The internet routes around damage. If these social media companies prove they're favouring the government rather than their customers, hackers or AI will just replace them. Won't be as pretty, perhaps, but it won't block or snoop so much. These companies haven't built up any goodwill to protect them.
But, they have built up moats via generally unregulated anti-competitive behavior. Also of note, the ISPs are owned by the same class of people, they aren't routing around anything, they are taking our money and cashing checks.
Which would be praise worthy if it was a net neutrality stance, but it's not.
Heh. Zuck got a call from "The King" and The King told him he better behave. Take down that site ... Zuck knows who holds the DOJ over his head ... and from where the money flows
Five years ago this site was ready to burn you at the stake if you defended copyright laws, which clearly were only written to protect the rich and powerful, like Disney!
Now those laws are obviously there to defend the little guy against the oligarchs, and we should ready our pitchforks to march on Silicon Valley for daring to violate our precious copyright laws!!
I think HN takes issue with the hypocrisy of the matter. Copyright law was used to punish regular people for consuming illegal media, but AI tech companies are forgiven for using the same illegal methods to run a business.
That’s completely understandable, but that’s not what I see from HN. If you were outraged when individuals were prosecuted for copyright and then you demand that OpenAI be prosecuted for it, you’re the hypocrite.
A flagrant violation requires clearly established jurisprudence. What is considered fair use has always been nebulous, and to the extent that there are standards on it, it's mainly through established precedence, of which there is none on AI training.
One can argue that the closest thing to an AI's training on a book is a person reading a book and remembering the details, which i'm sure you reject, but it's not prima facie unreasonable.
Dude you could literally just type any of the company's names and add the word "lawsuit" after it and see a plethora of lawsuits that were either lost or settled, and the majority of them are privacy related.
Its hard to believe just how many of you are this defensive of these companies and are just completely disingenuous, as if they give a shit about you.
I literally just typed "google lawsuit" and these came up.
This person does absolutely nothing to disconfirm their beliefs about anything. They think having sex with minors isn’t pedophilia, either. It’s scary. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50135657
You are posting links to civil judgements instead of criminal ones. This thread branch is about putting folks into prison. I am asking where these people have been convicted of a criminal offense where the punishment is prison. Do you have anything there? Because last I understood, the government needs to prove you guilty before they can incarcerate you in a prison.
lol, so reactionaries can chime in with "well ackshually" as if amateur message board comments require the same formalities as a trial? I've been in enough ice-agent-murders-a-protestor threads to know to steer clear of that noise!
This regime have flagrantly violated their oaths of office, outright ignoring their Constitutional roles and instead acting in bad faith to achieve their personal goals. These types of crimes
aren't usually written down, which is why "high crimes and misdemeanors" is never defined out despite clearly being a thing.
We can save the technicalities for if they actually get into a court. But worries about how that might play out should not prevent us from demanding justice for this concerted attack on the United States!
First, you seem to want to take this to politician place, I was asking about the crimes ypthat these executives have committed and convicted of that deserve prison.
> These types of crimes aren't generally formalized and written down
Then they aren't crimes. To have a crime you need a law first. Someone then has to break that law. You need an authority that recognizes and can enforce that law. Then you need a conviction under that law and a legal authority that can met out punishment. If you don't have a law, you cant have a crime and you cant have a conviction for it.
> But worries about how that might play out should not prevent us from demanding justice for what by all measures appears to be a concerted attack on the United States!
So your solution is “lets make what they did illegal now, and then convict them for a current law for something they did in the past that wasn’t illegal at the time they did it”?
Seems to me to be a dangerous precedent to set and one that will be used against you whenever power shifts (and power always shifts).
> I don't know what you mean by "take this to politician place"
Well, you wrote this, didn’t you?
>> This regime have flagrantly violated their oaths of office, outright ignoring their Constitutional roles and instead acting in bad faith to achieve their own personal/political goals.
You turned a simple question about what crimes were committed and convicted by tech leaders that deserved prison and decided to loop in a diatribe against the current administration. You apparently have an axe there you want to grind. So be it, but perhaps grind away on another thread appropriate to that topic.
> That behavior is most certainly in the realm of criminality, despite there not being a law that directly states it. Rather it's the kind of thing that needs to be decomposed into specific chargeable crimes by prosecutors, after having been investigated for the extent of communications, agreements, etc that effect the conspiracy. And then judges make an actual decision which intrinsically creates new precedents (ie common law) because these type of things don't happen every dao.
So…your answer is “no, they have not committed a crime for which they can be put in prison, but you really hope that some prosecutors and judges can get together to invent some way to parse legal behavior you disagree with into creating a precedent that can bypass congress’s responsibility to make law”.
Good to know.
It is shit like this that make people like you fucking scare the shit out of me…way more than some tech bro training AI on copyrighted material (And to put that in perspective, I am one of those people who think AI is probably gonna eventually kill us).
Reminds me that Plato viewed oligarchy as being better than democracy, as long as laws are being upheld. When laws are not being upheld, a lawless democracy is better than a lawless oligarchy.
It's an obvious flaw in hindsight. In an oligarchy, how exactly are laws upheld? The Oligarchs got there by being above the law and in our age of instant information the People see full-view what it takes to win. Nobody wants to be the sucker when everyone is getting theirs.
"This is a much more powerful term. I can do stuff that's unbelievable. I called Google, Google Maps. They wouldn't have taken my call in the first term. Now they kiss my ass."
They looks like degenerates - in the photo they really are sickeningly grotesque! It's not Felliniesque because they have their own, new style of hideousness: putrid, plastic, shiny, smug, weak, and radically vulgar!
I've noticed a number of your politically charged comments tend to rank highly on HN these days, jacquesm. So just to be clear, you are implying that this temporary account suspension was potentially a plot by Mark Zuckerberg to suppress a major political group in the US and Meta is okaying this internally to gain preferential treatment from the US government?
I still refuse to sign up for it so long as they have their "Fuck you, logged-out user" popup
It's not because of 'scraping'. They literally just want user count
People loved IG pre-FB acq. Then Zuck had his "IG can hurt us" emails, other private messages with one of the IG co-founders ("Zuck will go into destroy mode") and now we have photography being gatekept
> Today, amidst a historic day of thousands of rallies to mobilize early voting and fight against Trump’s election sabotage, Meta suspended the primary No Kings Instagram account without warning or reason.
