Somewhat ironically, changing the domain to fullwsj.com will redirect you to wsj.com stories via Facebook's redirector and that's currently not paywalled.
Perhaps it's just me, but reddit front page is much more toxic and filled with misinformation compared to most Facebook groups.
(Niche subs are really good though).
The biggest one in terms of users is Facebook. Everyone has given Facebook so many chances to change for years and yet, they are incapable of changing.
Not even the fines are scaring them. They are so tiny, they are laughing at them whilst they rake in billions in revenue.
They will never change and it will only get worse. They are the problem.
If what fb does makes tons of money and doesn't break the law, why would you expect them to change? And sure you can say well change the law. But the law that lets them do it is the 1st amendment.
Facebook is the most explicitly duplicitious sociopathic company in the tech sector. Many companies are sociopathic, especially as you get into pure finance companies like PE firms, but few are as duplicitous as Facebook.
That's why they're on my "wouldn't work for them if they wee the last tech company in the entire world" list. That list isn't long, but, FB is near the top of it.
Agreed. I have a similar list, it's not super long, but most of the FAAMG are on it, and Facebook is #1 on the "will never" list. Everybody has a price, but some things are non-negotiable.
So there's (for want of a more precisely nuanced way to put it) the default/knee-jerk outrage response to this, aka "how dare there be people above me in society that get the final word on what I can/cannot do without lawful recourse" etc etc.
But then... "more equal than others", taken in strict isolation, kind of goes off on an interesting tangent about how certain personality types are intrinsically socially compatible with each other; less jarring/grating, and more... resonant.
Stream-of-consciousness question: at a fundamental level, is there an exact point that this resonance, which is arguably benign at face value, can end up enabling social ${in}equality?
Not quite talking about individual scenarios of powerful person A taking an effectively entropically arbitrary liking to random person B and elevating them, ideally without [requirement for] compromise.
I mean more in the generalized sense, looking more from the perspective of network/emergent effects.
> Those included in the XCheck program, according to Facebook documents, include, in top row: Neymar, Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Jr. and Mark Zuckerberg, and in bottom row, Elizabeth Warren, Dan Scavino, Candace Owens and Doug the Pug.
Unfortunately Facebook has no choice. If you do not make your platform appealing for popular people you will have a hard time attracting their followers there.
How unfortunate it is that such a thing is seen as a "rock and a hard place". Making less money might just be the worst thing possible for a corporation like Facebook.
This is a very good question. What if I'm an Hollywood superstar or an NBA player or a billionaire and I want to chat and share stuff privately with my "colleagues".
Did the really use fb or instagram like we all do? I always see "official pages" for people like Bill Gates, but where/what do they share in their day to day life?
Ask yourself what you would use if you didn't want the general public to see it, while allowing your friends to see it? You would use anonymous accounts, or you would use use the privacy tools these platforms offer, or you would just use direct messaging apps.
Mitt Romney, the senator from Utah, former Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts governor, is also, apparently, the man behind a Twitter account that uses the moniker “Pierre Delecto.”
I liked that, you FINALLY got a taste of the Real Romney.
I had dinner with him and his family. I wasn't before, during, or afterwards a fan. To sum it up quickly, I have never in my life been in the company of people so removed from the everyday working man while being waited on by them. Truly an amazing experience that I look back on with a pre and post understanding of "the elite".
My guess is that pretty much everyone has misconceptions about the experiences of everyday working folk in that the working non-elite are populous and diverse. The key observation is if their mental models are helpful and for who.
I was with well off people that were still humans. The Romney’s I was with, I’m really not sure.
If there was a conservative thought between any of them I didn’t hear it. Nor did I hear anything that I would have described as a “good take” on any thing, like if he were to suggest something on topic X, that neither proponents nor opponents of X would consider the idea valid. In a two hours, I don’t imagine I heard a single honest heartfelt conviction.
Without giving up enough to ID me to anyone at any time in the future, I can say this… the world would burn if the Romney’s were in charge.
Elite in the title might make you think they mean a politician or celebrity. It’s really Facebook outsourcing to “XCheck” who has 5.8 million memebers and somehow avoids Facebook’s “moderation”.
I don't understand the way their enforcement works. I've reported videos of people literally setting live animals on fire and been told there was no violation, but my wife called someone a "loser" and got a week long ban.
I had the option to have the post re-reviewed, which took two days. I mean it could just be theatre, but I assumed on the second round a human reviewed it.
From the support response:
> The post was reviewed, and though it doesn't go against one of our specific Community Standards, you did the right thing by letting us know about it.
Setting squirrels on fire and watching the poor things scurry around I guess is cool with Facebook's Community Standards.
> Setting squirrels on fire and watching the poor things scurry around I guess is cool with Facebook's Community Standards.
Unfortunately nothing else you can do about it, either. Who do you even report this to? There's no LEO agency that would spend resources on that even though this is a well known pre-cursor to homicide.
Shit like that reminds me how failed society is - to be able to literally torture animals and face little to no repercussions, and get tons of clout and maybe even some money (ad revenue or whatever) in the process.
The problem with animal cruelty is that modern industrial animal farming is torture, and torture of the worst kind. So it's diffucult to draw the line without angering powerful groups and rich advertisers.
A squirrel that lives freely in nature and is once set on fire, that it will likely survive (and even if not) has a better life than a sow in a cage indoors where it can't move, is constantly pregnant and crushes its own babies because there is no space.
Most crimes, even if reported, are not meaningfully investigated. I am not sure that is really society failing. Society is still better on that than ever before.
Yes. Precisely. I think it is because the community of squirrels have no ability to retaliate.
If we observe the trend, the pull down are proportionate to the strength of the retaliators. Being against say LGBT isn't the same as being anti christian. Hit a particular group of people or ideology, the bans are well automated at this point.
They can't retaliate against social media platforms. And as to your garden, they aren't retaliating, they simply explore the commons to continue on life. Theirs and also contribute to a well balanced ecosystem for life as a whole to continue.
You are in your right to scare them off, of somewhat fence your goods to keep them at bay. Torturing those animals, or any animal for that matter does nothing to controlling their damage to your previous fruits of labor. Keeping them away is the best investment of time and effort if you don't see their value.
Content policy is just like airport security: a theater. You cannot take a bottle of water on board a plane, but you can take a laptop with enormous batteries. In my experience it's much easier to set lithium batteries on fire, than water. But what do I know.
Anyone want to bet that when some major news publication does a story about how these types of videos are being spread on Facebook they announce that they go against their community standards and that the company had no idea this is going on.
Some of the actions are automated based on some NN algorithm score, and then the appeals are human-powered. They have large third party content review offices that are operated like call centers in which humans review these things. I understand they're real meat grinders to work in.
I've reported clearly racist, harassing content before and had the reviewer report it as confirming to their standards. I know people that were banned for bullying for wishing people happy birthday. As much as I suspected a bunch of people are just quickly mashing random buttons to pump up their score, I read that they're evaluated based on the success and failure of appeals to their judgements, so I can't imagine they would be. There are clearly deep-seated problems with this process.
This is actually discouraging non-brigades from reporting. I reported obviously spam accounts and got the same feedback after a few weeks. Now I don't bother.
Brigades on the other hand have the motivation to play the numbers.
I once made fun of Justin Bieber(said he acts like a baby) on IG, and got a warning. Some guy threatened to Hunt me and my family, kill us and do bad things to our bodies and IG said it didn’t violate any rules, when I reported it. My account can now not even post the word “chump” without warnings. Talk about backwards.
It’s very safe to say there is no adult in the room at FB/IG when it comes to rule enforcement. I simply cannot wait until they get the whip from some governments.
Build an open messaging protocol and decent clients. Oh wait, some did exactly that.
The problem sadly isn't tech related. It's education. Corporates will market to the masses who are mostly tech ignorant, if not politically and economically ignorant too. So even with alternatives, the power of commercial communication is greater than what non profit are able to afford.
We will have to wait for people to suffer further and further, more will open their eyes to it, until radical resistance settles in people's limbic systems. We are getting close I think, I hope.
Honest question: have you tried writing first? I communicate with a few people via email every few months. It might start with a forwarded email, or just a quick how-do-you-do, then it deepens into long multi-paragraph replies over the course of days. Being able to sit down to write and rewrite what's been going on without someone watching the little typing bubble means I can get more in-depth with how I've been feeling. I would give it a shot. Try sending people a quick email. If they never reply, no biggie. If they do, you may be surprised at the result.
I would feel kinda silly asking for someone's email address over a chat messenger, but you are correct there's no attempt my side either. "nobody would go for it" is an assumption on my part
Let us know how it goes. Our limbic system is more accurate than our perception abilities.
The issue with email is partly a slight inconvenience. Unless you input large content, the UX time overhead is significant enough to prefer IM. EMails has not been designed for frequent back and forth on the same thread even if occasional. From there you loose most people. Email hasn't changed much, from the time we barely had Internet connections, the burden to find a connected client was enough to forgive the UX issue.
