Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook Is Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the US and Israeli Governments

theintercept.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 125 posts

Re: Facebook Is Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the US and Israeli Governments

#91

Post by beagle3 »

0xBA5ED wrote: post #90

>96 percent of Palestinians said their primary use of Facebook was for following news This is astounding to me given the likelihood of Facebook's unspoken allegiances and their history with respect to censorship.

While I agree, i’m Not familiar with even remotely neutral sources in Arabic; on one side you have a Hamas/Fatah “Iraqi information minister”’style reporting, and on the other side you have the Israeli reporting in Arabic. Facebook, despite being more closely aligned with Israel, and having the history of a Skinner box operator, is still more likely to bring news vetted by their friends with some commentary.

Very sadly, it might actually be their best source of news.

Re: Facebook Is Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the US and Israeli Governments

#93

Post by bitL »

cloakandswagger wrote: post #79
monaghanboy wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't been on Facebook in over a decade; I didn't see that it had any positive effect on my life (quite the contrary), and I'm definitely not impressed by their lack of social conscience. Despite the excessive pay and "pedigree" that working for them would offer, I'd never do it. I hope that a growing number of people from my and future generations will think the same.

Within my circles there has been a marked decrease in the perceived prestige of an engineering job at Facebook over the past few years. I'm sure it still requires a huge amount of talent and isn't lacking in meaty, difficult problems, but the core product just seems so unimportant.

> decrease in the perceived prestige of an engineering job at Facebook

Actually FB became a haven for xooglers that wanted to escape deteriorating engineering at lower levels at Google; there is still burning spirit of hacking present, even after IPO. FB works hard to retain it (outside noisy open offices though).

If you ever went through engineering interview process at FB, you'd have noticed it's one notch better prepared than the one at Google. Their Glassdoor rating is even slightly better and there are very few companies that are rated better (and usually smaller like Odersky's Lightbend, JetBrains...), so there is almost nowhere to go for a better engineering experience.

Re: Facebook Is Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the US and Israeli Governments

#94

Post by linkregister »

cloakandswagger wrote: post #88
monaghanboy wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you found any meaningful correlation between "talent" (engineering or otherwise) and tenure at a well-known tech company? From my experience, and based on people I know that work at Facebook, e.g., getting your foot in the door is just a matter of studying medium/hard-level problems on Leetcode (speaking verbatim here). I'm not sure you need a strong foundation in systems programming or design, or even a strong…

In my mind, that does apply when you're talking about entry level software development positions. If someone is an SDE1 (or equivalent) at Facebook/Google/Amazon, I assume they're smart, determined and they studied a lot for the standard whiteboard interview. If someone is a senior engineer at one of those companies, I assume they have a reasonable amount of talent. It's not easy to fake it or avoid expectations as a…

Agreed, the level of responsibility as a senior engineer at the "Big N" companies is generally too high to permit a mediocre engineer to survive. People get demoted from manager and staff engineer positions all the time, and it's not a career-ending event either.

Re: Facebook Is Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the US and Israeli Governments

#95

Post by Udik »

ars wrote: post #76
gridaphobe wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s standard to use the capital city to refer to the actions of a state. Tel Aviv is the internationally accepted capital of Israel, not Jerusalem.

> Tel Aviv is the internationally accepted capital of Israel, not Jerusalem. Can we please not post that nonsense here? I expect it in some of the stupider social networks (which tend to draw a certain kind of poster), but seeing that here is surprising. Other countries do not get to tell a county where its capital is. What exactly makes Tel Aviv the capital anyway? There's no seat of government there, nothing. Did t…

> Can we please not post that nonsense here?

Can you please not post nonsense here. Tel Aviv IS the internationally accepted capital of Israel, period. It's a fact you might like or not, but it remains a fact.

All the world's embassies are in Tel Aviv, not Jerusalem.

Re: Facebook Is Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the US and Israeli Governments

#96

Post by linkmotif »

ffgg wrote: post #83
linkmotif wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, except this is what Glen Greenwald writes instead: > Last March, Facebook briefly shut down the Facebook page of the political party, Fatah, followed by millions, “because of an old photo posted of former leader Yasser Arafat holding a rifle.” which is on the soft side of what Israel contests is incitement (see my post above, or Google for more examples, there are many).