> After intense backlash, Meta made the account visible again 90 minutes into the suspension, giving the appearance that everything was normal. But it blocked the account admin from posting for another three hours -- censoring the NO Kings coalition in the middle of today’s historic day of action.
This is yet another reason people in the US needs to get out and vote. People need to come out in mass to take back their country. But since most people in the US are being deluded, I expect the US will never recover from Trump and the very rich.
And now for a big BS quote from the article, which we all know is false.
>There is no evidence at the moment that the suspension was politically motivated
Do people actually expect these companies to be fair and impartial? Seriously, you may as well have a No Kings account on Truth Social while you’re at it.
Come, come, my good sir! COVID conspiracy theorists proven correct? Did 5G phone signals activate tiny robots in the COVID vaccine? No. Does the COVID vaccine work? It's not 100% effective, but mortality data certainly shows that those vaccinated are less likely to die. Time to do some research, update your priors, my friend.
Which reminds me of this month's HN post about Lula's FB account getting taken down https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49864642 , which turned out to only be for a couple hours after some content post got auto-flagged, before being restored by Meta. But the HN thread was a long discussion about it being a conspiracy by the US government to conduct election interference in Brazil.
The rest of the complaints are around exact term search/AI results which are notoriously inconsistent if you've ever done SEO/AEO. So not exactly the strongest evidence.
I'm not fan of Meta or their severe lack of transparency in moderation, but this stuff is so political it's basically impossible to debate on facts. Likewise Brazil's courts are notoriously political, notoriously anti-US social media (well before Trump), and your first link is a judge appointed by one of Lula's ex staff (Dilma Rousseff).
According to the actual court findings, Facebook blocked or hindered Lula's campaign for weeks, not hours. This was already explained to you before you made this post [0]. For further findings of fact, just read what the judges wrote after the investigation (I'm sure you're a nice, smart person, but obviously your opinions don't overrule Brasil's supreme court's findings).
Also, taking the word of the attacker that their crime wasn't that bad, without evidence, is pretty silly behavior, especially when it's facebook, with their long history of malfeasance and deception.
> this stuff is so political it's basically impossible to debate on facts.
It really isn't. Courts looked at the facts and made their decision. You can disagree, but it's not like you're "debating" a court ruling in doing so. The excuses you're tossing out were already tried and ruled dishonest by the courts, all the way up to the supreme court.
> obviously your opinions don't overrule Brasil's supreme court's findings
Their findings? You mean their purely political, pre-determined sentences that they justify after the fact with some reasonable sounding legalese slop? I'd take literally any random HN commenter's opinion over theirs any day.
Next year we're going to impeach a significant number of those "judges". I'm really looking forward to it.
Not to worry ... by providing any legalese slop to go with their rulings, they're ahead of more than half the SCOTUS decisions over the last two years!
Oh wait, we can't impeach US supreme court justices ... ah well, nevertheless.
> Their findings? You mean their purely political, pre-determined sentences that they justify after the fact with some reasonable sounding legalese slop?
You're repeated these claims, but they are not convincing with regards to this matter:
On the one hand, we have the entire court system of an entire country;
On the other hand, we have you. And Facebook.
Sorry, but you and Facebook are less trustworthy, less authoritative, and Facebook at least has shown themselves to be more partisan, too.
If this was actually an accident as you're claiming, then Facebook should be able to apologize, and explain exactly what happened, and what part of their "algorithm" caused it to disproportionately target mainstream left-wing politicians and political movements, and how they plan to fix it and make things right, and how people can verify that they have done so. Have they done any of that?
Appeals to authority are bad in general. Appealing to these particular authorities is just nonsense.
I'd rather people actually think about what I am saying. Evaluate the logic of the arguments I post in good faith, and either accept the argument or refute it.
> If this was actually an accident as you're claiming
I have never claimed that. Not once.
Let's make it clear: I'm not denying that Meta engaged in "interference".
The truth is after what I witnessed in 2022 it doesn't matter what big tech does. I couldn't care less what Meta did or did not do, it's merely a pale shadow before the crimes of the supreme court itself.
In 2022 the supreme court engaged in a blatantly unconstitutional censorship and political persecution campaign against Bolsonaro and the Brazilian right wing. People have already perished in prison because of them.
Watching people fret over the Facebook accounts of Lula at this point is just black comedy.
Want to trust an authority? Then trust the authority of the Brazilian people. Trust democratically elected senate we just voted into power for the express purpose of ending the reign of these judge-god-kings.
I'm appealing to the evidence, which also happens to be what the authorities say. Given that you have neither evidence nor authority in this discussion about whether Facebook's actions were accidental, your claims remain unconvincing on either count.
> I have never claimed that. Not once.
> Let's make it clear: I'm not denying that Meta engaged in "interference".
You are right, I mistakenly confused you for the other poster I replied to, who started this thread by claiming Facebook's actions were all accidental. I'm sorry.
> In 2022 the supreme court engaged in a blatantly unconstitutional censorship and political persecution campaign against Bolsonaro and the Brazilian right wing.
Was that before or after Bolsonaro attempted to overthrow the government and steal the election in a putsch? Most people are not free speech absolutists in all cases, and incitement to insurrection is a common and commonly accepted exception to free speech worldwide.
> I'm appealing to the evidence, which also happens to be what the authorities say.
I don't think I'm expressing myself properly.
I'm way past the point of caring about evidence and fairness.
Lula's been on a electoral crimes spree since he lost the first round of the presidential election earlier this month. He's doing the exact same things Bolsonaro did in 2022, only with complete impunity. Bolsonaro was relentlessly censored and fined for doing the exact same things Lula is doing now. Where the hell are these "judges" now?
Evidence? Nobody is disputing the evidence. The point is none of this matters because the judiciary itself is corrupt and cannot be trusted. The entire institution is too far gone.
I'll start caring about this evidence when these "judges" start applying their own precedents to the left wing as a whole and to Lula personally. Not one second before.
And everybody knows they won't actually do it, which is why we voted in senators to impeach them.
> Was that before or after
Obviously, political censorship during the election could only have taken place before the election. The court's profoundly destabilizing actions led directly to January 8th.
