Nobody believes themselves to be the bad guy, but many people frequently make decisions that cause harm.
One person makes a “decision making framework” but doesn’t make any individual decision themselves.
Then another person makes the individual decision, but based on the decision making framework, so they feel no personal responsibility for the choice.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42651178 ("[flagged] Total Chaos at Meta: Employees Protest Zuckerberg's Anti LGBTQ Changes (404media.co)")
https://www.404media.co/its-total-chaos-internally-at-meta-r... ( https://archive.is/R1c7S )
Remember how Mark was caught on hot mic saying ‘I wasn’t sure what number you wanted, Mr. President’ after lying about it on camera[0]
[0]https://www.businesstoday.in/world/us/story/i-wasnt-sure-wha...
Someone like Zuck actively isolates themselves: from buying huge tracts of land to literally isolate themselves, building underground shelters, hiring security to keep riff-raff away, etc. They have no concept of society. They just don't see themselves living in the same world as we do.
A few elite people are poached, some are acquihired, but most applied to get the job. I believe if you can make it to Meta you can make it to equivalent mega companies, it's a choice.
You might ask - but what about the people who work at those corporations? And that's also pretty simply explained by this classic quote: it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
This isn't high school. This is about real people having real experiences of fear, stress, violence, and horror facilitated by deliberate cultural engineering.
If the very talented and smart people don't get that, that's a them problem.
Yes it does. That is the only thing that makes enemies.
Lots of very talented and smart people work for big tobacco, Aramco, Stake (crypto gambling), Kick (streaming of crypto gambling), Purdue (made billions on manufacturing an opioid epidemic), DuPont, Shein, Nestlé, NSO group, the GEO group (private prison industry), Clearview (facial recognition at scale including for ICE) and indeed Meta.
I don't think we should hate them or show them hatred. I don't think that if you're working at a company that's suppressing someone's way of life you're somehow above criticism or contempt.
Also, simping for these companies is such a bad look.
Not only bash but zsh, fish and sh them as well.
Its not personal, and they operate outside of human morality so it doesn't even make sense to call them evil. But they'll still eat you.
I've come to strongly dislike this quote, because it's so often used on HN to decide that whoever's disagreeing with you is doing it for simple, stupid and greedy reasons, thus absolving you of the duty to think a bit about whether there might be nuance you're missing.
But not everyone think that way, some think that by limiting access to abortion information, they are actually saving (unborn) lives. Some people think that "sex positive" movements are morally questionable and help spread infection. For them, they are the good guys and they think that Meta is finally doing the right thing.
These are divisive political subjects and political parties with these ideas get elected for a reason. In a democracy, parties will not promote ideas that no one agree with, they need the votes, so if they are promoting them, it means that for a large part of the population, it is the right thing to do. HN is a bubble with mostly liberal ideas, we have to understand it for what it is.
That's in addition to the idea that "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it". But it applies more to activities that are almost universally recognized as bad rather than partisan ideas, things like scamming.
I'm not sure I agree with this, though I suppose it depends on what one defines as "liberal."
>In a democracy, parties will not promote ideas that no one agree with, they need the votes, so if they are promoting them, it means that for a large part of the population, it is the right thing to do.
I would say instead that it means that for a large part of the voting population, the ideas are not objectionable enough for them to vote differently or abstain. People are already voting in spite of the disconnect between the policies they support and the policies that actually get implemented [0]
[0] https://archive.org/details/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_th...
I forget the exact statistic, but CEOs are disproportionately sociopaths (compared to the whole population).
So, no story required because there's no guilt felt.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" - Upton Sinclair
And Meta in particular - just look at the founder/leader. The “CEOs are all sociopaths” trope exists because of people like Zuck.
Donald Trump's co-opted the religious nuts that are anti-abortion and anti-LGBT, and Zuck is more than happy to please him rather than risk prosecution and losing his money or freedom. What a model of cowardice.
That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not my fault.
And if it was, I didn't mean it.
And if I did, you deserved it.