Enter email address, autocomplete, type text, click send is enough a deterent for most of us to favor a chat window, type and press enter. And scroll up to see what was communicated prior. Got an image or audio? Drop it in, press enter. You can even record a quick audio message and boom, sent. Email client and protocol simply don't support that. At best you get addons which aren't necessarily supported on the other side.
Openness is the solution, but email protocol doesn't have what is needed for current needs of communication. Corporates building these tools now have the network effect, keeping the crowd in their walled gardens.
I have no overlap between people I know IRL and people I know on SM. They are wholly separate worlds. If I know them IRL, it's text and email - never ever SM.
For me, the point of SM is burnable bridges. It's a place to take risks and later apply the lessons to meatspace. In spite of that, I've cultivated many lasting online relationships but I can't see myself ever meeting any of them in person.
Might be an unpopular opinion but if you have a connection that exists only via social media and not at least via phone calling or some other more personal forms of communication too, its not much of a real connection.
I wish I had time to text and call every one of my friends, but sadly I just don't. Facebook is perfect because I can post there and all my friends see it without me having to call or text every one of them the same story.
Then when we do get a chance to meet up, we can skip right to the discussion of the thing instead of me first having to tell the story.
Especially since some of my friends live very far away and have very busy jobs so we only see each other every few years, but this way I can still keep up on their lives and they on mine.
Fair and valid question. I got rid of Facebook over a year ago but still use IG, but I cringe when I do.
Sadly I’m happy I left Facebook but I will admit I’ve missed a lot of news and events in friends personal lives. A good friends mom, whom I was very fond of, passed away and I learned about it months later. Another friend had a fast growing tumor and I missed that news and never got a last phone call with him. Both of which I regret missing out on.
I’ll still maintain I’m happy with my departure, but it has its drawbacks unfortunately.
I've been a social media hermit for basically my entire life so far but folded in and installed IG a couple weeks ago once I entered university. It's sadly just the norm. Telling someone my age to "just not use social media" seems like a boomer's shriek, and almost every club or association manages does all its' event coordination and stuff over IG.
It's extremely hard to get by, keep up with people, or even make friends without it.
The same could also be said for Discord as well, which I've seen over the past 4-5 years grow from a gamer-exclusive chat platform to what is probably the #1 choice for students nowadays for group interactions.
As far as we've come though I still think these kinds of things are still in their infancy when it comes to their impact on us as a society, so I guess the best thing to do is just wait and see what happens.
Because they employ blitzkrieg tactics that nobody should be able to get away with and by the time we notice it's too late to change our consumption habits
Yeah I gave up reporting. I’ve reported some people being extremely racist in comments, no action in either case. It’s either moderated by racist people, some poor AI or “rand()%2==0”
Same, I've reported a ton of death threats only to be told they're not in violation. Only for my mum to cop an autoban for calling someone a spring chicken.
My wife (an American) also got flagged for saying "Americans are selfish". She then made a post about our RV (camper) asking about sewer "hook ups" at a campground and was flagged for posting what looked like a sex ad.
We (the kids and I) now lovingly call her "hate speech Mom".
Especially after Jan 6, there are a couple of things you can say in an ordinary spirited political debate that will cop you a ban on FB. One is several flavors of "Americans are X," another is variants on "Kill the filibuster" (which I assume is pattern-matching to '[violence-word] the [congress-word], which they probably up-sampled in the threat modeling for, uh, obvious reasons).
The worse part is that in her eagerness to close the "prompt" on her phone she "agreed" she had posted this content (instead of appeal), which probably put some sort of permanent mark on her record. One can only hope she gets kicked off for good one of these days!
wtf?? I haven't been on FB for about 10 years now and every now and then a comment like this comes along which makes me realize just how out of touch with the global bureaucracy I've become
So Facebook now has an independent review board to determine whether their decisions to ban somebody follow their own policies. You can flag a decision to suspend your account for review by that board, but most decisions so flagged will not be reviewed.
I see it, and I note that (a) that's editorializing by the WSJ based on their interpretation of comments from law professor Kate Klonick and (b) the underlying facts are that Facebook claimed XCheck is used in "a small number of decisions" and the evidence in that article doesn't contradict that claim.
Nothing in the article gives hard numbers, so (unless WSJ has those numbers and forgot to report them), we have to extrapolate. XCheck-flagged accounts grew to 5.8 million users, but Facebook has 1.9 billion daily actives. If we assume about equal numbers of issues from the XCheck and non-XCheck accounts, XCheck accounts would make up less than 0.5% of all incidents. That's "a small number" if you're thinking in ratios. If you're thinking in absolute numbers, well, we don't have enough data to know what the absolute count looks like. Could be that a lot of XCheck'd accounts have zero incidents. Insufficient data.
I got warned for hate speech on FB for saying in a comment that Americans have the memory of a goldfish. I appealed it, the appeal was declined and my hate speech warning remains on my permanent FB record as being against community standards.
Pretty comical, considering it was accurate in context, and while you'd think American 1st amendment free speech rights would count, they don't, because FB is the private property of Zuckerberg.
No need for someone to point out that it's a publicly traded company. Zuckerberg controls 57.9% of the voting shares of FB. It is his personal property that he allows others to have an inconsequential piece of and everything that is wrong on the platform is because of him.
I got a 48h ban for calling the Japanese military "the japs" in the context of the Rape of Nanking. Wouldn't want to offend the group that raped and murdered millions now, would we?
A friend got a 48h ban for calling herself a "rital," a term for an Italian immigrant in France that used to be derogatory a century ago.
This is also the same company that allowed a terrorist to livestream a killing spree for 17 minutes despite it being reported over and over again. To add insult to injury they allowed copies of the same footage to proliferate across their platform for weeks.
Facebook spend a lot on PR talking up their AI capabilities and how it's being applied towards moderation. Would be nice if it actually worked.
> In a written statement, Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said criticism of XCheck was fair, but added that the system “was designed for an important reason: to create an additional step so we can accurately enforce policies on content that could require more understanding.”
Would be great if us plebs could get the privilege of accurately enforced policies.
This kind of makes sense. For every high profile person posting an ML-flagged “Napalm Girl” in the context of discussion around the Vietnam war, there’s thousands of instances of real child porn.
it cuts both ways. for every high profile person posting real porn (eg Neymar's revenge porn in the article) there are thousands of instances of regular users with ML flagged 'napalm girls'
Well of course. Why wouldn't they? Money and friends aside, they have to do it for people who wield power like China's upper echelon or the NSA. If they say no, they will be shut down in those markets.
Then to put it more simply, large companies must tow to influential requests because that influence determines the flow of money. Govt, private, or individual -- doesn't matter.
And Facebook is not actually shut down in China. It's partially blocked and working on a censorship project to reinstate itself there.
>“We are not actually doing what we say we do publicly,” said the confidential review.
Why do we even have the collective fiction where corporate messaging around a sore topic is treated as trustworthy? Especially with companies that we know lie all the fucking time?
Every FAANG company compulsively lies to it's customers, and it's a shame because it only encourages up-and-comers to "imitate the best". Making matters worse, American politicians are utterly ill-equipped to handle this kind of deception. Not only do they likely profit off the success of Facebook, there are numerous domestic interests in preserving their control. On top of that, nobody can pull the plug because it's wrapped up with the CIA, FBI, FCC and FTC.
Why out of the largest tech companies, like Amazon, Google, Netflix, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Twitter (well not large but similar to FB in terms of social network) only one has a reputation for constantly lying and misleading people on purpose in its self-interest? Is it because we pay more attention to FB or is it because FB is different in some way?
I dont actually see a reason to believe that _any_ of them would be telling the truth _ever_. There's no incentive to be honest and there's plenty incentive to not be.
I put all of the companies you name in pretty much the same basket, and avoid them as much as I can. I don't shop on Amazon, I don't use Netflix, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter. I don't use Apple products. I do use Android and Google Docs/Drive/Mail but my next phone will probably be an open one and I could drop the GSuite stuff without too much pain, mostly laziness that I haven't already.
I'm in the same boat. Trying my best to de-FAANG my life. Self hosting as much as possible, with as little management overhead as possible, but I'm still stuck on Android and I don't know how to break free.
I'm self hosting Ghost for blogging, Home Assistant for smart home controller, and in the middle of setting up Vaultwarden for passwords. I also run a lot of stuff off my Synology - Synology Drive instead of Dropbox or Google Drive, Synology Photos instead of Google Photos. I don't have a great solution for email or phone - emails is paid hosting through Zoho and use Android for phone. I'd like to get off those. It's all a long drawn out process.
In a few years this will be considered the only sane approach to digital life. There is still some road to travel though in terms of making it easy for the majority of people.
In retrospect the "big tech" era will be such a sad, dark, insidiously toxic period. So much hypocrisy, so much in-your face failure to honor basic social contracts, so much misallocated talent...
In this particular case, it's only Facebook and Twitter that are significant social networks and they are responsible for the biggest spread of misinformation. Google is a close third, if you hold Google responsible for its own search results (and not the websites they link to which their algorithm considers most important).
I mean I think they're all overgrown capitalist machines that thirst for their users' data, mindshare and money, and all of them have a heap of dirty secrets that either have or will leak out sooner or later. And none of their dirty secrets - like this 'revelation' that Facebook has a database of favorites - will be surprising.
