hckrnws
Meta blocks human rights accounts from reaching audiences in Saudi Arabia, UAE
(alqst.org)
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by giuliomagnifico
by giuliomagnifico
The site www.alqst.org is blocked here. I had to turn on a VPN to read the article.
Here, it's not even allowed to read about what's not allowed!
So yes, they absolutely have a choice.
In a just world, would social media platforms be taxed higher on corporate revenue and how would that pan out? Maybe we'll be left with small federated platforms without algorithms and ads.
Individual action is not an effective response.
But Meta is an international company, so maybe they have servers/staff in Saudi Arabia, in which case their only options are to leave the country or comply.
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Meta also had to block legitimate coverage in the US during the Covid pandemic because it conflicted with whatever the mainstream narrative was at the time, due to government forcing their hand.
If you're mad at any company that's following laws you don't like, you should direct your ire at the government that created the laws or policies, not at the companies that have no power to overrule said governments.
On one hand HN gets mad when big tech is perceived to have too much power, then on the other hand HN gets mad when big tech doesn't have enough power. It doesn't seem very coherent, just a mob getting angry at random emotional triggers.
Meta is a scourge.
It is useful, because instead of being surprised and reading this article, you can nod your head and go about your day because you already knew they were a company that was rotten to its core.
I would take most of these comments seriously if the respondents acted like they knew that
But in the demand from the article, I agree that it would be helpful to know the rules behind the censorship requests, but if they are remotely similar to the rules in democracies and republics that people are inspired by, then it comes with a gag order
Some say it will never happen, but they said that about the now-dying tobacco industry, too.
If they won't move off of facebook, I'm not sure there's anything you can do to retain the same level of interaction. Maybe you could allow yourself a reduced level of interaction while still feeling connected. For example, an SMS every couple of days should be plenty enough contact to keep up with any significant events. If you really want to take the reins, you could organise events yourself, ensuring you won't miss them.
That's just social media. Wait until CBDCs are rolled out globally and we'll what else can get blocked.
Who writes a carefully worded statement like this, in multiple languages, but then "accidentally" forgets to include details about who was blocked and why?
All that masquerading as a paragon of privacy but it never works where it's actually needed.
Why does this company deserve tax-breaks on their AI data-centers again?
> Since 30 April 2026, Gulf-focused NGOs ALQST for Human Rights and Democratic Diwan, as well as Saudi researcher Abdullah Alaoudh and human rights defender Yahya Assiri, have had their Facebook accounts rendered “unavailable” in Saudi Arabia at the request of the Saudi government, in a form of “geo-blocking”. Similar restrictions have been imposed in the UAE
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Why make it sound like it's a UAE problem?
Since y'all are pro at censorship, you may have the answer to my question?
Or is the content simply absent, and unless you directly visit the banned accounts, you don't even know anything was censored?
Who's naive enough to think that big corporations like Meta would care about human rights?
Zuck doensn't care. His motto is 'dumb fucks'. And that wasn't a joke. It's how he sees people
Zuckerberg proves otherwise IMO. There doesn't seem to be a bottom to how low they can go.
I'm shocked.
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Something happened during the pandemic where too many normies got hired into tech and then started larping around here.
The quality of comments here is now just emotional mainstream nonsense, compared to the annoyingly autistic (but often intelligent) analysis that used to be commonplace.
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It just means HN hasn’t yet held the vote to decide what we collectively think on the matter. The vote takes place tomorrow, and you need 500 karma to be eligible to vote.
In seriousness, what an immature view of the world to think an online forum has a hive mind that can be called out for hypocrisy.
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I communicate with direct family and many friends through Signal. Don't tell them to replace WhatsApp by Signal. Ask them to install Signal besides WhatsApp.
Both can exist at the same time and this is a route with much less friction and slowly builds the network effect.
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My position is that these companies are already violating Section 230 so that's the first thing you could attack them on. Section 230 shields "interactive computer services" from strict liability for third-party content. It's enabled the likes of Wordpress and Geocities and the original version of Youtube so they caqnq't be sued for defamation for what users post. This is distinct from, say, CNN, NYT, WaPo, Fox and other media companies that do have strict liability because they're first-party publishers.
My position is that an algorithmic feed and selective distribution turns such companies, which includes social media companies, from platforms into publishers (Section 230 doesn't use that language specifically; it's paraphrased).
Twitter pushes Elon Musk onto everyone's feeds. That's not a "platform". Twitter should be legally liable for doing that. Meta's Jordana Cutler essentially boasted about suppressing pro-Palestinian content [1], in effect consciously pushing pro-Israeli content. How is that different to just publishing the exact same content? I don't think it is.
The other way to handle this is as a product liability issue. Just like tobacco companies, social media companies should be sued for the foreseeable and known harm they produce, such as targeting minors, allowing advertisers to target minors, addictive behavior, pushing dangerous ideas (eg eating disorder content) and so on.
[1]: https://theintercept.com/2024/10/21/instagram-israel-palesti...
They do DPI to interfere with VOIP calling over VPNs though, the purpose being to use phone bills as a yet another hidden tax (which the UAE has a plenty of).
Depending on the sophistication of the VPN software being used network traffic can appear to monitors as UDP[0] packets superficially similar to what many video games produce.
If you do business in a country you’re expected to follow the laws of the country. The device you made the comment from is most likely made in China or has several parts made there.
But Meta is evil…
I don’t like meta for their creepiness factor. Outrage on this one though is unwarranted. It puts their local employees at risk of prosecution.
The fact that these criminals are embedded so deeply in our society is a reason to fight against them even harder. They are corrupting politics, they are corrupting the economy, they are pushing for lower salaries and less rights for the working class across the globe. They can be stopped and should be stopped.
