Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/26/zuckerberg-meta-white-house-pressure-00176399

by southernplaces7 • 2 years ago

639 1114 2 years ago

politico.com

consp• 2 years ago

He said it is not political and published it at the end of an election cycle ... Of course it is.

TMWNN3• 2 years ago

Nonetheless, better late than never for Zuckerberg to admit that he and Facebook erred.

ericjmorey• 2 years ago

I think the original point was that this wasn't late. It was timed to be influential to the outcome of the election.

hagbard_c• 2 years ago

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...

cheschire2• 2 years ago

So we hold him to the same standards as an 8 year old that is still learning self control?

mypastself5• 2 years ago

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.

JumpCrisscross8• 2 years ago

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...

EasyMark5• 2 years ago

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.

bigbacaloa• 2 years ago

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.

firesteelrain7• 2 years ago

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?

Etheryte3• 2 years ago

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?

firesteelrain7• 2 years ago

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.

Timber-65394• 2 years ago

The shocking answer to this moderation question is not what most people want i.e free speech.

jncfhnb• 2 years ago

People absolutely don’t of want maximal free speech. Moderation is a blessing

chgs3• 2 years ago

Most people don’t want free speech, and no country has free speech anyway.

The question is what limits are made.

krapp3• 2 years ago

Moderation is an expression of free speech. Coerced speech is not free speech.

actionfromafar4• 2 years ago

How much algorithmic push to which free speech?

GeekyBear• 2 years ago

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)?

mandmandam16• 2 years ago

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.

3np6• 2 years ago

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...

lupusreal8• 2 years ago

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.

smt882• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

greenthrow6• 2 years ago

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.

mandmandam16• 2 years ago

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

greenthrow6• 2 years ago

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.

throw_m2393394• 2 years ago

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...

greenthrow6• 2 years ago

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.

scott_w5• 2 years ago

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.

cheeseomlit2• 2 years ago

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_w5• 2 years ago

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.

djur5• 2 years ago

Who was President of the United States when the Hunter Biden story was being "censored"?

ecuaflo6• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Below are a couple examples from ChatGPT:

Please don't do this.

h2odragon• 2 years ago

"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_w5• 2 years ago

What does Hunter Biden's laptop have to do with preventing Covid disinformation?

Nothing you said answered my question.

seydor7• 2 years ago

It sounds like in both cases the US government asked facebook to spread lies, and they complied

minkles• 2 years ago

"Musk is getting away with it so why can't I?"

mrtksn• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

archagon4• 2 years ago

Not on this scale.

mike_hearn4• 2 years ago

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.

archagon4• 2 years ago

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.)

EasyMark5• 2 years ago

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?

chasd002• 2 years ago

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_Viscosity22• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

JumpCrisscross8• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

woooooo4• 2 years ago

Fighting spam and porn are a different category from censoring political viewpoonts with 25%+ adoption.

normalaccess• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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

AnthonyMouse12• 2 years ago

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.

It is possible to distinguish between censorship and spam filtering. In the case of censorship, the speaker wants to say something and the listener wants to hear it and the censor prevents this. In the case of spam filtering, the spammer wants to say something and the listener doesn't want to hear it and voluntarily requests that a third party filter it out, with the option to individually disable this filtering.

Now, someone could implement censorship and call it a spam filter, e.g. it filters spam and also disfavored facts and people leave it on because there is only a single on/off toggle and they don't want to be deluged with spam. But what this implies is that a "spam filter" with uncorrectable "false positives" is equivalent to censorship.

EasyMark5• 2 years ago

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.

Xen92• 2 years ago

Counterpoint: https://rumble.com/v4e0xw0-tucker-carlson-interviews-mike-be...

Xen92• 2 years ago

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.

hintymad3• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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

iamacyborg4• 2 years ago

The challenge is trying to determine who’s legitimately trying to question the science vs who’s a crank.

matwood2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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_duffle4• 2 years ago

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.

intended5• 2 years ago

People cheer these things on because they are tired of the other view point and don’t care to question solidarity during a global pandemic.

People question science all the time. Heck we all have people who tell us about this herb or diet that will fix things, or how plastic is deadly.

In addition the platforms removed this content, not the govt. And the platforms would 100% do it again, since we are discussing this topic with the benefit of hindsight.

Misinfo evidence shows that once misinfo is absorbed and accepted, people defend it. If the data shows that those scientists and doctors were wrong - people would ignore the data and reiterate their talking points.

purpleblue2• 2 years ago

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_ban2• 2 years ago

The Democrats are not trying to weaken the integrity of the Supreme Court.

driverdan• 2 years ago

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.

dilap2• 2 years ago

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.)

Dig1t2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Censorship, beyond what’s required by law, is doomed to fail.