It's called the "narcissist's prayer", it's what narcissists and sociopaths tell themselves to absolve themselves of accountability. Whatever the situation, they have an excuse as to how it's not their fault. It's like the stages of grief but for people trying to avoid consequences or guilt for their actions.
Same as when remembering the "Don't be evil" moto from Google.
I'm wondering if at some level we always knew it would end up like this. What kind of moral shield can we claim from this mess ? I'm afraid it's actually very little
It allows one to disavow any sense of social reciprocity after becoming obscenely rich.
I was curious, so I looked through his Wikipedia page -- it says he donated $1m to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in 2009 (which helped his family move to USA when he was a child). Even the NYT article notes that "The gift is small, given Mr. Brin’s estimated $16 billion in personal wealth" :D
(this is like you making $1m annually and donating $62.50)
That's the thing, you can only have that kind of number for so many years before you start really not wanting it to get down.
And chances are they have been buying quite a bit of lifestyle by borrowing against that number. Because selling would strip them of that voting control you pointed out. Then they can't really afford the number to go down, because the borrowing is effectively a cascade, so in reality they aren't anywhere close to free in their decisions.
(but I'd imagine that they are quite capable of deluding themselves into believing that the decisions they have to take to keep the number up are what they actually want)
Why shouldn't this be classified as a mental illness? Imagine a monkey hoarding more food than they could possibly eat, to the point that it lies next to them rotting away, while members of their tribe are dying from starvation. We'd immediately say that there is something wrong with that money, but why do we feel it is normal that some humans hoard an insane amount of money?
Having a billionaire who believes they aren't rich enough and need to make more money is like an anorexia patient believing they aren't skinny enough and need to lose more weight.
Next time your company makes you sit through one of these trainings, for whatever so-called value, remember: the company doesn't believe in it. It only believes in making money.
I don't think it's a benefit to society that corporations behave like amoral sociopaths. It should be in their interest to correct that behavior.
However, my point is this (slightly exaggerated) timeline:
1. "Diversity makes us stronger! Discrimination is bad! Power to women! Respect gender identities! Stop fake news!".
2. Go do all these trainings to improve yourself on those topics. We mandate this because we care, it's our inner moral fiber!
3. (election happens, government changes)
4. Actually, forget all of the above. The previous administration forced us, we now believe otherwise and we're decommissioning all those programs. Sorry we forced you!
So in the end, no value a corporation espouses is genuine, unless it's making money. So all those trainings? Fake. All those "values"? Fake. Individuals within the company may care, but the company as a whole doesn't (and let's face it, the CEO and board don't either, and never did).
If we're feeling charitable, we could argue any given company reflects the current (corporate) consensus about what's good/safe for business and for society, but always dressed in the language of "we genuinely believe this, it's heartfelt, and we're also trend setters because we care!". It's this last part that is 100% fake. At best they do what's safe for the current social/business climate; nothing is "heartfelt". If it was heartfelt, they would stand up to the bullies instead of saying "we never believed it, it was forced on us by the past evil administration!".
A very deep level. The level that joked about "pride month" being thrown put like Christmas decorations on July 1st.
The more positive sentiment back then is that bigotry wouldn't ever be profitable again as the world experienced more experiences and built more empathy. Of course, I can only laugh hysterically at poor 2014/2015 me.
Roughly speaking, the folks who truly cared knew.
Corporations have obvious market/regulatory incentives to say they're good guys.
Most people want to believe such statements, with the immediate incentive being a happier worldview.
Incentives for an extremely powerful corporation to actually be good are far weaker.
Persecuting marginalized people and supporting authoritarian regimes is the logical path for capitalism, yes.
The titular event is an account of when one of Google's executives came to britain to meet him in person (at this point he's fighting extradition to the United States but has not yet sequestered himself inside the Ecuadorian embassy). From the conversation Assange gets the impression that the Google exec is acting as an unofficial envoy of the US state department in hopes of convincing him to "play ball" by publishing more and more information which will advance the arab spring narrative. The rest of the book is his own personal investigation into the incestuous links between US foreign policy, social media corporations and the so-called "arab spring".