Twitter has it too - Trump got away with stuff most people would be instantly banned for. They cite he is a person of high importance, but the real reason is that Trump and the ripple effect each of his tweets had were responsible for a big chunk of their annual revenue.
Remember a few years ago that Twitter was struggling financially or stagnating in terms of activity and users? I'm sure I remember a few articles about that. But since then, Trump and some other populist politicians and commentators have caused big waves on there, because each post starts a very big and long discussion involving thousands if not tens of thousands of people, all of them having 'hot takes' on things.
TL;DR they exempt people from the rules because they make them the most money.
> Facebook and Twitter [are] responsible for the biggest spread of misinformation
I really wish it was that simple. if it was, we could just ban it all and have done with it. For the US this is a symptom of the splitting of a country into multiple warring parts. Partly whipped up by news networks, print journalism and all by the constant war for your attention.
TV news picks up some stupid tweet, offers it as an morsel for 5 minutes of hate. This pissed people off, they got online and berate the original tweet, the "other side" counter attacks, rinse, repeat. (see critical race theory)
The general public are being played, so that a number of large corporations can get attention enough to sell advertising space.
> Google is a close third, if you hold Google responsible for its own search results
why wouldn't you? I mean they are well known for allowing advertisers to manipulate results. They track your location, what your reading, who your talking to, and sell the products to third parties. If we should be keeping an eye on anyone, it should be google. The level of questioning that FB gets must be applied to any of the internet giants.
> Google is a close third, if you hold Google responsible for its own search results (and not the websites they link to which their algorithm considers most important).
If you include the videos that YouTube recommends, they pull even with Facebook and Twitter.
They are all optimizing for the ability of content to keep eyeballs glued to the screen (so they can show more ads), and nothing else.
>in Google’s effort to keep people on its video platform as long as possible, “its algorithm seems to have concluded that people are drawn to content that is more extreme than what they started with—or to incendiary content in general,” and adds, “It is also possible that YouTube’s recommender algorithm has a bias toward inflammatory content.”
Microsoft was a serial liar for decades over its efforts to quash competition for DOS, Windows, Internet Explorer, and its "embrace, extend, and extinguish" strategy. Amazon's statements about working conditions in its warehouses and its treatment of workers trying to unionize directly contradict documented actions. Twitter says one thing regarding abusive and hateful users but does another. Google finessed its theft of Java.
Some would say that you don't get to be as large and as profitable as those companies without resorting to mendacity and rule-breaking. Some would even say that such moves are required and acceptable
> Is it because we pay more attention to FB or is it because FB is different in some way?
Facebook probably has the most well-known face of any of these companies in Mark Zuckerberg. And one difference between Mark and other typical cut-throat business leaders is that he's got a reputation for being weirdly socially awkward in a noticeable way to the extent that there's numerous memes about him being a robot or alien.
Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, and others might be similarly ruthless or worse entrepreneurs, but they don't come across as the same level of creepy even though they also want to own your data, put cameras and microphones in your house, just as much as Facebook.
Further, why do we continue to accept the fiction that rules and laws apply to the elite as for the masses? Even the not-so-elite, the Stanford swimmer who brutally raped and assaulted Chanel Miller, though convicted, was given light sentence because of his "bright future", according to the judge.
Is there anyone walking around that actually believes that rules and laws apply to the elite?
Some seem to think that the reason this is excused is because (in the US at least) every poor schmuck seem to think they they will be rich and powerful someday and get to partake. I've never found that very credible, but smarter people than me seem to think so.
In other words, when the elite are impacted the full force of law will be brought to bear on the perpetrator of the injustice. This used to be called aristocracy. We've spent the past 250 years pretending it doesn't exist here in the States.
I find it funny how we use phrases like "Russian oligarchs" all the time without batting an eye, but we never use them when referring to the Bushes or the Clintons in the US.
The power resides in generational wealth not some commoners who got lucky. These people don't need to hold elected office because they can buy whatever they want, including manipulating government in their favor.
The Clintons and Bushes are not really oligarchs. They represent a monarchy maybe of inherited wealth and status.
Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerburg are better examples of oligarchs because they managed to create their own wealth and with that obtained political clout.
> The system tends to be very good at punishing rich people that swindle money from other rich people.
… Eventually? I'm surely not the only one who thinks of Madoff first, and he got away with it for almost a decade after suspicions were first reported.
Madoff got 150 years once he was convicted, though you are correct, I probably should have stated that the system is very good at punishing rich people that are CAUGHT swindling other rich people.
It's a convenient fiction the rich/elite propagate through funding stupid plot lines in books/TV/movies while hiding that the elite get off scott-free and later expunge the records.
Convenient because it allows the state to continue to pass more and more draconian laws that prevent any change to the status quo in which the rich get richer and poor are further dehumanized.
Yeah I wonder why this is. Perhaps misplaced idealism of human nature and authority. The Judge, CEO, or the Journalist despite their lofty titles are human too and can be influenced by others. They also are not immune to their own personal desires and biases as well.
Maybe we could consider it an easier explanation rather than a simple one. It seems like splitting hairs but its important
The rule of law however has been continuously pursued across centuries and different societies in an attempt to subvert this 'default' operating mechanism.
I would argue the nature bit is where you favor yourself. Its hard to find people who will disfavor themselves in the name of egalitarianism.
The rest is the result of resources/funds being concentrated in the hands of people who also end up with power due to said resources/funds.
Yes. Donald Trump was impeached twice and has an unknown number of civil and criminal investigations ongoing. If a billionaire and the leader of a major political party is in this much trouble, it kind of shows that elites do get in trouble.
Trump is an extreme example. He basically did everything he could to get himself into trouble. He operated as a troll essentially and instigated the public on Twitter, followed by an attempt to overthrow the government.
If we looked at normal and even favorable politicians like Nancy Pelosi or President Biden, we might find something worth investigating as well but has gotten swept under the rug.
Punishing politicians in itself can be political even...
Oh but that's part of the fiction and the rigging. If he were a poor non-white person, he'd have been in prison for the last 30+ years, or after whenever his first swindle and self-aggrandizing fraud happened.
Another way to look at it is that an elite mired in so much corruption and antisocial behavior was rewarded by being elected POTUS and allowed to finish his term and orchestrate an insurrection without consequence.
Impeachment + acquittal and open trials aren't punishment. They are the very opposite - they show how we make a show of justice for the elites, while doing nothing practical. I can promise you that nothing substantial will come of all these trials - he will at the very worse have to pay some small percentage of his huge fortune.
Brock Turner wasn't elite in any sense besides his acceptance into Stanford, which had been revoked. His father was an electrical engineer and his mom was a nurse.
GP referred to "not-so-elite." In this case, the small bit of "eliteness" would be white, male, athlete (All-American), upper middle class, accepted into a good college.
And that's probably enough to justify saying he has a "bright future," in this country and day and age.
There are peculiarities of eliteness in America that matter here. Because Americans maintain the fiction of a classless society and don't have the legal framework of a caste system, what counts as elite in America affects how the world views American elites, and how Americans view elites in other cultures. We don't for example, care how many cows in a bride's dowry.
The number of cows in a bride’s dowry is just a straightforward proxy for wealth, and that’s pretty universal.
Sure, in some cultures they use the number of cows as the reference point, in others they use the jewelry worn or the car driven by the individual. I know that some people compete in who can afford to spend the most money on their wedding too.
All of these are literally just another way of quantifying wealth through displays of it (regardless of whether it is real wealth or they just decided to spend all their savings on a $100k wedding). And I dont see how this is somehow unique to the US at all.
Can you imagine a judge in the US letting someone convicted of sexual assault off with a light sentence because he has a lot of cows? The point is that the elitism is not just relative to other Americans, but to the rest of the world.
> Because Americans maintain the fiction of a classless society
There is nobody in the US that believes US society is classless. Talk about fictions.
Everyone knows upper class, middle class, lower class segmentation. So how is it you reconcile your premise of Americans not thinking there are classes when everyone in the country defines themselves by such structures? Americans are taught the class structures all throughout school. Americans are informed about the class structures 24/7 by popular media and news, from the NYTimes to CNBC and everything inbetween.
The hyper rich and the poor have been an always part of US society. There are no exceptions in terms of grasping the distinction, nobody fails to get it. The US has had hyper rich and poor since its founding and everyone here has always been aware of the divisions. It's in our history books, it's in our earliest literature. It's omnipresent as a thing.
Before there was the industrial wealthy and working poor, there were the land barons and British lords, farmers, agrarian workers and the slaves that were brought to the US by the conquering European empires. The class systems here quite pre-date the country, so yes, Americans are fully aware of it all. It has never not been part of US society.
The fiction is that there's class mobility. That's part of why others commenting here have tilted towards minimizing the eliteness of a criminal convicted of sexual assault: they want to think that his "hard work" landed him where he is and that they, too, might accomplish as much once they grasp their own bootstraps.
I thought the whole point of them complaining about "rules for thee, not for me" and "the elite" were class complaints, but now the goalposts are moved and so anyone who excels at anything is part of "the elite"?