The opposite. Online communities can't be healthy without moderation. Cf. Twitter.

dlivingston• 2 years ago

There is a strong distinction between moderation, which is the removal of low-effort noise / spam / etc., and censorship, which is the suppression of ideas.

at_a_remove• 2 years ago

I will step a bit to the side of "censorship" and just talk about "misinformation."

The trouble with labeling something "misinformation" is that you also need to be one hundred percent right, forever or you need to be ready to make prominent retractions and groveling mea culpas. With this is mind, one ought to tread lightly on topics such as fast-moving science (especially the softer ones) and matters of policy recommendations. COVID was both of these. Yes, masks! No, don't use masks! Yes, masks. Yes, masks, haha you caught us we just didn't want you to buy up all of the masks. Yes, masks, but they really only prevent you from giving the virus to others.

My undergraduate was in the harder sciences, so it is not like I am some anti-science loon. I just think that acting with Total Certainty and If You Don't Agree You Are Killing People, on certain classes of topic, is a recipe for eventually being as believable as the numerous food pyramids which, once taken as gospel, now are simply shrugged aside.

Krssst• 2 years ago

better get it right 100% of the time

It turns out they were mostly right (at least the decisions were the best possible with the knowledge of the time). Vaccines were effective against infection at the time and became less so with new variants (still a very good idea to reduce illness severity and likelyhood of hospitalization), lockdowns had some side effects but all in all saved lives before we got the vaccine, and the like.

Now that misinformation is less harmful than before thanks to most people having some immunity, it's less controlled and more people start believing the misinformation to be the truth.

logicchains3• 2 years ago

lockdowns had some side effects but all in all saved lives before we got the vaccine

This just how effective the censorship was; the actual peer-reviewed science shows that lockdowns did not in fact save lives: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hec.4737?ut...

renegat0x02• 2 years ago

- 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"

throw3108222• 2 years ago

A quick reminder of how democracy works:

people's choice -> government -> media -> narrative -> people's choice

JumpCrisscross8• 2 years ago

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?

Infinity315• 2 years ago

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.

SecretDreams• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Ethically? Your ethics or mine?

3np6• 2 years ago

Or migrate towards a more decentralised and permissionless model where no single entity is "running the show".

Rebuff5007• 2 years ago

- 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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

- 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'?

renegat0x02• 2 years ago

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 :-)

seydor7• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

here's why that's a good thing

toofy• 2 years ago

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.

mypastself5• 2 years ago

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.

lesuorac2• 2 years ago

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...

lithos• 2 years ago

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.

moosey2• 2 years ago

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.

indoordin0saur5• 2 years ago

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_m2393394• 2 years ago

"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• 2 years ago

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.

kjkjadksj5• 2 years ago

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.

3np6• 2 years ago

We already know that both Twitter and Reddit heavily censored and weighted posts around this topic.

beej715• 2 years ago

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-otter2• 2 years ago

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?!

beej715• 2 years ago

I think blocking porn is a lot easier than blocking subtle misinformation based on half-truths, e.g. "Trump said he wants to be dictator".

I also think the scale is different between FB and SO, and SO has a much narrower definition of "on topic", as well.

andy_ppp16• 2 years ago

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.

_heimdall8• 2 years ago

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.

appplication3• 2 years ago

Put simply, people in these brackets don’t need more options for tax breaks.

zelias• 2 years ago

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?

indoordin0saur5• 2 years ago

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.

rendang3• 2 years ago

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.

ragnese4• 2 years ago

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.

commandlinefan3• 2 years ago

aren't allowing us to deduct unrealized losses

You can't really deduct realized losses either (annoyingly). You can use them to offset gains in future years, but they're not a deduction.

Terretta6• 2 years ago

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_ppp16• 2 years ago

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.

jhp1232• 2 years ago

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.

seydor7• 2 years ago

if this leads to decrease of censorship, i m not complaining

kmeisthax3• 2 years ago

Tech billionaires kissing up to the far right isn't going to decrease censorship. Maybe make it more palatable to you.

tracker15• 2 years ago

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_ppp16• 2 years ago

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.

danans3• 2 years ago

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.

donmcronald2• 2 years ago

What would trying to sell billions in stock at once

Let them pay their taxes with stocks. Problem solved.

mahogany• 2 years ago

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_• 2 years ago

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).

chrisco2553• 2 years ago

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.

kjkjadksj5• 2 years ago

Well when you have over 100m in assets in your pile of gold in the dragon lair, its time to be extractive.

andy_ppp16• 2 years ago

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?

