You can say many bad things about Google, but I think they are still "California liberals" on social issues.
I get AfD content recommendations (lurid, trashy stuff of uhm uncertain truth value) a propos of nothing in the village I grew up in - they are popular there with about 25% in the 2025 election. The region is not even in the east or particularly suffering economically. I don't get these recommendations in Berlin. It seems regional.
Indeed. US tech has been actively conspiring in lying to the American populace about everything in Canada from politics, election results, public opinion in Canada, resources needed by the US from Canada, etc. They're interfering in the affairs of any country that won't bend to their will.
A lot of bots of US origin are propagating false narratives posing as citizens of these countries.
I love how everyone from every political background thinks big tech has it out for them specifically. No, it couldn't be that algorithms are stochastic and random and sometimes ban random people. The tech companies are trying to manipulate everyone, every single side, into some goal only they understand.
Somehow none of the hundreds of thousands of software engineers that have worked there have managed to uncover exactly what this purpose is despite having access to the monorepos and visibility into the recommendation engine pipelines.
On the modern internet, people confuse conspiratorial thinking for well-reasoned thinking. But an idea is not correct just because it is interesting or exciting.
The manipulation is not in the algorithm but in the controls the algo offers, either to the company or to financial friends of the company. It's pretty blatant the way Meta is pushing far right politics everywhere in Europe, pushing pro Israeli propaganda while silencing opposing opinions.
It's not a secret that Meta is selling political preferences on its platform, as they have been for decades. Several Meta employee have blown the whistle about it already.
This is the conspiracy theory thinking GP was referring to. There’s no evidence for any of it, it’s all vibes.
I favorite reels that are pro-Palestinian, and now my feed is packed with anti-Zionist reels. I literally don’t think I’ve ever seen a pro-Israel reel.
I have multiple examples of "neutral" content being invaded by Israeli propaganda, and Facebook even admits they will only show "select comments" and won't allow you to see any other. Even sub comments won't show all responses but only pro Israeli. It's pretty clear that Meta favors these, and it's not just because of external actors trying to influence.
There is evidence here of influence on the Brazilian elections. They were working with Cambridge Analytics to influence British elections.
There has been multiple whistleblowers saying they are offering political favors. There as studies showing they do indeed prefer certain parties.
How long can we keep our heads in the sand? When will it be enough
They are beholden to the current US admin - as always - only good thing is that the current admin is so blatant that maybe one day even the Germans will realize that you need to have your own social media just you have your own national tv, newspapers etc.
> realize that you need to have your own social media
How could that be made to happen? Should EU somehow move to federated (let’s say per country) instances of Mastodon or something? Or one big platform? How would regular folks get used to it? And how could those initiatives be prevented from falling into irrelevance when network effects are at play?
I agree with the idea, it’s just that there’s the usual hurdles there aren’t necessarily good answers for that I know of.
You can still have Facebook, its just if you're german your home server is a german one, with algorithms running on german servers, staffed by Germans and subject to German oversight. It would still even be one big global network.
All which would be owned by a US entity after all, and still at the whims of Meta executives. CLOUD Act makes stuff like that impossible to trust, anything going through US infrastructure or administration needs to be considered compromised at this point.
Amazon/AWS tried this route with their "sovereign cloud" which still ends up being beholden exactly the same way as "real AWS", so what's even the point? Who is even falling for these "tricks"?
Right until the Germans decide that something should be blocked globally, not just in Germany. And now you have a problem, because there are going to be 150 other countries demanding the same kind of treatment.
It might work, but it also might bloat the whole operation so much that the social network becomes non-functional.
>We already prevailed in a similar legal case in Germany in 2021-2023 in which we learned an important lesson: we tried to use geoIP blocking as a “hack” in a similar circumstance at the start of the legal proceedings, allowing us to continue services in Germany until the case concluded. The plaintiff (Sony Music Entertainment GmbH) then used a VPN to access the blocked content from Germany in circumvention of the geoIP blocking. The court agreed with Sony in their assertions of noncompliance, and we were fined for contempt of court.
I guess it was Germany after all.
If free DNS is supposed to be able to block people who use a VPN to circumvent a geoIP block, then the court is effectively demanding global reach for their blocking orders. It doesn't matter whether the court doesn't have the expertise in this, it only matters that they made such a moronic decision.
The way it should've happened is that over the last 20 years EU governments should have tried to keep tech companies doing well in Europe.
We had video streaming sites like youtube. We had cellphone manufacturers. We had chat applications.
But the conditions for these companies were better outside of Europe. Now we're stuck with everything not made in Europe. (South Korea is more relevant in consumer tech than the EU.)
European governments still haven't swapped off MS.
I’m not following. Youtube has always been an American company. YouTube was founded in San Mateo, California, USA, and it was an American company the whole time before Google bought it.
The Chinese did it. We broke Boeings monopoly with Airbus.
I realize these are heavy handed approaches - but shows what can get done.
Perhaps smaller scale things can work as well: Ie supporting alternatives when they occur - ie tiktok back when it was kinda Chinese - use the China threat to enforce objective standards - rather than just following the us stance.
Use existing monopoly legislation.
All creating an open market place for social media that allows for newcomers and local alternatives rather than the single monopoly that is the situation now.
Notably Germany used to have its own social media. SchülerVZ/StudiVZ/MeinVZ was like Facebook, but German. They did well initially, but by 2011 Facebook had the lead, and from there network effects did the rest to cement Facebook as the winner
No, we had way more. I enjoyed being member of a local social media webiste (a elaborate forum) in my teens.
And StudiVZ, which I never liked, made that slowly die out. Facebook came later.
I would very much prefer to still be part of local social media (where you could resolve issues with the admin directly), but federated to other networks.
Well the solution is pretty simple: geo block US owned social media and wait a two days for people to move to the best EU alternative. One you remove the foreign subsidized option with complete market share capture, there will be options that can finally compete.
Both the US and the EU are already doing this exact thing with cars, basically.
But the reason is not sovereignty - it's to make sure people can't receive communications not approved by the (fascist*) French government.
* we know they are fascist because they're shooting the population in the streets and turning off the internet, just like bad countries do. there is no need to weasel the word fascism. so far this is isomorphic to the arab spring, but in france.
As a EU citizen I believe in the citizen's freedom to pick their social media platform, but when it comes to official accounts (e.g. government, the president or prime ministers, etc) I've always believed we should favour open protocols and federation. Public funding of course. Probably an unpopular opinion.
How is Russia currently moving everyone from Telegram onto some "Max" app?
B-but the EU can't do that!
It absolutely can. Just like it can push Chat Control down everyone's throats even though if you held a referendum on it it would be voted down (no, most Jacques the plumbers on the street don't want mass surveillance even if it's "against crime").
> They are beholden to the current US admin - as always
They have, as the joke goes, more money than God and influence all over the world. They are beholden to no one. They have the resources to fight in court against decisions they don’t believe in, and all the lobbying they need to shape established laws.
They choose their actions, and their actions are their own. Every single dollar they donate to the current president but not the previous one is an admission of their allegiance and (lack of) morals.
Having principles and standing for them costs money, and these societal parasites subsist on money and influence. Make no mistake, they will sell their own mother to further their goals, but they don’t have to while they can keep selling everyone else’s.
Or maybe the reason more bribes are paid to the current administration is that the current administration is more receptive to bribes? The ROI on gifts to Trump is probably higher than on gifts to Biden so it makes sense to give more.
That’s not the argument. Unfortunately, reading comprehension and engaging in good faith continues to decline rapidly on HN.
Not being beholden to someone does not mean you have power over them. For example: you are not beholden to me and thus don’t have to do anything I say; but that doesn’t mean I have to do anything you say either, I’m not beholden to you.
> They have, as the joke goes, more money than God and influence all over the world. They are beholden to no one.
The administration can take over them with the snap of a finger if they so desire. They have absolutely no power.
The best example of that is the BBC suit, where the only reason it's happening is because the US doesn't have any control over the entity because it's British.
> The administration can take over them with the snap of a finger if they so desire.
No, no they cannot. They sure want you to believe that, though, and the longer that fantasy is left unchecked, the more power it gets. The current administration is not omnipotent, and that is exemplified by the times it was pushed back (not by the bootlicker CEOs at major US tech companies, obviously).
Like John Oliver said, use the four key words that make weak bullies go away: “fuck you, make me”.
one day they will realize - everobody realized long time ago, its info war friend.
Germans for example own 90% of polish media and are growing our younglings to be ashamed to be polish
> Germans will realize that you need to have your own social media just you have your own national tv
There is a national broadcast apparatus in Germany, directly funded by the people in form of mandatory household monthly contributions. It definitely needs improvements and is far from ideal but it doesn’t work at behest of government (budget pressures, etc.). It was designed to resist the top down pressure from the admins (lessons learned from what Nazis did). AfD along with some private news networks backed by the likes of Telekom are really pushing to abolish it.
Germany is even more corrupt than the current US but is more subtle about it. I'd almost rather have German media censored by the US than by Germany, because the US can't arrest German people in Germany for their posts, but the German government does.
I agree with the general claim of their safer space.
Yet, I see several possibilities why that ended in an unnecessary aggression police operation -- esp. LKA in every federal state seems to overcompensate for non-action on devastating crime.
I don't see the connection. Explanation welcome.
Esp. since I don't won't to have a last word on a topic I don't know enough about.
At this point sociala media has become a television, on twitter I just unfollowed everyone who have't followed back and I keep seeing the same antisemitic, antimuslim, anti-EU, anti-woman shit, anti-immigrant shit. My SO happens to see very similar posts to the point that I can't show her a funny post because she would have already seen it. There are some different post of course but the money shot is mostly the ame.
They probably show posts based on location and background, so essentially just like Fox, CNN, MSNBC but everyone sees theirs from the same screen with the same agenda pushed from all of them.
I have almost no reason to look at my facebook feed, check it perhaps once every 1-2 weeks in case something important was only posted there (not that this helps as they don't show me actual friends actual updates). Recent visit was 50% ads, 25% recommended or weirdly boosted content, including a post from Mark Zuckerberg promoting his AI, and a post whose content I forget from the White House (I live in Germany, the last time I even visited the USA was 2018).
I think the most charitable explanation for this is that it's because polarizing content (aka ragebait) gets views/plays, which the ranking algorithms directly optimize for.
