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

Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 472 posts

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#421

Post by 8note »

silicon2401 wrote: post #96

We should bar mega corporations like Amazon and Facebook from receiving public funds and subsidies. One of the many things that invalidates that argument that one should just "start your own ISP/cloud service/etc" is the fact that these megacorporations receive billions in things like subsidies. I would argue that if private companies can do what they want but the government is forbidden from favoring religion, contr…

One further: we should bar the government from giving subsidies and contracts. The government should do the work itself, not contract out to third parties who don't have to spend the money with the same constraints government has.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#422

Post by carapace »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #268
ashtonkem wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not being sarcastic, but a lot of them are honest-to-god cultists; their connection with concrete reality is tenuous at best. They think that Q is real, and that Trump had secret information about vague evilness being done by Congress (eating babies or similar) that was going to be revealed when they got into the Capitol. Then they were going to arrest them all and execute them as punishment for their alleged crimes.…

This post like this that remind me the people seriously believe there aren’t just the same number of crazies on the right and left. That “your side“ has all of the “reasonable people” and is “morally right”, what an amazing coincidence. You only want one side to have to “own“ their crazies. That isn’t how it works. Neither side should be thought of or represented by their “crazies”, that isn’t anywhere near good fait…

Well, FWIW, I grew up in SF and I'm mostly Left-leaning (although I would have voted for Mitt Romney rather than Biden if that had been an option) and I'll go ahead and "own" our crazies.

I've met a few Left-wing nut jobs here over the years. I once attended a Communist rally by accident (I had a crush on the math teacher's daughter, no one told me the overnight field trip was to a Commie rally until we were already on the freeway.) Even as a kid I could tell that they were just a pathetic "religion"-without-God, I would say the lot of them (American Communists) are card-carrying loonies.

But (and you can see it coming can't you?)

But they never stormed the capitol.

Two questions for you:

1) What were they trying to do? (If they are not weird cultists?)

2) Can you think of a group on the Left like Qanon on the Right?

I'm sincere, I'm not trying to troll you or talk shit. What do you think?

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#423

Post by Bakary »

hker wrote: post #409
Bakary wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public opinion is swayed elsewhere as well and in plain sight. Most people have barely any knowledge of their own history and usually don't care to find out. Americans have all the information at their fingertips and yet we can all see how that is working out in terms of discourse. My point isn't to defend the CCP apparatus or to engage in whataboutism, but simply to point out that China isn't a blob of unthinking pe…

I agree that: - the Chinese culture will never be the same as the US, and - Chinese opinion is not a single blob, but I think “oriental” countries like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan show that they could be persuaded (let’s not use “educated” here) to be: - less aggressive to neighbors, and - not trying to dominate, to overthrow world order by exporting authoritarianism and censorship. And regarding swaying opinions,…

I concur with the general sentiment.

I don't want to speculate too much and go into armchair territory. That said, I wonder if it isn't more productive to look at China and each country in the region based on its own characteristics instead of a regional idea. Looking at all those you cited, they all have pretty specific ways of doing things and very different histories. I think they have less in common than say France and Germany have together, but that's my personal impression.

Ultimately China has much to gain from changing the world order, just like it was natural for the US to export its values and overthrow governments back in its own heyday. It's frustrating to see Western countries reason along the lines of "1. Be democratic 2. ??? 3. profit" instead of remembering why it has historically been a successful model and working from those first principles. This veering into cargo cult and magical thinking territory is of paramount danger if China is currently developing a competing model.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#424

Post by spoonjim »

mrweasel wrote: post #14

So is Google going to throw them out of the Play store? What's the argument for banning one social media and not another. Where do you draw the line that manages to keep Facebooks app available, while still being able to defend the removal of Parler. I know many will think I'm defending Parler, I'm not. I just don't see why Facebook is continuously given a free pass for all the horrible stuff on their platform. Is it…

I was a Parler registered user and there is no comparison. If you scroll through Facebook you see mostly unflatternig selfies, ads for stupid crap, somebody's random complaint about something you don't care about, a few Trumpies from high school, and maybe 1 comment every 200 meters saying something borderline-violent about Nancy Pelosi etc.

If you scroll through Parler, you barely had to go 1 meter before there's something aggressively violent.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#426

Post by consumer451 »

ctrlp wrote: post #298
brewdad wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Parler was so intent on staying on the right side of the law, maybe they should have cleared that backlog well before Jan 6th.

You said it yourself, Apple, Google, AWS are "the law" now.

Sounds like a market solution, does it not?