EricDeb2• 2 years ago

Couldnt it be similar to a property tax? That's evaluated on an annual basis. If you feel it's wrong you can appeal

ssalka• 2 years ago

If it goes through I bet you are going to have all sorts of people trying to claim unrealized losses for a tax break, that is gonna be a fun time for the courts.

mondrian• 2 years ago

There's a gradient of risk, though. Suppose someone is sitting on 5 billion dollars unrealized gains by holding the index fund VT. The idea of "risking 100% loss" in VT is ludicrous.

Maybe unrealized gains tax can be formulated as "cushy gains tax" if riskiness can be quantified in a reasonable way based on an asset's age and metrics over time. Then if an asset's risk score is above X, you don't pay tax. If it drops below X, you start to pay tax.

This would probably lead to more innovation and fewer monopolies, as people are incentivized to invest in riskier companies, and companies are incentivized to self cannibalize to maintain a healthy risk score.

anigbrowl5• 2 years ago

OK, but in that case people shouldn't be allowed to put up securities they own as collateral for loans ( a popular kind of financial engineering among very wealthy people).

theptip• 2 years ago

The point is that none of these guys are risking 100% of anything. Meta stock is liquid. You can sell it or hedge. You might slip 10% but it’s vanishingly unlikely to lose 100%.

The well-known tax dodge is to avoid realizing gains by borrowing against your stock. Say you pledge $1b as collateral on a loan. If interest rates are lower than your stock appreciation, the loan is free. So you don’t ever need to realize the gains, even though you are unlocking capital.

Of course, in the bear market you could get a margin call and have to liquidate at unfavorable prices (and pay taxes then). But not if you are keeping a big enough buffer.

dangus4• 2 years ago

You think Mark Cuban is risking being homeless or something? How insulting to equate the risk of people who already have over 100 million dollars to the risk of hourly wage employees who live paycheck to paycheck.

When you are wildly wealthy you are not risking anything, risk is merely an input to the math equation that only goes one direction. Up.

Grimblewald• 2 years ago

Not true, any time there is a risk of substantial loss the tax-payers have to bail these gambling addicts out.

kansface• 2 years ago

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_ppp16• 2 years ago

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!

skepticATX• 2 years ago

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!

Dig1t2• 2 years ago

This sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.

imgabe6• 2 years ago

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.

sbsudbdjd16• 2 years ago

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.

dmix3• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

NickC254• 2 years ago

I'll go with that.

Starting with the pentagon, who hasn't ever passed a real audit. Their budget is nearly $1 trillion.

I wonder how much of that goes to kickbacks, fraud, graft, etc.

laidoffamazon13• 2 years ago

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.

kshri248• 2 years ago

Her campaign supports Biden's 2025 tax proposals which includes tax on unrealized capital gains.

sakopov2• 2 years ago

You know what else was a "great idea" that was supposed to be only for the wealthy class? The income tax [1]. 100 years later and all of a sudden everyone is paying it.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/making-sense/the-income...

coffeecloud12• 2 years ago

Yup I totally agree, because bad things can happen we shouldn't try to do anything. Much simpler.

anvuong• 2 years ago

Tax on unrealized gain is total BS. It's BS right in the name. Why don't they just say collateral assets are taxable, so the loan pegged on these assets will get taxed. The way they are going with is pure stupidity.

briankelly• 2 years ago

I am with you on that. I think they don’t because this trick is classically used by powerful old money families to generate tax free income from dynasty trusts.

guywithahat• 2 years ago

It’s probably because they got in serious legal trouble last election for donations in support of Biden, and now the whole thing is starting over again as RFK is suing federal agencies for pressuring tech companies to suppress his election campaign.

The only way to win with politics in social media is to avoid it or promote free speech

someonehere• 2 years ago

Do you honestly think all the billionaires supporting Harris are actually for that? They’re going to be tons of loopholes and exceptions to these billionaires that give to her. If anything it’s attack on the middle class.

kshri248• 2 years ago

I think this is a great idea

It is a completely ridiculous idea. You can't value "unrealized gains" without using a third-party agency to come up with a number (typically through 409a valuation). And even if the third-party agency comes up with such a number, there is no way to have liquid cash available to pay the tax. To give you an example, say you are a Founder with a Startup that received investments from investors, through various rounds of funding, and the Startup is now valued at $1 Billion. Assume also that you sit on 5 million shares, with 51% equity post all the dilution. You will have to pay tax on $510 million. This $510 million is "unrealized gain". It is an "estimate" of what you would receive if the company was hypothetically acquired for that amount by a bigger company on that particular day of valuation. Assuming 25% tax that would be $127.5 million. Where will you come up with that money? There is no secondary market where you can use your shares to raise that money. You will probably have to take a loan from banks (if they have that sort of liquid cash available for ALL unicorn startup founders/centamillionaires/actual billionaires) and that too with exorbitant interest. Why would anyone want to go through all that hassle? The other option is for you to sell some of the shares to raise money to pay tax. But that is self-defeating because you are devaluing your net worth by the same amount.