However, it actually started years before those events. The supreme court created the "fake news" inquisition in 2019. They are literally the victims, investigators, prosecutors, judges and executioners in a trial of wildcard crimes against themselves with a jurisdiction covering the entire Brazilian territory. This inquisition is active to this day, and they used it to essentially usurp all power.
> Once that problem's been solved, then we can care about whether some social media company's algorithms are fair.
The dilemma comes in large part from whether or not you think some social media company's algorithms played a role in the senate you just voted into power. I suspect you do not (i.e. you see the senate result as a true, democratic expression of the will of the people of Brasil). Your view is not universally held, however.
I miss being able to dismiss right wing QAnon posters as just dumb American Facebook boomers.
Now conspiracy posting is fully mainstream on both sides of the spectrum in multiple countries, especially (ironically for Meta) among the youth raised on social media, and it's just exhausting reading it all them time.
No-one cares, peoples family and friends are not on the Fediverse.
My realization that it was cooked was when I was doing my comp sci PhD where everyone in our group fully understood the implications of data and surveillance capitalism but 3 out of 20 agreed to download Signal instead of WhatsApp/Messenger.
I agree with you but I also understand your peer group.
WhatsApp solves so many communication problems. It's a single protocol that can do text, audio and video calling. It works on low- and high-bandwidth connections. Everybody already has it, so it's functionally as ubiquitous as the phone itself.
Signal also has the "it's another app" problem. WhatsApp didn't have this problem initially because it was cheaper than texting in its heyday. Thus, having it on your phone made a lot of sense. Now that texting and video calling are functionally free and WhatsApp is ubiquitous, getting people onto something else is much more of an investment.
iMessage + FaceTime will be the next big platform if Apple decides to make it work across the pond. It has everything WhatsApp has while being disassociated from Meta.
the learning curve to understanding the fediverse is too high for most people. They just want to log in, have everything in one place, and not care how it got there.
The fediverse sucks and only people in their small tech bubbles don't seem to realize that the vast majority of people do not know or care about things like "federated social media".
We just need someone* to create a "WoW Classic" version of a social network so that we can get back on it and this time try to make it work. Social media is one of the worst things that has happened to humanity since the web was created. But it used to be good. So it's incomprehensible to me why no one has made a social networking site matching old facebook and without the awfulness added later.
It's fine if people don't care about the federated aspect but I don't think we can rely on a corporation to solve this problem. Even a small one. Federation solves a real technical problem whether end users care or not.
with the next change of administration there needs to be an investigation into every single one of these techbros and a Roosevelt treatment of the tech sector and corporate power.
You've got to hand it to Thiel, at least like other people of questionable political persuasion he's already fled to Argentina, gonna get crowded there in the future
I've never understood the phrase "free speech absolutist." We either have free speech or we don't, there is no in between.
I personally don't think hate speech should be illegal. If someone feels that way I'd rather know it and act accordingly than them keep it to themselves.
Others may well disagree with my view there and that's totally fine, but they do want limits to what one can say which means they don't want free speech.
However there is a difference. A balance of free speech on social media could look like
1. Anyone can say anything they want
2. The algorithms are simplified such that they are chronological and your direct network, rather than the anxiety boosting, "editorial" choice in promoting or limiting the speech of others, especially with how reposts and quote tweets amplify a given post.
We need to rethink and regulate algorithms while we are working on Ai regulation. Let's not let the tech companies that brought us the mess we are in slip by in this moment of seemingly bipartisan cooperation.
Let us also make targeted advertising illegal to remove the incentives that make the "anxiety algorithms" so profitable. Go back to a world of context based advertising like magazines.
One huge distinction to raise here is that free speech is a protection between the individual and the state. Corporations are free to regulate speech on their own platform, especially when users agree to terms of service that stipulate as much.
We can debate where the line on regulation should fall, but that isn't a free speech debate.
The state is not regulating speech in my scenario, it is regulating algorithms and the relative promotion/limitation of another person's speech.
We have considered algorithms to be a form of speech, because it is an "editorial" process, but this does not seem to be what they actually do. Similar to how Ai output is not copyrightable, algorithmic feed algorithms that work on big data should not be considered an "editorial" process. Thus, if we regulate algorithms, we are not regulating speech, we are regulating a process, albeit a digital one with little case law.
Regulating the algorithms would be extremely difficult and I don't expect regulators would be able to do it in a clear enough way that it keeps up with whatever tech companies try next.
Much simpler would be to clarify that algorithmically curated feeds of user content do not fall under the protections shielding the hosting company from liability. It seems reasonable to me that the intent of said protections was was to avoid scenarios where the website is in no way directly involved in the content creation itself, once the company decides what and how to show it that seems outside the original intent.
Yup, critics of Section 230 often cite the possibility doing so will chill speech, that companies will start taking things people say down, to avoid any chance of liability.
Perhaps instead of putting bounds (through laws) on what they cannot do, perhaps we list only what they are allowed to do (for algorithmic feeds), eg. can only show content from direct connections in chronological order. I do expect many people (currently believe) they like being able to discover new content outside of their network.
Whatever we come up with, which would benefit the people, I suspect will have big impacts on their profits. At the same time, if they do not have to spend vast resources to understand our nuances and target ads specifically to use, their cost centers would also be impacted.
I'm a growing proponent of ending targeted advertising. If we start with that, much of the incentives for our current algorithms (social, search, news) would seem to be removed from the equations.
No my point is that free speech isn't a spectrum, we either can say whatever we want or we can't. As far as whether we have it, no in the US we don't have it today as certain speech is still made illegal.
I don't cast free speech in absolute terms, I take issue with those that do since it isn't a spectrum.
Free speech isn't a spectrum in the same way altruism isn't a spectrum. We probably all agree there is no true speech, so we change "free" (as in true freedom) to "free" (as in "liberty") and establish a spectrum anyway.
No one wants "true" free speech anyway. an age of social media + deepfakes means true free speech is legalizing slander/libel. And we know the lies will persist much longer than it deserves.
As well as inciting violence. We don't even need to reach "hate speech" on the spectrum in order to talk about intolerable speech everyone agrees should be punished on.
I'm impressed that you can speak for everyone collectively here.
