that no, hackers hadn't penetrated
| the capitalist class it was more the other way round. The
| only "disruption" was a set of new levers for the
| bankers, handed over freely by people eager to join them.
| bodiekane wrote:
| The HN crowd is far left but they would never admit it.
|
| Go watch Bill Clinton talk about illegal immigration and
| border security in the 90s. He'd be considered far right
| today. Read a book or newspaper from 50 years ago or 100
| years ago and look at how much more freedom people had to
| build homes and businesses without a thousand licenses,
| permits, taxes and inspections.
|
| There was a time in America where the notion of an income
| tax or of restrictions on running a business out of your
| home were considered far-left authoritarian and
| unconstitutional, but now we've all gotten used to a
| million regulations on how we use our private property,
| the government surveilling our communications and
| finances, government oversight and permission required
| for all activities.
|
| Admittedly "left vs right" is hardly useful in
| contemporary politics, things are so multi-faceted and
| people's notions of what those terms mean is variable.
| But nonetheless, it's obvious that "the center" of
| American politics today is drastically far to the left
| from where it was previously.
|
| In some sense, the 1960s counter-culture liberal
| progressives "won" and became the center and the
| establishment. A leftwing extremist in 1968 on issues of
| feminism, race, social welfare, tax policy, foreign
| policy, housing policy and probably others is a centrist
| today.
|
| Environmental issues and unions are the only two areas I
| can think of where America has stayed the same or moved
| right since WWII.
| ribosometronome wrote:
| >But nonetheless, it's obvious that "the center" of
| American politics today is drastically far to the left
| from where it was previously.
|
| Ronald Reagan gave 3 million illegal immigrants permanent
| resident status.
| consteval wrote:
| The US is the most right-leaning country out of the first
| world.
|
| > but now we've all gotten used to a million regulations
| on how we use our private property
|
| Many of these originating from the right. Because the
| right is not, and has never been, a party of small
| government. They want big government, just their big
| government. That has meant historically enforcing
| slavery, then segregation, suppressing women's rights,
| suppressing abortion, dictating what you can do in the
| bedroom, and on and on and on. These are all conservative
| policy - and all HUGE government.
|
| > it's obvious that "the center" of American politics
| today is drastically far to the left from where it was
| previously
|
| Yes, this is called the progression of time. This is why
| people who are unable to change their mind over time end
| up falling behind and sounding crazy.
|
| Have you ever asked an old dude about how they feel about
| black people? Whoa! Clearly they grew up in a different
| time. Some let that shit go like they should, some don't.
| Those that don't are destined to be left to the past.
|
| Just a few decades ago a slight right winger might be
| anti-integration. Slight. A far right-winger would be
| lynching people in their neighborhood. So you're correct
| - we've moved past that.
|
| And, in 40 years, if I personally don't change my
| beliefs, I will also sound crazy. To conservatives that's
| scary or something. To me, that's how the world works. I
| say either adapt or be relegated to the insane.
| swader999 wrote:
| I'm pretty far out the mainstream thinking on some topics
| and I've felt like I've been treated fairly in most
| interactions over the years on HN.
| mrgoldenbrown wrote:
| I would not call HN progressive. Democratic yes, but
| Democrat nowadays means centrist at best/leaning right.
| matrix87 wrote:
| HN crowd is democrat but not progressive. Reddit crowd is
| progressive
|
| Also HN doesn't censor as much, libertarian-right posters
| that would've gotten downvoted to hell on reddit actually
| have an outlet here. Religious right has no outlet on
| either site
| llm_trw wrote:
| >HN is awesome because of the rules and moderation (including
| bans);
|
| It was awesome. Then it jumped the shark when people realized
| they could flag posts they don't like with no repercussions.
| immibis wrote:
| There was some post about Israel the other day (might have
| been Google's relationship to Israel or something) where
| every comment about the war starting last year was highly
| visible, while every comment about what happened prior to
| last year was dead.