Also, this isn't a new phenomenon. If you're interested, I'd recommend reading Shoshana Zuboff's 2018 book: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
Why should I believe your claim that AfD content is getting pushed on YouTube? Isn't it more likely that you personally hate AfD and so you find it salient and enraging whenever you see any AfD content at all yourself, regardless of exactly how YouTube's recommendation algorithm works on your account or whether they treat AfD particularly differently than any other political content? Are you actually measuring this?
To be clear I think it's entirely possible that YouTube is adjusting its recommendation algorithm to show AfD content to people more (or perhaps less) than would happen "organically", because AfD is a salient political party in German politics and YouTube knows this. But how do you determine what is the correct amount of AfD content to be recommended to people in a politically-neutral way, that doesn't end up amounting to you arguing that the YouTube algorithm is only fair if it censors political content you personally think is bad?
Even out of political reasoning, they are rigged for engagement and as it turns out fear mongering and hate bring a lot of engagement.
What are people going to watch between a 3 hours in depth debate about the future of the country on topics such as ecology, finance, social security and pension systems VS hundreds of reels about ImMiGrAnT RiOtS in paris?
Which is evidence of how extraordinary his actions were in January 2021, and how extraordinarily well the billionaire owners of American media (including Zuck) have managed to retcon it as something else.
I search about vaza jato then I search for less biased sources of his convictions:
Wasn't Lula convicted in 3 levels up to a federal court called STJ?
And then a single federal court judge who never submitted the case to colleagues, simply declared his judgement void based in technicalities?
And then all the investigation restarted from scratch, but since by law he was too old, his crimes prescribed in half the time and he was never investigated again.
The cherry on the top is that this single judge who declared his convictions null was appointed by the felon's political party.
So about a dozen different judges, in municipal, state and federal levels, analysed his multiple charges and declared him guilty in some of them. Then a single federal court judge appointment by the suspect's political party voided all of them.
You forgot to mention the judge who personally coordinated with the prosecutor to convict Lula in the first place was later appointed as Bolsonaro's minister of Justice. And ever since then, idiots like to pretend lawfare is not a thing unless done to one of Bolsonaro's ball lickers.
Ask any neurologist near you, and they will readily confirm how Trump exhibits all signs of dementia and mental decline on national TV every single day.
You don’t get it. When Biden blathered and fell asleep he was senile. When Trump spews word salad and falls asleep it’s clearly some brilliant strategy.
That’s because Trump sends better primate dominance signals than Biden, therefore everything he does is right. That’s how it works. Just ask the brain stem.
Yes, Republicans (overly cynical) have resignedly accepted their politicians are idiots and thus elected the most egregious buffoon, while Democrats (overly idealistic) were shocked their party could be (in some ways) more disconnected from reality.
The surprise is not that he was kicked off the main social media companies, the surprises are that the wheels of US justice turned so slowly that Trump got a chance to be re-elected rather than life in prison, and likewise that the US electorate went for him.
He was given far more leeway than any user in the history of social media.
The fact that they didn't ban him for so long weighs toward being partial to not banning politicians. Which seems to be the opposite of the point you're trying to make.
The whole point of the left is to censor their opposition.
Leftist ideas don't survive long in the real world/critical debate
.
So censoring opposition opinions (and jailing opponents) has been the lefts go to for more than 100 years.
Yeah you mean censored, as I predicted, for saying that the left have an unnatural need to censor people and arrest political opponents? Censored, as I said I would be.
Do you really believe this? Everything I hear from self described culture warriors like Musk was the left in the 80’s and 90’s was anti censorship as opposed to the moral majority on the right? You would find yourself in narrow company to say the left is fundamentally pro censorship, particularly in America.
Actually you'd find that almost everyone on the right believes the left is fundamentally pro censorship, along with other "facts", like the left is a hive mind of sheep, or the left is controlled by George Soros.
Which far right are you talking about? The lefts version of the far right where everyone to the right of Bernie sanders is Hitler? Or like Joel Webbon / Doug Wilson women shouldn’t vote far right? Who is this anti-free speech moderate right you describe?
Elon describes himself as moderate so is he one of these folks that doesn’t believe in free speech? He would say he stayed in the center and democrats moved left. What speech is this moderate right censoring?
Why yes. And as I predicted, I was censored. Meanwhile every leftist message left alone. It's a artificial echo chamber - created by people who ultimately hate freedom and free speech.
Our family escaped communism the hard way - it's grim how history repeats the worst.
Do you think the sitting president of the United States should be exempt from the terms of service? Who else should be exempt?
And I sort of wonder what point you’re trying to make, because you could take two lessons away -
One, Trump may not have been reelected if meta hadn’t banned him. So maybe it was another case of meta trying to help republicans.
Or, if Trump hadn’t been reelected, maybe the republicans wouldn’t be facing one of the worst midterm routes in history.
But honestly I’m not actually sure the point you’re trying to make. Meta hired a Republican strategist into their c suite since then. Sooo much has happened, there’s a lot of historical context to try to put it in.
At a point on time, there should be more structured and unbiased content in social media before elections in democratic countries to help people make their decisions.
This should be regulated to avoid interference from anyone.
The biggest problem now is that the billionaires behind social media nowadays will push for a liberal / right wing agenda in the west for their own interests.
You can resent them all you like; they don’t care as long as nothing is done to them, and nothing is being done. Resentment is worthless without action.
This… is how it has been for over a century, at this point - with reference to American billionaires specifically. Much of the shape of the modern world is the outcome of political influence by American financial giants, from pre-war industrial staging to post-war outright restructuring of global financial systems to ensure capital flows were favourable to the U.S. - I mean, for God’s sake, Bretton Woods, lend lease, the U.K. aerospace and nuclear programmes.
Strip it back to just billionaires, or their equivalent over time, and thus it always was.
People talk about the “new world order” as though this is some novel concept - but you can saunter back in time past the east India company, the bourbons, the holy Roman emperors, Rome, Greece, Sumeria, and see the same pattern played out throughout history. True power sits with wealth - an impoverished ruler relies on others for his means, and has no power of his own.
The wealthy, those with power, have always decided for the rest, have always had outsized influence, as long as there have been societies with the concept of “mine” and “yours”.
Things like these happen if a state fails to secure its information space. Giving control over it to foreign entities means providing population wide manipulative power to foreign entities with adversarial intentions.
Every state should have foreign agent laws (NGOs must register and must be transparent over their financials). Every state must have full control over their information space (especially educational, social and new media). Russia and China understood, Brazil and Europe did not.
It is not so black white. It is a dilemma. There is great value in freedom of expression. But fake expression with the explicit intention to mislead is not so good. It would be best if the population would be better at distinguishing truth from falsehood. Unfortunately much of the population seems to be at a level close to cattle.
> Unfortunately much of the population seems to be at a level close to cattle.
Not you though. You're a wolf among sheep. A true seer among the blind.
Everyone else is too dumb to know what's right, just manipulated by the media they consume on the Internet.
Not you though. You get all your information from trustworthy sources. Sure, they happen to agree with you 90% of the time but,hey, nobody's perfect, right? Well, except you. You've got all the answers.
If only everyone else would just let you make all the rules. You could get to all the bad people and make sure they stopped saying the wrong thing. Maybe provide them the resources they need to learn the truth and, if they don't want to learn the truth, we'll just keep them away from everyone else until they figure it out.
It's true though, these people exist. There's bias in everyone, but it takes a special kind of arrogant to call a large portion of the population "cattle" because they are disagreement.
These are thoughts that occur to me too when a safetyist progressive (for want of a better term other than "woke") suggests shutting down information to prevent people seeing the wrong ideas.
But you must see that it is a genuine conundrum. In a free-for-all information landscape (something which did not exist until yesterday), people need to be able to distinguish good information from bad for democracy to survive.
In fairness I think shutting down “wrong ideas” is just what people do when they think their ideas are prominent and want to protect that.
It’s almost weird the way we talk about free speech in 2026, looking back at the 20th century and the Hayes code, and how staid music and TV were prior to 1985-ish.
Maybe my most unpopular of opinions is that - I don’t know if I agree with censorship persay - but I’m not sure it’s healthy the way we’re all in a deluge of all these perspectives. You could get rid of 90% of content in the world and 90% of people would never notice.
> But you must see that it is a genuine conundrum...
I, frankly, don't. A lot of these conversations stop because of statements like this. You're assuming a set of priors that make your argument make a ton of sense and assuming other people agree with them as well. Take away that as your prior assumption and other viewpoints make a lot more sense.
There's a term for the phenomenon that I don't recall but there's a trap people fall into where they see themselves as the only one who can see through the lies and everyone else is falling for it. I think that happens a lot when people talk about "bad ideas".
I don't think it's the ideas existing that is the problem. I think a focus on the ideas is a distraction from the question of what are the conditions that make these ideas attractive to people?
As an example, I dislike Trump immensely. However it's not at all surprising to me that people voted for him for a lot of reasons but I think the best example was in what is probably the best political slogan/ad I've seen in my life, "He's for you, she's for they/them."
I don't think the problem was Trump, I think the problem was the choice being Trump's ideas and the ideas he was up against being.
>There's a term for the phenomenon that I don't recall but there's a trap people fall into where they see themselves as the only one who can see through the lies and everyone else is falling for it.
Possibly "naive realism", which I agree is a major problem, but I don't think I'm guilty of it here. The only premise of my argument, namely that democracy requires a shared understanding of facts, is widely accepted.
That may be the term but I recall it as a little more closely related to how I phrased it though probably not as clinical.
I don't necessarily think you're guilty of it but I do think the premise you're proposing hints at it.
I wouldn't argue that democracy doesn't requires are shared understanding of the facts. The argument I'm making is that the motivation for people to believe certain things often is the root of the "problem", rather than the existence of things for them to believe.
Notably, I think, The shared understand of "the facts", is a convenient over-simplification. The real world situations where someone has "the facts" wrong, isn't usually a question of fact or fiction really, it's a focus on the emphasis of the narrative being spun. A reading of the same story comes of very different, even with shared facts, depending upon which parts of the story you think are important.
The usual disagreement on a lot of current events isn't what actually happened. Fringe elements will argue the plain facts but the majority of people are disagreeing about why something happened, not what happened.
Nothing to disagree with particularly in what you say. I tend to frame this as divergent values.
