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

Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

politico.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 1001 posts

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#71

Post by JumpCrisscross »

mypastself wrote: post #65
consp wrote: post #2

He said it is not political and published it at the end of an election cycle ... Of course it is.

Can’t find the claim about the statement not being political anywhere in the linked article. But there’s this: > Meta’s CEO aired his grievances in a letter Monday to the House Judiciary Committee in response to its investigation into content moderation on online platforms Sounds like he wasn’t the initiator of the discussion, but I may be misreading the paragraph.

And it’s in the news because it’s being made newsworthy, not because it’s new.

“A U.S. federal judge,” in 2023 “restricted some agencies and officials of the administration of President Joe Biden from meeting and communicating with social media companies to moderate their content” [1].

[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/judge-blocks-us-officials-comm...

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#72

Post by JumpCrisscross »

throw310822 wrote: post #51
renegat0x0 wrote: post #49

- some people cannot think abstractly about speech, because it is skewed because of actions of Elon Musk, or Zuckerberg, or other individuals - it is certain that governments want to control the narrative, and it is not always done in our interests - sometime actions are done to help us, but [disinformation enters the room] - Everything at CEO level is "political" - centralization of social media and forums allowed f…

A quick reminder of how democracy works: people's choice -> government -> media -> narrative -> people's choice

> people's choice -> government -> media -> narrative -> people's choice

In this toy model, Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch have zero influence over either the media or government?

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#73

Post by JumpCrisscross »

mandmandam wrote: post #45
tyre wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The United States has free speech by all but the most extreme definitions. The 1st Amendment is well-tested and supported by the courts. Sometimes, like in Citizens United, to an extremely flexible definition of speech (political campaign donations by corporations.)

The right to speak, but not the right to be heard. That costs money . Speak in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and you can be placed in a "free speech zone" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone Let others say the wrong thing on your platform, be it advocating against a narrative or revealing evidence of war crimes, and you can be tortured.

> The right to speak, but not the right to be heard

Right to be heard implies a coercion to be heard. That’s the paradox of free speech.

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#74

Post by JumpCrisscross »

greenthrow wrote: post #70
mandmandam wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would the number of posts matter? Scale matters. Everyone on HN knows this. Why would the Biden Admin have a right to lean on FB to censor true and important information? "We need you to censor this false [read: true] information from your 3 billion users, because reasons" - not a very defensible position. By the way, I've advocated for tearing Meta apart and putting it in global public ownership for years , pa…

People on HN know scale matters for $$$$. Scale doesn't matter for rights. Again, these companies are using your outrage as a marketing tool. They are not, never have been and never will be open. It's not just Meta. Twitter/X is the same. They are all the same.

> Scale doesn't matter for rights

Ten people being denied their rights is no different from hundreds of millions?

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#75

Post by mike_hearn »

mrtksn wrote: post #31

In a few years they are going to be sorry for the other end of the spectrum because the issue stems from the fundamentals of their business: lack of mechanism to hold civil discussion, one person pretending to be multiple people, institutions pretending to be people. When a BS is viewed 10M times and its correction is viewed 10K times, what do you do? Demote the content you assume that it's BS but this time you have…

> Twitter's community notes are quite effective but they are simply very low bandwidth

That's why they are effective. I review Community Notes sometimes and the right assessment is almost always "no note needed". A lot of attempted CNs are just arguing with the poster's opinion, which belongs in replies. CN is meant to be for correcting cases where something is objectively false or missing critical context, and it does quite well at that. People are very good at spotting edited videos, mis-dated photos and so on, which is the bread and butter of real fact checking. Not very exciting but useful. Facebook could do worse than just reimplementing the system. It's certainly far better than letting activist run NGOs be editors.

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#76

Post by dwallin »

firesteelrain wrote: post #11
Etheryte wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if I see what you mean with the Stack Overflow idea. SO is purely a technical site, it's very easy to identify what's ontopic and everything else is offtopic. That doesn't apply to general discussion, never mind stuff like news or politics. How do you imagine that would work?

I was thinking like crowdsourced flagging and a reputation based system where users via reputation could be granted increasingly higher responsibilities as they use the site. People who post negative content would be subjected to negative feedback loops where their content would be progressively demoted, reduced visibility or encounter contribution limits. Moderation logs would become public for transparency purposes…

I think a better example of this type of moderation would be Wikipedia.

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#78

Post by Infinity315 »

throw310822 wrote: post #51
renegat0x0 wrote: post #49

- some people cannot think abstractly about speech, because it is skewed because of actions of Elon Musk, or Zuckerberg, or other individuals - it is certain that governments want to control the narrative, and it is not always done in our interests - sometime actions are done to help us, but [disinformation enters the room] - Everything at CEO level is "political" - centralization of social media and forums allowed f…

A quick reminder of how democracy works: people's choice -> government -> media -> narrative -> people's choice

I disagree with the assertion that the relation is cyclical. In reality, all of these systems are highly interdependent. I'd model it as a weighted complete digraph.

And certain subsets of these various nodes have a greater outsized influence than their peers. For example, the intelligentsia within the people are usually far more impactful than say Joe Blow from Appalachia.

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#79

Post by [deleted] »

greenthrow wrote: post #70
mandmandam wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would the number of posts matter? Scale matters. Everyone on HN knows this. Why would the Biden Admin have a right to lean on FB to censor true and important information? "We need you to censor this false [read: true] information from your 3 billion users, because reasons" - not a very defensible position. By the way, I've advocated for tearing Meta apart and putting it in global public ownership for years , pa…

People on HN know scale matters for $$$$. Scale doesn't matter for rights. Again, these companies are using your outrage as a marketing tool. They are not, never have been and never will be open. It's not just Meta. Twitter/X is the same. They are all the same.

[deleted]

Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

#80

Post by Brian_K_White »

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #59
chasd00 wrote: post #46

When the platforms starting censoring during the pandemic and last election cycle I remember saying they better get it right 100% of the time because the moment they get it wrong their credibility is shot. Hear we are. Censorship, beyond what’s required by law, is doomed to fail.

They were already doing censorship, just for different things - there was never a free for all because that eventually ends up like 4chan which is not advertiser-friendly. So you can lose credibility two ways, one by not doing any censorship because people on the internet will be the worst if you let them. Doing too much censorship is also bad because people don't like that either. Of the big causes of censorship cur…

Theres no push back because only the uploader knows it even happened. The millions of other people who did not get to see that video never knew there was anything that was taken from them.

Even after you start to hear about an example here & there, it still feels like an isolated and insignificant example. You as a viewer don't have any way to perceive the scale, the mass of what is being blocked and diverted and modified and bowdlerized. I mean to include all the ways creators taylor their stuff and self-censor so that it will get through, not just plain take downs.

Everyone knows it happens, but you have no way to see what that really means in it's totality. I think people would push back a lot if they could see that somehow.

Post reply on HN