One does not stop fighting cancer just because it has spread out.
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Is this a good justification though? I get what you’re saying, but the same argument you’re making for social media can also be applied to everything else, isn’t it?
If I don’t do human cloning, someone else will. If I don’t make bio weapons, someone else will. And so on
Yes, they absolutely have a choice. People can choose to not assist with transgressions against human rights in the year 2026 :)
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Has a company ever faced any sort of legal repercussions for sacrificing profit for moral reasons? That isn't rhetorical. I'm not aware of this ever happening, so I'm dubious of your claim.
> My ambition is to employ still more men, to spread the benefits of this industrial system to the greatest possible number, to help them build up their lives and their homes. To do this we are putting the greatest share of our profits back in the business.
> A business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders. The powers of the directors are to be employed for that end. The discretion of directors is to be exercised in the choice of men to attain that end and does not extend to a change in the end itself, to the reduction of profits or to the nondistribution of profits among stockholders in order to devote them to other purposes.
A person from a government told a person at Meta to block it, and that person did (probably by telling yet more people to do it).
It is also operated by human individuals as employees and c-suite
The governments that forced these changes in the first place are of course acting immorally, that's not in dispute.
Hyperbolic example: If your boss tells you to kill the next customer or you won’t get paid, doing the killing isn’t amoral.
I guess it just feels like a lot to me to expect a company to break the law on purpose, even in the service of a greater moral duty. But maybe it shouldn't. Obviously if they did pull out of the UAE and Saudi Arabia over this rather than comply that would be a laudable stand.
Anyhow, yeah - Facebook being banned in UAE would surprise exactly nobody that's familiar with their government. People are willing to tolerate a whole lot of nonsense for 0% taxes!
[1] - https://apnews.com/general-news-4c1f57ed465940659eeb79b41447...
Apologies for the sarcasm. But I think it’d be helpful for you to expand a little on what you mean by EU “censorship” in this case.
That "if" is incredibly shaky IMHO.
Neither the UAE nor Saudi Arabia have extradition treaties with the United States. (On a practical level, they wouldn't be able to enforce one if they had it.)
In a just world what Zuckerberg and his cronies are doing - the sheer unrelenting tidal wave of destabilising societal damage (nationally, internationally, globally), not to mention the negative consequences of bullying and the exacerbation of mental health issues at individual and group levels over the course of, now, decades - would be considered crimes, and they would all be put on trial, held to account, and appropriately sanctioned for them.
What he's done to individuals, to marginalised and oppressed groups, to societies, and to global stability is far worse than any damage that, for example, Sam Bankman-Fried managed to do and yet somehow SBF is in prison for 25 years and Zuck walks free.
Not OK.
(Not to say SBF doesn't deserve his criminal penalty but to highlight the disconnect where we're not seeing similar treatment of these social media moguls who, at very best, are completely indifferent to the harm they cause but whom, one starts to suspect, are actually gunning for that harm in order to cement their own power and positions.)
Zuck made money for rich people.
Criminal culpability must always filter through this lens.
Entertaining the thought experiment where all the normies join the fediverse: now you’ve got a big juicy target maintained by hobbyists.
When it’s Lazarus Group vs Randall, the over-worked sys admin who stood up a node in his spare time, who do you think wins?
Social networks are cancer. Just ban the lot of them and move on.
Surely the people with the power to ban the lot of social media don't have their own propaganda to shove down your throat. Surely they will only ban the bad ones where foreign agents spread dangerous ideas and keep the good ones where only upright citizens of their own country can talk about how great everything is.
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How do you define social network, though? Is Facebook a social network, even though it includes a marketplace? Is HN a social network? Is Newgrounds a social network....? Seems difficult to stomp out effectively
Banning is not the way to go about things. India is always ban happy -> a competitive exam in a state? Take down internet in the whole state to curb cheating. Outright banning hard to deal with stuff sets a bad precedent.
You'd have a much larger number of targets which makes things somewhat more difficult for those looking to exploit them since they'd have to track down the various platforms and navigate a variety of systems each with their own rules and culture. Fewer of them would allow ads at all and none of them would match facebook in terms of being as easy to weaponize. "Pay us to attack this platform's userbase" is a core part of facebook's business model.
You'd also be much better off when the people maintaining the system are hobbyists because they actually care about the platform and moderation. That's a massive improvement over facebook which does as little as they possibly can, only enough to be able to claim that they do "something" at the next congressional hearing, while still making sure that they can actively censor what they want. Moderation on major social media platforms seem to frustrate the efforts of legitimate users more than spammers and scammers.
I'd put my money on "Randall, the over-worked sys admin" over the half-assed AI moderator bots employed by Musk and Zuckerberg
The government in the US will prevent others from immediately physically infringing on your rights, say to brew beer. So they’d help us online too even at the expense of corporate platforms right?
I assume you want FB and Insta banned. What about Reddit? YouTube? Hacker news? Discord? X? Dating apps? Snapchat? WhatsApp? iMessage? Gmail? Just curious where exactly you draw the line, and how you’d implement the ban.
I've been pushing for the under-14 ban, which is popular in almost every country with polling, and holy shit is it a pigpen to wade through.
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If you remove one viewpoint because of government mandate, while still carrying the other, your platform is creating a biased viewpoint to influence people, that’s on the platform.
There have been numerous cases of companies ignoring local law for both good and bad.
The logic that if the local government was more open about their repressive policies then Meta would happily help spread that information is probably true but I don't think anyone has ever disagreed with that.