He's a notorious fan of unbridled American imperial power and "realpolitik" and brought Kissinger in multiple times to Google for "fireside chat" sessions.
Which always went over very... poorly... with the broader set of employees who used to get seriously annoyed at this. The reception was never good.
https://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-27...
>In the end, the most charitable interpretation of Assange’s “dissembling” as Mueller calls it, in the Seth Rich hoax is that he genuinely couldn’t rule out the possibility that Rich was his source. The Mueller report demolished that final moral refuge. Rich had been dead four days when Assange received the DNC files.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Seth_Rich#WikiLeaks_...
>As director Tennant has pointed out, secretary Powell presented evidence last week that Baghdad has failed to disarm its weapons of mass destruction, and willfully attempting to evade and deceive the international community. Our particular concern is that Saddam Hussein may supply terrorists with biological, chemical, or radiological material
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTDO-kuOGTQ
Anyways I might care more about Seth Rich "conspiracy theories" if anybody had bothered to investigate what happened to him instead of chalking it up as a "robbery gone wrong" (in which nothing of value was stolen) and calling it a day. In about six more months it will have gone unsolved for an entire decade.
Everyone always knew. The criticisms get lumped in with with the unreasonable nay-sayers because it makes them easier to dismiss.
The honest people I know working for obvious evil will acknowledge it and say they're just doing it for a paycheck. But this gives most people cognitive dissonance and they'll find better rationalization. See also: every cope post on hacker news by someone defending a company they're pretending not to work for.
Fascism is not to blame, it is a means to an end for the economy at large. Ultimately, the issue is uneven distribution of wealth and power.
That is not something I wrote.
This is not a useful definition of fascism, if that is what you mean. Fascism can exist entirely independently of capitalism, and has done.
Is it possible for fascism to thrive in a regulation-free capitalist world? Apparently yes. But they are not necessarily coupled.
It's a common misperception that fascism necessarily involves a merger of state and corporate power. Rather in a fascist regime, companies have no more choice in whether they further the state's aims and align with its goals than individual citizens have; they just have more devastating impacts.
As to whether Meta is aligning with the administration's goals, I don't know whether it is happening, consciously or unconsciously, in this case, but we know for certain there has been deliberate and conscious alignment elsewhere, because Zuckerberg made a big deal out of it.
Meta denied an escalating trend of censorship. “Every organisation and individual on our platforms is subject to the same set of rules, and any claims of enforcement based on group affiliation or advocacy are baseless,” it said in a statement, adding that its policies on abortion-related content had not changed.
Has The Guardian confirmed the facts either way? Or are they just reporting what people say without digging deeper?
I think reporting ought to try to get to some level of truth through rigor.
"we're consistent" doesn't mean "we're fair"
― Anatole France
Same goes for Meta, at one point it becomes blatantly obvious that you cannot trust any of their statements, because they turn out again and again to not be true.
Are all accounts linked to abortion or queer content now gone from Facebook? I don’t believe that’s the case, right?
Do all the reported accounts and content get nuked ? Potentially yes ?
Is that what the guardian claimed?
That would mean Facebook's response is either blatantly false, or deceptively using weasel wording.
They do some data-oriented investigations with partners but their budget is very finite as an organisation.
Someone could post that all black people are stupid and were better off enslaved and Facebook would respond to a report saying it doesn't violate any policies, but someone posting a shirtless photo of themselves to an lgbt group gets it shutdown for a week.
This is also why I keep saying that the Discord model is the future of social media, not Facebook or Twitter. Turns out that when you can allow users to exert meaningful control over their social spaces, instead of relying on the judgment of some of the most sociopathic, self-interested and immoral people in tech, you can create actual communities.
I've been part of several gun rights groups on Facebook, both for political advocacy and plan information sharing, that have been banned without warning. Meanwhile there are groups where nothing is ever posted that isn't for sale - I haven't seen one of those taken down for several years now, and many of them are scoped to an entire state and have tens of thousands of users.