Yes, I suppose the kulaks were members of the bourgeoisie after all, for they had skills, and skills are capital, and thus they are part of the oppressor class -- the elite.
Indeed, his mother, a nurse, and his father, as an engineer, both possessed intellectual capital and are thus counterrevolutionaries.
Just to be clear: the above is somewhat tongue in cheek and obviously nothing about the boy's background should be relevant in a violent crime case, and his was particularly disgusting.
Seriously, top athletes live on another planet in University. I remember working at the UT-Austin textbook store in my 20s and while everyone else had to find what they needed on their own, the football team had special permits they could bring you to not only get their books for free but you had to go get them for them
My understanding is that he also had a history of giving light sentences, not just to upper middle class defendants, and that his banishment has gone well beyond losing his job.
He is far from the only case of the rich getting differential treatment under the law. These stories are really a dime a dozen. How about this case of a rich boy from the affluent suburbs of LA (palos verdes estates, where Trump's golf course is), decides its cool to become a gang banger, gets involved with a murder, and is acquitted.
The existence of a remedy isn't a good excuse for avoidable injuries. The resolutions you allude to in that case took place after the public became incensed at the delicate treatment handed out to a guy who was literally caught in the act of humping a passed out woman behind a dumpster.
There are quite a few people who really, really want the caste system implemented in the US. Extreme class disparity embedded into our justice system. We understate these efforts at our peril.
He was given a light sentence, but its worth noting that the judge was following the recommendation of the probation department. This wasn't a judge going rogue on his own.
as the principal adjudicator, the judge can't be absolved of his responsibility by pointing to advisories. that the probationers were biased in their recommendation doesn't absolve him of his own biased judgment, and whether he's actually biased or not is a matter of the totality of his judicial record, not just this case.
This isn't just an issue with the elites, though. Locally I've noticed that when you look into the perpetrators of a lot of violent crime, they often have a string of prior cases where they were let off with almost no punishment (pleading down to a lesser crime, given probation that's not followed up on, suspended sentences, etc.). Then you have other cases where someone has done something relatively minor (or doesn't seem to have done anything at all), and the book gets thrown at them.
I'd say the American justice system is capricious more than anything. Plea bargains - which is extremely common in America but extremely rare to non-existent in most countries - also play a big roll. The guilty can reduce their sentence, while the innocent are threatened with years in prison unless they forfeit their right to defend themselves.
replying to cratermoon as a English born nearly retired child of a now almost entirely American family, whose parents totalled 100 years of life and was taught to program and think by my uncle who would be 121 years old if alive and who worked intimately with with the American war command, I have no answer to your question other than that is the defining of the American Way to believe that the rules apply for all of us equally. The definition of 20th century British nature is to be the inbred product of generations of ancestors who never doubted the rules for the privileged are not even comparable to those for the populace.
I am too old for reconsidering the possibilities of a investment linked naturalisation process, but the development in American political culture since 2016 has convinced me that I would be committed to doing everything possible to reverse recent real and far more damaging perceived decay of moral and judicial common citizenry in the USA. The rest of the world doesn't know how terrible this is for everyone.
And this is why I believe law should be truly blind. Any details such as race, gender, sex, education, political leaning in cases should be hidden and only public prosecution and defenders be allowed. We could easily handle whole process via text.
In short, I'd guess that's because the companies reporting on them are owned by billionaires, and shareholders with bags of fossil fuel, war, banking, etc, stocks.
For example, the company reporting this is the WSJ, owned by Murdoch. Why are the WSJ seen as respectable?
Why are any of the MSM seen as respectable? They're all objectively untrustworthy on basically everything except sport. They're all in it together, and the sooner we cut them out of our collective headspace the better our chance of survival.
Let's not overestimate the critical thinking skill advantage separating journalists from other people. I can check the citations as well as any editor, sometimes better because I know some things about math and have no reason to be biased.
When there's no scene to be at with a camera and nobody is getting interviewed, I just don't see what the media has to add. Spending years pouring over account records? Interviewing a eyewitness to get the real story from a hundred conflicting ones? Combing through a million tweets to find one with a video of a natural disaster? Those are things that a journalist could conceivably do better than I could.
Most journalists nowadays seem pretty gullible and hard set on their preconceived world views. I fail to see any advantage in critical thinking skills on the media class.
Journalists fail all the time, for sure, but there's a lot of journalists in the world churning out content every day. We tend to focus on the failures, but I don't see any evidence that the failures represent even a majority of the content.
Well here's one thing: they tend to cite sources. Do you have any actual data on your assertion? What you "fail to see" is merely a statement of your observation skills. I would like to compare that with other sources that aren't so clearly biased.
Yeah, I've got it. Citing the source is kind of basic. But, by itself, alone, it doesn't amount to much, if they can't even keep fidelity to the original source, if they can't even begin to understand the content they are citing. And this thing happens all the time.
Can you provide data about this? Can you provide data over time - like is this a new thing?
Until then you are just doing the same thing as the parent: making a bunch of unsubstantiated claims based on what can only be labeled as "your own bias".
I'd think that you "media hater" folks would act differently than you are. Like you claim to hate the media for misrepresenting the truth, but then refuse to actually back up your claims with any real data. If it wasn't so sad, it would be funny.
That's kind of the problem: the "legacy" media are unreliable, but people seem to take that as license to transfer total trust to some completely random media organisation that has god-knows-what agenda. Because it's very difficult to operate in an environment of total paranoia about every statement.
"Total paranoia" might be overselling it a bit. "Total skepticism", that is, "presumed bullshit until otherwise substantiated" is much more reasonable, and it can be applied to all media sources, legacy and otherwise.
You can't just say "cut them out" without some replacement way of disseminating similar knowledge around. The media has plenty of issues, but as a whole, they are still the best way we have of doing that. At least with media we have a good sense of where their bias is from outfit to outfit and can take in additional information or get it from multiple sources to combat those biases.
So I put the question back to you, what would replace it? And one answer I won't accept is individuals without any oversight at all - that isn't a viable answer (i.e. blogs, video, social media, etc.).
Do we have that collective fiction? I don't personally know anyone who thought that Facebook applied its rules to all equally, and certainly nobody here in the HN comments seems to be surprised.
> Why do we even have the collective fiction where corporate messaging around a sore topic is treated as trustworthy? Especially with companies that we know lie all the fucking time?
Yeah I don't get that. PR people are adversaries, not allies
Clearly we need to setup the Social Media Agency and regulate them. We'll staff the agency with high level political appointments comprised entirely of Twitter and Facebook executives.
It was inconceivable before 9/11 that we would ever have something called "Department of Homeland Security" or be "asked for our papers". Yet, right afterwards, we were given the "Department of Homeland Security" and the "Patriot Act", which has been extended every single time, despite how it has been regularly abused. My children have grown up into adults not knowing anything else. Just wait a short while. If you don't do something, you will live under the "Ministry of Truth".
I can only guess why, but I do know that it’s not new. For example, around 1920, journalists were praising Hershey town as a town without crime even though the town had many incidents (Michael D‘Antonio).
Whenever I see such a corporate communication, my mental process is to immediately imagine the meeting that led to its creation, having attended many such meetings.
Recently I've resorted to explaining various news items to my kids as "well, there would have been a meeting, and their lawyer would have said this... and the marketing person would have said that... and then they tried to figure out how to put out a statement that was true but didn't get them sued..."
Today I asked the public transportation company here to either enforce their mask mandate, or to let it completely be so people who actually care can decide for themselves how big of a risk they are willing to take. By having a mask mandate which is not being enforced many customers might get a false feel of security.
Same goes for Facebook. If people think that everybody is being fact checked and false information content is being taken down after being reported then stuff that doesn't get taken down must be true.
My personal pet theory is that -- whether we admit it or not -- most people are somewhat... spiritual? Humans tend to see and believe in meaning where none exists.
Seeing great injustice like this is just really hard for us, because it's a constant reminder that either:
1. there is no meaning / purpose / higher-power / etc, or
2. we have been forsaken by whatever higher-power there is.
Both of these are uncomfortable, so it's often easier to just subconsciously fall into ignoring the issues and lulling oneself into a bit of happiness. Until something like this happens, then everyone has to act surprised for a bit; lest they admit to #1 or #2 above.
I will jump on this bandwagon and say color me not surprised.
The issue is emblematic of a bigger issue though. General trust in our society is generally down. It stretches beyond the sectors normally understood as BS ( advertising, HR come to mind ), but moved to corrupt just about everything else out there. We are a point, where the only organization that is somewhat trusted is military.
Because we need regulation of new technologies and to address issues that are becoming endemic and long-standing enough that the general populace genuinely understands them. From neonics and bees to misinformation and facebook. But our political class has adopted a policy that demands no action be taken, as that is the official policy position on all free-market related issues for one of the two major political parties.
So popular belief that our society can fix the issues it is presented with drops.
Which means societal trust drops.
And those who are causing said problems, become emboldened.
Giving more power to those abusing it is not going to create trust.
Trust has been broken for all of human history. It’s just much easier for us to notice it now. I don’t know the solution, but more of what we’ve been doing isn’t it.