1. Whatever the govt wants
2. Their own mods to max profit.
Corporations were conceived specifically to remove responsibility. They should not be this widely available.
The transnational private sector is neither morally consistent nor geopolitically neutral.
The transnational private sector is neither morally consistent nor geopolitically neutral.
they do plenty of completely arbitrary censorship voluntarily. no government had mandated the frenzied erasure of certain viewpoints during certain events of 2020-2023, for example.
Being complicit is something, but being complicit while trying to sugarcoat or hide it is something else.
Do you think Meta will comply if North Korea or Iran requests same censorship?
If your answer is "No, they will not comply", then problem is the company
I'd say the US government is more important to Meta than either the UAE or Saudi government. What do you think US government people are saying to Meta about this?
Since no matter how much power they have they won't behave good let's go ahead and regulate the shit out of them and tear them into tiny mangable pieces.
If we had a thousand different smaller federated platforms it would be harder for governments to impose rules on them anyways.
They'll gladly connect everyone except those people/places they personally don't like, or anyone their friends/business partners don't like, or anyone they are paid/bribed to leave disconnected, or anyone who it isn't profitable to connect, or anyone who is profitable to connect but not profitable enough to be worth the bother, etc.
But seriously, they would gladly connect three people and leave everyone else out if it were most profitable. The fact freedom, such as it still is, is unevenly distributed is no excuse and we are not obligated to shrug and go, “Eh, what do you want this super valuable corporation to do?” We make it valuable as human beings. It should have a responsibility toward us. The fact it does not is a flaw in the system, not a fact of life.
Make them put big block ads across ⅓ of the screen with rotating warnings of the harms of the web site people are using, like with cigarette packs.
People hate friction online.
It's always amazing how fatties can shift responsibility onto others. The calorie count for Cola is listed right on the bottle. Just don't drink it if you're to fat. And spend a few hours teaching your fat kids to read.
it is legal to drink Cola, yes? so I will drink it as I have no control over it... eventually I am going to have serious health issues... and Ray20 will pay for this from his taxes... or alternatively, we can add some tax to companies that are net negative to society and are causing Ray20's money to be spent on my fat asses healthcare, yes?
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A lot of the times when Meta does something like this the fact the governments in question essentially demand that action seems to be ignored. Would you have a better view of corporate power if corporations could unilaterally ignore the laws of sovereign countries in which they operate?
Wouldn't it normatively be more in keeping with a proper distinction between public and private to say lobby your congressman to stop the ceaseless funding and weapon deployments to countries in the ME that don't share our values? I have the same feeling when people complain about Meta and privacy. I mean at least they are giving you a "free" service and you essentially take part in a transaction. The NSA has all your data anyway. Does anyone remember their congressional rep trying to convince them this is a good idea? You can log off from Facebook at any time. In some jurisdictions you can even claim a right to be forgotten. Try sending such a request to the NSA or your local police department. Do you really think such public entities are more trustworthy than their private bedfellows merely because they fall on opposite lines of the public/private divide?
If you want a new public culture you should probably identify the real target is not private companies which really don't care about these questions and just want to do whatever moves margins. Your real problem is a lot less easy to propagandize about - the fact that a majority of your fellow citizens (in the USA at least) don't actually care about their (and by extension - your) privacy or human rights in the Middle East. They want cheap oil and cheap products.
Not sure how many election cycles American liberals need to live through to get this through their heads.
> I mean at least they are giving you a free service and you essentially take part in a transaction.
Yes, it is akin to a transaction, but we cannot ignore the power imbalance between the user and the corporation. They actively engineer their platforms to keep you glued to the screen. It is far from free. You pay with time, money spent on whatever is advertised to you and a lot of other things.
My proposal was analogous to say tobacco tax or carbon tax and the like. We somehow made it essential to be on social media, it is proven to be harmful, policy action to shift priorities.
It's their content moderation and perhaps bot policies causing damage.
I have first hand experience with how harmful their policies were during the SARS-COV-2 era, where I and peers who shared about health practices we were following with decades of experience to help improve our health were moderated and censored due to Facebook policies.
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My experience was that there wasn't nearly enough moderation on social media about Covid. The absurd amount of misinformation was the final straw that finally got me to leave Facebook and Instagram.
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I say this as someone who closed my facebook account 15 years ago, and who never opened an Uber account.
Messaging apps like Signal are more than enough now a days to stay connected with the few people I need and want to stay in touch with.
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Need to maximum profits for the share holders. Modern day large scale companies follow the Friedman doctrine, not human decency. [0]. They need that fix of infinite growth, which by doing so become cancerous to society.
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E.g. in The Netherlands. First they did a mass block last December, then again in April:
https://www.at5.nl/artikelen/237924/meta-verwijdert-instagra...
Some were reinstated again, but not all and not after they have been offline for to long.
(The Dutch government certainly rejects LGBTQ censorship.)
Governments suppress information all the time. We know of a huge list of thousands of documents and terabytes of video implicating people in child abuse and as important as that is, we aren't getting all of the information. That's the government position. Redact and suppress. It's up to the people to demand transparency from their government and if they don't demand it and fight for it, they won't get it. Corporations like Meta aren't there to help fight the power.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2010/06/08/the-twitter-devolution/
See also...
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/06/evalu...
And these lies, of course, were spread by the social media platforms themselves and their PR departments.
If you're asking which one of the three I think we should focus our attention for change, I think the obvious answer from both a moral and logical standpoint is capitalism. The combination of democracy and free speech means money is political power. Allowing individuals to amass this much political power is both unjust and destabilizing. That goes for companies as well. If companies are going to be amorally motivated purely by money, we need to do a better job of pricing in externalities to put reins on that amorality.
