People should look up the North American Technate, because we're living in it. Its been a mission of techno-fascist for a couple decades, they're finally succeeding. They will get rid of democracy altogether
(they may have already, they can basically do mind control with recommendations algorithms and get swaths of people to do whatever they want).
I mean, if they have secret mind control powers that they've hid from the rest of the world for years, it seems kinda pointless to try and oppose them?
At that point, they've already won, neh?
(this is mostly to object that hyperbolic phrases like "basically mind control" don't do your argument any favor)
A large minority of people cannot cope with losing elections. Shadowy forces are behind every loss. Ironically, it's this attitude that undermines democracy. More than Facebook at any rate...
> Shadowy forces are behind every loss. Ironically, it's this attitude that undermines democracy.
I mean, this is South America we're talking about. It's not attitudes that undermine their democracy, it's very notoriously US-based three letter agencies.[1][2][3][4][5]
At least in certain parts of the world, there has been consistent efforts to manipulate the government and political movements for close to a century. It's not as if the US hasn't supported coup d'etats in Brazil, Chile, and other governments in South and Central America.
I don't believe this was the case, at least not openly, until Trump made it part of his platform. His personal ego injury has accelerated this massively, and fed into the right-wing cookersphere all over the place.
America has recently done a huge amount to undermine faith in its own democracy, and that has been gleefully spread around the world. Absent any evidence. It's gross.
You're currently in a thread discussing a news article that would be one piece of evidence. There's plenty of obvious evidence of technocratic influence in global poltics on all news platforms.
Meta has interfered with elections before, we know the Trump admin wants Bolsonaro Jr in power, and the US establishment has supported anti-socialism in Brazil in the past. (The CIA agitated against Lula under Reagan, for example)
Is it overly conspiratorial to think the Meta is doing what they're accused of on behalf of the US?
Those evil US imperialists and CIA agitators, not letting any new countries prosper like DPRK, Cuba and Venezuela, or be free of tyranny like PRC and Venezuela!
I am quite sure meta does support the german AfD. Rage causes engagement. AfD (and Trump and Orban and le Pen) communicate in such emotional ways that algorithms prefer them. Facebook does not care about truth, it cares about active users
Interference with an election is so in line with the current president's character that nobody has any reason to think otherwise.
The political atmosphere in the USA, and worldwide let's be honest, has become so cynical that people aligned with the American president don't really see any issue with doing morally wrong things or downright illegal acts if that means a political victory for them.
> The political atmosphere in the USA, and worldwide let's be honest, has become so cynical that...
We've redefined our communication medium worldwide in ~30 years. It's going to have consequences, the question is what we do about it. The edge lord cynicism came about because of economic issues, fix those first..
The last people in history who had as much wealth as Elon Musk were emperors.
Perhaps something can change to help prevent poverty and hunger if the economic value produced by society results in such enormous gains by such few people.
What's the incentives to not do it this way? Are there punishments for companies to lobby or influence things? How is the everyday voter affected by this?
The average persons day-to-day like of working, picking up their kids and making dinner is not affected by stolen taxes.
Democracy becomes impossible is a real threat but it's again not something that affects the average person day-to-day until shit hits the fan and it's too late.
Again, follow the incentives, the behavior, and the motivations of the average person.
Well, for each individual, there’s some level of disincentivization to act according to social and moral code. That’s kind of where shame and laws are supposed to come in to regulate. We are in a post-shame world it seems
I don't think shame has gone anywhere as a feeling, but I'd say that we are post-moral-shame due to neoliberalism.
In "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism", Zhuboff poses that shame in a neoliberal society becomes tied to individual failure, such as failure to succeed. You feel shame for your shortcomings and not working hard enough, rather than for some mortal virtue you failed to uphold. Psychopolitics by Han-Byul also goes into this, kind of how the market managed to convince the individual to enslave themselves and set their own requirements for themselves without a king or master to order this.
In such a society, shame cannot be ascribed to doing something monetarily rational. It's not immoral to better yourself in any way.