| dmix wrote:
| Those contentious threads never last long here for that
| reason. Reddit is 90% those sorts of heavily moderated
| comment threads where everyone agrees with each other and
| those who don't align get removed or downvoted. People
| can always just go there.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Comparison to Reddit: bogus.
|
| Yes, HN is better than a toxic cesspit full of ignorant
| teenagers. That's a low hurdle.
| crystalmeph wrote:
| I wonder if something like Slashdot's metamoderation system
| could be used to tamp down such abuse.
|
| One problem with metamoderation is that once a particular
| forum becomes an echo chamber, even metamoderation will
| unconsciously but repeatably ignore "valid" information
| from the other side and amplify misinformation from their
| own side. But if the site owners specifically searched for
| good-faith users from multiple viewpoints to serve as the
| jury pool for metamoderation, this could be workable.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Of the four dead comments I see, two are content-free trolling
| and one is a completely unrelated discussion about Jim Jordan.
| The fourth is a bit more borderline, but I think a reasonable
| person could conclude that the commenter is more interested in
| getting people riled up than having a discussion.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| > The fourth is a bit more borderline
|
| The vast majority of comments on political/social topics fit
| your description. If you're thinking of the one I'm thinking
| of (not mine, if it matters), I can't think of any reasonable
| test that would conclude "this should be dead, but all those
| others can stay."
|
| Edit: it's bigbacaloa's
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I agree that the vast majority of comments people would
| like to make on political/social topics violate the HN
| rules. Having seen political threads on Reddit, where any
| genuine insight is buried under a flood of namecalling and
| polemics, I think that's for the best.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| > the vast majority of comments people would like to make
| on political/social topics violate the HN rules
|
| Correction: delete the "would like to"
|
| Also, comparing this to Reddit is sort of Godwin's Rule
| transposed to a different domain. "Better than a poke in
| the eye with a sharp stick" is pretty much what you're
| saying.
| soneca wrote:
| I took the time to find it and dig why they were banned.
|
| Here is dang's explanation:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37421874
|
| It sounds a fair banning for me.
| cypress66 wrote:
| I always use showdead. There's not a lot of dead comments, but
| I often (maybe 1 every 4) have to vouch for them.
| bilekas wrote:
| It's very easy to claim censorship these days when in fact it's
| usually more benign than that, companies with large communities
| generally like to avoid anything inflammatory. Even still, like
| it or not, you don't have a right to say whatever you like most
| places on line. It's a privilege. Right or wrong that's just
| how it is.
| feoren wrote:
| [Dead] means they've been downvoted to oblivion. Moderators had
| nothing to do with it -- those were other users on HN. I always
| browse with "showdead" on and the vast majority of [Dead] posts
| are awful. They don't need to violate HN Guidelines, they were
| killed by the community.
|
| [Flagged] means it was killed by a moderator. Those are more
| rare. I don't agree with everything that is flagged but I think
| HN has a great moderation policy overall. Often when posts are
| flagged, the moderator responds explaining why.
| philipkglass wrote:
| Comments cannot be hidden by downvoting. Comments are marked
| [flagged] [dead] only after other users have clicked on the
| timestamp and selected "flag." I think that these things get
| conflated because comments that tend to attract heavy
| downvotes also attract flagging. The [flagged] [dead]
| comments are mostly (entirely?) killed by the actions of
| ordinary users, not moderators.
|
| Comments that are marked [dead] without the [flagged]
| indicator are because the user that posted the comment has
| been banned. For green (new) accounts this can be due to
| automatic filters that threw up false positives for new
| accounts. For old accounts this shows that the account has
| been banned by moderators. Users who have been banned can
| email hn@ycombinator.com pledging to follow the rules in the
| future and they'll be granted another chance. Even if a user
| remains banned, you can unhide a good [dead] comment by
| clicking on its timestamp and clicking "vouch."