Information literally moves faster on socials than it does from need sources and those things come with far less "truth through rigor".
I agree news sources should do leg work.. but in a world where nobody cares about the facts when spreading a story, is there still a point?
I might be an illogical optimist, but I undoubtedly believe that’s the job of journalists and newspaper editors in such a world. To FIGHT false narratives and misinformation.
We're asking credible news sources to fit a gun fit with sticks.
This reads like what you’re accusing them of doing. The way you’re asking the questions communicates skepticism in favor of facebook’s official statement. Facebook’s track record on policing content is not exactly one that inspires confidence in their narrative.
I am entitled to a dose of healthy skepticism.
If I believed that Meta is suspending accounts for the mere fact that they link to abortion information or non-pornographic queer content, rather some other policy reason, then I WOULD dig deeper because apparently The Gaurdian can’t be bothered to.
However, I don’t believe that to be the case by the mere fact that there are millions of accounts active that DO link to queer content or abortion information.
Heck, Planned Parenthood has an active Facebook account: https://www.facebook.com/plannedparenthood/
The Guardian article interviews several people whose accounts have been shut down. Are you proposing that all those people are lying, or is there perhaps the possibility of Facebook not telling the whole truth? Should you not be skeptical of Facebook's "we didn't do anything" claim as well?
I think reporting ought to try to get to some level of truth through rigor.
I think I'm getting bored with all the deflection bots and puppets on HN saying, "Don't discuss the issue in the OP's article! Look over here, instead!"
However the very first line reveals what the actual reason probably was: "posts showing non-explicit nudity triggering warnings"
[1] https://imginn.com/p/ClT7Cufrk0k/
>A message from Meta to the group dated 13 November said its page “does not follow our Community Standards on prescription drugs”, adding: “We know this is disappointing, but we want to keep Facebook safe and welcoming for everyone.”
>“The disabled accounts were correctly removed for violating a variety of our policies including our Human Exploitation policy,” it added.
... which is much more in-line with the idea that the actual reason is ideological positions. And if you scroll all the way to the bottom of the article you'll see that the "nudity" that was banned was not nudity at all. So non-nude they actually included the drawing in the Guardian article itself.
> The offending post was an artistic depiction of a naked couple, obscured by hearts.
Given Meta, I’m more inclined to believe code bugs in an automated clean up job which they then move into their appeals process to get corrected.
that's a pretty heavily-worked little phrase. What is "non-explicit" nudity? That sounds to me like starting at the violation and then working backward to ensure that the people they want to be violators turn out to be violators.
As a European, it is a very American Puritan thing to have.
Somewhere along the way we decided that kids can't see boobs until they're 21, but should be fine watching people get murdered.
I don't have the words for it, but it seems like everyone is fine with MASSIVE violence in every piece of media. I feel like I've lost the plot somewhere.
They have become remarkably sexless, practically no titillation to be found anywhere
I know it's against HN rules to ask if people have read the article, but you clearly didn't read the article.
The "non-sexual nudity" example is at the bottom of the article. It's a stylized cartoon drawing of a nude man and woman with arms around each others' waists viewed from the back as they walk along a path. There is a heart strategically placed around waist level so you can't even see their whole butts.
It's about the tamest artistic depiction of nudity you can imagine, certainly something that is totally fine anywhere else on Facebook. Very clear that this is a bullshit excuse being used by Meta.
"the organisation had received a message almost every week from Meta over the past year saying that its page “didn’t follow the rules”"
If you are getting content violation notices every week for a year, it is certainly not all because of this one cartoon.
[2] https://imginn.com/p/DCmnH4WPbXa/
[3] https://imginn.com/p/C-dBMzXRqnu/
> Fatma Ibrahim, the director of the Sex Talk Arabic, a UK-based platform which offers Arabic-language content on sexual and reproductive health, said that the organisation had received a message almost every week from Meta over the past year saying that its page “didn’t follow the rules” and would not be suggested to other people, based on posts related to sexuality and sexual health.