> Because we need regulation of new technologies and to address issues that are becoming endemic and long-standing enough that the general populace genuinely understands them.
in my view, regulation is not the answer. what's happened, from my perspective, is that only a small handful of platforms have gel'led into place, have come to take over all of our social media world. this is largely via a system of rampant acquisitions/anti-competitive behavior, & enormously high switching costs of leaving any given network.
we need more people engaged & trying to find answers. we need more networks. we need new ways of networking, new ways of moderating, at scale. the current contenders are mostly well over a decade old & have rotted into place, and trying to regulate these vast networks is not going to bring us to a better place. we have to really journey, to better, less dull places, via innovation & competition.
personally i feel like social networks are elemental to freedom of speech & democratic practices in the world today. if we as a public value speech, believe it important for public good, i would like to see funds set up to fund development & running of public good works. we should fund the fediverse, we should fund people trying to build helpful moderation tools; we should practice actively the values that are important to us.
If that's to be changed, who takes the action? The government? Does the government decide what's bad, and what's not? It's an unanswerable question that none agrees on.
Society hasn't worsened meaningfully, this kind of stuff has always existed, but the internet exposes this to everyone, pulling everyone out of their pre-internet bubbles.
And the military is the pawn of a corrupt State Department, national security elite, and military industrial complex, which renders moot the mostly honorable conduct of people in the military.
> the only organization that is somewhat trusted is military
Only in certain quarters. The US military has been subject to deliberate infiltration by both evangelicals (especially Air Force), white supremacists, and proto-insurrectionists for decades. More recently, there has been a seemingly endless parade of officers committing public acts of insubordination, or even incitement to mutiny/sedition. At this point, trust in the military is mostly limited to people who share those agendas.
Which claim do you find surprising? The infiltration has been documented so many times I'd consider it obvious. Here is just one example of the evangelical flavor for you to follow up on.
I'll let you look up the examples of military personnel participating in January 6 yourself. I'm a little wary TBH of being "sea-lioned" about things that are super well known and documented. It's an argument-by-exhaustion tactic I learned to recognize at least twenty years ago.
Thanks for the links. For your first link, I’m not sure how that’s considered infiltration if the ‘infiltrators’ are proudly announcing their beliefs and intentions, and from what I understand as a group have doing so since the 19th century.
If there are actually folks that, for example, pretended to be atheist/agnostic, climbed up the ranks, and suddenly became an evangelical then your worries are more understandable, though I’m not sure if that’s happened.
The info in the second link does seem worrying if true.
For the last link, considering there are thousands if not tens of thousands (?) of Lt. Cols, and equivalent ranks, in the US military, it’s somewhat surprising but not that unusual, or worrying, that there’s public insubordination by a few.
They're not hiding their beliefs, but they are hiding their intentions. When they join the military they take oaths to defend the constitution, which includes separation of church and state. They are strictly forbidden from allowing their religion to affect performance of their duties. When religious groups are actively recruiting people to join the military with prior intent to violate their oaths and regulations, that's still a Very Bad Thing. The fact that the secrecy is not total seems like exactly the kind of sea-lioning quibble I predicted.
> considering there are thousands if not tens of thousands
A little research shows that there are just over 10,000 LTCs in the Army, which is the largest branch so probably fewer in each of the others. But this has gone much higher than that. Another example is Stanley McChrystal, a four star general (there are only 43 of those in the army right now) and director of Special Forces Command, who resigned to avoid being formally charged with insubordination. Do you think his example helped or hurt wrt other officers committing similar acts of insubordination? That it was good or bad for military discipline and national security?
> not that unusual, or worrying, that there’s public insubordination by a few.
That's insane. The military runs on discipline. It's one of its most important, almost defining, features. Yes, this is surprising. There have been very few cases in my lifetime. Yes, it's worrying for a senior officer not only to be insubordinate but to incite others to follow them into mutiny/insurrection. Dismissing it as though military service were no different than being in a chess club is absurd.
‘ There have been very few cases in my lifetime.’ There ought not to be any cases in the ideal world. But of course given human nature, etc., a small rate, say a 0.1% insubordination rate seems quite reasonable. (which even still may be too ambitious unless the new recruits can maintain a very noble character)
There will always be people with less than virtuous intentions climbing up the ranks at any given point in time, at any given organization.
So the military certainly seems to be doing better at separating the wheat from the chaff than the federal bureaucracy or any private organization even 1/10 as large.
Please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN, and particularly please don't fulminate or post flamebait. It's all against the site guidelines, and not what this site is for. You can make your substantive points without that.
Now that there is concrete evidence that moderators are exempting people from the rules - aka selectively enforcing their own TOS/AUP - does that change their standing and protections?
The distinction lies in whether the service provider has rendered themselves a "publisher" under 230. The protection has historically been broadly interpreted but, in theory, Facebook could lose the protection if it chose, selectively, what content to promote or remove in violation of its own public TOS. Generally:
You have case law for this claim? Or hell, I'll take a quote from your "source" you think supports it.
(that's a trick question: No such case exists. What you say is not the law -- for anyone interested in a more-entertaining version summarizing the state of the law in this area than court decisions and statues, check out https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...)
From a discussion of case history provided by your helpful link:
"Generally, courts have said that a service’s ability to control the content that others post on its website is not enough, in and of itself, to make the service provider a content developer."
I have some theories but was hoping someone better informed than me would comment so I could learn more first and come to a more thoughtful position even if it's "not applicable".
But hey, your easily googlable link is useful too.
No. All that s.230 does is declare that platforms are not the 'publisher or speaker' of content provided by another 'information content provider'. It isn't a common carrier provision, so platforms are allowed to make whatever decisions they like about which people they're willing to host, or what TOS/AUP they want to enforce.
For such a simple provision, it's astonishing how many people are writing bad (and sometimes bad-faith) takes on what it means. [Edit:] It's actually absolutely as straightforward as it appears. Which is not to say that it couldn't be changed (and there are reasonable arguments both ways) but confusing what is and what ought to be is a hugely annoying feature of many armchair legal analysts.
Many discussions are explicitly about what S230 ought to be though, not what it is. Most discussions I've seen start out by stating it was made for a 1996 bulletin board and is dated. It's long overdue to handle this blanket immunity that's being abused by social media behemoths.
You don't have to be a lawyer to know something is a bad law and something is being abused.
Sure. And people writing 's.230 allows Facebook to have its cake and eat it, by allowing them to control their content and yet have immunity from responsibility for that which they choose to leave up' have a point. But there's an awful lot of people arguing that this or that moderation decision means that Facebook 'have now moved from being a platform to a publisher' and should be sued. Normally when Facebook have taken down something the commentator agrees with, or have left up something they think is harmful.
s.230 has no platform/publisher trade-off. If you're an intermediary and not the original information provider you are expressly not the speaker or publisher, irrespective of your editorial choices. That's the whole point of the provision. And it's really straightforward. A lot of people seem to want to muddy the waters, and they shouldn't.
As written, nothing changes with this not-revelation, revelation with respect to Section 230. It does recolor some of their statements about consistent treatment and enforcement but those are other matters.
> confusing what is and what ought to be is a hugely annoying feature of many armchair legal analysts
To be fair, the delusion is shared by many, including law itself. If "what ought to be" was the same as "what is," then what form of law would be needed?
In what sense is Facebook not a publisher? Their algorithm acts as an editor, choosing what to show me. If they had a simple chronological feed, then the platform argument would make sense.
If the NYT created a service where the articles I see were selected algorithmically, would they suddenly not be a publisher?
The "publisher" versus "platform" distinction is 100% a made-up distinction to motivate bad §230 takes.
What §230 does, very simply, is say that websites posting user-generated content are not liable for that content, even if they moderate the content. It was passed in response to a pair of court decisions that concluded that a website that moderated content (including, for example, weeding out profanity or pornography) was liable for all content posted, and a website that provided no moderation whatsoever wasn't liable.
I finally looked up the actual text of §230 and it says this:
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
So I guess the NYT would be responsible for articles they generate but I suppose they would get a pass for anything they re-publish (like from a wire service).
> So I guess the NYT would be responsible for articles they generate but I suppose they would get a pass for anything they re-publish (like from a wire service).
Exactly. Though, interestingly, the second part of your statement is only true for the online edition. For NYT-on-paper, they're liable for all of it. The same with the comments section: online, it's covered by s.230; offline, the 'letters to the editor' section in print is the responsibility of the paper.
Because s.230 expressly provides for them not to be treated as one. The worry at the time was that information services making editorial decisions (taking down harmful content, in particular) would be treated as publishers, and so liable for what was left up. That creates an obvious moral hazard problem, encouraging bulletin boards and web hosts to refuse to even look at what's being posted, to avoid liability. So s.230 was added to the Communications Decency Act to make clear that the legal responsibility would fall only on those originally providing the information.
This situation isn't mirrored outside the US, FWIW. IIRC England & Wales will impose liability for libels etc., but only if the host had actual or constructive knowledge of the content of the post and chose to let it stay up. That introduces quite a lot of legal uncertainty and a bias towards deleting controversial material but may be better overall. I don't really know.