I think a bit of the tragedy in this is that this stacks the incentives against morally right things in the long run. It was often better for resource accumulation to do the morally bad thing, and your counterweight would be shame from society, but now it's gone and the people who choose the (now much more accessible) morally corrupt path with run away with capital, power and social status. It's IMO a really good time in history to be a piece of shit as an average person
I thought this was terrible when this happened. But I would welcome them doing this every day instead of having Trump corruptly accept bribes to the tune of billions of dollars for his kids crypto company and rug pull American citizens twice with fraud crypto schemes, and go on a pardon spree for every fraudster and white collar criminal he can find.
Idk, maybe having a lewd President is better than having a corrupt, fraud-supporting, law-discarding President who is now trying to kick people off voter rolls so he doesn't lose a midterm after his failed running of the economy despite having every single branch of govt in his control
Honestly - what's immoral about someone showing their breasts? That's not going to hurt anyone, so why would it be immoral? Obsessing over how woman cover or reveal their bodies is regressive behavior, as if men can't be held responsible for controlling themselves, or children will be injured by seeing a body part that exists to feed babies.
>“My trans masculine friends were showing off their top surgery scars and living in joy, and I wanted to join them,” she said. “And because it is perfectly within the law in Washington, D.C., I decided to join them and cover my nipples just to play it safe. Because I wanted to be fully free and myself. I had zero intention of trying to be vulgar, or be profane in any way. I was simply living in joy, living my truth and existing in my body. Happy Pride. Free the nipple.”
> We long for the simpler, morally un-bankrupt times when people were flashing their bolt-ons on the White House lawn:
Perhaps one day you'll grow to understand that complaints about "flashing their bolt-ons" is dog whistle for moralist hypocrisy, whereas openly taking bribes, threatening close allies with invasion while launching economic war in the form of tarifs, and eliminating foreign aid programs causing hundreds of thousands of deaths digs a far deeper moral, ethical, and geopolitical hole to claw from.
> I don't think you understand how small stakes Watergate was in comparison to the daily collapse we are experiencing. And Nixon resigned because of it!
I agree. This is what baffles me the most about USians. They know Watergate was one of the lowest points in the US history in terms of corruption and anti democratic maneuvers by a high level political group in the country.
Yet, the Trump administration outcorrupts any Watergate scandal very much each week. Yet, the US population is so docile and controlled that they barely react.
The first time the media covers a new type of scandal, it can be shocking and lead to public outrage. See also the ridiculous outrage over the Lewinsky scandal. The next time it happens, it’s “normal” and only the other political team cares. I’m not sure why that is, but it probably has to do with partisans wanting to hold their ground, even if “their guy” has obvious issues.
If a future President personally murdered someone (not remotely by drone), I’m sure it would be a massive scandal... the first time it happened.
Have you researched Gore’s stochastic cheating that led to Bush stopping the vote count? The Supreme Court found by 7-2 that the Gore recount strategy violated voters’ constitutional rights. Why does nobody mention that part?
You’re smart enough to understand the math, and so was the Florida Supreme Court and U.S. Supreme Court, so what’s your response? How is it not election fraud to have a partial recount that’s statistically guaranteed to find net additional votes for you relative to your opponent? The fact that reporters didn’t cover it that way doesn’t justify your snarky response. Journalists are mostly innumerate; you meanwhile can’t play dumb about the math.
You’re basically taking an error that is randomly distributed, but then partially correcting that error only from pools that you know skewed your way to begin with.
Imagine if Trump had initiated hand recounted undervotes (votes the machine couldn’t count) only for election day votes but not mail in votes. That would be election fraud, because it would be calculated to find additional votes from a pool that skews GOP while not finding additional votes in a pool that skews Democrat. What Gore did was exactly the same thing.
People scream “election interference” at these highly attenuated and indirect actions like Meta taking down a post. But Gore was statistically minting additional Gore votes before two Supreme Courts stopped him.
Rayiner, the only clearly documented cases of election fraud including convictions as well as an attempt to ignore the outcome of an election which are much more recent and squarely in the Republican camp, which you voted for and which you conveniently ignored.
Gore’s election fraud is “clearly documented.” He manipulated the vote counting in a way that was statistically guaranteed to find more votes for himself. Florida Supreme Court and U.S. Supreme Court both found it violated people’s voting rights. Please provide a response instead of smug retorts like a high school student.
Interference in other countries' elections has been a cornerstone of American foreign policy since at least 1948, and overthrowing democratically elected governments and replacing them with comprador dictators has always been on the table when the elections still went the wrong way.