I take issue with any law that limits speech, including libel, regardless of who says it. Such laws remove agency, and therefore a level of responsibility, from those who hear the speech and choose to act on it.
In the same way that I strongly disagree with laying any blame on a woman for dressing a certain way before being attacked, I don't blame a person for saying something before another person takes an action we've deemed illegal.
The most famous free speech absolutist is Elon Musk and he’s not only not a critic of the Trump administrations lawlessness but a direct participant in it. Also censors a lot of shit on Twitter that he doesn’t like.
There's maybe 40 people on this list you could remotely consider "critics of woke censorship." And they are certainly not critics of censorship, wholesale. JK Rowling is a billionaire who has used her fortune to threaten legal action against multiple critics, forcing them to retract what they wrote about her. That does not sound like someone who is against censorship to me. Or is censorship okay as long as it's not "Woke"?
And even if your description did apply to everyone on this list, so what? A small handful of academics write a letter condemning Trump. How did you spin that into "People that criticize woke censorship don't like Trump." Are you under the impression that the world is comprised of ivory tower academics, and everyone else is a non-entity?
If you were paying attention at all, you'd see the entire anti-woke movement has become a young person's game, and it's completely divorced from censorship. It's more about open, malicious resentment towards anything non-white, now.
That whole letter is criticizing woke censorship. So everyone on that list is a critic. And it's not all academics.
It's very clear to observers of reality that the vast, vast majority of prominent people and organizations who criticized wokeness have moved on to criticzing Trump. For the most part, "free speech advocates" are just normal liberals with principles, but that doesn't stop people in every one of these threads calling out "free speech" like it's something insidious.
Again, nobody in this letter said woke. You're just nonsensically calling things you don't like Woke to post rationalize the types of censorship these people are okay with.
> It's very clear to observers of reality that the vast, vast majority of prominent people and organizations who criticized wokeness have moved on to criticzing Trump
Definitely not. What kind of claim is this? You can't think of anybody that complained about Woke censorship that still supports Trump? You are pointing out the exceptions.
I feel completely certain folks like FIRE / Lukianoff will immediately and loudly condemn this.
I would bet very good money every right leaning pro-free speech justice will condemn this.
I would even bet money Elon would condemn it if pressed on the issue, but probably won't be loud about it (which is the technically correct PR since he owns a competitor).
Edit: I personally strongly condemn it as well, though admit to some small schadenfreude. It can be hard to believe when "the roles reversed" meme actually ends up happening. And I do expect this was a genuine automation mistake by Meta given the quick apology.
I expect almost zero hypocrisy from "free speech absolutists", I expect them to be ideologically consistent and loud about it. FIRE in particular has a tremendous track record of doing so.
Elon is a bit of an outlier in his more hypocritical track record.
eh. FIRE exempts universities like Liberty from its evaluation of free speech on campus because its free speech restrictions are expected. It also rated public universities in Florida well, despite stated positions that they will comply with Florida legislation to restrict speech on campus.
FIRE is indeed not as hypocritical as most "free speech absolutists." But boy howdy do they have different bars for different groups.
There is a meme that conservatives often have their rights trampled (e.g. conservative businesses being debanked, conservative figures blacklisted from Hollywood and social media, Parler being delisted), but instead of conservative leaders doing anything about it, simply point out "Wow, can you imagine if the roles were reversed? The media and legal system would be up in arms!"
(You may not agree with the meme, I'm just telling you that the meme exists)
There really are not. I think it's hard for "non-heretics" to understand just how tight of a fist most online forums keep.
I invite you to try it! Pick a few heretical statements like "Islamic migration has been a disaster for Europe" or "It seems like this trans thing is socially contagious for young girls" and post them in relevant threads on the top 50 Reddit subs.
You will get immediately banned from 95% of these subs, and might last 2 weeks or so in the remaining 5%.
You would get banned from 80% of subs for being off topic.
You would get banned because repeating dog whistles of hate groups is the fastest way to get identified with hate groups.
I have seen what happens multiple times when these statements are posted. To the point that those communities got mentioned in Time magazine as examples of hate groups.
If you think this is a tight fist, consider that the communities that did leave Reddit and go to Parler/whatever, reintroduced moderation rules themselves.
Those types of comments are constantly posted to Reddit right now. It's a smaller number of subreddits than before the rightoid exile, but there are still a few popular ones.
Avoiding deplatforming entirely is impossible. Either you allow brigading and harassment which deplatforms the targets of harassment (who find it effectively impossible to use the service), or you deplatform the brigaders by denying them access to the fora of their targets.
The group now being themselves jailed still argue against those who categorically oppose jails.
You don't need to agree in order to understand the logic.
One side believes it is the "why" in the act that determines rightness or wrongness, the other side believes (if that is their genuine position) the act by itself is categorically wrong.
Back before Gawker went kaput I used to spend a bunch of time in the comment sections at Jezebel and The Root. Jezebel in particular had a huge problem with highly-motivated trolls.
Sometimes the trolling took the form of high-volume contrarian posting, but the trolls would also post porn and pictures of gendered violence in the comments on nearly every single article.
The way Jezebel dealt with it was through a variant of commenter whitelisting. Unapproved commenters (including yet-to-be-banned trolls) would have their comments in a purgatory until approved.
A community like Jezebel cannot exist when supposed free-speech absolutists have their way and protect the trolls. When the free speech of trolls is prioritized, their targets are denied freedom of assembly and freedom of association.
agreed generally, but one could argue that if a company is going to claim impunity for damages for a statement made on their platform because they are operating as a "virtual town square" rather than as a publisher, then they are obligated to permit speech in a way that is congruous with how a public space operates.
That approach sounds promising at first, and I'm interested in exploring it. But it seems to me as though it's not the tool which would allow unpopular groups to hold conversations without interference.
When meeting in an actual, physical town square, a group like the Jezebel.com commenters (or to pluck a group from elsewhere on the political spectrum, second amendment activists) doesn't have the right to be free from criticism. They could hold a rally there, or they could protest other groups, but they don't have the right to shut down those who would protest civilly against them.
What unpopular groups need is a private forum where they can congregate and exercise their right to freedom of association by excluding those who would disrupt their activities.
