> According to the petition, two people asked [Meta AI] to pick a number between 1 and 25. They gave no instructions and made no reference to the election. In one attempt, the AI answered 13. In the other, it answered 22. Those are the party ballot numbers of Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro, respectively. The groups question the coincidence.
My confidence in the validity of their claims tanked right about here.
I'm all for regulating transparency into social media algorithms. Meta most certainly is compromised by foreign actors. But can we choose less stupid hills to die on than numerology and GIFs? Headline is not remotely supported by the evidence.
The example showcased is particularly weak, but the actual scandal with Meta AI is that when they are asked to produce campaign material, they spontaneously produce it with Bolsonaro's number (22), even when not asked. But then they refuse to produce it with other numbers like Lula's 13, saying they can't perform this for a specific candidate. When asked, they admit they were inconsistent in producing Bolsonaro-linked material, but in new chats they reliably continue to do so. See for example what was posted in this thread
- Meta has suspended Lula's facebook account a week from the election day, and many advertising instagram and facebook accounts associated with his campaign have been consistently suspended and then reactivated with days of delay (this is a huge loss in the context of a political campaign)
- The reach of his opponents is being inflated to unexplainable proportions while people are having trouble finding Lula's profile by searching for... lula. And then you got people like Nikolas Ferreira, whose videos consistently reach several times his follower numbers and reach several times more views, likes, shares, etc than people like Kim Kardashian, Beyoncé, Messi, etc. He's a Brazilian politician who speaks Portuguese and talks about strictly Brazilian subjects. He recently posted a MUTED video that reached 60 million views in hours.
- Lula's big WhatsApp channel for coordinating online campaign actions with voters kept getting suspended over and over
- There are reports from Brazilian META EMPLOYEES talking about the unresponsiveness of the internal American team to solve reports they made regarding Lula's platform issues
There are so many problems I can't even list them all here without making it a wall of text. It's just too obvious.
> ... but it's another to willfully disrupt legal elections in a soverign country.
Especially if they're the same exact people who whine at the top of their lungs that our elections are the subject of foreign interference (even when it isn't). If one does a thing to someone else, they have zero leg to stand on when they think it's being done to them (even when it's not). Some of our first childhood lessons are "Lying is bad" and "Two wrongs don't make a right". Beyond ridiculous that the (supposedly adult) people in charge of our nation and corporations aren't able to handle lessons that most of the rest of us learn and understand as tiny children.
If the company putting at risk underlying social contract is not completely dismantled and its head is not sent in jail, the message they get is clear: go on as long as you can sustain the loss and profit. Or at least it's apparently the only way they can interpret it.
Or the public could grow up, learn that algorithms are stochastic, and not let their vote be influenced by the number that pops up when they type in "vote" in the search bar.
If this is influencing your votes your democracy is already lost.
I'm not sure looking down on the general public helps anything. People are obviously influenced by spamming them with information. It works in marketing, it works on election billboards, it works in lots of contexts.
Now look through this thread and be amazed at how most posters are apparently satisfied by this level of evidence and some are even calling for China-style Internet censorship in response. A good reminder that even enlightened progressives are helpless against cognitive bias when they want to believe the worst about their enemies.
Yup, it seems unfathomable to some commentators that the likes of AfD or Le Pen or Bolsonaro would get popular support were it not for US big tech (interference). Which truly boggles the mind, it seems to be the same narrative that couldn't believe Hillary lost the election and it was the russians fault. Even if that were true, you should still review your policies and how you ran the campaign and learn something from it. Here it's like we're in a world with no reinforcement learning feedback loop.
It seems similarly unfathomable to other commenters that US big tech is ideologically aligned with the rightwing parties in EU and SA.
Further that the current US administration is openly rooting for leaders to get elected that serve its interests and not the electorate’s interests (which makes sense) and that US big tech is entirely controlled and thrall to the US administration.
Truly mindboggling
Censorship is when you don't leave an information manipulation and mind control tool in the hands of a hostile foreign power. Sure.
As for the evidence, it has been well documented beyond the parent comment's silly examples and it includes shadowbanning popular profiles with certain opinions.
Shadowbans have a high base rate. You notice when it happens to your side and take it as a sign of bias. You don't notice when it happens to the other side, because that is not your circle and you don't track them as closely.
I guarantee your political opponents also think Meta is trying to shadow ban then.