Meta (Instagram) certainly pushes one side in India. I am sure of it.
I didn't quite believe its involvement with things in Myanmar where media, people vowed left and right of Meta's involvement.
But seeing it now firsthand, I certainly believe it.
Accounts, posts from one cabal being pushed to your feed even if you don't follow any of them.
If you open a fresh account, the accounts from those cabal are recommended at top.
Relentlessly showing posts from one side and promoting them like hell.
Suspected bot activities. There were posts that are sans merit clearly, but Insta pushed it and had the unvelievable amount of likes, like Messi would have, had he posted his wedding reels.
I don't have publishable evidence, but I ask you to trust me. Human to human.
I think it's their lack of oversight that allows bad actors to flourish. The BJP pay people to spread stupidity online (both with paid posts and liking swarms) and have done so for years (they were early to this game), and despite it being fraudulent activity, Meta does little to stop it or let people know it is not authentic activity
Yes I mean anecdotally, not India, but an acquaintance of mine (North American) got JD Vance in her feed and she doesn't like him
Myanmar - Facebook took responsibility from the moment they decided to "service" the country using shady tactics such as https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/facebook-misleading-indians-i... where they had what, one translator, two? Some of this is in Careless People
It shouldn't matter what specific political side - Facebook are bad actors (or Meta or whatever) across the aisle
Not Meta, but a note on ChatGPT was making the rounds the past few days: it will happily generate images featuring the right-wing candidate, logo or party number, while consistently refusing to generate anything related to the leftist Lula/PT/13.
"Technical error" sounds frustratingly vague and contentless, but it's odd to think about the lack of cultural consensus about whether the ability for others to depict someone with generative AI is more a benefit to him or her, or more a risk. I could imagine someone hearing this and sincerely thinking that Meta was protecting Lula from deepfake attacks (making it slightly harder for people to falsely depict him doing saying embarrassing or offensive things). Uses of AI to mock or attack people often get more attention than uses of AI to praise them.
In the U.S., if someone had programmed a generative AI to be unwilling to depict Obama, I imagine many people would assume that decision was meant to help Obama, not harm him.
this is turning out to be a disaster for the tech communities and powering technology fearmongers because people do not understadn the case here.
From what I can see, the meta cutoff data was from a time where one candidate was confirmed and the other wasn't. The political interference here was actually the timely manner for them to fix this. It took weeks of public pressure / federal government pressure for Meta to act.
I remember NYTimes/WaPost pieces being concerned about Hindu nationalist influence on the Republican party. Anyone who has spend 2 seconds online know it's more likely the Republican party nukes India than forming alliances with the BJP.
Quick-cut to Musk funding right-wing political parties in Europe, JD Vance using the NATO bully-pulpit to talk down European center-right politicians, and Trump creating a slush-fund worth billions to Argentina to prop-up its failing experiment in right-wing libertarian governance, and America evangelicals funding regressive politics across Africa and Europe, reducing America's refugee program to resettle right-wing South Africans.
People being edgy on X seems unrelated. Comment seems completely off-topic. Or are you implying Meta suppressed Lula's account because he threatened to murder Protestants? I don't get it.
Even though I've shilled the book before, it's an opportune thread to repeat the recommendation: if you haven't, read Careless People. For much of her career at Facebook, the author worked for Joel Kaplan, who was VP of Global Public Policy and is now Chief Global Affairs Officer. She's not particularly complimentary.
Americans don't like any entity to interfere in their elections but the reality is that their corporations are knee deep in interference in other countries never mind what they themselves call the deep state!
Does anyone remember Cambridge Analytica activity on Facebook during US elections in 2016.. Look it up if you don't remember. The same entity was also active in South America aka Colombia, Brazil, Argentina.. Cambridge Analytica was never charged and Facebook was never charged because it was all made legal. After the revelations, some laws changed but has it really changed. Is it stopping American interference in other countries? it doesn't look like it. What about at home? You know better than I do if you have an account; I don't.
Exactly. Even the american gov involved in other nations elections, toppling elected govs and whatnot. When the same thing happens to then they cry like ...