When a company (or even more generally a social phenomenon) is so big, the only logical consequence is that it becomes embedded in the layer that it services.
In society not everybody is equal, a social movement with the massive scope that Facebook has cannot deviate from such rule.
Power law is a thing, you can't escape it, not even the Universe can.
Then the fact anything is would be wrong, which if believed truly leads the only reasonable behavior to be the most destructive behavior (what is, existence, is bad, so destroying it is good).
In society not everybody is equal, however in societies with rule of law, the idea is that everybody is at least deemed equal under the law. That this unfortunately often fails in practice is very different from explicitly and intentionally having separate rules
If these are known misleading public statements then can SEC prosecute them? I'd think these statements can affect the stock price and this is securities fraud.
They would likely raise a "mere puffery" defense. Our legal system recognizes that in the course of business people will inevitably lie. At least a little. And so puffery, as a matter of law, is immaterial.
The puffery doctrine is quite controversial in some academic circles. Though I'm not sure it's litigated much anymore as a practical matter? At least not when it comes to civil suits alleging securities fraud.
I'm guessing you have just met "prosecutorial discretion" for the first time. Prosecutors have to power to never bring charges against their friends and allies with basically zero risk.
Consider the Jussie Smollett case. Kim Foxx, the Chicago DA (and allegedly close to Smollett) dismissed charges rather than recusing herself and bringing in another prosecutor.
It took widespread outrage to reverse that decision and Foxx still has her job.
Anything smaller than national outrage against a DA is almost always entirely overlooked.
Your next shock will no doubt be about the nature of grand juries. A prosecutor chooses what information to show to the jury. It is perfectly acceptable to leave out incriminating evidence or to leave out vindicating evidence.
A prosecutor can get friends and allies off the hook or punish opponents this way while claiming "the people decided". The whole grand jury system needs to be reworked to ensure it is more equal (or simply done away with).
The SEC doesn't conduct criminal prosecutions. They can only bring civil actions for securities law violations. If they do find evidence of criminality they pass it to the Justice Department for possible prosecution.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 529 ms ] threadhttps://seekingalpha.com/news/3739118-facebook-exempted-secr...
Not even the fines are scaring them. They are so tiny, they are laughing at them whilst they rake in billions in revenue.
They will never change and it will only get worse. They are the problem.
I’d done manual labor before, it’s sucks and the pay is low, but it sure beats selling your soul for a few greenbacks.
So there's (for want of a more precisely nuanced way to put it) the default/knee-jerk outrage response to this, aka "how dare there be people above me in society that get the final word on what I can/cannot do without lawful recourse" etc etc.
But then... "more equal than others", taken in strict isolation, kind of goes off on an interesting tangent about how certain personality types are intrinsically socially compatible with each other; less jarring/grating, and more... resonant.
Stream-of-consciousness question: at a fundamental level, is there an exact point that this resonance, which is arguably benign at face value, can end up enabling social ${in}equality?
Not quite talking about individual scenarios of powerful person A taking an effectively entropically arbitrary liking to random person B and elevating them, ideally without [requirement for] compromise.
I mean more in the generalized sense, looking more from the perspective of network/emergent effects.
Did the really use fb or instagram like we all do? I always see "official pages" for people like Bill Gates, but where/what do they share in their day to day life?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/21/us/mitt-romney-pierre-del...
I had dinner with him and his family. I wasn't before, during, or afterwards a fan. To sum it up quickly, I have never in my life been in the company of people so removed from the everyday working man while being waited on by them. Truly an amazing experience that I look back on with a pre and post understanding of "the elite".
If there was a conservative thought between any of them I didn’t hear it. Nor did I hear anything that I would have described as a “good take” on any thing, like if he were to suggest something on topic X, that neither proponents nor opponents of X would consider the idea valid. In a two hours, I don’t imagine I heard a single honest heartfelt conviction.
Without giving up enough to ID me to anyone at any time in the future, I can say this… the world would burn if the Romney’s were in charge.
I still suspect that method is imperfect since your account may be locked and you may need to associate a burner number to it.
From the support response:
> The post was reviewed, and though it doesn't go against one of our specific Community Standards, you did the right thing by letting us know about it.
Setting squirrels on fire and watching the poor things scurry around I guess is cool with Facebook's Community Standards.
Unfortunately nothing else you can do about it, either. Who do you even report this to? There's no LEO agency that would spend resources on that even though this is a well known pre-cursor to homicide.
Shit like that reminds me how failed society is - to be able to literally torture animals and face little to no repercussions, and get tons of clout and maybe even some money (ad revenue or whatever) in the process.
Not always, depends on where you are. Being set on fire is probably not better than the conditions of industral farms. Let's be realistic.
Tell that to my garden.
(I don't condone messing with wildlife in any way. However, I would like my arugula to grow up not behind bars.)
You are in your right to scare them off, of somewhat fence your goods to keep them at bay. Torturing those animals, or any animal for that matter does nothing to controlling their damage to your previous fruits of labor. Keeping them away is the best investment of time and effort if you don't see their value.
I've reported clearly racist, harassing content before and had the reviewer report it as confirming to their standards. I know people that were banned for bullying for wishing people happy birthday. As much as I suspected a bunch of people are just quickly mashing random buttons to pump up their score, I read that they're evaluated based on the success and failure of appeals to their judgements, so I can't imagine they would be. There are clearly deep-seated problems with this process.
Brigades on the other hand have the motivation to play the numbers.
It’s very safe to say there is no adult in the room at FB/IG when it comes to rule enforcement. I simply cannot wait until they get the whip from some governments.
Does it really? Whatever happened to just a friendly weekly email?
Efficiencies and user experience are better for more users on social media than email, despite it's obvious flaws.
Did regional steel mills _have_ to replace local blacksmiths? No, but they did.
The problem sadly isn't tech related. It's education. Corporates will market to the masses who are mostly tech ignorant, if not politically and economically ignorant too. So even with alternatives, the power of commercial communication is greater than what non profit are able to afford.
We will have to wait for people to suffer further and further, more will open their eyes to it, until radical resistance settles in people's limbic systems. We are getting close I think, I hope.
Man I'd love it if I could communicate socially via email, nobody I know would go for it
I'll make a point to give it a go :)
The issue with email is partly a slight inconvenience. Unless you input large content, the UX time overhead is significant enough to prefer IM. EMails has not been designed for frequent back and forth on the same thread even if occasional. From there you loose most people. Email hasn't changed much, from the time we barely had Internet connections, the burden to find a connected client was enough to forgive the UX issue.
Enter email address, autocomplete, type text, click send is enough a deterent for most of us to favor a chat window, type and press enter. And scroll up to see what was communicated prior. Got an image or audio? Drop it in, press enter. You can even record a quick audio message and boom, sent. Email client and protocol simply don't support that. At best you get addons which aren't necessarily supported on the other side.
Openness is the solution, but email protocol doesn't have what is needed for current needs of communication. Corporates building these tools now have the network effect, keeping the crowd in their walled gardens.
For me, the point of SM is burnable bridges. It's a place to take risks and later apply the lessons to meatspace. In spite of that, I've cultivated many lasting online relationships but I can't see myself ever meeting any of them in person.
(I have one friend I send mails to occasionally, though)
Then when we do get a chance to meet up, we can skip right to the discussion of the thing instead of me first having to tell the story.
Especially since some of my friends live very far away and have very busy jobs so we only see each other every few years, but this way I can still keep up on their lives and they on mine.
Sadly I’m happy I left Facebook but I will admit I’ve missed a lot of news and events in friends personal lives. A good friends mom, whom I was very fond of, passed away and I learned about it months later. Another friend had a fast growing tumor and I missed that news and never got a last phone call with him. Both of which I regret missing out on.
I’ll still maintain I’m happy with my departure, but it has its drawbacks unfortunately.
Double edged sword indeed.
It's extremely hard to get by, keep up with people, or even make friends without it.
The same could also be said for Discord as well, which I've seen over the past 4-5 years grow from a gamer-exclusive chat platform to what is probably the #1 choice for students nowadays for group interactions.
As far as we've come though I still think these kinds of things are still in their infancy when it comes to their impact on us as a society, so I guess the best thing to do is just wait and see what happens.
Their moderation is a complete joke.
We (the kids and I) now lovingly call her "hate speech Mom".
No lie, that is dirty talk.
Hook-up mom would be better.
Nothing in the article gives hard numbers, so (unless WSJ has those numbers and forgot to report them), we have to extrapolate. XCheck-flagged accounts grew to 5.8 million users, but Facebook has 1.9 billion daily actives. If we assume about equal numbers of issues from the XCheck and non-XCheck accounts, XCheck accounts would make up less than 0.5% of all incidents. That's "a small number" if you're thinking in ratios. If you're thinking in absolute numbers, well, we don't have enough data to know what the absolute count looks like. Could be that a lot of XCheck'd accounts have zero incidents. Insufficient data.
Pretty comical, considering it was accurate in context, and while you'd think American 1st amendment free speech rights would count, they don't, because FB is the private property of Zuckerberg.
No need for someone to point out that it's a publicly traded company. Zuckerberg controls 57.9% of the voting shares of FB. It is his personal property that he allows others to have an inconsequential piece of and everything that is wrong on the platform is because of him.