Saying ‘hi, I also like that band you have a shirt of’ was just too hard so we had to create trillion dollar monstrosities.
Oh well, now we have AI girlfriends as the next trillion dollar industry. We'll get it next time!
Boxer Rebellion, etc.
That includes censoring content that threatens puppet governments.
Social media prioritizing algorithms that feed off division and anger is evil.
If Facebook & Twitter were still ways to simply keep in touch with friends, family, and interest groups, I don't think anyone would care (other than the ads).
Most people's proposed solutions seem counterproductive. Making social media illegal and banning it entirety removes a valuable means of communication and networking for people. Forcing all social media platforms with n> users to be nationalized means all platforms that might be useful for activism will be controlled by the government. Forcing them to only use strictly alphabetic or chronological listings makes access more difficult, but doesn't necessarily remove polarizing or false information. Repealing Section 230 would cripple speech across the internet and make it impossible for platform owners to police minsinformation and hate speech without taking on legal liability for themselves. All of these solutions at least implicitly serve the interests of authoritarians and all of them only seem reasonable because of the current moral panic around social media.
Arab Spring
Nepalese Discord Protests
Euromaidan revolution in Ukraine
2009 Iranian presidential election protests
2011 Egyptian revolution
#BlackLivesMatter
#MeToo
Hong Kong protests
#NoKings protests
Yellow Vest protests (France)
Anti-Israel/Pro-Palestine protests
Anti-vaccine protests during COVID
Rohingya genocide
GamerGate
It is frequently confused with privacy, however. (https://www.privacyguides.org/en/basics/why-privacy-matters/)
iMessage is the dominant messenger because most people have iPhones combined with the fact that SMS has long been free and unlimited, so people don't see the problem of using it with the occasional Android user.
Really, it's all about the defaults. Even though everyone uses iPhones, they still use the calling feature from their cellular provider, because Apple doesn't push FaceTime as the default calling mechanism.
Signal is gaining popularity because there are people that care about using it over iMessage.
Signal is 100x better than WhatsApp, but it feels so unstable using any centralized messenger that has complete control over the software and the users. No centralized service can truly be relied on, non-profit or for-profit. But clearly that's what has to happen in order for the service to become mainstream, so it's an acceptable compromise for me. It's not like I can't say Signal does great things for privsec and metadata reduction.
Yet I've never felt as though I'm missing out. We communicate via alternative forms (texts, calls, hanging out in person) and I have never felt disconnected.
The whole trope about people being worried about missing out is misplaced - that feeling is exactly what these products are designed to imbue in their users. Ultimately, if you value others, you'll make the effort to connect somehow, and if they value you, they'll return that energy. If that two-way street doesn't exist, if they're not willing to give back a similar effort, then why do we need to know what they're doing or thinking every day?
"I've never had a social media account on any platform and I have plenty of friends and an active social life." Yeah, most people who use social media also have plenty of friends and an active social life.
You seem to not comprehend that there is actual utility to social media for many people, or that most people using social media aren't touch-starved incels or lonely basement dwellers or whatever.
But to answer OP's question since no one else will - maybe try Fediverse alternatives like Mastodon or Friendica.
Or you can do what I did and simply say “fuck it”. Get rid of your account anyway and deal with the consequences. I don’t even have WhatsApp (because, you know, Facebook) but don’t feel like that’s been a detriment to my social life. The people I care about understand and I see most of them on the regular. SMS and phone calls still work. I do know some people who live abroad that fortunately I can communicate via iMessage, but if that weren’t an option then email would have to do. I've been doing this for over a decade and while there was some friction at first, it’s been long since it has been an issue. It probably helps that these days most people understand that avoiding Meta is a good thing.
If you don’t care about people you personally know in your social media, then pick whatever you want depending on features. I recommend Mastodon. It has quirks (what doesn’t) but it’s fine. Chronological (not algorithmic) time-line, open-source, you can even subscribe to people with RSS feeds. If there’s someone you’d like to follow from e.g. Bluesky, there’s often a Mastodon bot for their posts. Or you can subscribe via RSS there as well.
Social is where the accounts are, many of which have a nonhuman substrate with the goal of coercing alignment out of you.
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79 chars.
Mexico?
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Nothing you can do about open forums really. They all regress to the mean user who has enough time to spend hitting the up and downvote arrows on the website all day.
I agree there are a lot more low quality comments, though. It depends on the article.
Assuming everyone actually does vote, which seems like a large assumption to make. Maybe what, 10% of people browsing/commentating actually votes? Less? So you have a small intersection much less than "majority of users".
Just read what people read, stop caring about irrelevant numbers, and participate faithfully in the discussions, the points matters nothing, either for if the comment is true or not, or if the rest of the HN community likes the comment or not, it simply doesn't matter.
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I don't know - I've said before, but the bigger red flag to me would be either that they worked for Meta at all, or that they didn't leave of their own accord. Any big tech company pretending someone was let go, as part of a mass lay-off, for performance reasons is generally going to rate as about as truthful as saying it's "because of AI", if I'm looking at hiring.
Not to erase that Meta is an absolutely shitty company run by a literal ghoul enabled by tens of thousands of "people" who are happy to make giving teenage girls depression in return for ad clicks their entire life's work.
If this is true, it should be easy to point to some examples from the last hundred years. Because that Wikipedia article you linked makes it very clear that the conclusion you're drawing is highly debated. The disagreement is important enough to be mentioned in the second sentence in that article. The first source on the page is the actual case and the next two are both criticisms of the interpretation that you seem to very confident in.
