So many poor arguments and analogies in you master sage comment.
1. No one is surprised when the armaments factory makes bombs; they claim to. Does Meta claim to be an influence factory? Ha! They argue tooth and nail against this fact in every court they've been sued or charged in. Thus, it is certainly surprising when a space for connecting to others makes specific connections, particularly political ones impossible or difficult in the midst of the election. I don't think most people saw that coming; perhaps you did because you are obviously more clever than the rest of us.
2. A zero percent chance versus a close to nil chance are objectively different. Which one is better or worse is of course context dependent.
3. If you work at a company that does bad things and you are trying to steer it away from those bad things, it is not clear that you are becoming complicit. Some could argue that you are the opposite of complicit.
4. Perhaps the point is not merely influencing your employer's business direction, but also that of your colleagues.
1. Meta are an obvious influence factory. Of course they say otherwise in court, but it's well known and not subtle.
2. I was being generous.
3. "Some could argue that you are the opposite of complicit", and they'd be wrong. "If you work at a company that does bad things and" let me stop you there at the "and". Your real job (the stuff before the "and") isn't negated by your hobby, and if they're severely at odds then your work effectiveness will suffer.
Here's another example, where Meta's AI was asked to make a voting poster for the election, made it about voting for Bolsonaro unprompted, then when asked to make one for Lula said it couldn't make one for political candidates: https://www.reddit.com/r/brasil/comments/1x965on/eu_n%C3%A3o...
It’s easy to hand wave that stuff as mysteries of the LLMs. Much stronger case now that these employees have spoken out about it. I hope they can point to specific cases.
I couldn't figure it out from this link or any other English news articles. After some searching and translating Brazilian language articles I found some complaints that they were unable to pay Instagram to boost their posts for a day, but that outage applied to many accounts. There was another problem where Instagram changed the search algorithm to only trigger account matching after 5 characters were typed, making "Lula" harder to find, but that's a global change. There are scattered additional complaints about IG stories losing a few seconds and political restrictions on AI tools not triggering equally for both candidates.
There is a spectrum. On the far left or right is the claim that someone who critizices society somewhat can go live in a cabin somewhere. That is very convenient, since that would remove everyone who is critical from society itself, meaning that nothing could be ever done to improve it.
Far to the other side are are FU Money/assets CEOs and what have you that could quit what they are doing. Not terribly far from them are well-paid software engineers who could just demote themselves to a regular-paid job and be fine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50255234
You don't know how many people have already quit. You don't know how many will quit. But you do know that someone that quits also loses any influence they have on the decisions.
Turns out when your main recruitment strategy is dangling multiple-6-figures in front of debt-laden college graduates (during an employment slowdown), there's always going to be another person willing to take the place of whoever leaves, and the work still gets done
A lot of folks left over Cambridge Analytica, another bunch left over Myanmar, more left over Trump, and yet the hits keep on coming...
(10) To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work.
(11) Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.
(12) Multiply paper work in plausible ways. Start duplicate files.
TBH I question the ethics of most big tech employees, but Meta is definitely the grossest money-grubbing hog pit of them all. I instantly lose respect for people who sell themselves to carry out the wishes of the billionaire elites like that. They'd be powerless without their legions of storm troopers.
Honestly, I dream of the day a meta employee isn't seen as a position of prestige or intelligence, but one of shame and disgust. I hope recruiters and companies actively avoid, not seek, meta employees.
Company influences politics for shareholder value, not a surprise at all. This was just the time they got caught and I bet the other MAG7 are doing it in some form too even if its just massive donations
That’s a rather binary and extreme way to see things. It doesn’t scale well if everyone acted like that.
It's better that people in these organizations feel they can speak up. If they have to choose between saying nothing or resigning, many would simply say nothing. And how is that situation any better?
Meanwhile, a couple of oligarchs are positioning convenient AI summaries in between us and all of the world's information. Talk about a useful tool to control people...
The American propaganda platforms have for a long time been helping the US regime to undermine democracies around the world. More and more Europeans are realising that the Nerd Reich are supporting the far right movements in Europe, helping Trump and his friend Putin in destabilising European democracies.
Hoping that Brazil and Lula will issue an international arrest warrant for Zuckerberg for being a foreign agent interfering in a sovereign state's election.
Germany should do the same with Musk.
I've mentioned this before, but . . . these systems were ALL originally conceived by the security state as tools for surveillance and propaganda, and for control. With a hitherto-unknown-and-probably-unknowable amount of Cold War Leftover/GWoT black money poured into them before their (sometimes extremely hinky) IPOs.