When has the US not interfere in other countries' elections, especially those taking place in its "backyard"? Nothing is off limits. Everything comes from the CIA playbook: bribes, threats, assassinations, social media trolling, censorship, etc. Of course, these days, interference is no longer limited to international affairs but has fully entered the domestic arena. Trump's top donors have already contributed billions to the midterm elections, but it may not be enough to sway voters. This coming midterm election, brace for the unexpected.
What a bunch of crying babies. Plus, my entire feed is full of pro-Lula garbage
Either most of my friends are pro-Lula (they are not) or Meta is helping them, not Bolsonaro.
This is an excuse for them to challenge the election if they (hopefully) lose.
For my other Brazilian friends over here: to me both sides are terrible but Lula is the convicted felon that spent 2 years in prison, and he ruled the country since 2003 and the place gets worse by the day.
All the evidence against him, all the people who ratted him out... You're just going to ignore all of it because of some bullshit technicality saying the trial took place in the wrong court or something?
And he was convicted. By several judges. It was the supreme court that voided Lava Jato. Essentially, they him in the presidential race specifically to take out Bolsonaro.
Hopefully tomorrow he will prove useless at even that, and his party will be buried for good.
Meta probably isn't, but the supreme court and electoral court absolutely are. Whatever the left is suffering at the hands of Meta is nothing compared to the censorship and persecution they perpetrated against the right with the full backing of the Brazilian institutions. It's almost comical to watch them cry about it now.
There's probably some Meta employees reading this. You probably are decent people, with a nice family, good to your friends, ethical citizens and aren't directly involved in this psyops conspiracy. But you will be responsible for a lot of suffering. The Amazon will be devastated. A lot of people will get poorer. Violence will spread. Autocracy will win. Few people will get richer.
Nah. Lula had nearly 20 years to revert the neoliberal policies of FHC, reindustrialize and finally turn this country around just like China. He chose to sedate the population with handouts, line his pockets and set up a Venezuela-tier juristocracy via the supreme court to maintain his own power.
It's over, and it's high time for him to get the hell out. If we're going to be a neoliberal shithole, then I sure as hell don't want him in charge of it.
And by the way, whatever Meta is doing is nothing compared to the censorship and persecution that Lula, his party and his supreme court judges perpetrated before, during and after the 2022 elections. I've commented extensively on this subject here on HN in case anyone wants to look into it. Whatever's going on here is a mere fraction of what the Brazilian right wing suffered at their hands.
Of course big and influential media companies favour one side over the other. That's been happening long before the internet. It's called propaganda and has been the practice of traditional newspapers, radio stations and television networks since the beginning of their existence. And that will continue being the practice. Now the questions are: how much does it matter? can/should we try to control it? what are the proposals for that? how to enforce it fairly for every political group? --- note the current government (the one complaining about Meta favouring the opposition) also has its own propaganda network favouring itself against the opposition.
The difference is that Meta says it's just a "platform" and not a "media company" (since it doesn't want to be regulated or held liable as a media company). So Fox News can host talk shows openly favoring one candidate, and NYT can write editorials in support of another candidate, but Meta cannot.
Just because people did shitty things in the past, doesn't mean people shouldn't care about the shitty things people are doing now. Particularly if the 'people' are corporations.
> A structural rule is some thing like: no politician can use Facebook, or alternatively, Facebook isn’t allowed to censor any candidate for political office. Such rules can be implemented with little room for debate.
Except there's debate all the time in the USA stemming from this originalist tradition from the founders' intent.
Like: the First Ammendment, there was debate about the role of money, is it speech? Culminating with Citizens United which is absolute lunacy.
The American system isn't objectively better by any means, it's just the one you're used to.
Ultimately it ended up being about money in politics, that the original complaint was about a movie is entirely moot given the consequences of the decision.
Why should everyone care about founders of a different country that's not even working particularly well at this time.
> while substantive decisions about guilt or liability are made by randomly selected juries
A system gamed as easily as any other one.
> Meanwhile other countries trust random people at companies
They don't trust them to do the right thing, which is why there is a law telling them what to do. The alternative is to ban privately-owned social networks (either all of them or at least those that don't follow the laws).