A: social media is a mind control tool that can be used for targeted political manipulation, as shown by the cambridge analytica scandal and plenty of other research.
B: the US is a hostile foreign power in relation to South America, as proven by its continuous threats, embargoes, tariff wars, coups and more recently the unashamedly declaration of a "Donroe doctrine"
And all foreign agents should be allowed to freely operate everywhere simply because Putin has falsely accused at least one person of being a foreign agent? Espionage sure is easy these days.
The perfidy of Putin (and many other authoritarian regimes) is that they can clothe their anti-democratic and anti-human policies in the language of their opponents.
So Putin can justify anything with words - what they say doesnt really matter or reflect reality. The actions and outcomes matter.
I mean, ideally I'd have Zuckerberg, Musk, Dorsey and friends in jail forcreating social networks where conflict is rewarded and pushed in front of everyone, leading to the collapse of the social fabric we're seeing throughout the world right now, but censorship is fine by me in the mean time.
your own country flipped its shit and said that Tiktok was CCP propaganda less than a year ago and tried to ban it, so it seems like foreign influence on your politics does seem to be a bad thing.
Look at this thread and you could think that the quoted example was the first, or main one, in the article.
When in fact, it comes after
> The petition describes a GIF search on WhatsApp for the word “brasil.” The first result was an image of Flávio Bolsonaro. It showed his ticket number and identified his running mate.
> According to the records sent to the court, the same result appeared on three separate accounts. The groups use this to ask whether its top position comes from systematic ranking criteria.
> A similar check on Instagram also showed images of the senator among the first results. Users who searched for “brasil” found three images of Flávio Bolsonaro in the top positions
> On WhatsApp, a GIF search for the word “ladrão” (thief) returned a caricature of the president in a striped uniform, a reference to prison dress. Another result carried the message “Supporting the Workers’ Party is a mental illness.”
> On Instagram, a search for the same word showed a GIF reading “Vote 13.” That is the Workers’ Party election number, tied to Lula’s candidacy.
And you could also think that the authors would be for censorship and completely crazy, when in fact:
> They are not claiming that they have proven bias in Meta, choosing instead to posit the question to the Superior Electoral Court.
That's all ignoring the fact that Trump and the US openly support Bolsonora, who is in jail for attempting a coup after losing the election.
And Brazil, AFAIK, was a military dictatorship until, what, 40 years ago? To my knowledge, without a "hard cut" that would have investigated this part of the country's history.
I am not Brazilian, who knows, I can't tell whether Lula is corrupt, or anything, what I have not seen is prove of the election fraud claims put forward by Bolsonaro sr.?
Not irrelevant since his son of course rehabilitates him and wants to "correct the public record".
And, yeah, I know, I won't get love for this on HN, but Trump's "election fraud" claims seem unsubstantiated to me from the outside, doesn't make me think Bolsonaro's claims would any more believable.
I've lost much of my naivite around politics, but if we can't agree to draw a hard line around this kind of interference with open and free elections, it seems like a swan song of democracy.
And this is coincidentally what many supporters of the current US admin see as positive.
Regarding censorship, before the age of Social Media, there already was all kinds of regulation around what kind of electoral advertisement is allowed and when, also regulation against defamation as a campaign strategy, but of course it's different from country to country.
Meta has a long history of not giving a shit whether their engagement algorithms at best... "damage" democratic processes, so I don't see any reason to be smug about it.
But it would be cool to limit political content on platforms with non-audited, non-public and intransparent engagement algorithms.
Just as it would be good to stop intransparent flow of big money into politics.
The latter is a sentiment that Trump catered to when he became president for the first time. Of course, only in a twisted, cynical way: "the system is broken, so I alone can fix it".
Need to see details, but it's perfectly plausible that geolocated requests from Brazil get a special treatment during this specific period of elections.
To assume that Evil Corp Inc. does evil things? They should just turn the platform off because it seems is only thing that works as a bargaining chip with such powerful entities.
I believe though it is an old phenomenom that if (given the default context) you ask a random number, it will more often than not give numbers from a very small set.
I just used a "Temporary chat" with ChatGPT twice to "Give a random number" and it gave 42 both times (this shuold be rather understandable why it ended up with this). Then I asked "Give a random number in 1-10" twice and it responded with 7 for both (and this too is an old "magic number").
btw today's models run random.randint() by default unless you prohibit python by choosing one of the dumb models, disable thinking, disable tool calls, etc.