Some of the old security state nomenklatura even stayed on into the Hi Tech Grandee era. In-Q-Tel. LifeLog. Regina Dugan. Douglas Gage, Jim Breyer, Howard Cox. Thiel and Palantir. And many more besides. Und so weiter, und so weiter.
They're not deviating from their mission or their "morals"; today, now -- with the chips finally down, i.e. global hegemony switching for the first time in the nuclear age -- these <ahem/> "companies" are returning to their roots.
Meta? That is, Facebook? Originally conceived by the security state? Zuckerberg, when he had the idea in college, didn't actually have the idea, but was given it by the security state?
A lot of people are implying that people that object should leave the company. The question is, if the people that actually care and push back leave:
1. Will this increase or decrease the incidents?
2. Will we know more or less about these incidents in the future?
3. Will anyone else inside work for or against this happening?
Which way do we want things to go?
I don't mean to say it's clearly this or that. I think it's a genuinely interesting and challenging dilemma. Do I continue working someplace that is involved in something evil but try and provide a voice, push, influence, or, if nothing else, a voice to the outside of the goings on inside, or do I separate myself and work only from the outside?
We can imagine the same for law enforcement, military, defence contractors, government, and any number of other vectors and industries.
Snowden was working from the inside before he leaked what he did. Every single whistleblower was involved first.
Okay. So the idea is to keep helping to overthrow democracy hoping that you'll get a chance to leak something?
And yes, working for META means doing your part to overthrow democracy. It's company strategy to do so, and like it or not, working for META means you are "just following orders" in this enterprise.
> 2. Will we know more or less about these incidents in the future?
The letter was from a UK communication worker's union and no article I can find includes the number of employees who signed the letter or their roles a Meta.
With how much is being obscured about the signers of the letter and their location, I think it's unlikely they were involved with the incident at all.
Yeah, I always wonder about this when I hear about people that resign from an organization in protest. Sure, they get to sleep at night now, but now they've just opened up a job for an unscrupulous person.
I mean, if you really think your organization is a net negative, perhaps your best civic effort is to just sort of linger as organizational dead weight or, better yet, as some sort of bureaucratic tar baby.
> I mean, if you really think your organization is a net negative, perhaps your best civic effort is to just sort of linger as organizational dead weight or, better yet, as some sort of bureaucratic tar baby.
Everything you contribute to the organisation helps it achieve its goal, no matter how small or insignificant. By staying you agree to continue to sell your skills and time to this organisation in favour of its objectives. You are as much part of the problem as the organisation itself.
It will be more expensive for Meta to hire people. Why do you think gambling companies pay better then other? And why gaming companies pay badly? Because too many people refuse to work for gambling companies, so price goes up. And conversely, too many people want to work on games, so price goes down.
People who stay will not meaningfully push back. They can grumble. They can ask to be reassign to slightly different position. But, they will never have any option to actually do something meaningful from inside.
What percentage of whistleblowers are punished, directly or indirectly, for their ethical behavior? What percentage come out of the experience worse? Worse finances? Worse health?
The incentives aren't there to behave as an ethical human being in business beyond getting caught breaking the law (for a narrow definition of ethics).
I say this as someone who fought for the smaller fry multiple times (one sexual harassment victim, one employee at risk of losing their visa, and multiple teams getting done to) in the workplace and came out of it with autistic burnout (I didn't know then about my autism) from the emotional labor leading to unemployment.
Also, if you think you're company is enabling musk&co, stay and document. In my city, the antifa group has one member who used to be a bar pillar at a place that after an ownership change became the new place for the néo-nazi and royalists to meet up. Last Saturday they planned on disturbing the protests. We all got the information about that the day before. The day of the protests, we had two watchdogs ready outside the bar who took pictures of the nazillons who got out and dispatched them to various signal groups, allowing engaged people to organise and prevent any disturbance, provocations or fights. My more casual friends didn't notice anything and were very happy about how the day went.
Inside information is critical, and you can always try to do your part.
Big Tech can offer a high salary for non-managers, for people who cannot impact the organization other than through extra-hierarchical means (organizing). Wy would they leave?
They have options. People here spend enough time glazing each others’ 200,000 lumen minds and abilities. And judging by extra-curricular activities, no lies are told as far as I can see. That means that they can just find other employment.[1] There is enough IT that the rest of us work on, IT that doesn’t want to become a global Panopticon. None of it is perfect. You might have to work on software that just makes some previously flexible and okay procedure into a rigid, somewhat buggy, but streamlined and legible to management kind of procedure. You might earn more than the cleaning personell who have unalloyed-good jobs, just removing dirt.[2] But it’s better for the soul.