> Why should everyone care about founders of a different country
Because the U.S. was the first country in the world created, with great study and deliberation, by high-IQ political philosophers. Because the country was already a successful democracy for 189 years before all the EU17 countries became democracies even on paper. Because the U.S. was having orderly transitions of power since it was as poor as Bangladesh is today.
> A system gamed as easily as any other one.
Decisions of randomly selected jurors are much harder to “game” than decisions of corporate censors or election board bureaucrats.
> They don't trust them to do the right thing, which is why there is a law telling them what to do.
Every dysfunctional third world has beautiful “laws telling people what to do.” We have those in Bangladesh. As often as not, such laws just become vehicles for manipulating elections because what the law says to do or who is following the laws or not is highly debatable. Such laws effectively turn the prosecutors and the court system into the locus of corruption, because they have the power to decide “who is following the law.” (It’s like Iran’s system with more steps. Iran actually has fair, functioning elections. It’s just that the Guardian Council, an expert body of highly educated scholars, gets to screen who is allowed to run for office.)
Please try to understand the difference between procedural/power allocation laws and laws that incorporate substantive standards. Instead of having laws that say “what to do”—which is always open to interpretation—you should have laws that focus on “who decides” and “how do they decide.” You need to either make the decision mechanical so everyone can see whether the rule is being followed or not, or you need to put the decision in the hands of a body that can’t credibly be accused of having their own agenda.
> Decisions of randomly selected jurors are much harder to “game” than decisions of corporate censors or election board bureaucrats.
Sure, which is why the laws in the US are not approved by randomly selected lawmakers. In that way it's irrelevant what some random jury decides, when the executive branch, the lawmakers and top judges are owned by the ruling class.
> We have those in Bangladesh. As often as not, such laws just become vehicles for manipulating elections
Sorry about that, but that's not a rule that applies everywhere, far from that. And of course the elections in the US are already heavily manipulated even without that.
> In that way it's irrelevant what some random jury decides, when the executive branch, the lawmakers and top judges are owned by the ruling class.
That’s the problem with having the executive branch, lawmakers and judges oversee the mechanics of the voting and elections. You’re making my point for me.
It's about the particular mechanisms how this is done. I don't live in the US and while we have many issues in our country, the elections were never in question. And I can assure you our country was not created by "high-IQ political philosophers".
Meanwhile in the US, if a majority party does not like the voting districts, they just redraw them, and if they don't like the voters, they disenfranchise them. Truly great high-IQ work.
> Because the country was already a successful democracy for 189 years before all the EU17 countries became democracies even on paper
My god man, what are you smoking? The oldest democracies in Europe are Norway (1814), Belgium (1831), The Netherlands (1848) and Denmark (1849). If you're going to claim misplaced American exceptionalism, then I'm going to point out that black people didn't receive universal suffrage until 1965 (the Voting Rights Act) -- and it's one of the few countries that still has not abolished slavery to this day (the 13th Amendment has an "except" clause).
> How does such a law not inevitably lead to the loser of the election complaining about “interference.”
The "fake news" nonsense is just plain old censorship and questionable in its own right, but the true reason why it's so destabilizing is the inconsistency.
The vast majority of judges are partidarian and openly support the left, so what happens in practice is only the left gets to censor the "fake news" of others. Whenever right wing candidates try to exercise the exact same rights, they are simply ignored.
It's literally happening right now: Lula's requests get accepted within a day while Bolsonaro's just sit there unseen forever. That way they get to censor the right and avoid being censored themselves.
This obviously partidarian "fact checking" censorship directly caused January 8th. It's not a fair election if you're censored and your opponent isn't.
I agree with you on structural and procedural rules.
Someone needs to tell President Trump that he is backing one of the country's most prominent militia figures — a real thief, corrupt, and involved in dozens, maybe even hundreds of crimes (including murder of Marielle Franco) ever since he entered politics. Or even before that. This isn't a fight between left vs right, or conservatives vs progressives. It's a fight between honest Brazilians vs Brazil's real organized crime.
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[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 19.4 ms ] thread(they may have already, they can basically do mind control with recommendations algorithms and get swaths of people to do whatever they want).
At that point, they've already won, neh?
(this is mostly to object that hyperbolic phrases like "basically mind control" don't do your argument any favor)
For some reason this reminds me of the baby hilter paradox.