Example. 100 illegal immigrants crash a border fence. Someone whose values makes them unbothered by immigration will think: Big deal, it's only 100 people, anyone who worries about that must be racist. The other person will get worked up because even 1 illegal immigrant is an affront to the sanctity of nations and borders. Both sides agree it was 100 people, yet somehow neither can imagine that the other side is sincere in their convictions. This seems quite common.
The idea that you can't have a foreign nation control the main channels that the population gets their news from, and that their population spends hours a day of their free time staring at, is black and white. And that's the core.
>Giving control over it to foreign entities means providing population wide manipulative power to foreign entities with adversarial intentions.
Alternatively, this blatant use of any tool available to influence non enemy states is disgusting, and forces everyone to a "everyone loses" scenario. Shifting the focus to an insufficiently defended victim removes the focus from the nature of the aggression.
That's an interpretation I've already seen in other replies. But that's not the idea.
Just visit the website of the NED and look at the many projects the US government finances around the world to meddle in these countries politically in favor of US interests[1]. Nations have to protect themselves against these foreign influences, otherwise they will be eaten alive.
NGOs are just one tool of exerting political influence in foreign nations.
Much more powerful are proprietary digital services like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. Their algorithms control what information people consume every day. If you are the CIA or the NED, that's the tool you need to exert influence on the thinking of the predominantly younger people in foreign countries (e.g. flush anti-China news into the Facebook feeds of younger users in Myanmar or Thailand).
That's why the US government wanted to move control of TikTok within the US to a domestic organization. They knew what was going on.
Careful what you’re applying spatial terms to. “Information space” might sound clever to you, but you’re basically redefining hearts & minds in territorial terms, which is really no different than saying that people are the sovereign territory of their countries. Down that road lies a fork in the road, one path takes you back to serfdom, the other way straight to fascism. Neither is a particularly pleasant place to visit, and once you’re there, leaving is rather difficult.
It's rather strange to see such shameless apologetic of Putinism on HN. Yeah right, let's give the government more power and control over the information, what could go wrong???!
You're the one paranoid about "putinism" so that explains where that came from. The GP said nothing of what you are interpreting. The US itself has a firm grasp on what information reaches its people, so what are you saying?
The GP was preaching the virties of information control, and we Russians know far too well how it ends.
And no, your claim that US has a firm grasp on what information reaches its people is laughable: you can host and serve any information critical of government without issues. The closest you had to putinism was when companies en masse started deplatforming Trump and his supporters in early 2021.
These billionaire ghouls need to answer for their many attempts on our Republics. Democracy can't survive when its most powerful members are working against it. We have to take them done ASAP, unless we want an encore of the 1940s.
Capital naturally compounds, and financial resources naturally seek political influence, so to combat the root of all evil is simply to cap individual's wealth versus society so they can't rig the game in their favor.
If I'm not mistaken it's much less than that. I remember reading it was R$100k, so ~$20k. Don't have the time to look further now, but this[13] story says at least one of the fines is R$50k(~$10k) per day.
This is exactly the kind of stupidity that helps people like Trump reelected. I know nothing about Brazilian politics, but this looks like a desperate attempt to undermine the opposition or pull Meta into needless controversy, and I have no idea how complicit the courts are in all this.
So what if searching for “brasil” returns a Bolsonaro GIF? I tried it myself, and the obvious explanation is that he’s wearing a Brazilian flag tshirt and dancing rather comically. How does a GIF appearing in search results imply political bias?
Sleeping giants is one of the most shadiest anti-democratic organizations that, once you grasp what they are actually doing, there’s literally nothing else left to do for voters than what you described. Its subversive unethical manipulation (there are offshoots in Europe as well) is a reason for me to go scorched earth and auto-inverse: anybody that’s not distancing himself from them is unelectable, anybody who promises to put them on a chopping block gets my vote.
> This is exactly the kind of stupidity that helps people like Trump reelected.
You mean when people admittedly have no knowledge of a subject but still speak authoritatively about it, viscerally criticising one of the sides and even suggesting fowl play, instead of taking care to be humble and understand the context before speaking or making accusations?
I agree, that is very much the kind of attitude that got us into the current situation.
The Supreme Federal Court in Brazil has been notorious for censorship. The New York Times has found that it has ordered 223 account-blocking orders since 2020.
Playing obvious problems of Brazil‘s judiciary system down like that are clear red flags for somebody not for 1 sec contemplating how he would react if the political camps would be reversed in this situation. It is their sovereignty if the censorship happens on speech you don’t like
35 per year isn't that many, all things considered. I think the USA government blocks more, but not through their supreme court. Whose accounts were blocked, and for what reasons?
Let's face it: Tech CEOs have aligned with fascists (techno-fascism) because - and that's a general rule throughout out history (see pre-WWII industrial titans aligned with Nazi-leaders): Industry leaders of large corporations and authoritarians share the same goal : ultimate control and power over others.
I think tech ceos
follow one simple variable: $CURRENT_POLITICAL_POWER
have lefties in power for the next of the decade and you'll see how datacenters become all about clean energy investment, climate change starts to matter, "don't be evil" starts to take shape
How does internet censorship 2016-2024 fit into your model?
It’s more simple than that. Industry tends to align with government because they have power and they want that power to be benefit them. If you’re a large company it would be stupid not to try to maintain that relationship.
Yes, I think we actually agree, and maybe I should have been clearer. Of course industry leaders always try to play nicely, e.g. if liberal/democratic party is in power, they will 'wear their liberal outfit'.
Yet, from a pure intrinsic values perspective, people that are power-seeking are alike in industry and politics, and when they support an authoritarian state/movement instead of a democratic one, it shows their true intentions.
What might give for some pause, if you listen carefully to the more "alt right" voices, Trump is the "moderate" or even "liberal" by their standards, by their own words.
"The most accomplished masterpiece of contemporary capitalism is neither the iPhone, nor the unicorn startup, nor even the visionary billionaire.
No.
Its flagship product, its anthropological jewel, its greatest achievement, is the right-wing poor person. A genuine feat of social engineering: materially deprived, yet rich in convictions that run counter to their own interests.
They have been carefully molded. They have been taught that their problems always come from below or from next door — the immigrant, the welfare recipient, the civil servant, the unemployed — never from above.
They have been taught to hate taxes while surviving thanks to public services. To defend heirs to fortunes while having nothing to pass on themselves. To applaud those who crush them, as long as they speak loudly and promise law and order.
The right-wing poor person is a fascinating creature. They vote against their own interests with fervor, convinced that one day, perhaps, they too will find themselves on the right side of the fence.
They mistake brutality for courage, authoritarianism for protection, injustice for merit. They are sold fear in a ready-made package, identity at bargain prices, and anger in bulk on a monthly subscription.
At the dawn of this new world, the monsters do not emerge from the margins: they rise from the ballot boxes, television studios, and simplistic slogans.
They thrive on manufactured misery and sabotaged political awareness.
Capitalism has not merely produced poverty; it has achieved something far worse: it has made the poor docile, obedient, spiteful, and grateful.
The fun thing is, the original nazis were quite pro-workers. The original fascists tried to address some concerns of the working class too. Leaders of both started out in far-left circles before jumping on the other side of the shoehorn. Which worked out much better for them.
Modern far-right frequently pays at least lip service to concerns of poor working class. At the same time modern left has become champaign left. Caring less and less about the actual working class.
And then the left becomes surprised that poor working class sometimes go to the other side…
If you take your time to go through nazi material and meeting minutes, they called themselves socialists at all times and they implemented socialist policies at all times. National socialist policies.
There is absolutely no doubt on this, and there are volumes upon volumes of backing this in the written evidence collected by the allies for the Nuremberg trials. They outwards called themselves socialists in their propaganda. They called themselves socialists in the laws and decrees they issued. And they called themselves socialists in their internal meetings between top nazis, long after they had assumed all power. It wasn't just rhetoric or propaganda, it was the real deal.
And if you consider what kind of policies and program implemented, they were socialist in every aspect, and the German citizen had their life completely organized in socialism. From the cradle to the grave.
But they certainly weren't socialist in the shape or form that present day socialists are.
You can be socialist without being a leftist or a liberal. You can be a socialist while having communists as your main enemy. You can be a nationalist or not while being a socialist or a conservative. National socialism became the de-facto system of government for both the Soviet Union and for China.
Very well put. I would like to add a less-eloquent epilogue to the story.
This curious animal was laid bare by the discovery that we are hackable by nature, and hacked by behaviour science. Though it took a few decades to get going, the understanding of how to influence motivation and decision-making is now very mature.
In order to arrive at this understanding, you need data, and lots of it. The social media platforms have performed the function of data aggregators and testing grounds for algorithmic control. But it was not the tech companies who came up with plans, only the tools to put them into practice.
The culprits, though they operate in shade, are generally non-partisan and understand that divide-and-conquer has always been an effective strategy. These people sometimes work in intelligence bureaus, but not always. They are, however, always known to those agencies. After all, you do not need to know you are an asset to be an asset.
The algorithms, necessarily kept as protected IP, are statistical engines that profile and predict, producing probabilistic outcomes and estimates. Before LLMs, one might have argued "but how can probabilistic algos really produce something meaningful?", now I would think people might have a different take, if they could see the layers and weights.
An emperor used to need an army, and this is what replaces it for non-violent insurrection and domestic control. Many will even state their ambitions publicly, and sometimes (though less frequently these days) their procedure. What they are doing is not strictly illegal, because the law gives "sovereignty" to a person's choices, without recognition that their choices might not be their own. Libertarianism has played right into their hands, in this sense.
A masterpiece, not only of conception, but also social engineering, with a technological endoskeleton built on the aggregated data we all willingly give them. All information feeds the machine, just as every financial transaction cements the central bank's authority.
> According to the petition, two people asked [Meta AI] to pick a number between 1 and 25. They gave no instructions and made no reference to the election. In one attempt, the AI answered 13. In the other, it answered 22. Those are the party ballot numbers of Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro, respectively. The groups question the coincidence.
My confidence in the validity of their claims tanked right about here.
I'm all for regulating transparency into social media algorithms. Meta most certainly is compromised by foreign actors. But can we choose less stupid hills to die on than numerology and GIFs? Headline is not remotely supported by the evidence.
Need to see details, but it's perfectly plausible that geolocated requests from Brazil get a special treatment during this specific period of elections.