And you can earn a normal wage. Not a bad wage.
But the horde of luminous minds in Silicon Valley and I guess the Seattle Area (and maybe urban Texas and I dunno) have showed us what they can do with all the demand for their labor, their high salaries, and the pliable management who know that they have to put up with the nerds.
[1] Yes. Some workers have many options. Many have some options, many have few. Most people can’t make principled employment choices.
[2] Now someone with 30 years of experience managing cleaning personell will tell me all the dirt on what cleaning personell get up to.
I really don't like to gas those jews, but know what, I'll keep gassing them and think on how I can topple the nazi regime, that is the best option. Ohhh also, my paycheck just cleared, >Order New Tesla<, done, now back to thinking on how I can kill Hitler or something (while ordering Uber Eats for an expresso machiatto for 30 dollars and pressing that 'Burn Them' button)
i hope there's someone at Meta who still thinks Nazis and wannabe nazis are bad and advocates for down weighting their stupid rants in the algo. but the evidence seems to be the opposite.
Meta itself has been describing the favouritism as caused by technical glitches - which for some reason always benefitted Bolsonaro.
Searches for Lula on Instagram didn't show any results while searches for Bolsonaro worked.
Restrictions on Lula's ad account was apparently also a technical glitch.
Strangely enough, there was also some technical glitches that caused whatsapp searches for Lula's 7 million members whatsapp channel to bring up Bolsonaro's whatsapp channel instead.
Did I mention that Meta was fined $25 billion dollars last week for lying and misleading the public?
Any calls for Meta to change are useless until Mark Zuckerberg no longer holds a majority of voting shares. You have to have reforms around that first. Cambridge Analytica, the Metaverse, the New Mexico judgment... all examples of things that would have gotten any other CEO canned due to their damage to the bottom line, but Mark doesn't have to worry, because he's not going to vote himself out.
There are so many English articles about this topic that never explain what happened. I clicked on everything from Reuters to Al Jazeera and they're all reciting the same line about "accounts restricted".
The "account restriction" was a period of about 24 hours where Instagram's "Boost Post" feature wasn't working for some accounts, including Lula's. The ads were still shown, but the part to add more money for the boosts wasn't working that day.
There's another complaint about not being able to search for "Lula" and get the exact account after they changed the global search to require 5 characters to identify accounts.
There are additional accusations of things like some stories posts getting cut short and the AI tool not applying political restrictions equally.
A lot of the articles imply the "internal communications" caught them red-handed doing these things intentionally, but as far as I can tell those internal communications are just them responding to the issues? If there was a leaked internal communication about them disrupting elections, the news stories would probably lead with that instead of dancing around the subject.
That's the context I could find after not getting much useful information from this link. I know this comment is going to make some people angry but to clear I'm only trying to figure out what these articles are talking about.
International UN election observers are also reporting about the American platforms suppressing free speech.
But please, just go ahead and trust the company that was fined $25 billion dollars last week for lying and misleading the public about its involvement in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Isn't that link basically saying what I said above, but in the same obscured way to hide the details of what happened?
> Incidents include temporary interruptions of one candidate’s campaign account; differences in audience engagement, user feeds, view counts and reach; restrictions on that campaign’s Instagram posts; and differences between the main political parties in AI image generation, WhatsApp channel search results, candidates’ Stories and the distribution of political content potentially benefiting the opposing candidate’s campaign.
> But please, just go ahead and trust the company
There are more options than "Completely trust the company" and "Completely trust any allegations against the company". Take some time and learn the details. Don't just pick sides and bury your head in the sand when someone wants to discuss facts.
Are you just going to keep throwing random links at me and ignoring the facts?
I'm not going to take "paydayreport.com" slop reporting over the actual Brazilian news sources I linked above. You're fully drinking the kool-aid and unquestioningly consuming any anti-Meta news as ground truth, but I'm trying to figure out what actually happened
"International election observers have raised concerns about Meta’s platforms. Incidents include temporary interruptions of one candidate’s campaign account; differences in audience engagement, user feeds, view counts and reach; restrictions on that campaign’s Instagram posts; and differences between the main political parties in AI image generation, WhatsApp channel search results, candidates’ Stories and the distribution of political content potentially benefiting the opposing candidate’s campaign."
Honestly, in 2018 Meta *allegedly* interfered in the other direction. It basically goes along with who the US President is. This discourse is just to stoke division and promote censorship and bigger government control.