It is the most ridiculous idea ever.

EDIT:

are doing to avoid paying tax including taking out loans against their own share portfolios

How is that tax avoidance? You do realize that when they pay the exorbitant interest on the loan, they are paying tax on the interest right? That is typically higher than if they just sold the shares and paid capital gains tax directly. Because here they are paying interest + tax.

High net worth individuals take out loans by risking their shares. Those shares are marked as lein. In other words, those shares get locked with the lender (bank in this case) and in case of the Founder not being able to repay due to bankruptcy, the lender can liquidate the assets (shares) and not be required to get the best value for it in the market.

This is not tax avoidance by any means. This is Capitalism 101: putting YOUR capital to use the way you see fit and taking personal risk along the way.

archagon4• 2 years ago

I mean, the Dutch already do it. So far nothing terrible has happened.

throwaway20372• 2 years ago

To me, this looks like a wealth tax by another name. I Google about the plan and found this:

    > households worth more than $100 million would pay an annual minimum tax worth 25% of their combined income and unrealized capital gains.

Ref: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/kamala-harris-supports-tax-un...

To be clear, Norway has also had a wealth tax for years. Summarised: The wealth tax rate is 0.7%(local)+0.3%(national) and is calculated based on assets exceeding a net capital tax basis of NOK 1.7 million for single/not married taxpayers and NOK 3.4 million for married couples. (Ref: https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/norway/individual/other-taxes)

And regarding "taking out loans against their own share portfolios": Yes, I agree, this is genius tax avoidance strategy. And, I am pretty sure the interest paid on that loan would be tax deductible in the US! Most large investment banks have a separate trading desk that facilitates these loans via private bankers.

00_hum3• 2 years ago

if we tax the super rich then the list of extremely powerful people will be one item long: politicians. i think its telling that they are going after rich conservative people rather than break up blackrock et al.

wsve• 2 years ago

That sounds like a good thing to me. I would prefer the people who hold power in our society be the ones democratically elected, not the ones who lucked into a leviathan amount of money and can now buy Twitter for fun.

techostritch• 2 years ago

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.

giantrobot3• 2 years ago

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.

tim3333• 2 years ago

You could just allow discussion without worrying too much which version.

Djdjur7373bb2• 2 years ago

You need to be very clear about what you mean by "lab leak theory"

Why? Are you implying that it was okay to censor discussion of some versions and not others?

stcroixx4• 2 years ago

The only definition the government should be involved in censoring would be one that is illegal and in that case they can get their lawyers and proceed with an indictment. Anything else is just propaganda.

Malidir4• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Zuck Vs Elon on the 2028 presidential ticket would be.... something

jpadkins2• 2 years ago

Elon was born in Africa and is not eligible to be president.

HybridCurve• 2 years ago

For a while it seemed like they might have it out in a cage match, can we just do that instead?

preciousoo5• 2 years ago

“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...

chrisco2553• 2 years ago

Gotta be honest, if I was talking to a competitor I'd lie about whatever non-public product expansion plans I had too.

bko• 2 years ago

Are you saying Zuck is lying about being asked by the White House to censor content or regretting it?

Malidir4• 2 years ago

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...

rsingel• 2 years ago

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

subsubzero• 2 years ago

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_drunk4• 2 years ago

he sees the tea leaves in where things are headed in November

Things are headed strongly in the opposite direction you're implying.

PierceJoy3• 2 years ago

He donated 400m to funding election infrastructure. How is that donating to Democrats?

IncreasePosts2• 2 years ago

So what? Pavel nicked the entire concept of Facebook from Zuckerberg.

preciousoo5• 2 years ago

Hell even Telegram(esp in earlier days) looks like a Whatsapp re-skin to the untrained eye

halyconWays3• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

And Zuck nicked them all.

I am assuming you believed him because he provided some evidence to support his claims?

swader99911• 2 years ago

I'm guessing he's privy to political sentiment and is front running that to mitigate a new more combative administration.

TiredOfLife• 2 years ago

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...

drdaeman3• 2 years ago

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.

dmix3• 2 years ago

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.

jaykru2• 2 years ago

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.

codedokode2• 2 years ago

This is not the first time Pavel being not very truthful. I rememeber when he was the CEO of Vkontakte, in 2012 he published a post claiming that he is living a modest life: "I don't own planes, cars or homes. My world is walking or riding the subway and sleeping in a 215 sq ft rental apartment. Those who want to be me would also have to give up meat, alcohol and expensive clothes". And just a year later there were the news that he broke the traffic rules while driving a Mercedes, hit a traffic cop, showed an indecent sign to him and ran away into Vkontakte office located nearby while his guard blocked the cop trying to chase him.

