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Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

politico.com

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

#951

Post by majani »

diob wrote: post #381
object-a wrote: post #184

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

My experience on all platforms is things have rapidly become slop. Quora, Facebook, Twitter, Threads. They all have a weird issue of random softcore sex stuff. I have nothing against sex content, but I do wish we could just click a button to say turn this off, like safe search. It can't be that hard to filter out all the weird shit, so I assume it makes them money.

It's the same with TikTok. If you search literally anything, some absurdly curvy, skimpily dressed woman will be part of the search results. Weird because I thought adult creators would be the first to be censored once social media platforms got to the profit maximization stage. G rated content is the biggest revenue multiplier in the media business

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

#952

Post by tonymet »

calgarymicro wrote: post #745
vuln wrote: post #743

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The evidence shows that a disproportionate amount of funding went to urban areas in key swing states, which generally lean Democrat. Never saw a single ballot drop box out near a corn field. The money helped fund those sorts of initiatives.

Does it? The article I linked says > But election officials have said there is no indication of favoritism in how the money was distributed, according to previous AP reports. The board of the Center for Tech and Civic Life also includes Pam Anderson, a Republican and former elected clerk of a suburban Denver-area county. Republican election officials have also vouched for the program’s impartiality, including Brian M…

what was the outcome?

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

#953

Post by stcroixx »

giantrobot wrote: post #417
techostritch wrote: post #116

The thing I'm getting out of this Zuckerberg letter is that we've basically learned nothing. It's a nakedly partisan letter designed to signal to Republicans that he's not taking sides. Which I guess is fine, but I'm thinking about Paul Graham's recent tweet about the next round of social networks being designed to be built in to combat trolling, and it makes me think. This time there was valid concern about issues l…

> This time there was valid concern about issues like the lab leak theory being censored on social media You need to be very clear about what you mean by "lab leak theory" because that term has a number of definitions that are very different. There's the definition where COVID was the result of gain of function research that leaked from a lab through negligence. There's also a definition that it was an entirely natur…

The only definition the government should be involved in censoring would be one that is illegal and in that case they can get their lawyers and proceed with an indictment. Anything else is just propaganda.

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

#954

Post by tonymet »

calgarymicro wrote: post #738
tonymet wrote: post #734

"Why this, why now, why you?" Why did Zucc stamp his name on this now, after putting $450m into Biden's campaign in 2020, and willingly censor in favor of the 2020 Biden campaign (covid + Hunter biden). You've got to wonder why he seems to be signaling to the Trump campaign that he is taking sides. My guess is either hoping for kickbacks or to thwart retribution for 2020.

> after putting $450m into Biden's campaign in 2020 This is false; he donated to state and local election offices, not Biden's campaign.[0] [0] https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-mark-zuckerberg-ele...

95% of campaign contributions in favor of a campaign are not directly to a campaign.

What was the outcome of the $450 million?

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

#955

Post by laidoffamazon »

mandmandam wrote: post #907
laidoffamazon wrote: post #898

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The choice is yours. Correct, the choice was theirs. They probably didn't want to keep spreading ivermectin conspiracy theories, it's bad for advertisers.

You don't find it interesting that both Meta and Google had monopoly lawsuits aimed at them in 2020? And at the exact same time, the exact same people were "asking" for scientific discussion of many kinds to be shut down across Whatsapp, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook, among many others? Because it wasn't just Ivermectin. It was the lableak hypothesis, investigating the WIV, following back GOF funding, vaccine contr…

> had monopoly lawsuits aimed at them in 2020?

Who was President in 2020?

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

#956

Post by kjkjadksj »

throw10920 wrote: post #783
kjkjadksj wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Its more a question of if the best way to allocate our resources is to allow the bulk of the population to struggle while a lucky few have more money than they could reasonably spend on themselves in several lifetimes.

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

#957

Post by stcroixx »

renegat0x0 wrote: post #491
Diederich wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - I do not know if there is a clean, ethical way to "run the social media" It's a very difficult problem, no doubt. Do you think Hacker News is 'social media'? If so, is it being run in a 'clean, ethical way'?