Let's dissect the parent poster's question for instructional purposes:
- If the answer is yes, then the parent poster would excoriate the respondent for being a horrible person.
- If the answer is no, then the parent poster would triumphantly crow that the respondent is not actually against deplatforming / pro-free speech after all.
Astute HN readers should immediately be able to spot the problem: the false dilemma fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma). They have set up an imaginary "free speech absolutist" who must be 100% against any and all speech restrictions if they do not support deplatforming, which is obviously nonsensical; no such people exist.
It is an attempt at a gotcha but doesn't hold up when examined. I have no idea why people think it's clever.
> I condemn deplatforming regardless of who it's being done to
The parent's post is the one who took an absolute stance on deplatforming. I did not invent the stance. You didn't say "I condemn deplatforming", you specifically added a clause that seems to specify that your belief disregards circumstance.
> "They have set up an imaginary "free speech absolutist" who must be 100% against any and all speech restrictions if they do not support deplatforming"
I did not do this. In fact, it would exclude my own belief, which is that I am generally against deplatforming, but admit there are extraordinary circumstances that should be exceptions, like the case of child porn.
Astute HN readers should immediately be able to tell that I am ironically doing the opposite of the accusation, which is pointing out how absolute binaries on this issue don't hold up to scrutiny. Now poster is falling back on a textbook motte-and-bailey claiming to not have said what they did.
Or perhaps they meant something different by "regardless of who it's being done to", say, that some deplatforming is justified by the exceptional nature of the circumstance but not by preconceived notions of the one being deplatformed. If that's the case, then clarify it rather than attacking me for interpreting your statement in a reasonable way.
>While TikTok has no official affiliation with Elon Musk, part owner Larry Ellison appears in the film via a text message offering to help Musk fund his Twitter purchase.
>Last month, YouTube, Meta, X, and TikTok all faced backlash for rejecting ads for the film. YouTube and Google quickly reversed course, calling it an “error.” However, TikTok and X have refused to change their stance, and neither platform has allowed paid advertisements for the film.
Meta employees acknowledged in internal communications that the Instagram accounts of Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva were hindered by restrictions during the country's election, newspaper Folha de S.Paulo reported on Friday, citing messages it reviewed.
The messages also acknowledged the platform recommended the profile of challenger Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, as well as his WhatsApp channel, according to the report.
Meta said the technical issues cited in the report were already public and the conversations it referenced related solely to the severity of the issues, not political interference. "Any suggestion that Meta favors one side is false," it added in a statement
Oh the days of watching Silicon Valley and loving this crazy, but quirky but seemingly good intentioned industry to work in. Maybe this is who they always were, but either way, how many billions do these CEOs need in exchange for the good of society is the question I ask.
289 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] threadWhich would be praise worthy if it was a net neutrality stance, but it's not.
They favour themselves. And if to best position themselves they must suck up to the government then that's what they'll do. Every time.
> rather than their customers
Who do you think their customers are? They aren't the users. The users are the product, the cattle they farm.
The customers are the advertisers. Advertisers don't want filthy protesters tarnishing their shiny brands.
To save you some searching:
https://www.gettyimages.nl/detail/nieuwsfoto's/guests-includ...
But that's not the point!
The point is that the laws are written by the oligarchs, for the oligarchs.
Laws are made to protect wealth and power, so of course the wealthy and powerful haven't "broken" them.
Five years ago this site was ready to burn you at the stake if you defended copyright laws, which clearly were only written to protect the rich and powerful, like Disney!
Now those laws are obviously there to defend the little guy against the oligarchs, and we should ready our pitchforks to march on Silicon Valley for daring to violate our precious copyright laws!!
One can argue that the closest thing to an AI's training on a book is a person reading a book and remembering the details, which i'm sure you reject, but it's not prima facie unreasonable.
Its hard to believe just how many of you are this defensive of these companies and are just completely disingenuous, as if they give a shit about you.
I literally just typed "google lawsuit" and these came up.
https://www.federalcellularclassaction.com/
https://www.googleassistantprivacylitigation.com/file\
https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-approves-68-million-goo...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/new-mexico-jury-finds-fa...
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2019/07/...
If you want to run to a parent or a teacher anytime your belief system is challenged that says more about you than me?
That adults attracting, grooming, and having sex with minors isn't pedophilia. You're sick and need therapy urgently.
https://www.thecarlatreport.com/blogs/2-the-carlat-psychiatr...
https://blog.atsa.com/2019/08/the-jeffrey-epstein-case-and-w...
https://learning.nspcc.org.uk/news/why-language-matters/paed...
I highly doubt you will read any of these, god forbid you have someone close to you actually a victim of pedophilia.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50141449
This regime have flagrantly violated their oaths of office, outright ignoring their Constitutional roles and instead acting in bad faith to achieve their personal goals. These types of crimes aren't usually written down, which is why "high crimes and misdemeanors" is never defined out despite clearly being a thing.
We can save the technicalities for if they actually get into a court. But worries about how that might play out should not prevent us from demanding justice for this concerted attack on the United States!
> These types of crimes aren't generally formalized and written down
Then they aren't crimes. To have a crime you need a law first. Someone then has to break that law. You need an authority that recognizes and can enforce that law. Then you need a conviction under that law and a legal authority that can met out punishment. If you don't have a law, you cant have a crime and you cant have a conviction for it.
> But worries about how that might play out should not prevent us from demanding justice for what by all measures appears to be a concerted attack on the United States!
So your solution is “lets make what they did illegal now, and then convict them for a current law for something they did in the past that wasn’t illegal at the time they did it”?
Seems to me to be a dangerous precedent to set and one that will be used against you whenever power shifts (and power always shifts).
Well, you wrote this, didn’t you?
>> This regime have flagrantly violated their oaths of office, outright ignoring their Constitutional roles and instead acting in bad faith to achieve their own personal/political goals.
You turned a simple question about what crimes were committed and convicted by tech leaders that deserved prison and decided to loop in a diatribe against the current administration. You apparently have an axe there you want to grind. So be it, but perhaps grind away on another thread appropriate to that topic.
> That behavior is most certainly in the realm of criminality, despite there not being a law that directly states it. Rather it's the kind of thing that needs to be decomposed into specific chargeable crimes by prosecutors, after having been investigated for the extent of communications, agreements, etc that effect the conspiracy. And then judges make an actual decision which intrinsically creates new precedents (ie common law) because these type of things don't happen every dao.