There also was a story when he claimed that Telegram is developed abroad but it turned out that many of Telegram employees actually worked at the same beautiful historical office building where Vkontakte was located at that time.

Also, a fun fact, when he was a CEO of Vkontakte, one day he was throwing banknotes into the crowd from a window in that notable historical building. Maybe he was conducting an experiment with universal basic income, who knows.

ein0p• 2 years ago

Doubtful that he’s “frequenting” there given how he left the country. When the FSB (Russian FBI) demanded he comply with the laws and provide the decryption keys he had his lawyers send a prank letter to the head of the FSB with two physical keys (as in, the actual keys you open your door with) attached to it as a sign of “compliance”. Try that in the US and see if you can “frequent” the country after that.

properpopper5• 2 years ago

professional cryptographers pointed out Telegram's crypto is a mess

They can earn a lot of money via Telegram Bug Bounty Program if they can prove it

next_xibalba• 2 years ago

Isn't this just competition?

torlok2• 2 years ago

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.

vixen99• 2 years ago

I wonder if you're incapable of seeing what's amiss with your 'hack' job on Carlson.

properpopper5• 2 years ago

Why are you treating any part of his interviews as valid information.

Why should I treat your comment as valid information?

bob_theslob646• 2 years ago

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."

willsoon• 2 years ago

HN already take a side.

dilyevsky• 2 years ago

One liar is lying to another liar about third liar

JohnMakin8• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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?

JohnMakin8• 2 years ago

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.

swader99911• 2 years ago

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'.

vintermann• 2 years ago

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.

pjc507• 2 years ago

People have hyperfixated on "flat earth", probably because it's safe, but QAnon is the same thing only more dangerous.

atum47• 2 years ago

This is the same with Instagram. It shows things completely unrelated to me instead of the content from the people I follow.

rasz• 2 years ago

FB actually directly pays creators of AI slop.

halyconWays3• 2 years ago

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.

swader99911• 2 years ago

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.

mrguyorama2• 2 years ago

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.

silverquiet6• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

That Facebook would turn into a soft core porn site was pretty unexpected, at least for me.

rnd02• 2 years ago

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.

glatisaint• 2 years ago

Facebook showing me political ragebait was the reason I uninstalled the app and stopped using Facebook.

graemep3• 2 years ago

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_duck3• 2 years ago

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.

mgiampapa2• 2 years ago

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.

SoftTalker2• 2 years ago

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?

nradov2• 2 years ago

It's funny how different users can have such opposite experiences on the same platform. My Facebook feed contains zero political rage bait or soft-core porn. Mostly I see pictures of kids, pets, and vacations. I assume the difference comes down to who you follow and which posts you like, but the algorithm is totally opaque so who knows?

beefnugs• 2 years ago

"..friend or relative.." "..nipples.." damn it, so you were the one that triggered years of the worst porn titles

tomcam• 2 years ago

it started showing me pictures of women whose nipples were obviously showing through their clothing,

I’m using Facebook wrong

EnigmaFlare2• 2 years ago

You're probably using it wrong. I never see the stuff people complain about. When one of my half-dozen Facebook friends posts something, Facebook emails me and I click the link for that specific post and don't see any other crap. I also occasionally participate in some local-only groups which don't have political ragebait or soft porn, just local people posting silly things they saw in the street or local marketplace groups where people sell their household junk.

I don't even know how to find this feed people keep talking about.

hojinkoh• 2 years ago

I get similar things on Facebook too. The problem is, my Facebook profile clearly stated that I'm an asexual female, but the recommendation engine obviously didn't pick that up...

IG_Semmelweiss• 2 years ago

Question.

Did you ever try Facebook purity (FBP) ?

If yes, did the forcing of chronological content into the feed, not work? Or did Facebook finally kill the widget?

FBP was the only thing that made FB bearable for a while, but im curious to other peoples experience with it

rightbyte• 2 years ago

I get those booty and nipple pics too. I think the algorithm might take 'hover time' in consideration. So it pumps posts that annoys you or otherwise makes you look a fraction of a sec longer.

complianceowl• 2 years ago

"which was an improvement"

I needed to laugh this morning. Thank you.

yadaeno4• 2 years ago

People talk about “the algorithm” but most of it is content creators hyper optimizing their content to make as much money as possible.