This will damage Meta's business. As the meme that they cannot be trusted spreads alternative methods of communication will revive, and start to flourish
Trust does matter. Hard to win, easier to loose, and no matter how big you are, how mean you seem, you can still sicken and die
And the fact that he did this years after Cambridge Analytica, just wow.
I wonder if it can even be stopped at this stage - Brazil can only arrest him or execs if they are in Brazil, even international warrants are tricky to enforce against people who can travel by private jet and mega-yacht.
Tech fascism is panicking universally as the algorithmic manipulation doesn't seem to work anymore as people are getting more and more aware of the tactics.
98 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 66.1 ms ] threadThe change is not "objectively worse" - it is the same for them and is definitely better for you. This is a pointless take.
1. No one is surprised when the armaments factory makes bombs; they claim to. Does Meta claim to be an influence factory? Ha! They argue tooth and nail against this fact in every court they've been sued or charged in. Thus, it is certainly surprising when a space for connecting to others makes specific connections, particularly political ones impossible or difficult in the midst of the election. I don't think most people saw that coming; perhaps you did because you are obviously more clever than the rest of us.
2. A zero percent chance versus a close to nil chance are objectively different. Which one is better or worse is of course context dependent.
3. If you work at a company that does bad things and you are trying to steer it away from those bad things, it is not clear that you are becoming complicit. Some could argue that you are the opposite of complicit.
4. Perhaps the point is not merely influencing your employer's business direction, but also that of your colleagues.
Sorry, bud, you didn't clinch it.
2. I was being generous.
3. "Some could argue that you are the opposite of complicit", and they'd be wrong. "If you work at a company that does bad things and" let me stop you there at the "and". Your real job (the stuff before the "and") isn't negated by your hobby, and if they're severely at odds then your work effectiveness will suffer.
4. How did that work out for you?
2. weaker still.
3. you don't own morality, buddy.
4. complete miss; i don' work for a company whose motives i question.
3 Still not clear if you possess it either.
4 So you're already solved this, and not at all in the way that you're advocating for? That's revealing.
Your responses are myopic, juvenile and add no understanding, so I am at this point going to say: good bye and have a nice day.
Narrator: They didn't.
If Meta keeps those positions at all.
Far to the other side are are FU Money/assets CEOs and what have you that could quit what they are doing. Not terribly far from them are well-paid software engineers who could just demote themselves to a regular-paid job and be fine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50255234
A lot of folks left over Cambridge Analytica, another bunch left over Myanmar, more left over Trump, and yet the hits keep on coming...
So we should rather want these people to stay on for as long as possible, and make it hard for Meta to pull off such shit.
It's better that people in these organizations feel they can speak up. If they have to choose between saying nothing or resigning, many would simply say nothing. And how is that situation any better?
does this mean they were ordered to take them down by the government? what can they do in that case?
Some of the old security state nomenklatura even stayed on into the Hi Tech Grandee era. In-Q-Tel. LifeLog. Regina Dugan. Douglas Gage, Jim Breyer, Howard Cox. Thiel and Palantir. And many more besides. Und so weiter, und so weiter.
They're not deviating from their mission or their "morals"; today, now -- with the chips finally down, i.e. global hegemony switching for the first time in the nuclear age -- these <ahem/> "companies" are returning to their roots.
I don't believe you.
Some of the others, I will give you.
1. Will this increase or decrease the incidents? 2. Will we know more or less about these incidents in the future? 3. Will anyone else inside work for or against this happening?
Which way do we want things to go?
I don't mean to say it's clearly this or that. I think it's a genuinely interesting and challenging dilemma. Do I continue working someplace that is involved in something evil but try and provide a voice, push, influence, or, if nothing else, a voice to the outside of the goings on inside, or do I separate myself and work only from the outside?
We can imagine the same for law enforcement, military, defence contractors, government, and any number of other vectors and industries.
Snowden was working from the inside before he leaked what he did. Every single whistleblower was involved first.
And yes, working for META means doing your part to overthrow democracy. It's company strategy to do so, and like it or not, working for META means you are "just following orders" in this enterprise.
I couldn't live like that for long.
The letter was from a UK communication worker's union and no article I can find includes the number of employees who signed the letter or their roles a Meta.
With how much is being obscured about the signers of the letter and their location, I think it's unlikely they were involved with the incident at all.
They're just signing a letter protesting it.