If you're getting a warning every week for a year, I would like to see the other 51 non cherry-picked examples that they didn't give to the guardian. Based on a quick look at some of their posts that are still publically available, I think Meta is completely justified in restricting visibility of some of these posts.
I remember when Alex Jones (or someone of that ilk) was being "de-platformed" by Google, Facebook, etc. Not only were people cheering for it, they were denying that being banned from YouTube (for example) was censorship since "there are other video hosting platforms" (yeah, there are but also not really) and "it's only censorship when it's the government who legally restrict you from speech".
(And Alex Jones is a detestable piece of shit just in case you think I'm a fan. But to paraphrase an old saying, freedom of expression is only a principle if it applies to people you utterly despise).
The ban message also claimed the suspension was done without automation.
Not just them. Anyone being slightly critical of vaccines, Russiagate, etc. Anyone warning about building this censorship apparatus. To paraphrase "Man for All Seasons," they crushed every law to get to the devil.
Now the Devil has turned, and there are no laws to protect them from it.
And to answer your question, "they" is referring to the people who were starkly in favor of censorship of right-wing opinions, and shadow banning and banning people who post right-wing content, or just generally anything that doesn't fall in line with any of the left-wing's billions of ephemeral and mutable narrative goal posts. I used "they" so as to avoid sounding snarky or antagonistic toward any group in particular, but you asked, so...
Like, killing is bad. But if I'm alive in WW2 times and I see Nazi soldiers shooting Jewish protestors on the street, I'm going to be horrified, while if I see Jewish protestors shooting Nazi soldiers on the street, I'm going to be significantly less horrified. One could even argue the latter is a good thing.
At this point, nobody trusts the other side to "play fair" and reciprocate, which makes standing on principle feel like a loss. If all sides stood up just a little bit for the principle of "I don't agree with that person, but I defend his right to voice himself", we'd all be better off.
Does the First Amendment not also give you editorial control over your websites, including which third-party content you host?
Indeed, the two are so different that being in favor of the former doesn't at all weaken the argument against doing the latter.
It turns out there's a middle ground between "no content moderation" and "restrict people for discussing some innocent physiological aspect of themselves they can't change", and that middle ground can be totally ok
Just like there's a totally-ok middle ground between libertarians who oppose any regulation at all, and authoritarians who want to control literally everything
The only way this works, is if we become more accepting of opinions we fundamentally truly disagree with. Anything short of that, and you're always going to run into people who draw the line in a way you find harmful.
Is it? According to who? After all, anybody can say "A is just another way of saying B" (especially if they ignore the differences), but it doesn't make it true. To wit: the differences I cited prove that there are differences.
> The only way this works, is if we become more accepting of opinions we fundamentally truly disagree with.
Historically speaking, accepting violence against minorities, and the rhetoric which fosters it, has not "worked" for the minorities.
We've tried this. This is what lead to Florida removing the vaccine mandate, something that is going to cause real harm because people have bought into a shared delusion. This tolerance of fundamental disagreements has metastasized into people committing real harm using the power of the state rather than any sort of centrist utopia.
No, it's not. There are laws in several countries of what kind of things you can publish in public. Sure, the line is definitely blurry, but there are lots of cases where it's not. Of course, Meta being an American company often means that local laws have less of an effect.
It does mean that people will see more and more bans now when they are reported by haters. I guess it's time for a new common social media network. But which? It'll be hard to get traction for fediverse networks in such a diverse and non technical community.
I don't really understand why though. I understand they're against LGBTQ for religious reasons or something but why try to ban it? They can just like... not follow the content they don't like? The algorithm does the rest. And the content on insta is already very mild. No nudity etc.
Members of any social activists groups seem likely to me to be of the more forceful vocal type and abortion and "queer groups" (that seems crazy broad to me) are two categories that particularly attract people with strong feelings.
It's not surprising to me that people in those groups would get banned more than others, especially the queer one because the topic of the group is explicitly sexual and I could see their posts more often crossing the ban line.
Now if all members of those groups are getting banned, that's surprising but I doubt there's anything malicious here (unless you consider their general content policy malicious).