Target is embroiled in one of such lawsuits over ESG mandates. https://www.dandodiary.com/2023/08/articles/esg/target-hit-w...
It’s not as bas as the time they helped organise a genocide though, so there is that.
Here's the video - parent is right this is incredibly mild:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUk5CB9kaBY
From the article: "he was charged with endangering state security under a 2012 cybercrimes law that tightened penalties for challenging authorities." "Cassim has been in the maximum security prison at Abu Dhabi since June. In December, he was convicted and sentenced to one year in prison, a fine and deportation."
Anonymity online seems the ultimate double edge sword. I prefer privacy over government prescribed safety.
So just give up because something is hard? Sounds like the tech industry and its never-ending quest for low-hanging fruit.
"We've tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas."
I think user 0x5FC3 correctly identifies the root of the issue, and any (if implemented) regulation should be based on the algorithmic serving, but I hold a firm belief that you cannot and should not try to outlaw math. From my first glance at this issue, it seems tricky
Delay delay delay and continue reap the profits in the meantime by making people talk in circles instead of addressing the problem. Let Q4 figure it out, just keep the Q2 gravy train rolling.
Also, nobody is trying to outlaw math. That's just a silly hyperbolic talking point.
HN is usually pretty good about brainstorming as a group on topics like these, and I value the insights of others.
I'm a SysAdmin. I'm not about to write the law, just trying to partake in the discussion
Also, the comment I referred to was quite literally talking about banning the use of algorithms to serve content. I'll ask you what that is, if it's not banning math?
No, but a good first step would be to widely acknowledge that the problem is hard. And thus is not solvable by a quick fix of a type "let's ban <something>". Otherwise we will keep trying quick fixes and local optimizations that will be just as quickly subverted by the deep pocketed incumbents.
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In a perfect world, sure. In the real world, the political demand for a solution to this problem means we'll get a lot of crummy solutions.
If the company doesn't operate in the country, a competitor will, and the United States in particular will be criticized for failure to compete, losing ground to China (or some other actor), and of losing soft power. If the American company does decide to comply with the laws of the host nation, they're evil and bad, and they're an example of fascism or being complicit in human rights violations. These charges are never levered at other countries or their companies, strictly American ones. For example, France sells weapons to Saudi Arabia.
Certain loud groups also like to complain when the United States takes forceful action to prevent those same human rights violations. They want the US to withdraw from the world, but they also want the US to be at fault for withdrawing and leaving others to suffer. We should ignore what they say and do what we think is right and in our best interest.
We're not going to change these countries by refusing to operate in them and we're just going to cede ground to a competitor for on change and no advantage. We're unwilling to fight or go to war over these things either, so we might as well learn to live with some countries doing some bad things or having some human rights violation and hope we can change them over time. In other words, it's fine that Meta operates in the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia even with the human rights violations.
EU member states are happy to sell weapons to these countries. Who cares if we let them on Facebook too?
Zuckerberg claimed time and time again he wanted to connect the world, and it was part of the earliest mission statements:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/02/mark-zuck...
It was on the hoodie!
https://www.cnet.com/culture/zuckerberg-hoodie-makes-mountai...
Mark said, "But there’s this mission belief that connecting the world is really important, and that is something that we want to do. That is why Facebook is here on this planet."
https://www.thedrum.com/news/ads-not-short-term-solution-int...
He also said he wanted to make an impact, but I always felt like this was misguided, because what matters is whether the impact is positive or negative.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/05/mark-zuckerbe...
If we give him the benefit of the doubt that he actually wanted to achieve something positive, maybe he sadly became subdued by having to make an outsized return from VC money. I don't know that we should give him the benefit of the doubt, but imagine if he had sold to Yahoo for a paltry billion dollars and then created a site to truly connect people with a foundation or some other entity that gave him more freedom to ignore profit.
Meta has more luxury of choice than most companies. They can choose to make positive impacts if they so choose. "He chose poorly" and "You have chosen wisely" comes to mind from the the ancient knight in the 3rd Indiana Jones film:
Only if we want a utopia
But is it not consistent to be consistently inconsistent?
But is it not consistent to be consistently inconsistent?
That would mean regulation of social media companies seems appropriate.
That would mean regulation of social media companies seems appropriate.
Despite Meta's self serving actions here their morals are significantly better than those of Saudi Arabia or the UAE.
Unless the moral position is something akin to realist self interest, in which case the apparent "inconsistency" is actually internally quite consistent. Perhaps the lack of consistent moral positions in competing paradigms is less an interesting phenomena to point out and more a tell that someone is laboring under an extremely naive conception of human morality.
Those countries don’t allow Meta to operate at all.
> If your answer is "No, they will not comply", then problem is the company
I don’t understand what point you’re trying to make. Large companies comply with the laws of countries they operate in. It’s not optional. If you have a presence there you either comply with their laws or they shut you down.
In some of these countries they might even arrest any employees of the company they can get their hands on to send a message, even if they didn’t have decision making authority. That’s not something you subject your employees to.
A company can not operate in a country and not follow its rules.
thats not a very relevant comparison.
If the answer is “No”, then it makes sense they would not follow laws they do not have to.
Or alternatively, we can leave Ray20 alone and not force him to pay for the treatment of a 200 kg fatties with the illegal motorcycle racing and wingsuit jumping hobbies.
> companies that are net negative to society
It is fatties who are net negative to society, not companies.
The remedy in that case then would not be a tax but to ban them from operating in that country. We already have these sorts of export controls with other countries. It is just the case that despite their egregious human rights record (bone saw, anyone?) the United States has propped up the Saudi regime since basically it first came to exist roughly a century ago.
The reason is obvious - Saudi brutality is a feature not a bug. It secures access to cheap oil.