To assume that Evil Corp Inc. does evil things? They should just turn the platform off because it seems is only thing that works as a bargaining chip with such powerful entities.
Why exactly opposition? I mean what exactly are you supposed to do then? Let foreign actors meddle with your election? X is doing exactly the same thing as Meta around the world. I do not see any other solution than some kind of repression.
If the company putting at risk underlying social contract is not completely dismantled and its head is not sent in jail, the message they get is clear: go on as long as you can sustain the loss and profit. Or at least it's apparently the only way they can interpret it.
Or the public could grow up, learn that algorithms are stochastic, and not let their vote be influenced by the number that pops up when they type in "vote" in the search bar.
If this is influencing your votes your democracy is already lost.
I'm not sure looking down on the general public helps anything. People are obviously influenced by spamming them with information. It works in marketing, it works on election billboards, it works in lots of contexts.
> ... but it's another to willfully disrupt legal elections in a soverign country.
Especially if they're the same exact people who whine at the top of their lungs that our elections are the subject of foreign interference (even when it isn't). If one does a thing to someone else, they have zero leg to stand on when they think it's being done to them (even when it's not).
One thing you learn in life is that hypocrisy is the way to get rich. Do whatever is good for you now and if a different thing is good for you later do that thing then, instead of continuing the thing you're doing now. It seems to work.
I think the Cambridge Analytica scandal was largely made up in similar ways. Data privacy is important, but much of the data they “stole” seems to me to be within then-contemporary expectations for third party access, and I’ve never seen a coherent explanation of how collecting this data disrupted elections.
Perhaps in Brazil it’s illegal for political messages go viral on social media at all? Then I could see how there’s an issue here. But that isn’t my understanding.
The average user didn’t and doesn’t understand what’s going on at all. When I used Facebook more heavily, I would routinely see memes passed around where people were alarmed to discover Facebook has a license to use reproduce their photos, and posted legalese on their walls which they believed would revoke that license so Zuckerberg can’t steal them.
The average person who did understand these things, before the mid 2010s, was very passionate about open standards. The zeitgeist at the time was that you should be able to do anything through the API that you can do through the official app; it wasn’t until 2015 (https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/28/facebook-api-shut-down/) that Facebook turned off their official API for letting third parties dig through your friends’ entire profiles. If Facebook had announced in 2017 that they’re turning off API access to the timeline, which they ended up doing as part of the Cambridge Analytica response, people would have been very frustrated and would not have believed that it was a privacy-first measure.
Yes, and to add to this, people in the tech space were generally quite upset at the death of third-party Twitter clients and more recently Reddit clients. But, well, the level of API access required to create a third-party client is fairly obviously "all the data".
You phrase this as a "gotcha" but I don't think you understand that NGOs and nonprofits are the exact kind of entity that would naturally be involved here.
Algorithmic transparency is a deeply unprofitable and difficult task, with people from all sides screeching at you thinking you're biased against them. Governments obviously shouldn't be involved (unless you're a fan of state-controlled media), and so the only people that will take this on are people that care enough about the impact of social media on society to give up careers in the private sector.
If you care so much, you can always join one of these NGOs! You won't. I guarantee you they are not as biased as you think they are, and they certainly don't hold a "shadow ban this guy" hammer.
One big company says things should be secret, another says that things should be transparent, and your conclusion is that both are equivalent and therefore any attempt for transparency is meaningless. I don't buy that logic. A party being biased doesn't mean that its stance on every issue is automatically wrong; at the very least, it's possible as an individual to have a mutual interest with a company.
I believe though it is an old phenomenom that if (given the default context) you ask a random number, it will more often than not give numbers from a very small set.
I just used a "Temporary chat" with ChatGPT twice to "Give a random number" and it gave 42 both times (this shuold be rather understandable why it ended up with this). Then I asked "Give a random number in 1-10" twice and it responded with 7 for both (and this too is an old "magic number").
btw today's models run random.randint() by default unless you prohibit python by choosing one of the dumb models, disable thinking, disable tool calls, etc.
Because the AI is trained on real world data and in the real world real people are making a gigantic amount of images and posts in support for the two biggest candidates.
Now look through this thread and be amazed at how most posters are apparently satisfied by this level of evidence and some are even calling for China-style Internet censorship in response. A good reminder that even enlightened progressives are helpless against cognitive bias when they want to believe the worst about their enemies.
Yup, it seems unfathomable to some commentators that the likes of AfD or Le Pen or Bolsonaro would get popular support were it not for US big tech (interference). Which truly boggles the mind, it seems to be the same narrative that couldn't believe Hillary lost the election and it was the russians fault. Even if that were true, you should still review your policies and how you ran the campaign and learn something from it. Here it's like we're in a world with no reinforcement learning feedback loop.
It seems similarly unfathomable to other commenters that US big tech is ideologically aligned with the rightwing parties in EU and SA.
Further that the current US administration is openly rooting for leaders to get elected that serve its interests and not the electorate’s interests (which makes sense) and that US big tech is entirely controlled and thrall to the US administration.
Truly mindboggling
It's not that it's unfathomable. Most just agree with that because that's how you 'make it' in the VC world of today. They also pretend that the right wing is somehow for free speech, of course ignoring everything the right likes to censor, such as criticism of Israel/support for Palestine.
> It also doesn't help that it's easy to lump 'the left' with 'everything I don't like re social issues' because the institutional left is basically neoliberals who prefer to talk social politics to avoid talking about economics.
That's actually a great analysis, thanks for that!
Censorship is when you don't leave an information manipulation and mind control tool in the hands of a hostile foreign power. Sure.
As for the evidence, it has been well documented beyond the parent comment's silly examples and it includes shadowbanning popular profiles with certain opinions.
Shadowbans have a high base rate. You notice when it happens to your side and take it as a sign of bias. You don't notice when it happens to the other side, because that is not your circle and you don't track them as closely.
I guarantee your political opponents also think Meta is trying to shadow ban then.
And all foreign agents should be allowed to freely operate everywhere simply because Putin has falsely accused at least one person of being a foreign agent? Espionage sure is easy these days.
The perfidy of Putin (and many other authoritarian regimes) is that they can clothe their anti-democratic and anti-human policies in the language of their opponents.
So Putin can justify anything with words - what they say doesnt really matter or reflect reality. The actions and outcomes matter.
A: social media is a mind control tool that can be used for targeted political manipulation, as shown by the cambridge analytica scandal and plenty of other research.
B: the US is a hostile foreign power in relation to South America, as proven by its continuous threats, embargoes, tariff wars, coups and more recently the unashamed declaration of a "Donroe doctrine"
I deny that social media is a mind control tool that can be used for targeted political manipulation. The examples I see people provide for such a phenomenon almost always boil down to “social media let lots of people see bad messages I don’t agree with instead of good messages I do agree with”. Unless you take a very expansive view and consider e.g. catchy chants at a protest to be political manipulation, the effect just isn’t strong enough.
>social media let lots of people see bad messages I don’t agree with instead of good messages I do agree with
If the provider can tamper with the algorithm to filter out information that goes against its political preferences, how is that ineffective or not targeted political manipulation? The idea of democracy presumes that the public can be well informed in order to take decisions.
Because information passes through all kinds of formal and informal filters in the status quo, so adding another one doesn’t move the needle very much. In the US, the antivaxx movement has recently become so influential that it took over the national health authorities, despite most media platforms openly filtering out their information to suppress them.
I mean, ideally I'd have Zuckerberg, Musk, Dorsey and friends in jail forcreating social networks where conflict is rewarded and pushed in front of everyone, leading to the collapse of the social fabric we're seeing throughout the world right now, but censorship is fine by me in the mean time.
your own country flipped its shit and said that Tiktok was CCP propaganda less than a year ago and tried to ban it, so it seems like foreign influence on your politics does seem to be a bad thing.
Look at this thread and you could think that the quoted example was the first, or main one, in the article.
When in fact, it comes after
> The petition describes a GIF search on WhatsApp for the word “brasil.” The first result was an image of Flávio Bolsonaro. It showed his ticket number and identified his running mate.
> According to the records sent to the court, the same result appeared on three separate accounts. The groups use this to ask whether its top position comes from systematic ranking criteria.
> A similar check on Instagram also showed images of the senator among the first results. Users who searched for “brasil” found three images of Flávio Bolsonaro in the top positions
> On WhatsApp, a GIF search for the word “ladrão” (thief) returned a caricature of the president in a striped uniform, a reference to prison dress. Another result carried the message “Supporting the Workers’ Party is a mental illness.”
> On Instagram, a search for the same word showed a GIF reading “Vote 13.” That is the Workers’ Party election number, tied to Lula’s candidacy.
And you could also think that the authors would be for censorship and completely crazy, when in fact:
> They are not claiming that they have proven bias in Meta, choosing instead to posit the question to the Superior Electoral Court.
That's all ignoring the fact that Trump and the US openly support Bolsonora, who is in jail for attempting a coup after losing the election.
And Brazil, AFAIK, was a military dictatorship until, what, 40 years ago? To my knowledge, without a "hard cut" that would have investigated this part of the country's history.
I am not Brazilian, who knows, I can't tell whether Lula is corrupt, or anything, what I have not seen is prove of the election fraud claims put forward by Bolsonaro sr.?
Not irrelevant since his son of course rehabilitates him and wants to "correct the public record".
And, yeah, I know, I won't get love for this on HN, but Trump's "election fraud" claims seem unsubstantiated to me from the outside, doesn't make me think Bolsonaro's claims would any more believable.
I've lost much of my naivite around politics, but if we can't agree to draw a hard line around this kind of interference with open and free elections, it seems like a swan song of democracy.
And this is coincidentally what many supporters of the current US admin see as positive.
Regarding censorship, before the age of Social Media, there already was all kinds of regulation around what kind of electoral advertisement is allowed and when, also regulation against defamation as a campaign strategy, but of course it's different from country to country.
Meta has a long history of not giving a shit whether their engagement algorithms at best... "damage" democratic processes, so I don't see any reason to be smug about it.
But it would be cool to limit political content on platforms with non-audited, non-public and intransparent engagement algorithms.
Just as it would be good to stop intransparent flow of big money into politics.
The latter is a sentiment that Trump catered to when he became president for the first time. Of course, only in a twisted, cynical way: "the system is broken, so I alone can fix it".