| wredue wrote:
| Flagged 100% does not need moderator involvement. Even being
| post restricted needs no moderator involvement.
|
| I have had no shortage of comments flagged by a certain group
| of people that like their "alternate facts" and share their
| HN posts to discord for brigading / mass down voting anyone
| that calls their lies out.
|
| It only takes 2-3 quick user flags for your comment to be
| permanently, automatically flagged, and only a couple of
| those to get comment restricted.
| simonmysun wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this, otherwise I may never know tge
| meanings of the terms on HN. I hope there was a guide.
|
| Meanwhile I saw a dead post 0 minutes ago, is is true that
| someone flagged it immediately? I personally don't find the
| post evil but only little boring.
| throwup238 wrote:
| If they've been flag killed, it will say _[flagged][dead]_
| (and yes I 've seen it happen within a minute of someone
| commenting on very popular threads). If it's just _[dead]_ ,
| you should look at their comment history because chances are
| they've been banned by dang. Alternatively, some people
| register on HN via Tor which also auto-shadowbans them until
| enough people vouch for their comments.
| seydor wrote:
| I don't think they are removed by moderators, they are flagged.
|
| HN is a small community , and frankly more moderate than
| everywhere else (except twitter these days).
|
| Sadly, censorship in 2024 is coming by the people, for the
| people.
| thom wrote:
| Hacker News is the only online community that doesn't feel like
| it's actively driving me insane. Whatever censorship is being
| done, whether in good or bad faith, I'm all for it.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I would, but then I'd have to read comments that peers on this
| site have decided aren't worth my time, and more often than not
| they're right.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| You can't see which users Dan has down-weighed. Their posts are
| not autodead, but their comments decay rapidly to the bottom of
| threads.
| grogenaut wrote:
| I did this. I spent 10 minutes diffing, only a few things
| weren't listed. One was just full of cursing and not a useful
| piece of discussion. Another was a comment claiming that Trans
| was a concept made up 2 years ago.
|
| So far seems working as intended.
|
| What might be more useful is to get your nerd hat on and run a
| few diffs through sentiment analysis and post that as a topic.
| I'd definitely read a ML / Sentiment Analysis / Bias analysis
| type document, would be a great topic.
| sidcool wrote:
| There's always money involved. There is no awakening of inner
| morality. Just follow the money and you'd know why this is
| happening.
| jmyeet wrote:
| When someone starts making claims, there is a tendency for those
| claims to become "fact" if there isn't sufficient counter-
| messaging.
|
| Case in point: the idea that conservatives are somehow having
| their speech suppressed. This is patently false. Twitter has
| become 4chan. Any number of conservatives topics like anti-
| vaxxers, Brexit, anti-immigrant propaganda and so _thrive_ on
| social media, including and especially Facebook.
|
| Now you can argue that this isn't intentional. It's simply a
| result of these platforms responding to and promoting "engagement
| bait". There might be some truth to that but at a certain point,
| particularly if you're the CEO of Meta, you can't play dumb. You
| should know what your platform is promoting and what benefits
| you.
|
| What you're seeing here is Zuckerberg is increasingly becoming
| aligned with the billionaire class and, by extension, the
| political right (eg [1]). This is the arc that leads to becoming
| Peter Thiel.
|
| No one, and I mean no one with the possible exception of Noam
| Chomsky, is a free speech absolutist. Elon, for example, has
| banned people who have simply hurt his feelings (many times).
|
| And while Zuck is sucking up Republicans in Congress, see how far
| you get on any of these platforms if you use words like "Gaza",
| "Israel", "Sde Temain" or "Palestine".
|
| All of these big tech companies have been very successful in
| pushing the idea that it's "the algorithm" that upranks or
| downranks content, like there's no human involved. This is
| propaganda. Humans decide what's in the algorithm and they make
| those decisions based on what they want it to do.
