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How come Musk has never raised awareness on censorship issue in China - which is orders of magnitudes worse than the US? He very clearly has no problem speaking out against other countries governments
Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content
211–220 of 1001 posts
Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content
#212I wonder if this is coming up just before the election because of the Harris campaign’s suggested policy of capital gains tax on unrealised gains for people who have over $100m in assets? I think this is a great idea personally given what these people are doing to avoid paying tax including taking out loans against their own share portfolios. Worth thinking about what people are willing to do to not pay billions of d…
I feel an exchange tax that included loans would probably be a much better approach. Taxing seated/parked assets, especially on the very wealthy seems like a recipe for disaster. So you have to sell, or leverage the property to pay taxes. What would trying to sell billions in stock at once, or leverage hundreds of thousands of rental properties look like to the larger economy, and what would the effect be? Also, who…
> Taxing seated/parked assets, especially on the very wealthy seems like a recipe for disaster.
Idea: tax loans taken out using assets as collateral at regular income tax rates. After all, that money gets used like regular income (living expenses).
The taxed amount can then be added to the basis when the asset is sold. It would be like reverse of depreciation calculations.
Set an asset and loan value floor so it only affects people with assets $10M+.
After all, regular people pay taxes on annuities, which are similar in structure.
Disclaimer: IANA-Accountant, but I am a taxpayer who tries to legally minimize my taxes.
Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content
#213Earlier 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…
Scale does not matter. Where in the constitution does it say “scale”?You have freedom to censor your small online forum as you see fit, you are welcome to censor your mega-super Facebook platform as you see fit. There is no distinction here. Those people who get kicked off a platform are free to set up their own forums (or go to telegram or whatever)and yell into the cloud about the wrongs done to them and set up the…
It should matter. In fact, this is why antitrust law exists. If ideas are a marketplace, then Facebook has pricing power in that market. Facebook is big enough that it's actions alone dictate the opinion of a large portion of America. Twitter used to be the same way.
The answer to all this censorship is simple: break up Facebook. If we absolutely, positively can't, then make them a common carrier, regulate them like a utility, and strip out all the profit incentive to keep bad actors on the system. The funny thing is that Facebook's crimes are not merely censoring what they believe to be disinformation, but also amplifying people who break their own rules. Facebook and Twitter had world leaders policies intended to justify keeping politicians who break their rules on platform, specifically so they could amplify them, because it made the company money.
In other words, everyone angry that Twitter banned Trump in 2021 should also be angry that Twitter didn't ban him in 2017.
Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content
#214[flagged]
The idea that a private social/sharing/communications platform should be required to carry the messages of the head of government is strongly authoritarian and quite unconstitutional. It’s incredible to me that people will argue the government’s lack of control over mass media platforms is censorship. IMO, nobody should be required to carry government propaganda.
yeah but you can still disagree with them for doing so. I don't get why so many people think the 1A protects them from criticism of the way they exercise their own freedom of speech. It's not just your freedom of speech that gets protected.
Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea that a private social/sharing/communications platform should be required to carry the messages of the head of government is strongly authoritarian and quite unconstitutional. It’s incredible to me that people will argue the government’s lack of control over mass media platforms is censorship. IMO, nobody should be required to carry government propaganda.
That's not what the parent is claiming, merely that facebook lost all credibility
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Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content
#216But he has no regrets pouring gasoline on the bonfire of Brexit, I guess? He's only concerned when there is a real danger of someone going after his wealth. It will be interesting to watch the business community of the US unite against the Democrats. Interesting times.
Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content
#217Notably, Meta's algorithmic feed evolved so rapidly that it had major consequences before they were well understood.
1) FB launched and was able to scale past MySpace by making its feed algorithmic and gracefully degrading the freshness of content to get good uptime while MySpace was unusable during peak hours of the day.
2) FB realized that the feed being algorithmic could be a good thing, and could drive engagement directly, apart from simply avoiding downtime.
3) FB realized that the algorithmic feed was the heart of its ad platform.
4) Users got an explosion of sponsored content that overwhelmed the useful human content from friends and family.
5) Zuck decided to focus on News content and vowed to make FB the place to go for news.
6) The algorithmic feed created incredible virality and rapid spread of sensational, triggering content. Donald Trump's campain in 2016 exploited this characteristic and was able to exert great control over attention simply by Donald saying outlandish and intentionally polarizing things.
7a) This tactic, combined with viral content from other fringe groups (with questionable sponsorship & eaily funded via the ad platform) was credited with Trump's victory in the 2016 election. News orgs, motivated by profits and engagement, kept publishing more and more of the sensational stories which gave Trump's approach more and more power. Those opposed to Trump unwittingly fueled his rise in their naïveté about how the algorithm was amplifying his worldview when they shared stories about how abhorrent it was.
7b) This was a stunning blow to Meta and led to the rapid creation of internal censorship teams in response to pressure from political leaders.
8) Facebook's voluntary censorship was among the first in a movement to de-platform a wide variety of political speech in the US and other nations. Family members of top US officials were high level execs and FB, and there was/is a revolving door between Meta and government, even between Meta and the CIA (Meta's internal "disinfo" team is staffed mainly by ex-CIA info ops experts and analysts).
9) All this led to the creation of new, "anti-censorship" platforms, the purchase of Twitter by Musk for political reasons, and a variety of other consequences.
10) Now Zuck finds that consumers have lost some trust in the FB brand and there is tremendous pressure to keep the ad business profitable, but most importantly that hiring thousands of content police is very expensive and has unintended consequences.
We can hope that the US Government chooses to resort to more direct attacks on free speech and gives up the approach of pressuring firms to do anti-democratic things. With most Americans happily consuming an algorithmic feed that aggressively suppresses dissent, it is funny to think about the impact on society it has compared with something like China's great firewall.
Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
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He must have a fantastic PR team. Across the political spectrum, I'm seeing a ton of support for him. Decades of harvesting and selling personal data (including shadow profiles of non-users), "I don't know why people trust me", Cambridge Analytica, the metaverse/attempt at owning the future of the internet- all swept under the rug in exchange for open Llama weights and a couple statements about censorship. Musk could cure mortality without changing as many minds about him.
Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
Putting it even more simply, people don't need tax breaks. If our current system has loop holes it needs to be simplified such that loop holes can't reasonably exist.
It would be nice, but I don’t see why perfect need be the enemy of good
In my opinion, we don't need perfect and we aren't comparing to good.
A perfect tax code would be impossible, a more simply one would be very doable.
We're talking about a campaign proposal here with no legislative draft so its a guessing game, but in my opinion any move similar to taxing unrealized gains will serve only to make it more complex and would not fall under the category of "good" for me.
Re: Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. If you look at every attempt to create "The Uncensored Free Speech Version Of [ANY_SERVICE]," they all, inevitably turned into a 4chan-like trashfire. You've got to have some kind of moderation.
This is where I really feel my age. Every message board and chatroom (bbs, forums, irc, icq, aol, et all) on the young internet was virtually uncensored and a 100% free for all, yet we all mostly got by. You went to the places you knew to go to. The communities mostly self moderated by kicks/bans. It worked really well. So whats changed? Well, I have my thoughts, but one thing is for sure, as soon as the platform its…
There isn't really any such thing as true "self-moderation", because there are always mods/admins who are more empowered to enforce judgements than the typical user. That system necessarily changes as those forums grow. Your perception of "the platform itself" doing the moderating is just some arbitrarily chosen tipping point along that evolution where you notice the subjective change.