TikTok split screen slop is a xx million dollar business at this point so you can expect a huge investment to pump out even more slop YoY

xnx• 2 years ago

Infrastructure is so cheap now. How is there not an ad-free social network? If you eliminate ads and the "intelligent" feed, that must save 95% of the administrative costs.

commandlinefan3• 2 years ago

pictures of women whose nipples were obviously showing

Oh man, my wife would get so mad at me when she saw me scrolling through Facebook and I'd tell her I didn't pick this feed. I did finally get it to stop.

fennecbutt• 2 years ago

Yes lowest common denominator but also the average I guess.

You see scantily clad women promoted cause many slavering str8 guys actually do frequently click on stuff like that.

Definitely you'll see that our baser instincts and emotions are taken advantage of way more often; sex, anger/outrage, desire/jealousy.

It's no wonder that "watch this super wealthy person show off their wife/cars/house/yacht" is so damn popular.

o24ro2u34o• 2 years ago

I deleted my Facebook account in 2013 and haven't missed it at all

diob• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Don't worry, soon someone here will build an "HDMI-hole" that uses AI to directly filter unwanted content from a HDMI signal.

UncleOxidant• 2 years ago

I am not seeing this in Threads.

amatecha• 2 years ago

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.

pndy2• 2 years ago

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.

nirui2• 2 years ago

I don't think you should put Twitter on the list among the rest, because it's completely on another league.

I followed zero person on Twitter and has zero followers, currently on my Twitter feed:

    - Racist shit like: https://x.com/barrystantonGBP/status/1828414194548461801, https://x.com/WarMonitors/status/1828498157589938272, 
    - People got bombed to shit: https://x.com/Nadira_ali12/status/1828380272322322536
    - People got shot: https://x.com/SteveInmanUIC/status/1828409629329760769, https://x.com/datsjackedup/status/1828372131727720509, https://x.com/Haqiqatjou/status/1828518967578706415
    - People fighting each other: https://x.com/SteveInmanUIC/status/1828440833835573529
    - People got mutated: https://x.com/_NicoleNonya/status/1828212958742081803, https://x.com/Nadira_ali12/status/1828241017096614366
    - Also post about this news: https://x.com/soaringeagle555/status/1828335179141963944

This is just what I saw when I hit F5 on the home page and then Page Down. You can see those are posted recently, and have very high engagement. Just take look the View and Liked count on those posts I listed, those people are insane. Sure, humans are animals, big fucking deal, I'm there for cute cat videos, not fucking WikiLeak.

And it's not the worst day either, in those worst days, you saw people getting shredded (literal), animals eating each other etc with all the blood and graphic and more, in full HD. As well as, of course, political propaganda lies and misinformation, you know something can be summarized to "why we should kill them" and "why you should kill yourself", which is probably the most lighthearted content among those.

I mean, yeah sure, everyone have their freedom of speech to post shit like that, but WHY I HAVE TO WATCH IT? I never responded (liked, commented etc) on any of those. Why I'm keep seeing these? AFTER I've blocked hundreds of those accounts?

At this point, Elon Musk might as well turn his X.COM into an actual porn network, and it'll still be less harmful to the public than what it is now.

Maybe this also showed why a person with unaddressed mental problems should not be left in charge of anything social, just my guess.

majani• 2 years ago

It's the same with TikTok. If you search literally anything, some absurdly curvy, skimpily dressed woman will be part of the search results. Weird because I thought adult creators would be the first to be censored once social media platforms got to the profit maximization stage. G rated content is the biggest revenue multiplier in the media business

kredd2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

It's just Reddit now.

didip• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

UniverseHacker2• 2 years ago

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.

graemep3• 2 years ago

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)

mnky9800n• 2 years ago

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.

dfxm122• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

egypturnash• 2 years ago

As far as I know the closest thing to an ad you’ll find on a Mastodon server is an occasional post from your admin saying “hey if you have some money to burn, we run partially on donations”.

PeterStuer• 2 years ago

It was filled with slop long before ai slop though.

Denzel• 2 years ago

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.

cogman10• 2 years ago

A decent number of those fraud alarms are now fake which is extra fun. It's not just a bot problem, it's a bot mimicking the anti bot problem.

Dibby053• 2 years ago

Couldn't this be caused by a competitor spamming the report button rather than an automated alarm?

alexander2002• 2 years ago

same with all social media today cliche songs/cliche posts /ragebait stuff / annoying laughing sound effects

seoulmetro• 2 years ago

It's due to them choosing to make it like this.

Why does this come up so much? Yes... Google, Facebook, Instagram, they're all hamstringing their experience to spite you. They benefit and you lose.

martin82• 2 years ago

I'm using Nostr now. There is no algorithmic feed, so I have the experience again that I used to have on Twitter 15 years ago. It's awesome.