So…your answer is “no, they have not committed a crime for which they can be put in prison, but you really hope that some prosecutors and judges can get together to invent some way to parse legal behavior you disagree with into creating a precedent that can bypass congress’s responsibility to make law”. Good to know.
It is shit like this that make people like you fucking scare the shit out of me…way more than some tech bro training AI on copyrighted material (And to put that in perspective, I am one of those people who think AI is probably gonna eventually kill us).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_People%27s_History_of_the_Un...
Hillary doesn't need to do anything like that. But even she was there.
We each have a lens on reality, your lens' aperture is skewed on this specific aspect.
"This is a much more powerful term. I can do stuff that's unbelievable. I called Google, Google Maps. They wouldn't have taken my call in the first term. Now they kiss my ass."
This thread is the reason, it's like people off meds posting here about unrelated topics, crazy town.
It's not because of 'scraping'. They literally just want user count
People loved IG pre-FB acq. Then Zuck had his "IG can hurt us" emails, other private messages with one of the IG co-founders ("Zuck will go into destroy mode") and now we have photography being gatekept
> Today, amidst a historic day of thousands of rallies to mobilize early voting and fight against Trump’s election sabotage, Meta suspended the primary No Kings Instagram account without warning or reason.
> After intense backlash, Meta made the account visible again 90 minutes into the suspension, giving the appearance that everything was normal. But it blocked the account admin from posting for another three hours -- censoring the NO Kings coalition in the middle of today’s historic day of action.
[0]https://indivisible.actionkit.com/mailings/view/127823
And now for a big BS quote from the article, which we all know is false.
>There is no evidence at the moment that the suspension was politically motivated
Like what happened in 2024?
Do not get mad at companies who just need to survive to the next admin without any more issues.
Which reminds me of this month's HN post about Lula's FB account getting taken down https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49864642 , which turned out to only be for a couple hours after some content post got auto-flagged, before being restored by Meta. But the HN thread was a long discussion about it being a conspiracy by the US government to conduct election interference in Brazil.
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/south-america/brazil-lula-wins...
and Meta employees have commented also:
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/meta-employees-said-l...
The rest of the complaints are around exact term search/AI results which are notoriously inconsistent if you've ever done SEO/AEO. So not exactly the strongest evidence.
I'm not fan of Meta or their severe lack of transparency in moderation, but this stuff is so political it's basically impossible to debate on facts. Likewise Brazil's courts are notoriously political, notoriously anti-US social media (well before Trump), and your first link is a judge appointed by one of Lula's ex staff (Dilma Rousseff).
Also, taking the word of the attacker that their crime wasn't that bad, without evidence, is pretty silly behavior, especially when it's facebook, with their long history of malfeasance and deception.
> this stuff is so political it's basically impossible to debate on facts.
It really isn't. Courts looked at the facts and made their decision. You can disagree, but it's not like you're "debating" a court ruling in doing so. The excuses you're tossing out were already tried and ruled dishonest by the courts, all the way up to the supreme court.
0 — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50137079
Their findings? You mean their purely political, pre-determined sentences that they justify after the fact with some reasonable sounding legalese slop? I'd take literally any random HN commenter's opinion over theirs any day.
Next year we're going to impeach a significant number of those "judges". I'm really looking forward to it.
Oh wait, we can't impeach US supreme court justices ... ah well, nevertheless.
You actually can!
You're repeated these claims, but they are not convincing with regards to this matter:
On the one hand, we have the entire court system of an entire country;
On the other hand, we have you. And Facebook.
Sorry, but you and Facebook are less trustworthy, less authoritative, and Facebook at least has shown themselves to be more partisan, too.
If this was actually an accident as you're claiming, then Facebook should be able to apologize, and explain exactly what happened, and what part of their "algorithm" caused it to disproportionately target mainstream left-wing politicians and political movements, and how they plan to fix it and make things right, and how people can verify that they have done so. Have they done any of that?
Appeals to authority are bad in general. Appealing to these particular authorities is just nonsense.
I'd rather people actually think about what I am saying. Evaluate the logic of the arguments I post in good faith, and either accept the argument or refute it.
> If this was actually an accident as you're claiming
I have never claimed that. Not once.
Let's make it clear: I'm not denying that Meta engaged in "interference".
The truth is after what I witnessed in 2022 it doesn't matter what big tech does. I couldn't care less what Meta did or did not do, it's merely a pale shadow before the crimes of the supreme court itself.
In 2022 the supreme court engaged in a blatantly unconstitutional censorship and political persecution campaign against Bolsonaro and the Brazilian right wing. People have already perished in prison because of them.
Watching people fret over the Facebook accounts of Lula at this point is just black comedy.
Want to trust an authority? Then trust the authority of the Brazilian people. Trust democratically elected senate we just voted into power for the express purpose of ending the reign of these judge-god-kings.
> Appeals to authority are bad in general.
I'm appealing to the evidence, which also happens to be what the authorities say. Given that you have neither evidence nor authority in this discussion about whether Facebook's actions were accidental, your claims remain unconvincing on either count.
> I have never claimed that. Not once.
> Let's make it clear: I'm not denying that Meta engaged in "interference".
You are right, I mistakenly confused you for the other poster I replied to, who started this thread by claiming Facebook's actions were all accidental. I'm sorry.
> In 2022 the supreme court engaged in a blatantly unconstitutional censorship and political persecution campaign against Bolsonaro and the Brazilian right wing.
Was that before or after Bolsonaro attempted to overthrow the government and steal the election in a putsch? Most people are not free speech absolutists in all cases, and incitement to insurrection is a common and commonly accepted exception to free speech worldwide.
I don't think I'm expressing myself properly.
I'm way past the point of caring about evidence and fairness.
Lula's been on a electoral crimes spree since he lost the first round of the presidential election earlier this month. He's doing the exact same things Bolsonaro did in 2022, only with complete impunity. Bolsonaro was relentlessly censored and fined for doing the exact same things Lula is doing now. Where the hell are these "judges" now?
Evidence? Nobody is disputing the evidence. The point is none of this matters because the judiciary itself is corrupt and cannot be trusted. The entire institution is too far gone.