If you are a pleb, its up to the AI. so unless that video has been fingerprinted, then it'll be approved.
if the sentiment analysis AI says you were being abusive: ban. if you appeal (if you can) it might, perhaps 1/100,00 times be looked at by a human
A friend got a 48h ban for calling herself a "rital," a term for an Italian immigrant in France that used to be derogatory a century ago.
Facebook spend a lot on PR talking up their AI capabilities and how it's being applied towards moderation. Would be nice if it actually worked.
I reported 9 comments misgendering a trans person and none of them were considered against community standards, supposedly.
It’s ridiculous
Would be great if us plebs could get the privilege of accurately enforced policies.
And Facebook is not actually shut down in China. It's partially blocked and working on a censorship project to reinstate itself there.
Why do we even have the collective fiction where corporate messaging around a sore topic is treated as trustworthy? Especially with companies that we know lie all the fucking time?
In retrospect the "big tech" era will be such a sad, dark, insidiously toxic period. So much hypocrisy, so much in-your face failure to honor basic social contracts, so much misallocated talent...
I mean I think they're all overgrown capitalist machines that thirst for their users' data, mindshare and money, and all of them have a heap of dirty secrets that either have or will leak out sooner or later. And none of their dirty secrets - like this 'revelation' that Facebook has a database of favorites - will be surprising.
Twitter has it too - Trump got away with stuff most people would be instantly banned for. They cite he is a person of high importance, but the real reason is that Trump and the ripple effect each of his tweets had were responsible for a big chunk of their annual revenue.
Remember a few years ago that Twitter was struggling financially or stagnating in terms of activity and users? I'm sure I remember a few articles about that. But since then, Trump and some other populist politicians and commentators have caused big waves on there, because each post starts a very big and long discussion involving thousands if not tens of thousands of people, all of them having 'hot takes' on things.
TL;DR they exempt people from the rules because they make them the most money.
I really wish it was that simple. if it was, we could just ban it all and have done with it. For the US this is a symptom of the splitting of a country into multiple warring parts. Partly whipped up by news networks, print journalism and all by the constant war for your attention.
TV news picks up some stupid tweet, offers it as an morsel for 5 minutes of hate. This pissed people off, they got online and berate the original tweet, the "other side" counter attacks, rinse, repeat. (see critical race theory)
The general public are being played, so that a number of large corporations can get attention enough to sell advertising space.
> Google is a close third, if you hold Google responsible for its own search results
why wouldn't you? I mean they are well known for allowing advertisers to manipulate results. They track your location, what your reading, who your talking to, and sell the products to third parties. If we should be keeping an eye on anyone, it should be google. The level of questioning that FB gets must be applied to any of the internet giants.
If you include the videos that YouTube recommends, they pull even with Facebook and Twitter.
They are all optimizing for the ability of content to keep eyeballs glued to the screen (so they can show more ads), and nothing else.
>in Google’s effort to keep people on its video platform as long as possible, “its algorithm seems to have concluded that people are drawn to content that is more extreme than what they started with—or to incendiary content in general,” and adds, “It is also possible that YouTube’s recommender algorithm has a bias toward inflammatory content.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/youtube...
Some would say that you don't get to be as large and as profitable as those companies without resorting to mendacity and rule-breaking. Some would even say that such moves are required and acceptable
Facebook probably has the most well-known face of any of these companies in Mark Zuckerberg. And one difference between Mark and other typical cut-throat business leaders is that he's got a reputation for being weirdly socially awkward in a noticeable way to the extent that there's numerous memes about him being a robot or alien.
Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, and others might be similarly ruthless or worse entrepreneurs, but they don't come across as the same level of creepy even though they also want to own your data, put cameras and microphones in your house, just as much as Facebook.
Some seem to think that the reason this is excused is because (in the US at least) every poor schmuck seem to think they they will be rich and powerful someday and get to partake. I've never found that very credible, but smarter people than me seem to think so.
Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerburg are better examples of oligarchs because they managed to create their own wealth and with that obtained political clout.
Haha, there's that fiction. See how deeply it pervades all thinking about power and success in the US?
… Eventually? I'm surely not the only one who thinks of Madoff first, and he got away with it for almost a decade after suspicions were first reported.
Convenient because it allows the state to continue to pass more and more draconian laws that prevent any change to the status quo in which the rich get richer and poor are further dehumanized.
The rule of law however has been continuously pursued across centuries and different societies in an attempt to subvert this 'default' operating mechanism.
I would argue the nature bit is where you favor yourself. Its hard to find people who will disfavor themselves in the name of egalitarianism.
The rest is the result of resources/funds being concentrated in the hands of people who also end up with power due to said resources/funds.
If we looked at normal and even favorable politicians like Nancy Pelosi or President Biden, we might find something worth investigating as well but has gotten swept under the rug.
Punishing politicians in itself can be political even...
Also, the judge who made the ruling was fired.
And that's probably enough to justify saying he has a "bright future," in this country and day and age.
From a global perspective, the eliteness is far more than a "small bit".
Sure, in some cultures they use the number of cows as the reference point, in others they use the jewelry worn or the car driven by the individual. I know that some people compete in who can afford to spend the most money on their wedding too.
All of these are literally just another way of quantifying wealth through displays of it (regardless of whether it is real wealth or they just decided to spend all their savings on a $100k wedding). And I dont see how this is somehow unique to the US at all.
There is nobody in the US that believes US society is classless. Talk about fictions.
Everyone knows upper class, middle class, lower class segmentation. So how is it you reconcile your premise of Americans not thinking there are classes when everyone in the country defines themselves by such structures? Americans are taught the class structures all throughout school. Americans are informed about the class structures 24/7 by popular media and news, from the NYTimes to CNBC and everything inbetween.
The hyper rich and the poor have been an always part of US society. There are no exceptions in terms of grasping the distinction, nobody fails to get it. The US has had hyper rich and poor since its founding and everyone here has always been aware of the divisions. It's in our history books, it's in our earliest literature. It's omnipresent as a thing.
Before there was the industrial wealthy and working poor, there were the land barons and British lords, farmers, agrarian workers and the slaves that were brought to the US by the conquering European empires. The class systems here quite pre-date the country, so yes, Americans are fully aware of it all. It has never not been part of US society.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/03/3...
Athletics are another sense in which he was elite.
Yes, I suppose the kulaks were members of the bourgeoisie after all, for they had skills, and skills are capital, and thus they are part of the oppressor class -- the elite.
Indeed, his mother, a nurse, and his father, as an engineer, both possessed intellectual capital and are thus counterrevolutionaries.
Just to be clear: the above is somewhat tongue in cheek and obviously nothing about the boy's background should be relevant in a violent crime case, and his was particularly disgusting.
Pardon my rudeness, but if that's the only thing someone sees as elite, I'd suggest that the person's own elite status is just a notch below them.
Just as a matter of terminology, I think one doesn't usually speak of judges being fired. He lost his seat in a recall election.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Persky#Repercussions_to_...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2019/09/11/recalled-ju...
(By recall election right?)
https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2018/07/23/cameron-terrell-a...
1: https://edition.cnn.com/2016/09/02/us/brock-turner-release-j...
I'd say the American justice system is capricious more than anything. Plea bargains - which is extremely common in America but extremely rare to non-existent in most countries - also play a big roll. The guilty can reduce their sentence, while the innocent are threatened with years in prison unless they forfeit their right to defend themselves.
Ever tried to get a job with a string of convictions? The criminal justice system in the US doesn't need to imprison a person for them to be punished.
I am too old for reconsidering the possibilities of a investment linked naturalisation process, but the development in American political culture since 2016 has convinced me that I would be committed to doing everything possible to reverse recent real and far more damaging perceived decay of moral and judicial common citizenry in the USA. The rest of the world doesn't know how terrible this is for everyone.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Anatole_France
For example, the company reporting this is the WSJ, owned by Murdoch. Why are the WSJ seen as respectable?
Why are any of the MSM seen as respectable? They're all objectively untrustworthy on basically everything except sport. They're all in it together, and the sooner we cut them out of our collective headspace the better our chance of survival.
By the way did you know that hydroxychloroquine does cure COVID, if you also take it with tons of Zinc? Big Pharma (TM) doesn't want you to know.
When there's no scene to be at with a camera and nobody is getting interviewed, I just don't see what the media has to add. Spending years pouring over account records? Interviewing a eyewitness to get the real story from a hundred conflicting ones? Combing through a million tweets to find one with a video of a natural disaster? Those are things that a journalist could conceivably do better than I could.
I'm thinking not.
Journalists fail all the time, for sure, but there's a lot of journalists in the world churning out content every day. We tend to focus on the failures, but I don't see any evidence that the failures represent even a majority of the content.
Until then you are just doing the same thing as the parent: making a bunch of unsubstantiated claims based on what can only be labeled as "your own bias".
I'd think that you "media hater" folks would act differently than you are. Like you claim to hate the media for misrepresenting the truth, but then refuse to actually back up your claims with any real data. If it wasn't so sad, it would be funny.
That's really all you can go on.