|
| [1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/mark-zuckerberg-
| prais...
| rightisleft wrote:
| meta and google should be classified as public utilities
| hnax wrote:
| Always, as a good hedger Zuck, anticipating regime change in the
| White House by November, is minimizing the potential fallout of
| his treacherous behavior. Hold him accountable.
| seydor wrote:
| Last time it didn't work out , so it s not always
| fitsumbelay wrote:
| In 2020, the charity he and his wife run donated hundreds of
| millions of dollars to local US election offices to help cover
| extra costs related to the pandemic. Conservatives claim, without
| evidence of course, that those funds skewed election results
| toward Democratic Party candidates especially in battleground
| states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. All of Zuckerbergs earned
| media -- the "inside look" at his mixed martial arts training,
| riding futuristic surfboards carrying with a giant 'merican flag,
| pretending to fight with Musk -- a larger and more seasoned uber
| clown for the ages -- and virtue-signalling on behalf of fRea
| SpEAcH pRINSSaPuLLz -- is just part of the act
| duxup wrote:
| Actions speak louder than words. Just log onto Facebook and see
| what he wants you to see.
|
| I don't know what he thinks he is selling folks on, but it's
| mostly spam and garbage...
| moosey wrote:
| Engagement. In fact, IMO, trying to achieve engagement should
| be illegal psychological experimentation on humans, but I'm an
| outlier.
| chambers wrote:
| I don't trust Zuckerberg and I don't trust his motivations. That
| said, I think there's some truth in his words:
|
| https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-j...
|
| Skip the political mumbo-jumbo and go straight to page 27 to 29
| of this investigation report. Internal emails show FB employees
| unhappy to onboard to a private takedown request portal, where
| Government employees would post tickets on "disinformation" that
| FB & other tech companies would then be obligated to police.
| Further, the report suggests that CISA & its proxies didn't have
| a legal mandate to compel FB, Twitter, and other companies to
| censor content, so the CISA resorted to "suggesting" they would
| get the FBI involved.
|
| The entire doc has an obvious political slant, but I think it
| partially explains why the Stanford Internet Observatory and
| other proxies self-dismantled before litigation commenced.
| peter_retief wrote:
| Was it not wrong for the white house to put pressure on
| Zuckerberg?
|
| Are we not blaming the wrong people?
|
| In his defense, the FBI told him to. Most people would have
| believed the FBI.
| megous wrote:
| I will maybe believe him maybe when they unban student groups
| like SJP Columbia.
|
| https://x.com/ColumbiaSJP/status/1828099828301107294
| cratermoon wrote:
| translation: disinformation and lies welcome here
| idunnoman1222 wrote:
| This guy decides^
| jasonlotito wrote:
| Key point here for me was that this was on FB, and no one else.
| Zuckerberg might regret doing this, but he did it. No one else.
| And, unless he is lying, he wasn't forced to do this. So, really,
| nothing more to add.
|
| Should note:
|
| The Supreme Court in June tossed out claims that the Biden
| administration coerced social media platforms into censoring
| users by removing COVID-19 content. The majority ruled that
| because Facebook "began to suppress the plaintiffs' COVID-19
| content" before the government pressure campaign began,
| platforms, not the Biden administration, bore responsibility for
| the posts being taken down.
| mandmandam wrote:
| ... What?
|
| Apologies if I'm missing the sarcasm, but Instagram, Twitter,
| Youtube, Reddit, Pinterest and even LinkedIn all suppressed
| certain stories, keywords, etc. For Twitter and Google at least
| we have documents proving Biden admin requests. I think there's
| a whole lot more, but the point stands regardless.
|
| > unless he is lying, he wasn't forced to do this
|
| "We could make things real hard for you for four years. We were
| thinking about breaking you guys up actually, you're sort of a
| monopoly. Anyway, here is our request - we'd never force you
| though. The choice is yours." [Ominous stare.]
