Zuckerberg says the White House pressured Facebook over some Covid-19 content

https://apnews.com/article/meta-platforms-mark-zuckerberg-biden-facebook-covid19-463ac6e125b0d004b16c7943633673fc

by typeofhuman • 2 years ago

40 47 2 years ago

andy_ppp2• 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.

EDIT: surprisingly aggressive downvoting on this, seems reasonable to make the point that a lot of owners of social media sites have billions of dollars in taxes riding on a Trump win if this policy happens.

MangoCoffee• 2 years ago

I wonder if this is coming up just before the election because of the Harris campaign suggesting capital gains tax on unrealised gains for people who have over $100m in assets?

say what? If that's the case, then we can expect many wealthy individuals with significant influence to speak out, such as Jeff Bezos with his ownership of The Washington Post.

rhelz3• 2 years ago

Of course, but that's what the opposing party should be doing--just like Democrats were correct to point out all the foibles of Trump. Nobody should just get a free pass.

oezi• 2 years ago

Only if those wealthy people consider being taxed unfair. They shouldn't.

taylodl5• 2 years ago

I'm firmly against taxing unrealised gains - for the fact that they are unrealised.

What we should do is re-think the capital gains tax, especially when using securities in lieu of personal income. That's how the C-suite has been avoiding a lot of income tax, and it's not just people having $100M in assets.

Also, the top tax rate should be increased, especially for incomes above $10M.

Likewise, the FICA cap should be increased.

Those few tweaks put us in really good shape, without resorting to taxing unrealised gains.

andy_ppp2• 2 years ago

Sure, I’m definitely not against better solutions but a small sliver of people owning everything and the middle class and poor increasingly owning less and less of the wealth over generations needs to be looked at if we want people to be able to own homes and have consumers to buy things.

taylodl5• 2 years ago

“I believe the government pressure was wrong and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” Zuckerberg wrote

I believe how Zuckerberg handled a pandemic that killed millions of people around the world was wrong. At some point in time, we have to admit to ourselves that misinformation, including misinformation masquerading as "satire", is deadly and we're going to have to come to terms whether spreading deadly misinformation is a constitutionally protected right.

nilespotter• 2 years ago

It is.

LargeWu3• 2 years ago

Not all speech is, or should be, protected speech.

yttribium• 2 years ago

Good thing we came to terms with that in 1789.

taylodl5• 2 years ago

Except we didn't.

You can't yell "Fire!" in a crowded public space as a prank nor can you yell "Bomb!" at an airport as a prank. We have determined that's NOT protected speech. Neither is slander nor libel.

You're going to have to work a little harder at convincing me why spreading misinformation that can kill people should be regarded as protected speech.

bdavisx• 2 years ago

spreading deadly misinformation is a constitutionally protected right

For the people saying that it is a protected right, then how come you can't yell "fire" in a crowded theater when there isn't a fire?

I'm not trying to argue one side or the other - because I don't have a good answer. But it's not as one sided as some people make it out to be - free speech isn't totally free.

gruez3• 2 years ago

For the people saying that it is a protected right, then how come you can't yell "fire" in a crowded theater when there isn't a fire?

That's a terrible example, not only because the ruling where it's used was overturned, but it was also used to justify imprisoning anti-draft activists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States

readthenotes14• 2 years ago

So you're saying that he should have squelched the idea of 6 ft separation and masking, the latter of which was just made up in the former of which the government had both sides on? Or squelched the official US government position that it couldn't be a lab leak?

ben_w2• 2 years ago

Or squelched the official US government position that it couldn't be a lab leak?

That anyone cared if it was or wasn't, continues to surprise me.

Either way, the lab is in China and you can't do anything about it.

Either way, the virus came from China and you can't do anything about it.

Either way, China tried to suppress news initially and this allowed it to spread faster and sooner than it might otherwise have done.

Either way, wet markets were and remain a known breeding ground for novel zoonotic diseases that we'd like to not be like that, but we can't do anything about them because they're in China and we have no say in the matter.

Either way, the response to it has to be the same — it was out of control and killing people just the same, regardless of origin.

progrus• 2 years ago

The long march has stalled, soon the lizards will break ranks and flee.

zug_zug2• 2 years ago

Meh, I find this very hard to care about. I suppose to some degree there was some overreaction around covid, but I feel like some portion of the country being actively conspiratorial saps any faith I had that there's some inherent selection algorithm out there in our nature that will elevate rational, calm, evidence-based ideas to the top.

readthenotes14• 2 years ago

I kind of don't know what you're complaining about which I guess is your point. Was it the people who claim that the mask was a government conspiracy? Or the scientist who conspired to just kind of make up masks in six feet?

I'm sure it's not the now proven cover-up of the lab leak hypothesis that was considered conspiracy theory that is proved to just simply be a conspiracy.

zug_zug2• 2 years ago

I'm referring to the significant percentage of the population who believed conspiracy theories around vaccines.