Trump openly supports the Bolsonaros who are his political allies. The European Union openly supported Lula when the roles were reversed in the last election.
As for WhatsApp GIF searches. Searches for "brasil" shows one candidate as the first person after GIFs of the flag. Search results before you have started typing anything shows the other candidate.
You can search for any negative term that one side commonly uses against the other, and WhatsApp will suggest GIFs of the person. Do you understand that millions of normal people send these GIFs to each other in WhatsApp groups and private messages? Of course they're going to turn up in top suggested.
Do an image search on Google for a common derogatory term of any (in)famous politician you know of and look at the results.
> Do you understand that millions of normal people send these GIFs to each other in WhatsApp groups and private messages?
Of course, it could be organic. I shortened my text a bit so it's not explicitly mentioned anymore, but I still wrote about "engagement algorithms".
It doesn't need to be a political influence dial at Meta's HQ.
Regardless of whether there is intentional influence by the platform, or the platform intransparently favors other actors who in turn use the platform, it's a problem. Even when the platforms just do it for simple financial reasons or political opportunism.
On HN, people are usually quick to lament to damaging effects of engagement optimization on public discourse.
I thought mentioning that I cannot judge whether Lula is a corrupt president (I assume that's what's meant by "criminal") is enough to make clear that I am not arguing for silencing opinions.
What I would like to see is addressing Social Media's role in weaponizing outrage advertisement using slander, and also, platforms getting away with not making transparent how they weight political advertisement in elections.
In my opinion, electoral advertisement should be regulated, and it is regulated, in many countries. This does not prevent you from sending memes on WhatsApp, it might prevent a platform from suggesting political memes to you when you did not explicitly seek out partisan content.
Regarding the rest:
Lula has been found guilty of corruption, Bolsonaro has been imprisoned because of his coup attempt.
Seems hard to argue about that in one-sided way, and I'm not gonna make any explicit stance here, I am not from Brazil.
It seems impossible to assess whether one of the two is in fact not guilty of the crimes they were charged for. What I did notice though were the election fraud claims, and consensus seemed to be that they are false.
The coup attempt also seems to be undisputed.
The EU has sought out trade deals with Brazil, which was more easily possible with Lula, AFAIK.
I'm not gonna defend everything (sry, not "anything") the EU does here either.
My point was how the public deals with election fraud claims and coups.
And it does seem strange to normalize those openly, even 5 years after the capitol storm.
> It seems impossible to assess whether one of the two is in fact not guilty of the crimes they were charged for.
It's actually not, a cursory understanding of Brazilian politics is all that's needed to understand this in context. Lula was essentially "acquitted" for his crimes, as it was proved after he served a few years in prison that the charges were brought under false pretenses by partisan operators. (https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/04/brazil-crimi...)
It was also quite convenient for liberals and the right wing at the time to jail Lula, as he was at the apex of his popularity and was making life hard for the Brazilian bourgeoisie. Bolsonarism can essentially be read as a revolt of the Brazilian elite against Lula's economic policies which stepped on the toes of a few powerful sectors of the Brazilian capitalist class.
Lula has a long history of successfully managing capitalism as a socialist. Brazilian politics is extremely corrupt and pay-to-play, and the Bolsonaros are essentially a crime family in their own right. Flavio, the son running for president, has been convicted of embezzlement when he was a state congressman and is literally under investigation right now for money laundering and bank fraud.
Yes, I would love to block American social media companies from meddling with the elections of my country. Like you did with TikTok, for example, when your government forced ByteDance to sell to an American company to continue operating. Fucking hypocrisy is palpable.
I see the opposite: the OP cherry picked the weakest of a long list of examples. The other reactions you’re seeing in the thread are based on all the discoveries, not just that one.
The example showcased is particularly weak, but the actual scandal with Meta AI is that when they are asked to produce campaign material, they spontaneously produce it with Bolsonaro's number (22), even when not asked. But then they refuse to produce it with other numbers like Lula's 13, saying they can't perform this for a specific candidate. When asked, they admit they were inconsistent in producing Bolsonaro-linked material, but in new chats they reliably continue to do so. See for example what was posted in this thread
- Meta has suspended Lula's facebook account a week from the election day, and many advertising instagram and facebook accounts associated with his campaign have been consistently suspended and then reactivated with days of delay (this is a huge loss in the context of a political campaign)
- The reach of his opponents is being inflated to unexplainable proportions while people are having trouble finding Lula's profile by searching for... lula. And then you got people like Nikolas Ferreira, whose videos consistently reach several times his follower numbers and reach several times more views, likes, shares, etc than people like Kim Kardashian, Beyoncé, Messi, etc. He's a Brazilian politician who speaks Portuguese and talks about strictly Brazilian subjects. He recently posted a MUTED video that reached 60 million views in hours.
- Lula's big WhatsApp channel for coordinating online campaign actions with voters kept getting suspended over and over
- There are reports from Brazilian META EMPLOYEES talking about the unresponsiveness of the internal American team to solve reports they made regarding Lula's platform issues
There are so many problems I can't even list them all here without making it a wall of text. It's just too obvious.
The headline is that Meta is ignoring a court order, which seems to be the case.
The numerology is weak evidence on its own, but it is decidedly odd in connection with the other examples. If a pattern persists in seemingly irrelevant areas and favours one candidate in a political race then the call for clarification is valid.
Or at least a serious enough issue for a court to order Meta to desist while the legal trial is ongoing.
My wife is Brazilian. I think HN might be missing some cultural context here. IIUC in Brazil when you vote for a presidential candidate you literally enter the 2 number digit assigned to the candidate's party. When casting your vote for Bolsonaro you enter 22, or 13 for Lula. The machine then displays the candidate's info and you press a confirm button to finalize your vote.
That would of course incur instant retaliatory tariffs. And the truth is that near all politicians just want to refrain from rocking the boat, hold on to power, and have a nice cushy retirement. Enacting such policies which are good for the people in the long term yet incur the wrath of the US, do the opposite for those goals.
Get Zuckerberg (and whoever else you want) to come to Brazil and then arrest them at the airport when they get off the plane. If you have actual case that is SOP. Difficulty = having an actual case
Basically with corruption you can control what democracies do. We see this with the orange mafia in charge of the USA right now - even though sometimes it also yields entertainment, indirectly:
I know 5 Brazilian people in the US and they are all voting for Bolsonaro. Apparently the Lula dude has been in power for 12 years (not in a row). No wonder they want him gone.
Bolsonaro voters see the US as some kind of capitalist heaven, where they can live out their dreams of becoming rich and powerful without regulations. That is not a surprise. Brazilian expats majorly vote left in the rest of the world.
Of note, this Bolsonaro is the son of the former president, with zero political plans or credentials; his only claim is the name itself and what it represents. I find the idea of a family lineage in government, much, much worse.
Lula was voted in to power, Brazil is still a strong democracy despite the direction it’s going. It is a shame that another viable opposition candidate could not be produced as I’m not fond of having 80+ year olds in that seat, but still better than the alternative.
I think most Brazilian, as other Latin American, voters would rather be a bit more like the US and less like what the left has delivered to them in the past decades.
The impression I have is that many Brazilian voters want their version of the American Dream — yet don’t realize that Brazilian society is much different from the American one and that Brazil won’t ever replicate the success of the US, regardless of a government’s policies.
Well, I strongly disagree, especially if we are talking about the US in the last decade.
Bolsonaro’s government has zero proposals for anything that will lead the country in that direction anyway, and did very little in the four years they had. Some new, fresh leadership is urgently needed, hopefully in 2030 if there’s still elections.
It’s wild that you think you can speak for so many people in such a way, of people that you have limited experience with. How did you end up so delusional and convinced of yourself?
I know 30 or more in the US that are all voting Lula. It usually mirrors local US politics demographics in my experience. In a red state you're likely to meet right-leaning Brazilians. In a blue state, left-leaning.
I have a feeling the problem isn’t that malicious unfortunately.
Right-wing folks are driven by social media since ~2016. Their content is emotional, aggressive and naturally conducive to more engagement. It’s what their base feeds on. So a lot of the situations described here are just standard ranking algorithms doing their job.
But that begs the question: is the existence of these platforms that amplify divisive and inflammatory content the problem itself? I vote yes. The power of reaching a wide audience should not be handed off without any cross-checks.
I couldn't agree more, in the past TV, newspapers and radio were paid by a specific party to flood the citizens with their own truth without any algorithm. Currently, there aren't a simple way to control information, the ask here is to manipulate the algorithm in favor of something which could later facilitate other sides too.
Could be. Another simple explanation is that there is a lot of bot activity messing with the algorithm.
I'm relatively sure I see bot activity on public facebook groups where I live in a blue county in a blue state and see hundreds of vitriolic angry comments that aren't aligned with voters current frustrations (i.e. economy)
Isn't turning money into influence over people"s behavior more or less their core business model. The company shouldn't be allowed to exist, buy since they are, well of course they're going to keep doing what they're made to do.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 21.8 ms ] threadBig tech is so rigged (intensional or not), the question if it is socially net negative has become rhetorical.
You might simply have been engaging with related content unknowingly, even if it's only one critical of them.
I get AfD content recommendations (lurid, trashy stuff of uhm uncertain truth value) a propos of nothing in the village I grew up in - they are popular there with about 25% in the 2025 election. The region is not even in the east or particularly suffering economically. I don't get these recommendations in Berlin. It seems regional.
A lot of bots of US origin are propagating false narratives posing as citizens of these countries.
Somehow none of the hundreds of thousands of software engineers that have worked there have managed to uncover exactly what this purpose is despite having access to the monorepos and visibility into the recommendation engine pipelines.
On the modern internet, people confuse conspiratorial thinking for well-reasoned thinking. But an idea is not correct just because it is interesting or exciting.
It's not a secret that Meta is selling political preferences on its platform, as they have been for decades. Several Meta employee have blown the whistle about it already.
I favorite reels that are pro-Palestinian, and now my feed is packed with anti-Zionist reels. I literally don’t think I’ve ever seen a pro-Israel reel.
There is evidence here of influence on the Brazilian elections. They were working with Cambridge Analytics to influence British elections.
There has been multiple whistleblowers saying they are offering political favors. There as studies showing they do indeed prefer certain parties.