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| OK, so Facebook at the request of the Biden Harris administration
| censored the Hunter laptop story and knew it was not actually
| Russian disinformation.
|
| It's not like you could draw a straight line between this action
| and something you'd categorize as election interference.
| djur wrote:
| There was no "Biden-Harris administration" in 2020.
| salojoo wrote:
| This is good news. Feels refreshing to see some respect towards
| users for a change.
| 50208 wrote:
| Hard to understand why Zuck would come out with this now? This is
| like a bazooka shot at Democrats ... to give Gym Jordan this
| information to twist and distort. Never mind that the "censored"
| data turned out to be from Russian operative sources ... yes,
| never mind that.
|
| This seems bigger than just business, or the House Judiciary
| Committee. Is this about Israel and fear of what a Harris admin
| would do (or stop doing)? Either way, there is definitely
| underhanded intent in this "admission" from ole'Zuck IMO.
| aklemm wrote:
| Does he regret facilitating the circulation of garbage?
| mandeepj wrote:
| Pressures from sitting governments to enforce policies aren't
| new. So, not sure if he's trying to gain sympathy or favors from
| the other side.
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/india-threatens-jail-for-facebo...
| settsu wrote:
| Of all the things Zuckerberg could have cited, he chose arguing
| _FOR_ allowing information that could have materially detrimental
| effects on living human beings??
|
| Or did I misread?
| vezycash wrote:
| He's telling half truths. Facebook started censoring Trump during
| his presidency!
| jdubz79 wrote:
| Anyone getting their "news" from a Social Media is a useless
| stupid that earth does not need.....
| dev1ycan wrote:
| He's doing the same thing for the israeli conflict out of his own
| volition so I don't believe a word he's saying.
| mocmoc wrote:
| good joke
| nappingbat wrote:
| You can either have a healthy democracy, OR you can have Facebook
| (and X).
| 3np wrote:
| Everyone: Please stop the flaming of Zuck, Meta and any
| politicians in this thread? Nobody cares how much or little you
| trust Zuck and these comments contribute nothing to the
| discussion.
|
| There is great significance and potential conversation here
| regardless of how accurately Zuck is laying out facts or his
| intentions behind this letter. We don't want that getting drowned
| by all-to-predictable echo chamber.
|
| > Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less,
| as a topic gets more divisive.
|
| FWIW, I'm as distrustful of him as the next person but I do think
| he's deliberately accurate in representation of facts and events
| in this letter. Including this spicy gem at the end:
|
| > Respectfully,
|
| > /s/ Mark Zuckerberg
| notfed wrote:
| Zuckerberg should learn to plead the 5th when asked about
| political intervention questions.
|
| He keeps apologizing, thinking it will gain him respect, but the
| general public only sees this as a grand admission of guilt
| (ostensibly for some crime they didn't know of until now, and
| still don't know any details about).
|
| Many other CEOs get asked similar questions, and they refuse to
| engage in the discussion; the result is no news coverage.
| Covzire wrote:
| Facebook usage is tanking I think, they're losing market share
| because nobody trusts facebook for anything but the marketplace
| anymore, with exceptions of course but I don't know many people
| who use it anymore for anything but birthdays and the like.
| caseyy wrote:
| Mark seems to still be one of the tech CEOs with a soul and a
| spine, rather than only being driven by money. People give him
| crap for the metaverse, but at least it was driven by a strong
| vision and a dream instead of bean-counting and stock-maxing.
|
| Good to see him stand up to government interference in social
| media. Manipulating the social fabric for political gain is far
| more insidious than manipulating regular media. We have ethical
| problems with government interfering in the latter, so we should
| strongly reject political interference in the former.
| yalogin wrote:
| Why is this t regretful to stop misinformation? I don't get it,
| is he hedging against a trump win this election?
| hilux wrote:
| Does this mean that Facebook's internal analysis predicts a Trump
| victory? That's how I read it.
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