I'll start caring about this evidence when these "judges" start applying their own precedents to the left wing as a whole and to Lula personally. Not one second before.
And everybody knows they won't actually do it, which is why we voted in senators to impeach them.
> Was that before or after
Obviously, political censorship during the election could only have taken place before the election. The court's profoundly destabilizing actions led directly to January 8th.
However, it actually started years before those events. The supreme court created the "fake news" inquisition in 2019. They are literally the victims, investigators, prosecutors, judges and executioners in a trial of wildcard crimes against themselves with a jurisdiction covering the entire Brazilian territory. This inquisition is active to this day, and they used it to essentially usurp all power.
You have disputed the evidence (e.g. was the outage for hours, or days or weeks ?)
Im sorry you're having a bad time
The dilemma comes in large part from whether or not you think some social media company's algorithms played a role in the senate you just voted into power. I suspect you do not (i.e. you see the senate result as a true, democratic expression of the will of the people of Brasil). Your view is not universally held, however.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49310291
I support that transparency. Meta should do the same.
Same reason why I defend the paper trail in the voting machines. I don't want anyone accusing us of any manipulation when we finally win.
Only against the right wing's Bolsonaro. The left wing's Lula can do and is doing everything they punished him for back in 2022.
Now conspiracy posting is fully mainstream on both sides of the spectrum in multiple countries, especially (ironically for Meta) among the youth raised on social media, and it's just exhausting reading it all them time.
My realization that it was cooked was when I was doing my comp sci PhD where everyone in our group fully understood the implications of data and surveillance capitalism but 3 out of 20 agreed to download Signal instead of WhatsApp/Messenger.
You are asking for too much sadly.
WhatsApp solves so many communication problems. It's a single protocol that can do text, audio and video calling. It works on low- and high-bandwidth connections. Everybody already has it, so it's functionally as ubiquitous as the phone itself.
Signal also has the "it's another app" problem. WhatsApp didn't have this problem initially because it was cheaper than texting in its heyday. Thus, having it on your phone made a lot of sense. Now that texting and video calling are functionally free and WhatsApp is ubiquitous, getting people onto something else is much more of an investment.
iMessage + FaceTime will be the next big platform if Apple decides to make it work across the pond. It has everything WhatsApp has while being disassociated from Meta.
We just need someone* to create a "WoW Classic" version of a social network so that we can get back on it and this time try to make it work. Social media is one of the worst things that has happened to humanity since the web was created. But it used to be good. So it's incomprehensible to me why no one has made a social networking site matching old facebook and without the awfulness added later.
* Maybe some of us can do it, send me a message.
You've got to hand it to Thiel, at least like other people of questionable political persuasion he's already fled to Argentina, gonna get crowded there in the future
Or are you trying to elicit emotions?
I personally don't think hate speech should be illegal. If someone feels that way I'd rather know it and act accordingly than them keep it to themselves.
Others may well disagree with my view there and that's totally fine, but they do want limits to what one can say which means they don't want free speech.
However there is a difference. A balance of free speech on social media could look like
1. Anyone can say anything they want
2. The algorithms are simplified such that they are chronological and your direct network, rather than the anxiety boosting, "editorial" choice in promoting or limiting the speech of others, especially with how reposts and quote tweets amplify a given post.
We need to rethink and regulate algorithms while we are working on Ai regulation. Let's not let the tech companies that brought us the mess we are in slip by in this moment of seemingly bipartisan cooperation.
Let us also make targeted advertising illegal to remove the incentives that make the "anxiety algorithms" so profitable. Go back to a world of context based advertising like magazines.
We can debate where the line on regulation should fall, but that isn't a free speech debate.
They have been abusing their power, something has to change
I haven't seen anyone show that here yet, though the Twitter files did show that for example.
We have considered algorithms to be a form of speech, because it is an "editorial" process, but this does not seem to be what they actually do. Similar to how Ai output is not copyrightable, algorithmic feed algorithms that work on big data should not be considered an "editorial" process. Thus, if we regulate algorithms, we are not regulating speech, we are regulating a process, albeit a digital one with little case law.
Much simpler would be to clarify that algorithmically curated feeds of user content do not fall under the protections shielding the hosting company from liability. It seems reasonable to me that the intent of said protections was was to avoid scenarios where the website is in no way directly involved in the content creation itself, once the company decides what and how to show it that seems outside the original intent.
Perhaps instead of putting bounds (through laws) on what they cannot do, perhaps we list only what they are allowed to do (for algorithmic feeds), eg. can only show content from direct connections in chronological order. I do expect many people (currently believe) they like being able to discover new content outside of their network.
Whatever we come up with, which would benefit the people, I suspect will have big impacts on their profits. At the same time, if they do not have to spend vast resources to understand our nuances and target ads specifically to use, their cost centers would also be impacted.
I'm a growing proponent of ending targeted advertising. If we start with that, much of the incentives for our current algorithms (social, search, news) would seem to be removed from the equations.
I don't cast free speech in absolute terms, I take issue with those that do since it isn't a spectrum.
No one wants "true" free speech anyway. an age of social media + deepfakes means true free speech is legalizing slander/libel. And we know the lies will persist much longer than it deserves.
As well as inciting violence. We don't even need to reach "hate speech" on the spectrum in order to talk about intolerable speech everyone agrees should be punished on.
I take issue with any law that limits speech, including libel, regardless of who says it. Such laws remove agency, and therefore a level of responsibility, from those who hear the speech and choose to act on it.
In the same way that I strongly disagree with laying any blame on a woman for dressing a certain way before being attacked, I don't blame a person for saying something before another person takes an action we've deemed illegal.
Right, like everywhere on the planet, hence why I ask if you're saying it doesn't exist. It sounds like your answer is yes.
huh, but everywhere in the world where they put value on having free speech, the situation is "somewhere in between"
My experience is that, for the most part, the people who criticized woke censorship are also critics of the Trump administration and its lawlessness.
Just look at the signatories of the Harper's letter: https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/
The vast, vast majority have gone on to criticize Trump in his second term.
And even if your description did apply to everyone on this list, so what? A small handful of academics write a letter condemning Trump. How did you spin that into "People that criticize woke censorship don't like Trump." Are you under the impression that the world is comprised of ivory tower academics, and everyone else is a non-entity?