To be clear, what I mean is that they are demonstrably not "the law." This is a market problem and this was the market solution.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#427

Post by agumonkey »

ezzzzz wrote: post #385
agumonkey wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the NSA was engineered with internet / social networks scale though. But they were already failing in the 9/11 days soo..

I mean, PRISM was a post 9/11 thing and yeah, Snowden's leaks directly noted Facebook, YouTube, etc. There is really no telling what exactly is out there, but we know the NSA has massive Data Centers and a massive budget. Basically, even the most personal private information about literally any citizen is just a FISA Warrant away. Things posted in a public forum are a cakewalk. Maybe they aren't doing anything novel…

Prism is the tool. But I assume that the paradigm is surveilling/fighting small groups not large mobs going slowly insane. But this is just a bedroom idea.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#428

Post by tqi »

mordymoop wrote: post #406
tqi wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> include things like Discord and Reddit as well as Facebook and Twitter. Hackernews?

Maybe. It didn’t seem like stuff was this nuts when we were constrained to BBSes, which is closer to what this is.

That's probably because only 5% of the world had access to the internet at the time.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#429

Post by 52-6F-62 »

3princip wrote: post #412
52-6F-62 wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your issues with opinion columns from 15 to 20 years ago does not render the entire medium of 21st century journalism "fake news". I'm certain if you read the entirety of the New York Times (and many other outlets) published articles on the subject you would find a range of perspectives, not just the ones that you're purporting sum up journalism of the past 20 years. I was reading the same outlets you were at that ti…

I haven't claimed that all content published by MSM is fake news or even the majority. A war was initiated under false pretenses, published by these organizations. Everyone knew it was fake and a charade and they published it anyway. This is a question of pot calling the kettle black. And in this case (against Facebook or in other cases Parler) the harm caused by MSM is far far greater than any conspiracy theory on s…

I'm afraid I don't understand.

Not reporting on the matter would not have prevented the matter (in this case, you're speaking of the war in Iraq).

The "MSM" did not fabricate intelligence and start a deadly war.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#430

Post by IgorPartola »

tristor wrote: post #410
IgorPartola wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Substitute Amazon for local pharmacy, grocery store, or gas station. Look, the point isn’t to talk about gun rights. The point is that Parler was the toxic runoff from 4chan, Facebook, and the parts of Reddit it deemed too toxic to keep. Facebook is 99.9% reposting of random memes. It’s 0.1% is doing a lot of harm, but by and large it isn’t obviously designed to be a white supremacy platform, it just happens to be us…

I think rather than trying argue your original analogy was relevant and useful, you should instead simply admit that it was a bad analogy using an (intentionally or not) inflammatory and afactual comparison that detracts and distracts from the point you are trying to make. It's pretty clear that you're trying to make the point that Facebook is a platform for mostly benign things which as an ancillary has functionalit…

I will say that my analogy might not have been as universally accessible as I had hoped. Clearly not. I could have picked something like chemical compounds as examples. It is a sad state that so many people attach their identity as humans to gun ownership and I keep underestimating just how much some cling to that.

To your other point, I am not defending Facebook here. The question that was raised: how come Parler was deplatformed as harmful but Facebook wasn’t even though it’s arguably worse in absolute terms. My point was that it’s probably because in relative terms Parler was mostly seen as being used in harmful ways while Facebook is seen as mostly non-harmful with some harmful parts.

I stand by that assessment, as in why Apple and Google haven’t removed the Facebook app from their app platforms. I do wish Facebook would get reined in because it is not a force for good. I think there was a brief period of maybe 2-3 years when it was a net positive: when you could use it to simply connect with people you used to know and lost contact with. Initially it was a weird stalker platform as you said, later it turned into a combo meme machine (and a bad one at that) and a marketing platform. About the only parts of FB that I still find useful personally are its Marketplace which is an objectively better experience than Craigslist (though FB is ruining it with how it’s running advertising there that really messes up your searches), and Messenger (but only because I at some point connected with a number of people on there; I will likely be moving those conversations elsewhere since there isn’t anything special about the Messenger itself). It’s other two major properties, Instagram and WhatsApp, are useful for other things but also have their own major problems. Instagram I think is a flash in the pan until the current generation of users ages out of being cool and the next generation wants to move to a new platform simply because they don’t want to hang out with the old geezers. WhatsApp has a privacy problem by design and better alternatives already exist (Matrix, Signal).

But yes Facebook is basically a mostly bad for society platform, it’s just bad in the sense that fast food is bad, not in the murder is bad. We tend to react to diffuse bad influences differently than to acute ones.

Post reply on HN