How long can we keep our heads in the sand? When will it be enough
How could that be made to happen? Should EU somehow move to federated (let’s say per country) instances of Mastodon or something? Or one big platform? How would regular folks get used to it? And how could those initiatives be prevented from falling into irrelevance when network effects are at play?
I agree with the idea, it’s just that there’s the usual hurdles there aren’t necessarily good answers for that I know of.
Amazon/AWS tried this route with their "sovereign cloud" which still ends up being beholden exactly the same way as "real AWS", so what's even the point? Who is even falling for these "tricks"?
It might work, but it also might bloat the whole operation so much that the social network becomes non-functional.
>We already prevailed in a similar legal case in Germany in 2021-2023 in which we learned an important lesson: we tried to use geoIP blocking as a “hack” in a similar circumstance at the start of the legal proceedings, allowing us to continue services in Germany until the case concluded. The plaintiff (Sony Music Entertainment GmbH) then used a VPN to access the blocked content from Germany in circumvention of the geoIP blocking. The court agreed with Sony in their assertions of noncompliance, and we were fined for contempt of court.
I guess it was Germany after all.
If free DNS is supposed to be able to block people who use a VPN to circumvent a geoIP block, then the court is effectively demanding global reach for their blocking orders. It doesn't matter whether the court doesn't have the expertise in this, it only matters that they made such a moronic decision.
We had video streaming sites like youtube. We had cellphone manufacturers. We had chat applications.
But the conditions for these companies were better outside of Europe. Now we're stuck with everything not made in Europe. (South Korea is more relevant in consumer tech than the EU.)
European governments still haven't swapped off MS.
I realize these are heavy handed approaches - but shows what can get done.
Perhaps smaller scale things can work as well: Ie supporting alternatives when they occur - ie tiktok back when it was kinda Chinese - use the China threat to enforce objective standards - rather than just following the us stance.
Use existing monopoly legislation.
All creating an open market place for social media that allows for newcomers and local alternatives rather than the single monopoly that is the situation now.
They are the minimum.
And StudiVZ, which I never liked, made that slowly die out. Facebook came later.
I would very much prefer to still be part of local social media (where you could resolve issues with the admin directly), but federated to other networks.
Both the US and the EU are already doing this exact thing with cars, basically.
https://www.blast-info.fr/articles/2026/information-exclusiv...
But the reason is not sovereignty - it's to make sure people can't receive communications not approved by the (fascist*) French government.
* we know they are fascist because they're shooting the population in the streets and turning off the internet, just like bad countries do. there is no need to weasel the word fascism. so far this is isomorphic to the arab spring, but in france.
B-but the EU can't do that!
It absolutely can. Just like it can push Chat Control down everyone's throats even though if you held a referendum on it it would be voted down (no, most Jacques the plumbers on the street don't want mass surveillance even if it's "against crime").
They have, as the joke goes, more money than God and influence all over the world. They are beholden to no one. They have the resources to fight in court against decisions they don’t believe in, and all the lobbying they need to shape established laws.
They choose their actions, and their actions are their own. Every single dollar they donate to the current president but not the previous one is an admission of their allegiance and (lack of) morals.
Having principles and standing for them costs money, and these societal parasites subsist on money and influence. Make no mistake, they will sell their own mother to further their goals, but they don’t have to while they can keep selling everyone else’s.
The problem is that the same is true for many politicians. They do a lot of lobbying in Europe too.
That’s not the argument. Unfortunately, reading comprehension and engaging in good faith continues to decline rapidly on HN.
Not being beholden to someone does not mean you have power over them. For example: you are not beholden to me and thus don’t have to do anything I say; but that doesn’t mean I have to do anything you say either, I’m not beholden to you.
The administration can take over them with the snap of a finger if they so desire. They have absolutely no power.
The best example of that is the BBC suit, where the only reason it's happening is because the US doesn't have any control over the entity because it's British.
No, no they cannot. They sure want you to believe that, though, and the longer that fantasy is left unchecked, the more power it gets. The current administration is not omnipotent, and that is exemplified by the times it was pushed back (not by the bootlicker CEOs at major US tech companies, obviously).
Like John Oliver said, use the four key words that make weak bullies go away: “fuck you, make me”.
https://youtu.be/ohPToBog_-g?t=1610
What's different for this administration is that neither the Congress, Senate or Supreme Court will opose them.
There is a national broadcast apparatus in Germany, directly funded by the people in form of mandatory household monthly contributions. It definitely needs improvements and is far from ideal but it doesn’t work at behest of government (budget pressures, etc.). It was designed to resist the top down pressure from the admins (lessons learned from what Nazis did). AfD along with some private news networks backed by the likes of Telekom are really pushing to abolish it.
I agree with the general claim of their safer space. Yet, I see several possibilities why that ended in an unnecessary aggression police operation -- esp. LKA in every federal state seems to overcompensate for non-action on devastating crime.
I don't see the connection. Explanation welcome. Esp. since I don't won't to have a last word on a topic I don't know enough about.
They probably show posts based on location and background, so essentially just like Fox, CNN, MSNBC but everyone sees theirs from the same screen with the same agenda pushed from all of them.
I have almost no reason to look at my facebook feed, check it perhaps once every 1-2 weeks in case something important was only posted there (not that this helps as they don't show me actual friends actual updates). Recent visit was 50% ads, 25% recommended or weirdly boosted content, including a post from Mark Zuckerberg promoting his AI, and a post whose content I forget from the White House (I live in Germany, the last time I even visited the USA was 2018).
Also, this isn't a new phenomenon. If you're interested, I'd recommend reading Shoshana Zuboff's 2018 book: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
AfD is controversial - it's click bait - the algorithm is feeding 'action' - that's the problem.
To be clear I think it's entirely possible that YouTube is adjusting its recommendation algorithm to show AfD content to people more (or perhaps less) than would happen "organically", because AfD is a salient political party in German politics and YouTube knows this. But how do you determine what is the correct amount of AfD content to be recommended to people in a politically-neutral way, that doesn't end up amounting to you arguing that the YouTube algorithm is only fair if it censors political content you personally think is bad?
What are people going to watch between a 3 hours in depth debate about the future of the country on topics such as ecology, finance, social security and pension systems VS hundreds of reels about ImMiGrAnT RiOtS in paris?
Wasn't Lula convicted in 3 levels up to a federal court called STJ?
And then a single federal court judge who never submitted the case to colleagues, simply declared his judgement void based in technicalities?
And then all the investigation restarted from scratch, but since by law he was too old, his crimes prescribed in half the time and he was never investigated again.
The cherry on the top is that this single judge who declared his convictions null was appointed by the felon's political party.
So about a dozen different judges, in municipal, state and federal levels, analysed his multiple charges and declared him guilty in some of them. Then a single federal court judge appointment by the suspect's political party voided all of them.
He also didn't rape children and steal billions while destroying the world economy...
That’s because Trump sends better primate dominance signals than Biden, therefore everything he does is right. That’s how it works. Just ask the brain stem.
The surprise is not that he was kicked off the main social media companies, the surprises are that the wheels of US justice turned so slowly that Trump got a chance to be re-elected rather than life in prison, and likewise that the US electorate went for him.
The fact that they didn't ban him for so long weighs toward being partial to not banning politicians. Which seems to be the opposite of the point you're trying to make.
/Yeah this will be censored too. QED.
Most of it is psychological projection.
the modern left bears no resemblance to classical liberals. in the modern political discourse, being pro free speech puts you on the far right.
Elon describes himself as moderate so is he one of these folks that doesn’t believe in free speech? He would say he stayed in the center and democrats moved left. What speech is this moderate right censoring?
And I sort of wonder what point you’re trying to make, because you could take two lessons away -
One, Trump may not have been reelected if meta hadn’t banned him. So maybe it was another case of meta trying to help republicans.
Or, if Trump hadn’t been reelected, maybe the republicans wouldn’t be facing one of the worst midterm routes in history.
But honestly I’m not actually sure the point you’re trying to make. Meta hired a Republican strategist into their c suite since then. Sooo much has happened, there’s a lot of historical context to try to put it in.
The Ayatollah.
This should be regulated to avoid interference from anyone.
The biggest problem now is that the billionaires behind social media nowadays will push for a liberal / right wing agenda in the west for their own interests.
I am sure that everyone involved must be feeling invincible but this is how you build resentment that will last.
If I have to choose between being subject of the Chinese Communist party or American psychopath billionaires, I'll gladly choose the party.
Strip it back to just billionaires, or their equivalent over time, and thus it always was.
People talk about the “new world order” as though this is some novel concept - but you can saunter back in time past the east India company, the bourbons, the holy Roman emperors, Rome, Greece, Sumeria, and see the same pattern played out throughout history. True power sits with wealth - an impoverished ruler relies on others for his means, and has no power of his own.
The wealthy, those with power, have always decided for the rest, have always had outsized influence, as long as there have been societies with the concept of “mine” and “yours”.
Every state should have foreign agent laws (NGOs must register and must be transparent over their financials). Every state must have full control over their information space (especially educational, social and new media). Russia and China understood, Brazil and Europe did not.
Not you though. You're a wolf among sheep. A true seer among the blind.
Everyone else is too dumb to know what's right, just manipulated by the media they consume on the Internet.
Not you though. You get all your information from trustworthy sources. Sure, they happen to agree with you 90% of the time but,hey, nobody's perfect, right? Well, except you. You've got all the answers.
If only everyone else would just let you make all the rules. You could get to all the bad people and make sure they stopped saying the wrong thing. Maybe provide them the resources they need to learn the truth and, if they don't want to learn the truth, we'll just keep them away from everyone else until they figure it out.
But you must see that it is a genuine conundrum. In a free-for-all information landscape (something which did not exist until yesterday), people need to be able to distinguish good information from bad for democracy to survive.
It’s almost weird the way we talk about free speech in 2026, looking back at the 20th century and the Hayes code, and how staid music and TV were prior to 1985-ish.
Maybe my most unpopular of opinions is that - I don’t know if I agree with censorship persay - but I’m not sure it’s healthy the way we’re all in a deluge of all these perspectives. You could get rid of 90% of content in the world and 90% of people would never notice.
I, frankly, don't. A lot of these conversations stop because of statements like this. You're assuming a set of priors that make your argument make a ton of sense and assuming other people agree with them as well. Take away that as your prior assumption and other viewpoints make a lot more sense.