If you were paying attention at all, you'd see the entire anti-woke movement has become a young person's game, and it's completely divorced from censorship. It's more about open, malicious resentment towards anything non-white, now.
It's very clear to observers of reality that the vast, vast majority of prominent people and organizations who criticized wokeness have moved on to criticzing Trump. For the most part, "free speech advocates" are just normal liberals with principles, but that doesn't stop people in every one of these threads calling out "free speech" like it's something insidious.
> It's very clear to observers of reality that the vast, vast majority of prominent people and organizations who criticized wokeness have moved on to criticzing Trump
Definitely not. What kind of claim is this? You can't think of anybody that complained about Woke censorship that still supports Trump? You are pointing out the exceptions.
I feel completely certain folks like FIRE / Lukianoff will immediately and loudly condemn this.
I would bet very good money every right leaning pro-free speech justice will condemn this.
I would even bet money Elon would condemn it if pressed on the issue, but probably won't be loud about it (which is the technically correct PR since he owns a competitor).
Edit: I personally strongly condemn it as well, though admit to some small schadenfreude. It can be hard to believe when "the roles reversed" meme actually ends up happening. And I do expect this was a genuine automation mistake by Meta given the quick apology.
Elon (and others) will stay silent unless pressed on the issue, and even then it’s betting odds.
I expect almost zero hypocrisy from "free speech absolutists", I expect them to be ideologically consistent and loud about it. FIRE in particular has a tremendous track record of doing so.
Elon is a bit of an outlier in his more hypocritical track record.
Not these days, sadly.
FIRE is indeed not as hypocritical as most "free speech absolutists." But boy howdy do they have different bars for different groups.
You must not have read it. Because the complaints are about _restrictions_ on student speech...
But: 1. It's trivially true the Hecklers Veto results in less speech, not more, and most "free speech absolutists" on both sides oppose it
2. This is not a double standard; he also opposes the right wing using the Hecklers Veto
(You may not agree with the meme, I'm just telling you that the meme exists)
I got banned from Reddit for quoting Trump verbatim.
I invite you to try it! Pick a few heretical statements like "Islamic migration has been a disaster for Europe" or "It seems like this trans thing is socially contagious for young girls" and post them in relevant threads on the top 50 Reddit subs.
You will get immediately banned from 95% of these subs, and might last 2 weeks or so in the remaining 5%.
You would get banned from 80% of subs for being off topic.
You would get banned because repeating dog whistles of hate groups is the fastest way to get identified with hate groups.
I have seen what happens multiple times when these statements are posted. To the point that those communities got mentioned in Time magazine as examples of hate groups.
If you think this is a tight fist, consider that the communities that did leave Reddit and go to Parler/whatever, reintroduced moderation rules themselves.
It is actually very banal.
The group now being themselves jailed still argue against those who categorically oppose jails.
You don't need to agree in order to understand the logic.
One side believes it is the "why" in the act that determines rightness or wrongness, the other side believes (if that is their genuine position) the act by itself is categorically wrong.
Sometimes the trolling took the form of high-volume contrarian posting, but the trolls would also post porn and pictures of gendered violence in the comments on nearly every single article.
The way Jezebel dealt with it was through a variant of commenter whitelisting. Unapproved commenters (including yet-to-be-banned trolls) would have their comments in a purgatory until approved.
A community like Jezebel cannot exist when supposed free-speech absolutists have their way and protect the trolls. When the free speech of trolls is prioritized, their targets are denied freedom of assembly and freedom of association.
When meeting in an actual, physical town square, a group like the Jezebel.com commenters (or to pluck a group from elsewhere on the political spectrum, second amendment activists) doesn't have the right to be free from criticism. They could hold a rally there, or they could protest other groups, but they don't have the right to shut down those who would protest civilly against them.
What unpopular groups need is a private forum where they can congregate and exercise their right to freedom of association by excluding those who would disrupt their activities.
- If the answer is yes, then the parent poster would excoriate the respondent for being a horrible person.
- If the answer is no, then the parent poster would triumphantly crow that the respondent is not actually against deplatforming / pro-free speech after all.
Astute HN readers should immediately be able to spot the problem: the false dilemma fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma). They have set up an imaginary "free speech absolutist" who must be 100% against any and all speech restrictions if they do not support deplatforming, which is obviously nonsensical; no such people exist.
It is an attempt at a gotcha but doesn't hold up when examined. I have no idea why people think it's clever.
The parent's post is the one who took an absolute stance on deplatforming. I did not invent the stance. You didn't say "I condemn deplatforming", you specifically added a clause that seems to specify that your belief disregards circumstance.
> "They have set up an imaginary "free speech absolutist" who must be 100% against any and all speech restrictions if they do not support deplatforming"
I did not do this. In fact, it would exclude my own belief, which is that I am generally against deplatforming, but admit there are extraordinary circumstances that should be exceptions, like the case of child porn.
Astute HN readers should immediately be able to tell that I am ironically doing the opposite of the accusation, which is pointing out how absolute binaries on this issue don't hold up to scrutiny. Now poster is falling back on a textbook motte-and-bailey claiming to not have said what they did.
Or perhaps they meant something different by "regardless of who it's being done to", say, that some deplatforming is justified by the exceptional nature of the circumstance but not by preconceived notions of the one being deplatformed. If that's the case, then clarify it rather than attacking me for interpreting your statement in a reasonable way.
https://web.archive.org/web/20261018012124/https://meidasnew...
Tiktok banned the account promoting a Musk documentary too. Oh how the cookie crumbles!
https://www.theverge.com/tech/1013453/tiktok-bans-alex-gibne...
>While TikTok has no official affiliation with Elon Musk, part owner Larry Ellison appears in the film via a text message offering to help Musk fund his Twitter purchase.
>Last month, YouTube, Meta, X, and TikTok all faced backlash for rejecting ads for the film. YouTube and Google quickly reversed course, calling it an “error.” However, TikTok and X have refused to change their stance, and neither platform has allowed paid advertisements for the film.
"Meta employees said Lula's accounts were hindered during Brazil election, Folha reports" (https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/meta-employees-said-l...)