And then what I saw was media personalities intentionally fanning the flames (e.g. Rogan) because they understood creating cultural rift us-them war out of a nothingburger was a way to maximize engagement.

Ideally we'd all be so rational we would have no us-versus-them instincts at all, and could be completely objective and form independent opinions on every issue based on data. But it's very clear that culture has a bit of a mob-mentality, and it's an open question whether we'd be better off with more or less coordination/restriction on our communication.

Mattasher• 2 years ago

The use of "some" here in the headline seems dishonest and diminishing of what was done. Like, "some people were effected by the car crash".

Technically true, but effectively more narrative than journalism, especially since among that censored "some" was a lot of true information and experiences.

drooopy• 2 years ago

Has mark zuckerberg ever expressed any regret for the fact that his platforms have played a role in instigating conflict and lethal violence in many different parts of the world over the years or is this his only regret?

seydor3• 2 years ago

I think he apologized publicly to some people whose relatives had been victimized through social media

cameldrv• 2 years ago

Ultimately to maximize engagement you want to get people obsessed with something. Whether it’s sometimes violent racism, vaccine paranoia, national politics, whatever, you just need to get them obsessed, and then they will spend hours every day on your site feeding this beast and go insane. Then you will sell lots of ads and get rich.

In this case, the government was saying: “Hey we have no problem in general with you driving people insane, but in this particular topic, having a bunch of antivax lunatics ain’t helping with the pandemic.”

IMO the problem is not the content per se, it’s the massive psychological manipulation. It’s incompatible with a free, functioning democracy.

TYPE_FASTER• 2 years ago

Ultimately to maximize engagement you want to get people obsessed with something. Whether it’s sometimes violent racism, vaccine paranoia, national politics, whatever, you just need to get them obsessed, and then they will spend hours every day on your site feeding this beast and go insane. Then you will sell lots of ads and get rich.

Yes. This is exactly what Elon is doing with X at the moment.

rhelz3• 2 years ago

When the plague struck, I was living in NY city, in a large apartment building. *Every* *single* *day* one of my neighbors was wheeled out the front doors, feet-first, never to return.

Then it was *two* neighbors a day...

The hospital beds were filling up so fast, they were building tent hospitals in Central Park. So many bodies were piling up in morgues that there was serious talk about having mass burials.

It is very easy to armchair quarterback how this should have played out--5 years later, with the benefit of hindsight. Yes, lots of things could have been handled better. Yes, we should do postmortems to find out what could be done better next time.

But FFS, both the government and corporate leaders had to make decisions in real time--decisions they knew would have real consequences, and decisions they knew had the possibility of being wrong. They didn't have the luxury of perfection. It was a once-in-a-century pandemic, and they had to act in the face of partial information.

All things considered, they did a pretty good job.

seydor3• 2 years ago

There were a bunch of cities, countries and states that did provably better job - NY was one of the worst-hit places in the world. So, no.

rhelz3• 2 years ago

chuckle there it is.

While I was in NYC, my sister was living in a rural town, population of around 100. She was mystified why our governor was making us wash our hands and wear masks. Why, they weren't doing any of that in her town, and nobody died at all!! How could we just let our civil liberties be violated like that!!!

Friend, I'm only telling you what I saw with my own eyes. NYC was one of the first hit, because it one of the most connected cities with the rest of the world, and it was one of the hardest hit, because of the very high population density.

There was no one-size-fits-all policy--some policies were more apropos for rural places, some were more apropos for dense urban centers. But that doesn't mean that the policies apropos to a farmhouse in a 1,000-acre cornfield would have had better results in NYC.

readthenotes14• 2 years ago

Putting covid patients in nursing homes and then covering that up was certainly not anything related to a "pretty good job"

seydor3• 2 years ago

It looks like there is a come-back of free speech on big tech. Probably because their interests and some government's interests do not align as of lately . Not that I 'm complaining but if this is really a trend, it took way too long to take us back to 2001

Also interesting that the AP article doesn't mention the hunter biden story censorhip that zuck mentions in the same letter.

ImJamal2• 2 years ago

Wasn't AP complicit in the laptop censorship? I feel like they claimed there was no evidence. Maybe I am mixing them up with another new org?

pupppet• 2 years ago

There's no such thing as free speech on a private platform. If you disagree, go walk on set to make your views known tonight on the 6 o'clock news and see how that works out for you.

mekal• 2 years ago

There certainly is...Zuck can censor whatever he wants but just because it's a private platform doesn't mean the gov can censor it, or pressure him to do so. You saw the "White House pressured Facebook" part...right?

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

[dupe]

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41365868

josefritzishere• 2 years ago

There a retcon in that article. They say Biden and 2020 but Trump was president in 2020. Biden was sworn in January 2021.

Zuckerberg says the White House pressured Facebook over some Covid-19 content

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