So I put the question back to you, what would replace it? And one answer I won't accept is individuals without any oversight at all - that isn't a viable answer (i.e. blogs, video, social media, etc.).
Yeah I don't get that. PR people are adversaries, not allies
Works for the FDA, anyway.
Recently I've resorted to explaining various news items to my kids as "well, there would have been a meeting, and their lawyer would have said this... and the marketing person would have said that... and then they tried to figure out how to put out a statement that was true but didn't get them sued..."
Same goes for Facebook. If people think that everybody is being fact checked and false information content is being taken down after being reported then stuff that doesn't get taken down must be true.
Seeing great injustice like this is just really hard for us, because it's a constant reminder that either:
1. there is no meaning / purpose / higher-power / etc, or
2. we have been forsaken by whatever higher-power there is.
Both of these are uncomfortable, so it's often easier to just subconsciously fall into ignoring the issues and lulling oneself into a bit of happiness. Until something like this happens, then everyone has to act surprised for a bit; lest they admit to #1 or #2 above.
The issue is emblematic of a bigger issue though. General trust in our society is generally down. It stretches beyond the sectors normally understood as BS ( advertising, HR come to mind ), but moved to corrupt just about everything else out there. We are a point, where the only organization that is somewhat trusted is military.
That is not a good state of affairs.
So popular belief that our society can fix the issues it is presented with drops.
Which means societal trust drops.
And those who are causing said problems, become emboldened.
Trust has been broken for all of human history. It’s just much easier for us to notice it now. I don’t know the solution, but more of what we’ve been doing isn’t it.
in my view, regulation is not the answer. what's happened, from my perspective, is that only a small handful of platforms have gel'led into place, have come to take over all of our social media world. this is largely via a system of rampant acquisitions/anti-competitive behavior, & enormously high switching costs of leaving any given network.
we need more people engaged & trying to find answers. we need more networks. we need new ways of networking, new ways of moderating, at scale. the current contenders are mostly well over a decade old & have rotted into place, and trying to regulate these vast networks is not going to bring us to a better place. we have to really journey, to better, less dull places, via innovation & competition.
personally i feel like social networks are elemental to freedom of speech & democratic practices in the world today. if we as a public value speech, believe it important for public good, i would like to see funds set up to fund development & running of public good works. we should fund the fediverse, we should fund people trying to build helpful moderation tools; we should practice actively the values that are important to us.
If that's to be changed, who takes the action? The government? Does the government decide what's bad, and what's not? It's an unanswerable question that none agrees on.
Society hasn't worsened meaningfully, this kind of stuff has always existed, but the internet exposes this to everyone, pulling everyone out of their pre-internet bubbles.
Only in certain quarters. The US military has been subject to deliberate infiltration by both evangelicals (especially Air Force), white supremacists, and proto-insurrectionists for decades. More recently, there has been a seemingly endless parade of officers committing public acts of insubordination, or even incitement to mutiny/sedition. At this point, trust in the military is mostly limited to people who share those agendas.
https://www.advocate.com/commentary/2018/3/29/christian-take...
Likewise for white supremacists.
https://www.splcenter.org/news/2020/02/11/splc-testifies-con...
Here is just the latest example of an active duty military officer committing very public acts of insubordination.
https://www.stripes.com/branches/marine_corps/2021-08-27/mar...
I'll let you look up the examples of military personnel participating in January 6 yourself. I'm a little wary TBH of being "sea-lioned" about things that are super well known and documented. It's an argument-by-exhaustion tactic I learned to recognize at least twenty years ago.
If there are actually folks that, for example, pretended to be atheist/agnostic, climbed up the ranks, and suddenly became an evangelical then your worries are more understandable, though I’m not sure if that’s happened.
The info in the second link does seem worrying if true.
For the last link, considering there are thousands if not tens of thousands (?) of Lt. Cols, and equivalent ranks, in the US military, it’s somewhat surprising but not that unusual, or worrying, that there’s public insubordination by a few.
They're not hiding their beliefs, but they are hiding their intentions. When they join the military they take oaths to defend the constitution, which includes separation of church and state. They are strictly forbidden from allowing their religion to affect performance of their duties. When religious groups are actively recruiting people to join the military with prior intent to violate their oaths and regulations, that's still a Very Bad Thing. The fact that the secrecy is not total seems like exactly the kind of sea-lioning quibble I predicted.
> considering there are thousands if not tens of thousands
A little research shows that there are just over 10,000 LTCs in the Army, which is the largest branch so probably fewer in each of the others. But this has gone much higher than that. Another example is Stanley McChrystal, a four star general (there are only 43 of those in the army right now) and director of Special Forces Command, who resigned to avoid being formally charged with insubordination. Do you think his example helped or hurt wrt other officers committing similar acts of insubordination? That it was good or bad for military discipline and national security?
> not that unusual, or worrying, that there’s public insubordination by a few.
That's insane. The military runs on discipline. It's one of its most important, almost defining, features. Yes, this is surprising. There have been very few cases in my lifetime. Yes, it's worrying for a senior officer not only to be insubordinate but to incite others to follow them into mutiny/insurrection. Dismissing it as though military service were no different than being in a chess club is absurd.
There will always be people with less than virtuous intentions climbing up the ranks at any given point in time, at any given organization.
So the military certainly seems to be doing better at separating the wheat from the chaff than the federal bureaucracy or any private organization even 1/10 as large.
The best thing to do with Facebook is to nuke their data centres and incarcerate the execs and board members.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/63755
Now that there is concrete evidence that moderators are exempting people from the rules - aka selectively enforcing their own TOS/AUP - does that change their standing and protections?
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB10306
(that's a trick question: No such case exists. What you say is not the law -- for anyone interested in a more-entertaining version summarizing the state of the law in this area than court decisions and statues, check out https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...)
"Generally, courts have said that a service’s ability to control the content that others post on its website is not enough, in and of itself, to make the service provider a content developer."
But hey, your easily googlable link is useful too.
For such a simple provision, it's astonishing how many people are writing bad (and sometimes bad-faith) takes on what it means. [Edit:] It's actually absolutely as straightforward as it appears. Which is not to say that it couldn't be changed (and there are reasonable arguments both ways) but confusing what is and what ought to be is a hugely annoying feature of many armchair legal analysts.
You don't have to be a lawyer to know something is a bad law and something is being abused.
s.230 has no platform/publisher trade-off. If you're an intermediary and not the original information provider you are expressly not the speaker or publisher, irrespective of your editorial choices. That's the whole point of the provision. And it's really straightforward. A lot of people seem to want to muddy the waters, and they shouldn't.
As written, nothing changes with this not-revelation, revelation with respect to Section 230. It does recolor some of their statements about consistent treatment and enforcement but those are other matters.
To be fair, the delusion is shared by many, including law itself. If "what ought to be" was the same as "what is," then what form of law would be needed?
If the NYT created a service where the articles I see were selected algorithmically, would they suddenly not be a publisher?
What §230 does, very simply, is say that websites posting user-generated content are not liable for that content, even if they moderate the content. It was passed in response to a pair of court decisions that concluded that a website that moderated content (including, for example, weeding out profanity or pornography) was liable for all content posted, and a website that provided no moderation whatsoever wasn't liable.
I finally looked up the actual text of §230 and it says this:
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
So I guess the NYT would be responsible for articles they generate but I suppose they would get a pass for anything they re-publish (like from a wire service).
Exactly. Though, interestingly, the second part of your statement is only true for the online edition. For NYT-on-paper, they're liable for all of it. The same with the comments section: online, it's covered by s.230; offline, the 'letters to the editor' section in print is the responsibility of the paper.
This situation isn't mirrored outside the US, FWIW. IIRC England & Wales will impose liability for libels etc., but only if the host had actual or constructive knowledge of the content of the post and chose to let it stay up. That introduces quite a lot of legal uncertainty and a bias towards deleting controversial material but may be better overall. I don't really know.
When a company (or even more generally a social phenomenon) is so big, the only logical consequence is that it becomes embedded in the layer that it services.
In society not everybody is equal, a social movement with the massive scope that Facebook has cannot deviate from such rule.
Power law is a thing, you can't escape it, not even the Universe can.
It's not right and it's not wrong. It just is.
Luckily, its good.
The puffery doctrine is quite controversial in some academic circles. Though I'm not sure it's litigated much anymore as a practical matter? At least not when it comes to civil suits alleging securities fraud.
Edit- It seems it will be (at least part of) Elizabeth Holmes' defense: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-06/elizab...
Consider the Jussie Smollett case. Kim Foxx, the Chicago DA (and allegedly close to Smollett) dismissed charges rather than recusing herself and bringing in another prosecutor.
It took widespread outrage to reverse that decision and Foxx still has her job.
Anything smaller than national outrage against a DA is almost always entirely overlooked.
Your next shock will no doubt be about the nature of grand juries. A prosecutor chooses what information to show to the jury. It is perfectly acceptable to leave out incriminating evidence or to leave out vindicating evidence.
A prosecutor can get friends and allies off the hook or punish opponents this way while claiming "the people decided". The whole grand jury system needs to be reworked to ensure it is more equal (or simply done away with).