Tagbert• 2 years ago

Why is it called a “newsfeed”? It’s a collection of opinion posts, personal notices, and ads. I’ve never seen any actual news there.

grishka• 2 years ago

On Twitter you can at least just switch to the "following" chronological feed and forget that the algorithmic one exists.

nostromo2• 2 years ago

It's simply that people are posting less and less content publicly. That's all moved to private chats and "close friends" posts.

The content that's filling the void is just filler, be it AI, clickbait, memes, etc.

EchoReflection• 2 years ago

interesting,I see almost 0 spam on X, only a handful over the last few years...

teekert• 2 years ago

Fwiw, I experience the same on LinkedIn.

mzs• 2 years ago

I use https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr on desktop. It's only posts from my friends in chronological order (plus ads). What I've noticed is my friends don't post nearly as much anymore. My suspicion is that is why the algorithm promotes groups and click/rage-bait now. I would guess actual normal friends of ours stopped posting so much because their feeds became so intolerable in the first place.

surfingdino• 2 years ago

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.

resters2• 2 years ago

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 naïveté 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.

3np6• 2 years ago

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...

resters2• 2 years ago

I mean, it's not like the CCP isn't doing a superset of the same things...

Or a subset! Facebook is also a very effective social credit score if viewed through that lens.

fny• 2 years ago

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.

AlbertCory10• 2 years ago

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.

IncreasePosts2• 2 years ago

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)

AlbertCory10• 2 years ago

"Presumably" ?? which ones? How do you know?

sangnoir5• 2 years ago

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.

AlbertCory10• 2 years ago

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."

zooq_ai• 2 years ago

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

llm_trw2• 2 years ago

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.

wtcactus• 2 years ago

I think this is a very complex subject and no one, in good faith, can claim that heavy moderation is either awesome or terrible.

SpicyLemonZest2• 2 years ago

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.

AlbertCory10• 2 years ago

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

cypress66• 2 years ago

I always use showdead. There's not a lot of dead comments, but I often (maybe 1 every 4) have to vouch for them.

bilekas2• 2 years ago

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.

bilekas2• 2 years ago

Authors note :

It's super interesting to see the sentiment on this comment. During EU hours, it was upvoted a surprising amount, and then when the US active time zones come in, it's downvoted pretty significantly.

What a beautiful little bellwether from a place (hn) where I appreciate the discourse I really appreciate. I actually expected the opposite.

feoren• 2 years ago

[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• 2 years ago

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."

wredue8• 2 years ago

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.

simonmysun2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

seydor7• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

shadowgovt9• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

meta and google should be classified as public utilities

hnax• 2 years ago

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.

seydor7• 2 years ago

Last time it didn't work out , so it s not always

fitsumbelay• 2 years ago

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

seydor7• 2 years ago

Is that a US constitutional violation by the biden government? I guess not because they weren't really forced to. Yet again , putting pressure on media is not negligible

gwbas1c2• 2 years ago

The first amendment specifically uses the word "congress," and the President is not congress.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-1/

From what I understand, the executive branch generally uses the power of persuasion to influence media. There's no legal consequences for failing to comply; but instead the media has to weigh political consequences.

To put it differently, if your social network is used to push conspiracy theories and otherwise undermine democracy, you're going to have a tough time asking for political favors.

seydor7• 2 years ago

but if the president had the power to censor, that power should come from a law that the congress made. it wouldnt make sense otherwise

hsdropout• 2 years ago

This was recently decided by the US Supreme Court.

https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-social-media-biden-...

tantalor2• 2 years ago

Was it an official act?

If yes, totally immune from consequences.

If not, then was it really "pressure"? In what sense?

duxup• 2 years ago

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...

moosey2• 2 years ago

Engagement. In fact, IMO, trying to achieve engagement should be illegal psychological experimentation on humans, but I'm an outlier.

murphym• 2 years ago

funnily enough, that's the name of their recent recommendation algorithm paper

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.17152

chambers• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

megous2• 2 years ago

I will maybe believe him maybe when they unban student groups like SJP Columbia.

https://x.com/ColumbiaSJP/status/1828099828301107294

cratermoon• 2 years ago

translation: disinformation and lies welcome here

idunnoman12222• 2 years ago

This guy decides^

jasonlotito5• 2 years ago

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.

mandmandam16• 2 years ago

... 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.]

laidoffamazon13• 2 years ago

The choice is yours.

Correct, the choice was theirs. They probably didn't want to keep spreading ivermectin conspiracy theories, it's bad for advertisers.

SV_BubbleTime10• 2 years ago

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.

djur5• 2 years ago

There was no "Biden-Harris administration" in 2020.

SV_BubbleTime10• 2 years ago

There was. They just weren’t in office yet.

Yet, they still pressured Facebook to suppress truth and opinion they just didn’t like.

