191–200 of 732 posts
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So what was up with Hunter Biden's laptop anyway? Was it full of state secrets or something?
Among other things, it shows that his father did know about his shady deals (ukraine, china). Also had videos of various illegal activities that you and I would probably be thrown in jail for if the FBI found them on a laptop of ours
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100% this. The former President was caught red-handed hiding top secret documents at his freakin' vacation home, with probable intent to commit espionage against the United States , including disclosure of sensitive human intelligence assets ... And Hacker News has it's knickers in a knot because the FBI warned a social media company that the Hunter Biden story might be a Russian psyops campaign? Seriously people?
> The former President was caught red-handed hiding top secret documents at his freakin' vacation home No, he did not "hide" the documents. As a letter quoted in a recent article in Politico [1] shows, the documents were removed from the White House when the administrations changed on Jan. 20, 2021. Which means whoever was responsible for checking documents that were removed from the White House by the outgoing Presi…
Btw, I don't recall any other US president having classified and top secrets docs at home after leaving WH.
It's now a NATO security issue, allies should be informed.
This is the great fear of many come to pass - censorship by algorithm. Facebook didn't outright ban sharing of the Hunter Biden laptop stories like Twitter did, they instead tweaked their algorithm to prevent the story from spreading. We found out about it this time because Zuckerberg owned up to it, but what about next time? For all we know, Facebook, Google and Twitter are doing this right now on a range of other s…
We do know they are doing this otherwise hate speech, spam and disinformation would be most of their platforms.
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I suggest reading the articles before writing in the comments: > Facebook did not completely ban sharing of the article, but instead limited how much its algorithm automatically shared it to other people for a week, while third-party fact-checkers tried to verify the reporting. So while people could post the article and discuss it, it was less likely to spread organically to new users.
"The algorithm" here refers to Facebook's backend. They are using that word carelessly. I know how it works, I worked on the actual "algorithms" at Facebook. This censorship wasn't done by an "algorithm" in any meaningful sense of the word. Somebody at Facebook coded a rule that showed this content to fewer people.
All algorithms are coded rules, the idea of using an algorithm to somehow launder responsibility in tech companies is ridiculous.
Before companies had algorithms they had heuristics, nobody would (successfully) deflect blame for the actions of the organization by saying "the heuristic did this!"
But on the other hand trump is/was a danger to society and democracy. I'm happy the story was censored, given that it still seems like a non story (no real crime committed afaik) And I fully understand the issues with my statement, the hypocrisy of it and the slippery slope nature of the act, but I do think some extreme cases do require bending the rules.
Watching the Earth move beneath the feet of the gatekeepers in the 00s came with a lot of warranted but clearly unsubstantiated catharsis.
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You don’t need a social network for that, just a messaging app. The idea that families would not be able to keep in touch without social media is absurd and obviously wrong.
You don't need them, but friction matters. You can stay in touch via the postal service. That does not mean that newer mediums with lower friction and more capabilities do not deliver real value to people. Whether or not social media is a net positive, no serious person can argue that they do not deliver value to large numbers of people.
Facebook added a Like Count next every comment my family made and thanks to that totally fucked social dynamics for good.
This is the great fear of many come to pass - censorship by algorithm. Facebook didn't outright ban sharing of the Hunter Biden laptop stories like Twitter did, they instead tweaked their algorithm to prevent the story from spreading. We found out about it this time because Zuckerberg owned up to it, but what about next time? For all we know, Facebook, Google and Twitter are doing this right now on a range of other s…
I do believe it's been this way for a while. Noam Chomsky wrote Manufacturing Consent in 1988. (There's a movie out there created in 1992 if you don't want to read the book). Basically the same factors at work then are the same factors at work today -- just escalated with an algorithm.
There is an objective reality -- it's just that people are too lazy to go find it.
But on the other hand trump is/was a danger to society and democracy. I'm happy the story was censored, given that it still seems like a non story (no real crime committed afaik) And I fully understand the issues with my statement, the hypocrisy of it and the slippery slope nature of the act, but I do think some extreme cases do require bending the rules.
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This isn't "censorship by algorithm" though. This was a human being intentionally banning a specific thing. There was no algorithm in the loop. They didn't "tweak their algorithm" anymore than an antivirus tweaks its algorithm to detect a new virus, they specifically censored a specific piece of content.
I suggest reading the articles before writing in the comments: > Facebook did not completely ban sharing of the article, but instead limited how much its algorithm automatically shared it to other people for a week, while third-party fact-checkers tried to verify the reporting. So while people could post the article and discuss it, it was less likely to spread organically to new users.
At least as I understood, the algorithm tweak only lasted 1 week and then was reversed once the story sounded more probable.