801–810 of 1001 posts
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> What would trying to sell billions in stock at once Let them pay their taxes with stocks. Problem solved.
Ignoring the many other reasons why that would be problematic, what happens when the US government suddenly owns notable (or even controlling) stakes in companies?
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That Facebook would turn into a soft core porn site was pretty unexpected, at least for me.
Instagram is {in}famous for its bikini babes, a not insignificant fraction of which advertise their "availability" in various cities. How this has never come up in the various congressional hearings about protecting children mystifies me, reddit, twitter and instagram all have a culture of onboarding young women into sex work.
That's quite a claim.
It's funny because Facebook's news feed in the last couple years is unusable, filled with AI slop and clickbait. Twitter similarly requires aggressive use of block + mute to eliminate scams, clickbait, and other content I'm not interested in. I don't know if this is due to their changes in moderation policy, or if AI has overwhelmed them, but I vastly preferred the old news feeds
A few years back it started showing me obvious political ragebait. I ignored it and then it started showing me pictures of women whose nipples were obviously showing through their clothing, which was an improvement, but still not the reason I signed up for Facebook. I've always understood it as the algorithm is looking for engagement and will try some lowest common denominator tactics to engage in it. As someone who…
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There was. They just weren’t in office yet. Yet, they still pressured Facebook to suppress truth and opinion they just didn’t like. You can chose to not defend bad actions.
You’re thinking of the FBI, who reported to Trump. The Biden campaign reported things like the non-consensual nudes which did not have any justification as a public interest story.
You wrote that I’m sure doing your very best to believe it. Bless your heart.
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Well when you have over 100m in assets in your pile of gold in the dragon lair, its time to be extractive.
> Well when you have over 100m in assets in your pile of gold in the dragon lair, its time to be extractive. This is emotional pleading, not a serious argument of any sort, based on the core premise of "this person has more money than me, and I don't like that, therefore I should get some".
Wealth and income inequality has well-studied negative effects on society.
The ability for a single person to own over $100m in assets is not a human right. It's not a protected class or status. It's an abhorrent misappropriation of human resources. It is a societal mistake.
And let's not forget, people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg have multiple THOUSANDS of $100 million dollars in net worth. This completely insane $100 million figure is so small to those men that you would have to earn $100 million every single year for over 30 lifetimes to get to their level of wealth.
It's not about demanding some of the money from the wealthy. That's a shallow way to think about it. It's about the inherent power imbalance and exploitation that comes along with being excessively wealthy like this.
Think for a second what would happen to you if Jeff Bezos banned you from using all Amazon products. Would the Internet even work anymore for you? You know, every company has the right to refuse service to anyone. This one man can basically cut you off from television, e-commerce, Internet, employment (if you do engineering work on AWS), even Thursday Night Football.
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How about a choice for which social circle you'd like to view at one time. We could call it "Circles".
By far the biggest thing people remember about Google+ was the hamfisting of it (several people lost their Youtube accounts) and yet people also reported that it was otherwise a good experience (compared to the Facebook feed); one thing Google had to contend with was Facebook not offering access to the social graph so they had to build the network effects by a more difficult route eg Facebook replacing people's email…
It’s been years and I’m still mildly annoyed about losing it.
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Sounds like it's the FBI's credibility that is shot - imagine Facebook had done nothing and it HAD been a Russian propaganda operation ?
> HAD been a Russian propaganda operation But it wasn’t. And everyone who looked the videos of Hunter smoking crack, and his text messages discussing Joe Biden involved in business dealings, and his relationship with his 24yo niece knew it wasn’t “Russian Disinformation”. It was obviously real, and hidden from everyone in order to influence the election. It was censorship at request of the government and election int…
I’m still waiting for the media to tell me what “I want to fold clothes with you in the bathroom at Whole Foods” meant.
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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...
More to the point: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/06/scotus-tosses-cl... "On Wednesday, the Supreme Court tossed out claims that the Biden administration coerced social media platforms into censoring users by removing COVID-19 and election-related content."
> “For months, high-ranking Government officials placed unrelenting pressure on Facebook to suppress Americans’ free speech," Alito wrote. "Because the Court unjustifiably refuses to address this serious threat to the First Amendment, I respectfully dissent."
It seems like the court had agreement that government coercion did happen. They threw the case out because they couldn’t draw a direct correlation to harm to the specific people that brought the allegations up.