You can chose to not defend bad actions.

salojoo• 2 years ago

This is good news. Feels refreshing to see some respect towards users for a change.

50208• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Does he regret facilitating the circulation of garbage?

mandeepj• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

He's telling half truths. Facebook started censoring Trump during his presidency!

dev1ycan• 2 years ago

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.

nappingbat• 2 years ago

You can either have a healthy democracy, OR you can have Facebook (and X).

3np6• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

intended5• 2 years ago

I think the grand admission of guilt is what was wanted from him. This is setting up to say that the Biden admin influenced platforms.

yalogin• 2 years ago

Why is this t regretful to stop misinformation? I don’t get it, is he hedging against a trump win this election?

hilux• 2 years ago

Does this mean that Facebook's internal analysis predicts a Trump victory? That's how I read it.

timeon3• 2 years ago

Or panicking and trying to turn the wave like CNN'n'co.

LightBug12• 2 years ago

Oh fucking please ... what a fucking hero ...

mcv• 2 years ago

Wait a minute... Censorship requests from the Biden administration before the 2020 election? There was no Biden administration before the 2020 election. Something doesn't quite add up here.

tonymet4• 2 years ago

"Why this, why now, why you?"

Why did Zucc stamp his name on this now, after putting $450m into Biden's campaign in 2020, and willingly censor in favor of the 2020 Biden campaign (covid + Hunter biden).

You've got to wonder why he seems to be signaling to the Trump campaign that he is taking sides.

My guess is either hoping for kickbacks or to thwart retribution for 2020.

calgarymicro3• 2 years ago

after putting $450m into Biden's campaign in 2020

This is false; he donated to state and local election offices, not Biden's campaign.[0]

[0]https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-mark-zuckerberg-ele...

vuln• 2 years ago

The evidence shows that a disproportionate amount of funding went to urban areas in key swing states, which generally lean Democrat. Never saw a single ballot drop box out near a corn field. The money helped fund those sorts of initiatives.

tonymet4• 2 years ago

95% of campaign contributions in favor of a campaign are not directly to a campaign.

What was the outcome of the $450 million?

ProAm• 2 years ago

I feel this is mostly political posturing now that we are close to the election. Whoa is me for doing something the government requested (not demanded) I do during a pandemic. Not the end of the world, but lets not act like the timing is too convenient for a political hot button issue of 'big government'. The feed in FB is already hot garbage, if he really felt this hurt his business he would have said no at the time. Just my opinion.

navaed01• 2 years ago

I’ll say this to everyone who is so quick to get out the government overreach brush.

I was on tik tok today. I was fed a post that used an AI audio clip of Trump calling republicans dumb and stupid.

People thought it was real. They comment and believe it. The clip has been reused hundreds of time to make new posts. It will reach millions. This is one example.

There is government meddling in social media. It’s not always ours. That’s the MORE concerning part

fma• 2 years ago

I wonder how his wife, a medical doctor feels about letting medical informative spread.

His line "we should not compromise our content standard" tela me he doesn't personally use Facebook. I can't scroll down more than a few screen length before closing the app due to poor quality ads and recommended content. I rarely see posts from my own network.

maxehmookau• 2 years ago

The fact that he honestly believes Facebook has any sort of content standard is hilarious anyway.

energy123• 2 years ago

Convenient timing, on the eve of the election and just after the Overton Window has shifted in tech circles.

KingMob• 2 years ago

He clearly has no problem with censorship, though.

Meta just banned all accounts of the Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine, as well as NYU's People’s Solidarity Coalition.

roshankhan28• 2 years ago

i mean look at instagram itself, they have vastly deviated from the original idea of being a photo sharing app to a platform that is reel sharing app. also it will pull you in into doom scrolling if you dont have the ability to limit yourself.

torginus• 2 years ago

What I don't understand about this is the partisan spin of the story - much of Covid 19 happened under the Trump administration, including the most severe lockdowns before vaccines, and corresponding information warfare and articles about how people out on the streets are evil.

Blaming Biden/Harris for this is an incredibly revisionist take thats surprising considering its very recent 'history'.

michaelteter• 2 years ago

I’m sure he does regret it as it cuts into his business model of profiting from disinformation.

JimmaDaRustla• 2 years ago

Sure, they're banning tiktok while letting straight pressure to manipulate news feeds on Facebook is perfectly fine... Because it's the government is the have getting what they want

Malidir4• 2 years ago

Came across a tiktok vid where a comentator was saying that perhaps all the data Zuckerberg has access to is showing a clear Trump win.

And so he is now attacking Biden strategically to build relations with Trump.

insane_dreamer• 2 years ago

I deleted my Facebook account 10 years ago. Everything that has happened since then has served to confirm that decision. I don't miss it.

Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

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