I mean, if you really think your organization is a net negative, perhaps your best civic effort is to just sort of linger as organizational dead weight or, better yet, as some sort of bureaucratic tar baby.
they could take a page out of the CIA manual for it.
Everything you contribute to the organisation helps it achieve its goal, no matter how small or insignificant. By staying you agree to continue to sell your skills and time to this organisation in favour of its objectives. You are as much part of the problem as the organisation itself.
People who stay will not meaningfully push back. They can grumble. They can ask to be reassign to slightly different position. But, they will never have any option to actually do something meaningful from inside.
The incentives aren't there to behave as an ethical human being in business beyond getting caught breaking the law (for a narrow definition of ethics).
I say this as someone who fought for the smaller fry multiple times (one sexual harassment victim, one employee at risk of losing their visa, and multiple teams getting done to) in the workplace and came out of it with autistic burnout (I didn't know then about my autism) from the emotional labor leading to unemployment.
The incentives aren't there. I wish they were.
Inside information is critical, and you can always try to do your part.
They have options. People here spend enough time glazing each others’ 200,000 lumen minds and abilities. And judging by extra-curricular activities, no lies are told as far as I can see. That means that they can just find other employment.[1] There is enough IT that the rest of us work on, IT that doesn’t want to become a global Panopticon. None of it is perfect. You might have to work on software that just makes some previously flexible and okay procedure into a rigid, somewhat buggy, but streamlined and legible to management kind of procedure. You might earn more than the cleaning personell who have unalloyed-good jobs, just removing dirt.[2] But it’s better for the soul.
And you can earn a normal wage. Not a bad wage.
But the horde of luminous minds in Silicon Valley and I guess the Seattle Area (and maybe urban Texas and I dunno) have showed us what they can do with all the demand for their labor, their high salaries, and the pliable management who know that they have to put up with the nerds.
[1] Yes. Some workers have many options. Many have some options, many have few. Most people can’t make principled employment choices.
[2] Now someone with 30 years of experience managing cleaning personell will tell me all the dirt on what cleaning personell get up to.
We Palantir employees want to build software tools for clients to combine, clean, and make sense of their own scattered datasets
If you truly despise their actions, start leaking documents to the press. Climb the ladder as high as possible and infiltrate top leadership.
The best I could find was from some translations of paywalled Brazilian articles like this one https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/poder/2026/10/em-mensagens-int...
The "account restriction" was a period of about 24 hours where Instagram's "Boost Post" feature wasn't working for some accounts, including Lula's. The ads were still shown, but the part to add more money for the boosts wasn't working that day.
There's another complaint about not being able to search for "Lula" and get the exact account after they changed the global search to require 5 characters to identify accounts.
There are additional accusations of things like some stories posts getting cut short and the AI tool not applying political restrictions equally.
A lot of the articles imply the "internal communications" caught them red-handed doing these things intentionally, but as far as I can tell those internal communications are just them responding to the issues? If there was a leaked internal communication about them disrupting elections, the news stories would probably lead with that instead of dancing around the subject.
That's the context I could find after not getting much useful information from this link. I know this comment is going to make some people angry but to clear I'm only trying to figure out what these articles are talking about.
But please, just go ahead and trust the company that was fined $25 billion dollars last week for lying and misleading the public about its involvement in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2026/10/meta-must-pr...
> Incidents include temporary interruptions of one candidate’s campaign account; differences in audience engagement, user feeds, view counts and reach; restrictions on that campaign’s Instagram posts; and differences between the main political parties in AI image generation, WhatsApp channel search results, candidates’ Stories and the distribution of political content potentially benefiting the opposing candidate’s campaign.
> But please, just go ahead and trust the company
There are more options than "Completely trust the company" and "Completely trust any allegations against the company". Take some time and learn the details. Don't just pick sides and bury your head in the sand when someone wants to discuss facts.
I'm not going to take "paydayreport.com" slop reporting over the actual Brazilian news sources I linked above. You're fully drinking the kool-aid and unquestioningly consuming any anti-Meta news as ground truth, but I'm trying to figure out what actually happened
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2026/10/meta-must-pr...
Trust does matter. Hard to win, easier to loose, and no matter how big you are, how mean you seem, you can still sicken and die
It won’t.
On the other hand, this false protection, brings fake sense of security in people.
I do think it was Facebook paying for this.
Probably Zuckerberg's gravestone
And the fact that he did this years after Cambridge Analytica, just wow.
I wonder if it can even be stopped at this stage - Brazil can only arrest him or execs if they are in Brazil, even international warrants are tricky to enforce against people who can travel by private jet and mega-yacht.