I mean, this is South America we're talking about. It's not attitudes that undermine their democracy, it's very notoriously US-based three letter agencies.[1][2][3][4][5]
[1] https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/legacy-posting/chile-united-states...
[2] https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/southern-cone/2025-1...
[3] https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB133/index.htm
[4] https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB465/
[5] https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/events/operation-condor-1975-1980
America has recently done a huge amount to undermine faith in its own democracy, and that has been gleefully spread around the world. Absent any evidence. It's gross.
i don't see the correlation with current events. do you have a source that establishes this based on evidence?
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/51954
Trump has also been posting maps that are identical to the North American Technate maps (that include Greenland).
https://bostonraremaps.com/inventory/technocracy-inc-technat...
Im not going to litigate reality with someone whos purposely denying it.
Is it overly conspiratorial to think the Meta is doing what they're accused of on behalf of the US?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/meta-employees-said-l...
It’s their platform, they can boost who they want.
The political atmosphere in the USA, and worldwide let's be honest, has become so cynical that people aligned with the American president don't really see any issue with doing morally wrong things or downright illegal acts if that means a political victory for them.
We've redefined our communication medium worldwide in ~30 years. It's going to have consequences, the question is what we do about it. The edge lord cynicism came about because of economic issues, fix those first..
“Just fix the hunger and poverty, duh”
I also thought like that. When I was twelve.
Perhaps something can change to help prevent poverty and hunger if the economic value produced by society results in such enormous gains by such few people.
Democracy becomes impossible is a real threat but it's again not something that affects the average person day-to-day until shit hits the fan and it's too late.
Again, follow the incentives, the behavior, and the motivations of the average person.
In "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism", Zhuboff poses that shame in a neoliberal society becomes tied to individual failure, such as failure to succeed. You feel shame for your shortcomings and not working hard enough, rather than for some mortal virtue you failed to uphold. Psychopolitics by Han-Byul also goes into this, kind of how the market managed to convince the individual to enslave themselves and set their own requirements for themselves without a king or master to order this.
In such a society, shame cannot be ascribed to doing something monetarily rational. It's not immoral to better yourself in any way.
I think a bit of the tragedy in this is that this stacks the incentives against morally right things in the long run. It was often better for resource accumulation to do the morally bad thing, and your counterweight would be shame from society, but now it's gone and the people who choose the (now much more accessible) morally corrupt path with run away with capital, power and social status. It's IMO a really good time in history to be a piece of shit as an average person
https://www.newsweek.com/topless-trans-woman-white-house-pri...
Idk, maybe having a lewd President is better than having a corrupt, fraud-supporting, law-discarding President who is now trying to kick people off voter rolls so he doesn't lose a midterm after his failed running of the economy despite having every single branch of govt in his control
>“My trans masculine friends were showing off their top surgery scars and living in joy, and I wanted to join them,” she said. “And because it is perfectly within the law in Washington, D.C., I decided to join them and cover my nipples just to play it safe. Because I wanted to be fully free and myself. I had zero intention of trying to be vulgar, or be profane in any way. I was simply living in joy, living my truth and existing in my body. Happy Pride. Free the nipple.”
Perhaps one day you'll grow to understand that complaints about "flashing their bolt-ons" is dog whistle for moralist hypocrisy, whereas openly taking bribes, threatening close allies with invasion while launching economic war in the form of tarifs, and eliminating foreign aid programs causing hundreds of thousands of deaths digs a far deeper moral, ethical, and geopolitical hole to claw from.
The country's biggest scandal - Watergate, was fundamentally an election sabotage/political espionage scandal
Bush in Florida stopping the vote count was definitely democracy being tagged.
I agree. This is what baffles me the most about USians. They know Watergate was one of the lowest points in the US history in terms of corruption and anti democratic maneuvers by a high level political group in the country.
Yet, the Trump administration outcorrupts any Watergate scandal very much each week. Yet, the US population is so docile and controlled that they barely react.
If a future President personally murdered someone (not remotely by drone), I’m sure it would be a massive scandal... the first time it happened.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot
That's just too funny Rayiner... really, you broke the record here.
You’re basically taking an error that is randomly distributed, but then partially correcting that error only from pools that you know skewed your way to begin with.