I may have had an overly optimistic ideal of people running small federated mastodon servers for friends and family for free/donations being the only type of "social media".
Thanks for the back and forth.
If an individual lobbying the government wouldn't be overpowered by monied corporate interest in the government, maybe. Sadly that's not the case, at least in the US.
> The NSA has all your data anyway.
Yes, and this is incredibly unpopular and if we had a real representative democracy we'd be able to do something about it.
> In some jurisdictions you can even claim a right to be forgotten.
This too is popular and would be codified more broadly if, again, it wasn't for corporate lobbyists.
> Do you really think such public entities are more trustworthy than their private bedfellows merely because they fall on opposite lines of the public/private divide?
To beat a dead horse...
> the fact that a majority of your fellow citizens (in the USA at least) don't actually care about their (and by extension - your) privacy or human rights in the Middle East
Factually untrue.
The Iran war is incredibly unpopular, beating Iraq and Vietnam in unpopularity this quickly into the operation [1]
Most Americans want us to stop funding Israel [2]
Most Americans are against spying on fellow Americans (esp democrats/the left; tho republicans love a good ole police state)[3].
I'd argue strongly the reason these numbers aren't more in favor of anti-intervention and privacy is decades and decades of propaganda and fear mongering (about socialism/communism during the Cold War and before, about the Middle East/muslims since the oil crisis and before) because of, you guessed it, corporations lobbying for military engagement, oil contracts etc.
There is a thoroughly documented history of American corporations lobbying the government to, here is a brief list:
- Hawaiian overthrow (1893): sugar (dole, spreckles) - Spanish-American war (Cuba, Philippines, Puerto Rico) (1898): sugar, tobacco, shipping - Columbia/Panama (1903): canal rights - Nicaragua (1909-1933): United Fruit, banking - Honduras (1903, 1907, 1911, 1924): United Fruit and others - Dominican Republic (1916–1924, 1965): sugar again - Iran (1953): oil - Guatemala (1954): United Fruit! - Congo (1960-61): copper/cobalt - Brazil (1964): mining - Indonesia (1965–66): mining, oil - Chile (1970-73): copper - Iraq (2003): oil, war contractors - Iran (2025-26): oil, war contractors
There are many more - some more contested than others - but the above list have clear historical documentation linking them to corporate interests.
Socialism, communism, "terrorism", the war on drugs, "democracy", and Iran getting nukes have all been helpful tools for US corporations to curry influence with bought politicians to have the US colonize or dismantle other countries for their benefit.
Your analysis puts all the blame directly on citizens vs looking at root causes and the obvious successes of corporate and government propaganda on the opinions of Americans.
Let's instead look at who benefits most from these wars and try and dismantle their ability to influence opinion and government and work towards a more representational and fair government we have a say in.
[1]: https://www.natesilver.net/p/iran-war-polls-popularity-appro... [2]: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20260519-poll-shows-majori... [3]: https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/52425-what-americans-think...
You aren't telling me anything I don't already know. You cannot be pro democracy and at the same time treat the electorate like children. Propaganda is part of electioneering. Parties advocating for their own interests should be a feature in a healthy democracy. Are you suggesting the electorate is incapable of dealing with their basic obligations as citizens of a free society? And your scapegoat for this is the corporations?
What is your theory of democracy if the population is so susceptible to "corporate lobbyists"? Why trust such a body to make decisions if it can't even cope with basic propaganda?
Have you been to red counties? I think you are severely over-indexing on your own biases. Corporate lobbying has nothing on tribalism, racism, and general parochialism. You seem to be well read enough when it comes to history. I am surprised your assessment of human nature has not caught up.
The fact is most Americans don't care. If they did they would elect different leaders. If your theory is that the electorate is simply brainwashed well that seems to me as much an indictment on the notion of democracy itself as a criticism of any allegedly brainwashing entity.
Of course I put blame on citizens. Your attempt to shift all the blame to "corporate lobbyists" is about as convincing as the "they were about to get a nuclear weapon" responsibility shift.
Citizens are responsible because in a democracy they are the ultimate arbiters. You don't get to shift the responsibility, it's not optional. The notion of democracy itself rests on it. If you feel a need to control what information citizens consume so that you can personally legitimize their decisions I would suggest to you perhaps you don't really believe in democracy. As George Carlin said, garbage in garbage out.
Unlike you, I listen with an open mind and curiosity. It's led me to an obsession in my health practices as a nearly full-time job for about 10 years, I don't just blindly follow what I'm spoon fed by a doctor or some authority figure. And neither do I blindly call forth the label of "science" to win approval and credibility.
Your statements imply that we can't trust scientists because of their "authority" and that they just use that position as scientists to nefariously control you?
Why should anyone trust you? "Curiosity", having an "open mind" and "a nearly full-time job for about 10 years" aren't credentials anyone with critical thinking would recognize as reliable.
Whether you like it or not, scientists and doctors have to go through many years of rigorous study and full-time practice for their specific fields and are constantly challenged by their peers in their work place and in academia. That's a more reliable (tho not perfect) set of credentials.
Scientists are intellectually adversarial to each other by nature because all ideas must be challenged (eg peer review) in order for those ideas to become consensus. Science is constantly in a state of change and evolution as incorrect conclusions ideas are abandoned in favor of more correct conclusions, based on new learning.
That's the whole point. Science will get things wrong, it's impossible not to some times, but the global scientific community is constantly seeking to get closer and closer to base "truth" about the world.