There's a term for the phenomenon that I don't recall but there's a trap people fall into where they see themselves as the only one who can see through the lies and everyone else is falling for it. I think that happens a lot when people talk about "bad ideas".
I don't think it's the ideas existing that is the problem. I think a focus on the ideas is a distraction from the question of what are the conditions that make these ideas attractive to people?
As an example, I dislike Trump immensely. However it's not at all surprising to me that people voted for him for a lot of reasons but I think the best example was in what is probably the best political slogan/ad I've seen in my life, "He's for you, she's for they/them."
I don't think the problem was Trump, I think the problem was the choice being Trump's ideas and the ideas he was up against being.
Possibly "naive realism", which I agree is a major problem, but I don't think I'm guilty of it here. The only premise of my argument, namely that democracy requires a shared understanding of facts, is widely accepted.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naïve_realism_(psychology)
I don't necessarily think you're guilty of it but I do think the premise you're proposing hints at it.
I wouldn't argue that democracy doesn't requires are shared understanding of the facts. The argument I'm making is that the motivation for people to believe certain things often is the root of the "problem", rather than the existence of things for them to believe.
Notably, I think, The shared understand of "the facts", is a convenient over-simplification. The real world situations where someone has "the facts" wrong, isn't usually a question of fact or fiction really, it's a focus on the emphasis of the narrative being spun. A reading of the same story comes of very different, even with shared facts, depending upon which parts of the story you think are important.
The usual disagreement on a lot of current events isn't what actually happened. Fringe elements will argue the plain facts but the majority of people are disagreeing about why something happened, not what happened.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias (a cousin)
Nothing to disagree with particularly in what you say. I tend to frame this as divergent values.
Example. 100 illegal immigrants crash a border fence. Someone whose values makes them unbothered by immigration will think: Big deal, it's only 100 people, anyone who worries about that must be racist. The other person will get worked up because even 1 illegal immigrant is an affront to the sanctity of nations and borders. Both sides agree it was 100 people, yet somehow neither can imagine that the other side is sincere in their convictions. This seems quite common.
Oh heck no, “it takes one to know one” as they say. Im the sheepiest sheep.
Alternatively, this blatant use of any tool available to influence non enemy states is disgusting, and forces everyone to a "everyone loses" scenario. Shifting the focus to an insufficiently defended victim removes the focus from the nature of the aggression.
It clearly is an enemy state. The US, that is.
Just visit the website of the NED and look at the many projects the US government finances around the world to meddle in these countries politically in favor of US interests[1]. Nations have to protect themselves against these foreign influences, otherwise they will be eaten alive.
NGOs are just one tool of exerting political influence in foreign nations.
Much more powerful are proprietary digital services like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. Their algorithms control what information people consume every day. If you are the CIA or the NED, that's the tool you need to exert influence on the thinking of the predominantly younger people in foreign countries (e.g. flush anti-China news into the Facebook feeds of younger users in Myanmar or Thailand).
That's why the US government wanted to move control of TikTok within the US to a domestic organization. They knew what was going on.
[1]: Example: https://www.ned.org/region/asia-2/
And no, your claim that US has a firm grasp on what information reaches its people is laughable: you can host and serve any information critical of government without issues. The closest you had to putinism was when companies en masse started deplatforming Trump and his supporters in early 2021.
13: https://g1.globo.com/jornal-nacional/noticia/2026/10/23/meta...
So what if searching for “brasil” returns a Bolsonaro GIF? I tried it myself, and the obvious explanation is that he’s wearing a Brazilian flag tshirt and dancing rather comically. How does a GIF appearing in search results imply political bias?
You mean when people admittedly have no knowledge of a subject but still speak authoritatively about it, viscerally criticising one of the sides and even suggesting fowl play, instead of taking care to be humble and understand the context before speaking or making accusations?
I agree, that is very much the kind of attitude that got us into the current situation.
Playing obvious problems of Brazil‘s judiciary system down like that are clear red flags for somebody not for 1 sec contemplating how he would react if the political camps would be reversed in this situation. It is their sovereignty if the censorship happens on speech you don’t like
have lefties in power for the next of the decade and you'll see how datacenters become all about clean energy investment, climate change starts to matter, "don't be evil" starts to take shape
It’s more simple than that. Industry tends to align with government because they have power and they want that power to be benefit them. If you’re a large company it would be stupid not to try to maintain that relationship.
Yet, from a pure intrinsic values perspective, people that are power-seeking are alike in industry and politics, and when they support an authoritarian state/movement instead of a democratic one, it shows their true intentions.
And they have their favorite phrase:
May flying spaghetti monster, help us all.No.
Its flagship product, its anthropological jewel, its greatest achievement, is the right-wing poor person. A genuine feat of social engineering: materially deprived, yet rich in convictions that run counter to their own interests.
They have been carefully molded. They have been taught that their problems always come from below or from next door — the immigrant, the welfare recipient, the civil servant, the unemployed — never from above.
They have been taught to hate taxes while surviving thanks to public services. To defend heirs to fortunes while having nothing to pass on themselves. To applaud those who crush them, as long as they speak loudly and promise law and order.
The right-wing poor person is a fascinating creature. They vote against their own interests with fervor, convinced that one day, perhaps, they too will find themselves on the right side of the fence.
They mistake brutality for courage, authoritarianism for protection, injustice for merit. They are sold fear in a ready-made package, identity at bargain prices, and anger in bulk on a monthly subscription.
At the dawn of this new world, the monsters do not emerge from the margins: they rise from the ballot boxes, television studios, and simplistic slogans.
They thrive on manufactured misery and sabotaged political awareness.
Capitalism has not merely produced poverty; it has achieved something far worse: it has made the poor docile, obedient, spiteful, and grateful.
A masterpiece, I'm telling you!"
Maximino Fernández
Modern far-right frequently pays at least lip service to concerns of poor working class. At the same time modern left has become champaign left. Caring less and less about the actual working class.
And then the left becomes surprised that poor working class sometimes go to the other side…
There is absolutely no doubt on this, and there are volumes upon volumes of backing this in the written evidence collected by the allies for the Nuremberg trials. They outwards called themselves socialists in their propaganda. They called themselves socialists in the laws and decrees they issued. And they called themselves socialists in their internal meetings between top nazis, long after they had assumed all power. It wasn't just rhetoric or propaganda, it was the real deal.
And if you consider what kind of policies and program implemented, they were socialist in every aspect, and the German citizen had their life completely organized in socialism. From the cradle to the grave.
But they certainly weren't socialist in the shape or form that present day socialists are.
You can be socialist without being a leftist or a liberal. You can be a socialist while having communists as your main enemy. You can be a nationalist or not while being a socialist or a conservative. National socialism became the de-facto system of government for both the Soviet Union and for China.
This curious animal was laid bare by the discovery that we are hackable by nature, and hacked by behaviour science. Though it took a few decades to get going, the understanding of how to influence motivation and decision-making is now very mature.
In order to arrive at this understanding, you need data, and lots of it. The social media platforms have performed the function of data aggregators and testing grounds for algorithmic control. But it was not the tech companies who came up with plans, only the tools to put them into practice.
The culprits, though they operate in shade, are generally non-partisan and understand that divide-and-conquer has always been an effective strategy. These people sometimes work in intelligence bureaus, but not always. They are, however, always known to those agencies. After all, you do not need to know you are an asset to be an asset.
The algorithms, necessarily kept as protected IP, are statistical engines that profile and predict, producing probabilistic outcomes and estimates. Before LLMs, one might have argued "but how can probabilistic algos really produce something meaningful?", now I would think people might have a different take, if they could see the layers and weights.
An emperor used to need an army, and this is what replaces it for non-violent insurrection and domestic control. Many will even state their ambitions publicly, and sometimes (though less frequently these days) their procedure. What they are doing is not strictly illegal, because the law gives "sovereignty" to a person's choices, without recognition that their choices might not be their own. Libertarianism has played right into their hands, in this sense.
A masterpiece, not only of conception, but also social engineering, with a technological endoskeleton built on the aggregated data we all willingly give them. All information feeds the machine, just as every financial transaction cements the central bank's authority.
My confidence in the validity of their claims tanked right about here.
I'm all for regulating transparency into social media algorithms. Meta most certainly is compromised by foreign actors. But can we choose less stupid hills to die on than numerology and GIFs? Headline is not remotely supported by the evidence.
It's one thing to discard it as "numerology and gifs" but it's another to willfully disrupt legal elections in a soverign country.
Or is a decade a really long time and we've all forgotten about Cambridge Analytica?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica
Reinforcement feedback loops, etc
If this is influencing your votes your democracy is already lost.
The public can fight Facebook in the same way an infant can fight Muhammad Ali.
Especially if they're the same exact people who whine at the top of their lungs that our elections are the subject of foreign interference (even when it isn't). If one does a thing to someone else, they have zero leg to stand on when they think it's being done to them (even when it's not).
Perhaps in Brazil it’s illegal for political messages go viral on social media at all? Then I could see how there’s an issue here. But that isn’t my understanding.
CA put out quizzes and in that era of Facebook the average user absolutely did not think filling in a quiz meant giving some organisation your data.
People probably didn't think about them being run by third parties at all - it was just a fun thing to fill in shared by friends and family.
The average person who did understand these things, before the mid 2010s, was very passionate about open standards. The zeitgeist at the time was that you should be able to do anything through the API that you can do through the official app; it wasn’t until 2015 (https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/28/facebook-api-shut-down/) that Facebook turned off their official API for letting third parties dig through your friends’ entire profiles. If Facebook had announced in 2017 that they’re turning off API access to the timeline, which they ended up doing as part of the Cambridge Analytica response, people would have been very frustrated and would not have believed that it was a privacy-first measure.
I'm not sure i want to live in that world.
That is what seems to be happening here.
The truth doesn't matter, what matters is getting more government money, and more regulation to get more financing, etc
NGOs are big business, and be assured, they don't care about fairness one bit more than Meta
Algorithmic transparency is a deeply unprofitable and difficult task, with people from all sides screeching at you thinking you're biased against them. Governments obviously shouldn't be involved (unless you're a fan of state-controlled media), and so the only people that will take this on are people that care enough about the impact of social media on society to give up careers in the private sector.
If you care so much, you can always join one of these NGOs! You won't. I guarantee you they are not as biased as you think they are, and they certainly don't hold a "shadow ban this guy" hammer.