Yes, I thought about it. Yes, I think it is, but it can change. I think it is due to rules and users here. If this became place for every uncle and aunt it would not be the same :-)

Without access to the content which is suppressed, how can you form an opinion on whether that suppression is ethical?

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

#958

Post by mandmandam »

laidoffamazon wrote: post #955
mandmandam wrote: post #907

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't find it interesting that both Meta and Google had monopoly lawsuits aimed at them in 2020? And at the exact same time, the exact same people were "asking" for scientific discussion of many kinds to be shut down across Whatsapp, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook, among many others? Because it wasn't just Ivermectin. It was the lableak hypothesis, investigating the WIV, following back GOF funding, vaccine contr…

> had monopoly lawsuits aimed at them in 2020? Who was President in 2020?

Yes, the case against Facebook was filed in December of 2020, less than a month before Biden was sworn in.

The Facebook case was then refiled by Biden's FTC pick Lina Khan in 2021, and made "more robust and detailed than before". [0]

Khan (who was fast-tracked to the position) also went after Microsoft and Google during the same period. [0] And Twitter. Some of those cases could have begun earlier too - what's important is that all those cases were active while Biden's admin was making "requests".

The Biden admin had a massive stick to wave at the tech giants, regardless of who started each lawsuit and when, and demonstrated both the power to make judgments and to easily make problems go away [1]:

> “You are now 0 for 4 in merger trials. Why are you losing so much?” demanded California Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley at a House oversight hearing this summer. “Are you losing on purpose?”

> ...

> In her interview with CNN, Khan said she was “quite happy” with the FTC’s merger work

All the leverage was sitting right there for any request from Biden to have a lot of implied 'stick' behind it.

Companies consented to remove content without looking too deeply at it, and a lot of problems went away. I guess that could be a coincidence, but the giant 9+ figure lawsuits would certainly be worth a mention, no?

* * *

0 - https://www.vox.com/2021/8/19/22632826/facebook-ftc-lawsuit-...

1 - https://edition.cnn.com/2023/10/16/tech/lina-khan-risk-taker...

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

#959

Post by aguaviva »

somedude895 wrote: post #869
KingMob wrote: post #834

He clearly has no problem with censorship, though. Meta just banned all accounts of the Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine, as well as NYU's People’s Solidarity Coalition.

[flagged]

I wouldn't be surprised if those accounts spread From the River to the Sea messages, which is basically calling for a genocide

If that were the concern they would swiftly ban the accounts of the Likud party, which has used the slogan in genocidal contexts as well (and continues to spout such rhetoric, along with its coalition partners). And in fact, the origins of the phrase can be traced back to Zionist literature from the 1920s. From Wikipedia:

   The 1977 election manifesto of the right-wing Israeli Likud party said: "Between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty." ... The Israeli-American historian Omer Bartov notes that Zionist usage of such language predates the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and began with the Revisionist movement of Zionism led by Vladimir Jabotinski, which spoke of establishing a Jewish state in all of Palestine and had a song which includes: "The Jordan has two banks; this one is ours, and the other one too," suggesting a Jewish state extending even beyond the Jordan River.
In any case -- current usage of the slogan from the pro-Palestine activist side is not intrinsically genocidal. Some basically do mean it that way. But most (at least those I talk to) do not. In their view it just means they want a Palestine that is "democratic, pluralistic, free from apartheid and other forms of oppression".

And there's certainly nothing untoward about wanting that.

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

#960

Post by calgarymicro »

tonymet wrote: post #954
calgarymicro wrote: post #738

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> after putting $450m into Biden's campaign in 2020 This is false; he donated to state and local election offices, not Biden's campaign.[0] [0] https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-mark-zuckerberg-ele...

95% of campaign contributions in favor of a campaign are not directly to a campaign. What was the outcome of the $450 million?

> 95% of campaign contributions in favor of a campaign are not directly to a campaign.

Yes, they tend to go to super PACs, not government election offices.

> What was the outcome of the $450 million?

Election offices having more funding to do their jobs.

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