Imagine if Trump had initiated hand recounted undervotes (votes the machine couldn’t count) only for election day votes but not mail in votes. That would be election fraud, because it would be calculated to find additional votes from a pool that skews GOP while not finding additional votes in a pool that skews Democrat. What Gore did was exactly the same thing.
People scream “election interference” at these highly attenuated and indirect actions like Meta taking down a post. But Gore was statistically minting additional Gore votes before two Supreme Courts stopped him.
Don't be ridiculous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore
> Please provide a response instead of smug retorts like a high school student.
Flagged.
I didn't quite believe its involvement with things in Myanmar where media, people vowed left and right of Meta's involvement.
But seeing it now firsthand, I certainly believe it.
Accounts, posts from one cabal being pushed to your feed even if you don't follow any of them.
If you open a fresh account, the accounts from those cabal are recommended at top.
Relentlessly showing posts from one side and promoting them like hell.
Suspected bot activities. There were posts that are sans merit clearly, but Insta pushed it and had the unvelievable amount of likes, like Messi would have, had he posted his wedding reels.
I don't have publishable evidence, but I ask you to trust me. Human to human.
Watching all the techbros trying to crowd the stage to get in the shot with Modi when he went to SF was a precursor to them all crowding around Trump.
Reading a good newspaper shows the megaliked reels push a false narrative. Even the paper that the oppositions like.
Myanmar - Facebook took responsibility from the moment they decided to "service" the country using shady tactics such as https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/facebook-misleading-indians-i... where they had what, one translator, two? Some of this is in Careless People
It shouldn't matter what specific political side - Facebook are bad actors (or Meta or whatever) across the aisle
In the U.S., if someone had programmed a generative AI to be unwilling to depict Obama, I imagine many people would assume that decision was meant to help Obama, not harm him.
From what I can see, the meta cutoff data was from a time where one candidate was confirmed and the other wasn't. The political interference here was actually the timely manner for them to fix this. It took weeks of public pressure / federal government pressure for Meta to act.
It gives the appearance that Meta is not an impartial platform like they try to claim for regulatory purposes.
I remember NYTimes/WaPost pieces being concerned about Hindu nationalist influence on the Republican party. Anyone who has spend 2 seconds online know it's more likely the Republican party nukes India than forming alliances with the BJP.
Quick-cut to Musk funding right-wing political parties in Europe, JD Vance using the NATO bully-pulpit to talk down European center-right politicians, and Trump creating a slush-fund worth billions to Argentina to prop-up its failing experiment in right-wing libertarian governance, and America evangelicals funding regressive politics across Africa and Europe, reducing America's refugee program to resettle right-wing South Africans.
The alliance is so strong that people are coming even to HN to spread disinformation.
One problem the Brazilian left is facing is that the non-Musk platforms are not too fond of death threats against Protestants, landlords, farmers etc.
Does anyone remember Cambridge Analytica activity on Facebook during US elections in 2016.. Look it up if you don't remember. The same entity was also active in South America aka Colombia, Brazil, Argentina.. Cambridge Analytica was never charged and Facebook was never charged because it was all made legal. After the revelations, some laws changed but has it really changed. Is it stopping American interference in other countries? it doesn't look like it. What about at home? You know better than I do if you have an account; I don't.
Pathetic
Either most of my friends are pro-Lula (they are not) or Meta is helping them, not Bolsonaro.
This is an excuse for them to challenge the election if they (hopefully) lose.
For my other Brazilian friends over here: to me both sides are terrible but Lula is the convicted felon that spent 2 years in prison, and he ruled the country since 2003 and the place gets worse by the day.
Hacked messages uncovered procedural fraud in Lula’s trial, leading to the annulment of his convictions.
Even if the trial was annulled due to procedural fraud (which it wasn’t), it doesn’t take away his corruption and what his group did to the country.
One can argue that there have been numerous procedural frauds in Bolsonaro's trial - but of course if it’s the other side you don’t care ;)
The fact is that Lula was not convicted.
And he was convicted. By several judges. It was the supreme court that voided Lava Jato. Essentially, they him in the presidential race specifically to take out Bolsonaro.
Hopefully tomorrow he will prove useless at even that, and his party will be buried for good.
Nazis have this thing where they depict any political target as being both too weak and too strong, and too dumb and too smart.