On insta we just want to communicate and organise parties together. Behind closed doors where were yes, we often do freaky (yet consensual) things to each other ;) But the photos will not end up on insta as we obey the policy. In fact these events have very strict no-camera rules anyway.
It's always been a bit difficult and most people create several 'backup' accounts already that people can follow in advance in case they get banned. Sometimes that's justified according to the policy, usually it's not. The moderation policies have always been a bit erratic with instagram, even worse since they fired all of their moderators last year and moved a lot of it to AI.
The bans don't appear to be targeting these groups otherwise the groups would be empty. Instead, it appears that the bans are toward a subset of the groups.
My speculation is that, due to the nature of the groups (sexuality and abortion), it seems very reasonable to me to expect that the more vocal members of the groups might post content that is against Facebook guidelines.
So when you say "we", I'm not sure who you're referring to because I'm likely not talking about you.
> Sometimes that's justified according to the policy, usually it's not.
Says everyone who's ever been banned from anywhere. If people are often getting banned amd don't change their behavior, they'll probably continue to be banned on their alts, especially since alts to avoid bams are usually a banable offense itself.
Facebook's policies are probably stupid, I don't know, but they are their policies and if someone can't figure out what crosses the line after multiple bans, I think that's on them. If you don't like their policies, there are a lot of other places to go rather than creating a bunch of alta on a service that doesn't want you to do what you want to do on it.
Wow interesting, I thought social media was more an embarrassing thing to admit you participated in these days.
One of the reasons was that Instagram until about 2 years ago was pretty cool about just showing you people you follow instead of dumping unwanted algorithmic shit on you. But after the rise of tiktok they have unfortunately mirrored that. You can still switch to following in the app but it keeps switching back.
It also gives the ability to follow people without giving your phone number which is really important because most of us aren't even known by our real names.
So it’s become an embarrassment within the last 2 years. Yeah, this is what I’m talking about.
I don't know who's behind this, but they're delusional.
Yes.
Zuck has seen that the current regime strongly incentives certain sorts of compliance. He is showing them the outcome which they desire.
If the religious conservatives actually cared about children's lives they'd provide free healthcare, great schooling and opportunities for them. As it stands they only care about them until they're born. Then the amount of care drops sharply especially if they happen to be of the "wrong" colour.
It's much more about suppression of women's rights than actual care about children.
The "bastion of free speech" is exporting its censorship to other countries... If I'm an EU lawmaker, I'd honestly use this to just ban Zuckerberg's entire social media sites and get it over with
And by "this" I mean that they want organizations to proactively make changes that fit with the policies of whoever is in power, even if there's no actual laws that make them do this. When Democrats ran the place, big tech was going out of their way to out-woke one another, with product announcement videos somehow starting with land acknowledgements and the likes, and now the same companies are going out of their way to out-dumb one another and this is just one of many examples.
I mean, America is a place with only two sides, and both sides are very on board with having their particular preferences and ideas enforced informally without any sort of legal framework. I think it would be useful for a lot more of the outrage to be directed at that fact.
Just.. be against all of this! This shit where legally you can do whatever the fuck you want but actually in reality you're going to get in serious trouble if you don't toe the party line, and oh by the way the party line switches every 4 years... that's no way to run a business! It's banana republic stuff.
I mean I agree that there's a difference in scale, in that censoring access to abortion advice is actively harmful and most things people felt they had to do under Biden (eg land acknowledgements, DEI trainings etc) are just cringe. But come on, don't politicize everything! It will only come to bite you back in the arse, as this episode illustrates beautifully.
It's designed in a way that that's not even a thing. Anyone can create account locally on their computer or mobile phone (even completely offline) and that's it. If you save & store your "notes" or "posts", you can always re-broadcast them later to different "relay" servers - and this is what your app can do for you anyway.
- Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences
- Are you saying Facebook should be forced to platform speech it doesn't like?
- Xkcd "showing you the door"
Did I miss any? Heavy pendulums hurt to be struck by.
But everyone always excuses it. "He was young when he wrote those IMs"