Unless you have some other suggestion, I don't see any other way humans can get a clear understanding of the world other than the scientific process and I see no less reliable source than the current global scientific consensus.
when I said I don't blindly follow authority or blindly call "science" as a credibility shield, I think you demonstrated bad faith of my argument by saying:
> Your statements imply that we can't trust scientists because of their 'authority' and that they just use that position as scientists to nefariously control you?
I never implied scientists can't be trusted or that they're nefarious. This is both a straw man and attacking me as some sort of person wishing ill intent on others.
When you said > I don't see any other way humans can get a clear understanding of the world other than the scientific process
Again via bad faith, or straw man, you imply I have rejected the scientific process.
Do you know what circular framing is? Do you see any circular reasoning issues in your response? I thank you for your engagement, though I can see we aren't aligned in intent in having an open-minded, scientific conversation.
I'm not going to pretend that the CDC did a good job during Covid, but it's very clear to me that a lot fewer people would have died if we had all followed their guidance more strictly. I generally err on the side of sparse moderation, but life and death scenarios are one of my main exceptions.
I'm sorry if I offended you. It seems like we disagree on the fundamental nature of science, and I don't think that it's likely that we will overcome that disagreement. So, it looks like this conversation is over. Have a good day!
Then again, here I am arguing in good faith with you, so more the fool I.
Thanks for demonstrating my point.
I can't wait until one day you get old enough and wise enough to hold a voice that is anti-mainstream or anti-populist, and some youngin throws your words Conspiracy right back at you to censor you. Enjoy what we call, "Karma" my friend.
This isn’t how the algorithm works. It costs less than $10k to get some conspiratorial nonsense circulating nowadays, and less than $1mm to flood the zone.
This can be a real argument and conversation but we would need to know what {x} is and the causal chain that leads the world to be better after Meta leaves the US.
The question is, who determines whether Meta should exit the US? Is it @ornornor? Hacker News? The Guardian? Europeans? Saudis?
If it's any of the above, I think Meta would have needed to exit the US market a while ago. ;)
Exactly.
Okay but that's not what were talking about. We're talking about Meta following the rules specified by the government of a country in which they operate. They don't need immunity to follow the rules.
The rhetorical device "Remember when they told us that ____" is meant to imply that there was some legitimate, trustworthy authority that made a claim about the world that people should have been willing to trust, that turned out not to be true. And what I'm disputing is that the specific authorities - prestige English-language news and opinion organizations like The Atlantic - should ever have been particularly trustworthy, or even authoritative. The Atlantic writing an article in 2010 arguing that social media is bringing democracy to Iran by facilitating the Green Revolution should not even at the time have been considered to be a trustworthy, authoritative voice that people should put much creedence in. Indeed the actual text of that article is someone challenging the claims that (Western) social media were particularly important to what was happening at the time, presumably in response to other, more pro-social-media voices also speaking at the time.
My point is not necessarily to litigate what specific people writing for specific publications about then-current geopolitical events, and how good their analysis was in hindsight; it's to argue that any analysis of this sort is simply not a promise that anyone should feel betrayed about not being consistent with real events years later.
Blaming capitalism for what's happening in America is like blaming an engine for a car not having seatbelts.
And I don't even think these are the best ideas. But they have "a proven track record".
We should treat existing fortunes as bugs and correct them.
They've had decades to move to Dubai or New Zealand or whatever other magical country doesn't tax its residents. I wonder why they choose to stay in one of the richest countries in the world instead?
They're trying to do the same with Islam, enormous amounts of money are being spent, but Islam has the advantage of an extremely strict and rigorous scholarly heritage and preservation, thank God. We are under no illusion that the battle will be an easy one. Much of what's happening today has been foretold in our texts.
I used those words in the context of the rise of companies like Meta and people like Zuckerberg. I trusted the people reading what I wrote to know that. A response telling me the US is a republic adds nothing to the conversation but allowing an individual to bask in their own pedantry.
The idea that democracy doesn't exist in the world is not something that I currently agree with. Did you mean to say direct democracy?
Very similar take on free speech vs absolute free speech. Did your definition mean to include exceptions for libel, fraud, child exploitation? Etc.?
You seem to be insinuating something about me by saying "it's interesting you felt..." But you are the one who put the "unrestricted" qualifier next to capitalism and no such extreme anchors on the other two concepts.
It's also interesting that you chose to imply something about my character instead of reflect on your own choice of words and their objective meanings.
- tobacco company execs lied under oath in the USA and killed millions for profit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Berkshire
- fascist-owned CNews keeps spreading illegal (under french law) fake news yet noone is jailed, the fines barely make a dent in the profits, and their nationwide TV channel continues to receive license despite breaking all regulations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNews#Warnings_and_sanctions
That's just scratching the surface.
More in general, Malcolm Gladwell is not convinced about the power of social media...
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and the genocide in myanmar, that was definitely accelerated political action
If you truly feel that judged and offended, and I say this with kindness, perhaps you would do well to ask yourself why.
Loved your little passive aggressive encouragement to look inward though. So kind.
Unless they collect stamps.
Shoving my child is sometimes/generally immoral. Shoving my child to get them away from an oncoming bus is moral, and on a swing often encouraged.
More on topic: Hurting others can absolutely be moral for the greater good/if it saves more people. What that is is less clear, and the reasoning can be (and frequently is) abused through lying, but I think it's fairly clear cut in the Russia/Ukraine case referenced.
But, honestly, I think all he ever really wanted to do was make money, and control the narrative. The connecting the world stuff makes a nice sound bite, and it was the motivation for some of the others at the company though. Read Careless People.
Like who? Notable candidacies are predicated on million dollar budgets, and pretty much everyone who runs on justice and gets into an office in the US then neuters themselves.