A dead dude with a rifle is incitement? That’s a laugh. In the US you can go to a rifle range and buy targets with the president’s face on it. Then you upload that to YouTube and get hundreds of likes. FB is not offended by a dead Arab with a gun. It’s scared of other things, but you’ll have to re-read the article to find out

> A dead dude with a rifle

Yeah, like Jefferson Davis, or any other dead dude with a rifle used to incite violence. Nothing new here. Nothing to take lightly.

> dead Arab with a gun

Why are you trivializing Arabs? Much less dead Arabs? I don’t think Arabs would appreciate being taken so lightly. I don’t take them lightly. They’re serious people.

> That’s a laugh

This is exactly what I’m talking about. Glossing over and making trivial things like this. It’s not funny. It’s real and it’s serious. I’m certain you wouldn’t be laughing if it was your killing being incited.

Re: Facebook Is Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the US and Israeli Governments

#97

Post by lithos »

beagle3 wrote: post #91
0xBA5ED wrote: post #90

>96 percent of Palestinians said their primary use of Facebook was for following news This is astounding to me given the likelihood of Facebook's unspoken allegiances and their history with respect to censorship.

While I agree, i’m Not familiar with even remotely neutral sources in Arabic; on one side you have a Hamas/Fatah “Iraqi information minister”’style reporting, and on the other side you have the Israeli reporting in Arabic. Facebook, despite being more closely aligned with Israel, and having the history of a Skinner box operator, is still more likely to bring news vetted by their friends with some commentary. Very sad…

"History"? it should be something closer to "reality of being a Skinner box operator".

Re: Facebook Is Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the US and Israeli Governments

#98

Post by dogma1138 »

Udik wrote: post #95
ars wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tel Aviv is the internationally accepted capital of Israel, not Jerusalem. Can we please not post that nonsense here? I expect it in some of the stupider social networks (which tend to draw a certain kind of poster), but seeing that here is surprising. Other countries do not get to tell a county where its capital is. What exactly makes Tel Aviv the capital anyway? There's no seat of government there, nothing. Did t…

> Can we please not post that nonsense here? Can you please not post nonsense here. Tel Aviv IS the internationally accepted capital of Israel, period. It's a fact you might like or not, but it remains a fact. All the world's embassies are in Tel Aviv, not Jerusalem.

Jerusalem might be not publicly acknowledged but no one claims TLV is the capital of Israel.

All International agreements are under signed as Jerusalem, anytime there is a foreign visit they go to Jerusalem, even Sadat when he came to visit Israel during the peace process went to the Knesset in Jerusalem to give his speech.

The US embassy and many others in the Netherlands are in The Hague it doesn’t make it the capital of the Netherlands. International recognition isn’t what defines a capital city so while most nations won’t publicaly say its Jerusalem not a single one would say it’s Tel Aviv they would simply refuse to answer.

Re: Facebook Is Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the US and Israeli Governments

#99

Post by ENOTTY »

dragonwriter wrote: post #86
wavefunction wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Censorship can only be committed by the government. The fact that facebook is complying with requests from governments is both the right and responsibility of facebook.

> Censorship can only be committed by the government. False. Heck, the modern understanding of censorship is strongly influenced by the (officially, still continuing, but greatly reduced in significance even within the Catholic community) official censorship practice of the Catholic Church. Now, there are certainly consideration that apply tomstaye censorship that may not apply equally to non-state censorship, but st…

The Catholic church was the government in large parts of the western world back in the day.

Re: Facebook Is Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the US and Israeli Governments

#100

Post by lostlogin »

prove_np wrote: post #37
pwaai wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I live in Israel and not once I've been shown some horrible video of Palestinians attacking locals. Well, if you bury your head in the sand on a hot summer afternoon and proceed to claim its night, it's hard to take further claims seriously. I will agree that there is extremists on both ends that just furthers their own political/economic interests and muddies the water. ...but my analysis of the conflict over ther…

I encourage you to come over and see how things actually go by. People are getting killed by terrorists who happen to be 16 years old kid brain-washed by the same news you and I are having an argument over. My point was that we've never demonstrated the same approach to the so-called beef. We do not go out to the streets, gun blazing, and start killing. I'm sure some of you will hop and go say "Right, you prefer to d…

Israel kills far more Palestinians than Palestinians kill Israelis.
Post reply on HN