USA big tech is just as bad as Russias or China's
It's much, much worse
I don't know how you can sleep at night.
It's over, and it's high time for him to get the hell out. If we're going to be a neoliberal shithole, then I sure as hell don't want him in charge of it.
And by the way, whatever Meta is doing is nothing compared to the censorship and persecution that Lula, his party and his supreme court judges perpetrated before, during and after the 2022 elections. I've commented extensively on this subject here on HN in case anyone wants to look into it. Whatever's going on here is a mere fraction of what the Brazilian right wing suffered at their hands.
Except there's debate all the time in the USA stemming from this originalist tradition from the founders' intent.
Like: the First Ammendment, there was debate about the role of money, is it speech? Culminating with Citizens United which is absolute lunacy.
The American system isn't objectively better by any means, it's just the one you're used to.
Why should everyone care about founders of a different country that's not even working particularly well at this time.
> while substantive decisions about guilt or liability are made by randomly selected juries
A system gamed as easily as any other one.
> Meanwhile other countries trust random people at companies
They don't trust them to do the right thing, which is why there is a law telling them what to do. The alternative is to ban privately-owned social networks (either all of them or at least those that don't follow the laws).
Because the U.S. was the first country in the world created, with great study and deliberation, by high-IQ political philosophers. Because the country was already a successful democracy for 189 years before all the EU17 countries became democracies even on paper. Because the U.S. was having orderly transitions of power since it was as poor as Bangladesh is today.
> A system gamed as easily as any other one.
Decisions of randomly selected jurors are much harder to “game” than decisions of corporate censors or election board bureaucrats.
> They don't trust them to do the right thing, which is why there is a law telling them what to do.
Every dysfunctional third world has beautiful “laws telling people what to do.” We have those in Bangladesh. As often as not, such laws just become vehicles for manipulating elections because what the law says to do or who is following the laws or not is highly debatable. Such laws effectively turn the prosecutors and the court system into the locus of corruption, because they have the power to decide “who is following the law.” (It’s like Iran’s system with more steps. Iran actually has fair, functioning elections. It’s just that the Guardian Council, an expert body of highly educated scholars, gets to screen who is allowed to run for office.)
Please try to understand the difference between procedural/power allocation laws and laws that incorporate substantive standards. Instead of having laws that say “what to do”—which is always open to interpretation—you should have laws that focus on “who decides” and “how do they decide.” You need to either make the decision mechanical so everyone can see whether the rule is being followed or not, or you need to put the decision in the hands of a body that can’t credibly be accused of having their own agenda.
Sure, which is why the laws in the US are not approved by randomly selected lawmakers. In that way it's irrelevant what some random jury decides, when the executive branch, the lawmakers and top judges are owned by the ruling class.
> We have those in Bangladesh. As often as not, such laws just become vehicles for manipulating elections
Sorry about that, but that's not a rule that applies everywhere, far from that. And of course the elections in the US are already heavily manipulated even without that.
That’s the problem with having the executive branch, lawmakers and judges oversee the mechanics of the voting and elections. You’re making my point for me.
Meanwhile in the US, if a majority party does not like the voting districts, they just redraw them, and if they don't like the voters, they disenfranchise them. Truly great high-IQ work.
My god man, what are you smoking? The oldest democracies in Europe are Norway (1814), Belgium (1831), The Netherlands (1848) and Denmark (1849). If you're going to claim misplaced American exceptionalism, then I'm going to point out that black people didn't receive universal suffrage until 1965 (the Voting Rights Act) -- and it's one of the few countries that still has not abolished slavery to this day (the 13th Amendment has an "except" clause).
The "fake news" nonsense is just plain old censorship and questionable in its own right, but the true reason why it's so destabilizing is the inconsistency.
The vast majority of judges are partidarian and openly support the left, so what happens in practice is only the left gets to censor the "fake news" of others. Whenever right wing candidates try to exercise the exact same rights, they are simply ignored.
It's literally happening right now: Lula's requests get accepted within a day while Bolsonaro's just sit there unseen forever. That way they get to censor the right and avoid being censored themselves.
This obviously partidarian "fact checking" censorship directly caused January 8th. It's not a fair election if you're censored and your opponent isn't.
I agree with you on structural and procedural rules.