It's not a democratic state, and US society has very little tolerance for or understanding of democracy.
My point is simply you don't get to rob the electorate of its agency because you don't like the choice its made. That's about as silly as the grandparent to your comment citing random polls to establish some authoritative notion of what Americans believe.
What "agency"? Participation in US elections is junk level, politicians openly and routinely 'redistrict' and suppress voting, and the median US citizen is revulsed by the prospect of egalitarian organising.
The current US president is an Idi Amin style autocrat, and the "electorate" is responding by lulling around in the streets with one hand occupied by a live streaming spy device and then getting beaten by cops or cop adjacents.
> Yes, and this is incredibly unpopular and if we had a real representative democracy we'd be able to do something about it.
no, this is something people dont care about, and is a low invasive way for the government to solve a problem people do care about - terror attacks
Cheers!
The reason not to is they start trending and then infecting the political system. By the time anyone brings evidence to the table, the status quo has been shifted.
Also, I may not have as robust understanding of anarchism... Does anarchism incorporate game theory and account for tensions between competition and cooperation?
Do you really live in that much of a US-centric bubble where you don’t realise outside influence exists?
Sure, but I wager not being in the US means less money. And thus less influence
> Do you really live in that much of a US-centric bubble where you don’t realise outside influence exists?
Adding any friction to their influence is a good thing, in my eyes.
When you read history, you would see that many Mawali were scholars, and you can read about the Mamluki empire. This was never seen anywhere in human history.
As discussed elsewhere in this thread, the slavery that you're thinking of is still permitted in capitalist america, not to mention other forms that exist today in broad daylight, but are more subtle, so people don't say anything (and those are prohibited by Islam).
Correction, scholars were Mawali
To end any possible confusion, "unrestricted capitalism" meant capitalism without enough restrictions. It was used to cover a range of related concepts and ideologies such as laissez-faire, Anglo-Saxon, and neoliberalism. It was used to indicate that my problem was not with more basic capitalistic ideals like private property and competitive markets.
In your original comment you made the specific point "societies are going to have to reckon with the fact that democracy, free speech, and unrestricted capitalism simply aren't a sustainable mix". I then pointed out that "unrestricted capitalism" isn't actually being practiced anywhere, which is true. The reason I pointed this out can be reframed as a question: "What society actually thinks that unrestricted capitalism is sustainable?" or alternatively... "No societies are practicing unrestricted capitalism, so why would a reckoning be necessary?".
Your response was to then claim "Neither does democracy nor free speech [exist anywhere in the world]" which is clearly false.
Where I think we stand now: My opinion is that the reason these problems are mounting in the USA is due to when it exists in the money-government-power-system-life-cycle. There are surely lessons to learn here, but "unrestricted capitalism" is a misnomer and not relevant, and therefore a balance between it and other factors is by extension irrelevant. The core problem is corruption and a shift in government from prioritizing the wants of individuals to the wants of corporations. This is manifesting as both too many bad laws and not enough good laws, and a breakdown in how laws are written and maintained. There are several critical regressions, but a big one was citizens united. Overall, this particular instance of the system is at the end of its life, and requires substantial renewal. It's a messy and complex problem, and in many ways probably inevitable. It has nothing to do with unrestricted capitalism.
I admit that my original comment was insufficiently clear in representing my point and it would have been better if I had elaborated.
I am also disappointed by your continued Ad Hominem. It's exchanges like this that turn me off HN for a while.
Hope you have a good day!
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You just can't let a government get this bad, and the set of rules and procedures you need to reign in a tyrant are pretty different from the ones you need to keep a system stable and functioning under normal operation.
Had a previous US administration thought that the US is a stable and functional democracy that can be entrusted with such a law, you will be in trouble.
I'm supposed to conclude from this election that the electorate didn't support the current president?
Your post is really unimpressive. You care about these things yet you need me to provide you the name of progressive politicians? You want to take agency away because of redistricting and voter suppression yet immediately claim that the "median US citizen is revulsed by the prospect of egalitarian organising"? So do they have agency or not? Did the politicians program their revulsion too? Or was that the corporations? Maybe they need to hang out with you for a few weeks to be sufficiently deprogrammed.
I'm sure it will look like many other such ventures in that domain. I can see the people desperately trying to crawl over the walls now as you go into another second paragraph non sequitur.
I think what is clear is you don't believe in democracy. How can you given the obvious contempt you show for the American electorate.
Unlike you I know the difference between someone who doesn't have agency and someone who isn't worth my time. Have a good day.
For an electorate to have agency it has to be informed, egalitarian and politically organised. None of this holds for the notable usian elections. There are local exceptions of course, but on average usians do not organise politically and loathe those that try. This is why "activist" is an insult in the US and union busting widely tolerated. It is also why the US does not have political parties in the sense other countries have them, i.e. groups of people self organising and making collective decisions.
In the US, elections are commonly bought. Variations on this practice is also exported, and has been an issue for decades, including in Europe where the US has used a little of everything from mafia mediated terrorism to high tech psyops to get their way.
As for the parliamentary practices of the US, issues brought up in those contexts are often treated in a way that is absolutely inscrutable to most voters and in a way more reminiscent of televised game shows than actual democratic deliberation. Recently there was a proposal made but the initial sponsors did a miscount so it actually had a chance to pass, so they suddenly turned around and voted against it. Deceptions like that seem to be everywhere in usian politics.
If you want to use a different definition of anarchism that includes a legal system and police force then that's not the kind of anarchism being discussed here.
I assumed that by "unrestricted capitalism" you meant laissez faire, or in alignment with how it's defined in textbooks, Google, or any modern LLM model, etc...