"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
I believe though it is an old phenomenom that if (given the default context) you ask a random number, it will more often than not give numbers from a very small set.
I just used a "Temporary chat" with ChatGPT twice to "Give a random number" and it gave 42 both times (this shuold be rather understandable why it ended up with this). Then I asked "Give a random number in 1-10" twice and it responded with 7 for both (and this too is an old "magic number").
btw today's models run random.randint() by default unless you prohibit python by choosing one of the dumb models, disable thinking, disable tool calls, etc.
How is meta compromised by foreign actors? And who are the foreign actors?
That's actually a great analysis, thanks for that!
I think that’s very USA centric - i feel it’s different in Europe or South America
That person was then politely told to rtfa and given more substance than they thought was in there.
And what did you do?
That’s quite ironic.
As for the evidence, it has been well documented beyond the parent comment's silly examples and it includes shadowbanning popular profiles with certain opinions.
I guarantee your political opponents also think Meta is trying to shadow ban then.
That sarcastic comment justifies all Putin's laws about "foreign agents", "undesirable organizations", "extremist organizations" and such.
So Putin can justify anything with words - what they say doesnt really matter or reflect reality. The actions and outcomes matter.
A: social media is a mind control tool that can be used for targeted political manipulation, as shown by the cambridge analytica scandal and plenty of other research.
B: the US is a hostile foreign power in relation to South America, as proven by its continuous threats, embargoes, tariff wars, coups and more recently the unashamed declaration of a "Donroe doctrine"
?
If the provider can tamper with the algorithm to filter out information that goes against its political preferences, how is that ineffective or not targeted political manipulation? The idea of democracy presumes that the public can be well informed in order to take decisions.
your own country flipped its shit and said that Tiktok was CCP propaganda less than a year ago and tried to ban it, so it seems like foreign influence on your politics does seem to be a bad thing.
The irony and hypocrisy are hilarious.
When in fact, it comes after
> The petition describes a GIF search on WhatsApp for the word “brasil.” The first result was an image of Flávio Bolsonaro. It showed his ticket number and identified his running mate.
> According to the records sent to the court, the same result appeared on three separate accounts. The groups use this to ask whether its top position comes from systematic ranking criteria.
> A similar check on Instagram also showed images of the senator among the first results. Users who searched for “brasil” found three images of Flávio Bolsonaro in the top positions
> On WhatsApp, a GIF search for the word “ladrão” (thief) returned a caricature of the president in a striped uniform, a reference to prison dress. Another result carried the message “Supporting the Workers’ Party is a mental illness.”
> On Instagram, a search for the same word showed a GIF reading “Vote 13.” That is the Workers’ Party election number, tied to Lula’s candidacy.
And you could also think that the authors would be for censorship and completely crazy, when in fact:
> They are not claiming that they have proven bias in Meta, choosing instead to posit the question to the Superior Electoral Court.
That's all ignoring the fact that Trump and the US openly support Bolsonora, who is in jail for attempting a coup after losing the election.
And Brazil, AFAIK, was a military dictatorship until, what, 40 years ago? To my knowledge, without a "hard cut" that would have investigated this part of the country's history.
I am not Brazilian, who knows, I can't tell whether Lula is corrupt, or anything, what I have not seen is prove of the election fraud claims put forward by Bolsonaro sr.?
Not irrelevant since his son of course rehabilitates him and wants to "correct the public record".
And, yeah, I know, I won't get love for this on HN, but Trump's "election fraud" claims seem unsubstantiated to me from the outside, doesn't make me think Bolsonaro's claims would any more believable.
I've lost much of my naivite around politics, but if we can't agree to draw a hard line around this kind of interference with open and free elections, it seems like a swan song of democracy.
And this is coincidentally what many supporters of the current US admin see as positive.
Regarding censorship, before the age of Social Media, there already was all kinds of regulation around what kind of electoral advertisement is allowed and when, also regulation against defamation as a campaign strategy, but of course it's different from country to country.
Meta has a long history of not giving a shit whether their engagement algorithms at best... "damage" democratic processes, so I don't see any reason to be smug about it.
But it would be cool to limit political content on platforms with non-audited, non-public and intransparent engagement algorithms.
Just as it would be good to stop intransparent flow of big money into politics.
The latter is a sentiment that Trump catered to when he became president for the first time. Of course, only in a twisted, cynical way: "the system is broken, so I alone can fix it".
As for WhatsApp GIF searches. Searches for "brasil" shows one candidate as the first person after GIFs of the flag. Search results before you have started typing anything shows the other candidate.
You can search for any negative term that one side commonly uses against the other, and WhatsApp will suggest GIFs of the person. Do you understand that millions of normal people send these GIFs to each other in WhatsApp groups and private messages? Of course they're going to turn up in top suggested.
Do an image search on Google for a common derogatory term of any (in)famous politician you know of and look at the results.
Of course, it could be organic. I shortened my text a bit so it's not explicitly mentioned anymore, but I still wrote about "engagement algorithms".
It doesn't need to be a political influence dial at Meta's HQ.
Regardless of whether there is intentional influence by the platform, or the platform intransparently favors other actors who in turn use the platform, it's a problem. Even when the platforms just do it for simple financial reasons or political opportunism.
On HN, people are usually quick to lament to damaging effects of engagement optimization on public discourse.
I thought mentioning that I cannot judge whether Lula is a corrupt president (I assume that's what's meant by "criminal") is enough to make clear that I am not arguing for silencing opinions.
What I would like to see is addressing Social Media's role in weaponizing outrage advertisement using slander, and also, platforms getting away with not making transparent how they weight political advertisement in elections.
In my opinion, electoral advertisement should be regulated, and it is regulated, in many countries. This does not prevent you from sending memes on WhatsApp, it might prevent a platform from suggesting political memes to you when you did not explicitly seek out partisan content.
Regarding the rest:
Lula has been found guilty of corruption, Bolsonaro has been imprisoned because of his coup attempt.
Seems hard to argue about that in one-sided way, and I'm not gonna make any explicit stance here, I am not from Brazil.
It seems impossible to assess whether one of the two is in fact not guilty of the crimes they were charged for. What I did notice though were the election fraud claims, and consensus seemed to be that they are false. The coup attempt also seems to be undisputed.
The EU has sought out trade deals with Brazil, which was more easily possible with Lula, AFAIK.
I'm not gonna defend everything (sry, not "anything") the EU does here either.
My point was how the public deals with election fraud claims and coups.
And it does seem strange to normalize those openly, even 5 years after the capitol storm.
It's actually not, a cursory understanding of Brazilian politics is all that's needed to understand this in context. Lula was essentially "acquitted" for his crimes, as it was proved after he served a few years in prison that the charges were brought under false pretenses by partisan operators. (https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/04/brazil-crimi...)
It was also quite convenient for liberals and the right wing at the time to jail Lula, as he was at the apex of his popularity and was making life hard for the Brazilian bourgeoisie. Bolsonarism can essentially be read as a revolt of the Brazilian elite against Lula's economic policies which stepped on the toes of a few powerful sectors of the Brazilian capitalist class.
Lula has a long history of successfully managing capitalism as a socialist. Brazilian politics is extremely corrupt and pay-to-play, and the Bolsonaros are essentially a crime family in their own right. Flavio, the son running for president, has been convicted of embezzlement when he was a state congressman and is literally under investigation right now for money laundering and bank fraud.
https://www.reddit.com/r/brasil/comments/1x965on/eu_n%C3%A3o...
What would be useful here is leaking the system prompt for the Meta AI inside WhatsApp
This used to be an under the hood and frowned upon type of maneuver, but now it is much more rampant and far reaching thanks to AI
- Meta has suspended Lula's facebook account a week from the election day, and many advertising instagram and facebook accounts associated with his campaign have been consistently suspended and then reactivated with days of delay (this is a huge loss in the context of a political campaign)
- The reach of his opponents is being inflated to unexplainable proportions while people are having trouble finding Lula's profile by searching for... lula. And then you got people like Nikolas Ferreira, whose videos consistently reach several times his follower numbers and reach several times more views, likes, shares, etc than people like Kim Kardashian, Beyoncé, Messi, etc. He's a Brazilian politician who speaks Portuguese and talks about strictly Brazilian subjects. He recently posted a MUTED video that reached 60 million views in hours.
- Lula's big WhatsApp channel for coordinating online campaign actions with voters kept getting suspended over and over
- There are reports from Brazilian META EMPLOYEES talking about the unresponsiveness of the internal American team to solve reports they made regarding Lula's platform issues
There are so many problems I can't even list them all here without making it a wall of text. It's just too obvious.
The numerology is weak evidence on its own, but it is decidedly odd in connection with the other examples. If a pattern persists in seemingly irrelevant areas and favours one candidate in a political race then the call for clarification is valid.
Or at least a serious enough issue for a court to order Meta to desist while the legal trial is ongoing.
That's "Half-Life 3 confirmed" levels of copium.
Allocate risk to each according to their reward.
It's getting ridiculous online.
Cuts to Sundar starring blankly.
Basically with corruption you can control what democracies do. We see this with the orange mafia in charge of the USA right now - even though sometimes it also yields entertainment, indirectly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvfePoni9eM
Of note, this Bolsonaro is the son of the former president, with zero political plans or credentials; his only claim is the name itself and what it represents. I find the idea of a family lineage in government, much, much worse.
Lula was voted in to power, Brazil is still a strong democracy despite the direction it’s going. It is a shame that another viable opposition candidate could not be produced as I’m not fond of having 80+ year olds in that seat, but still better than the alternative.
Bolsonaro’s government has zero proposals for anything that will lead the country in that direction anyway, and did very little in the four years they had. Some new, fresh leadership is urgently needed, hopefully in 2030 if there’s still elections.
100% of my friends know who I am, therefore I must be famous.
Right-wing folks are driven by social media since ~2016. Their content is emotional, aggressive and naturally conducive to more engagement. It’s what their base feeds on. So a lot of the situations described here are just standard ranking algorithms doing their job.
But that begs the question: is the existence of these platforms that amplify divisive and inflammatory content the problem itself? I vote yes. The power of reaching a wide audience should not be handed off without any cross-checks.
I'm relatively sure I see bot activity on public facebook groups where I live in a blue county in a blue state and see hundreds of vitriolic angry comments that aren't aligned with voters current frustrations (i.e. economy)
It has to end. Millions of lives are at sake.