One big company says things should be secret, another says that things should be transparent, and your conclusion is that both are equivalent and therefore any attempt for transparency is meaningless. I don't buy that logic. A party being biased doesn't mean that its stance on every issue is automatically wrong; at the very least, it's possible as an individual to have a mutual interest with a company.
You phrase this as a "gotcha" but I don't think you understand that NGOs and nonprofits are the exact kind of entity that would naturally be involved here.
Algorithmic transparency is a deeply unprofitable and difficult task, with people from all sides screeching at you thinking you're biased against them. Governments obviously shouldn't be involved (unless you're a fan of state-controlled media), and so the only people that will take this on are people that care enough about the impact of social media on society to give up careers in the private sector.
If you care so much, you can always join one of these NGOs! You won't. I guarantee you they are not as biased as you think they are, and they certainly don't hold a "shadow ban this guy" hammer.
They are beholden to the current US admin - as always - only good thing is that the current admin is so blatant that maybe one day even the Germans will realize that you need to have your own social media just you have your own national tv, newspapers etc.
one day they will realize - everobody realized long time ago, its info war friend.
Germans for example own 90% of polish media and are growing our younglings to be ashamed to be polish
> realize that you need to have your own social media
How could that be made to happen? Should EU somehow move to federated (let’s say per country) instances of Mastodon or something? Or one big platform? How would regular folks get used to it? And how could those initiatives be prevented from falling into irrelevance when network effects are at play?
I agree with the idea, it’s just that there’s the usual hurdles there aren’t necessarily good answers for that I know of.
The Chinese did it. We broke Boeings monopoly with Airbus.
I realize these are heavy handed approaches - but shows what can get done.
Perhaps smaller scale things can work as well: Ie supporting alternatives when they occur - ie tiktok back when it was kinda Chinese - use the China threat to enforce objective standards - rather than just following the us stance.
Use existing monopoly legislation.
All creating an open market place for social media that allows for newcomers and local alternatives rather than the single monopoly that is the situation now.
Notably Germany used to have its own social media. SchülerVZ/StudiVZ/MeinVZ was like Facebook, but German (and with three networks targeted at school kids, university students and everyone, respectively). They did well initially. But by 2011 Facebook had the lead, and from there network effects did the rest to cement Facebook as the winner
The way it should've happened is that over the last 20 years EU governments should have tried to keep tech companies doing well in Europe.
We had video streaming sites like youtube. We had cellphone manufacturers. We had chat applications.
But the conditions for these companies were better outside of Europe. Now we're stuck with everything not made in Europe. (South Korea is more relevant in consumer tech than the EU.)
European governments still haven't swapped off MS.
I’m not following. Youtube has always been an American company. YouTube was founded in San Mateo, California, USA, and it was an American company the whole time before Google bought it.
Perhaps I wasn't very clear - we had video streaming sites before youtube. The local sites could not keep up with youtube.
Could a European competitor have even existed when even youtube struggled with the GEMA lawsuit for over half a decade? And that by the end of it they still had to pay?
You can still have Facebook, its just if you're german your home server is a german one, with algorithms running on german servers, staffed by Germans and subject to German oversight. It would still even be one big global network.
Right until the Germans decide that something should be blocked globally, not just in Germany. And now you have a problem, because there are going to be 150 other countries demanding the same kind of treatment.
It might work, but it also might bloat the whole operation so much that the social network becomes non-functional.
All which would be owned by a US entity after all, and still at the whims of Meta executives. CLOUD Act makes stuff like that impossible to trust, anything going through US infrastructure or administration needs to be considered compromised at this point.
Amazon/AWS tried this route with their "sovereign cloud" which still ends up being beholden exactly the same way as "real AWS", so what's even the point? Who is even falling for these "tricks"?
Well the solution is pretty simple: geo block US owned social media and wait a two days for people to move to the best EU alternative. One you remove the foreign subsidized option with complete market share capture, there will be options that can finally compete.
Both the US and the EU are already doing this exact thing with cars, basically.
As a EU citizen I believe in the citizen's freedom to pick their social media platform, but when it comes to official accounts (e.g. government, the president or prime ministers, etc) I've always believed we should favour open protocols and federation. Public funding of course. Probably an unpopular opinion.
How is Russia currently moving everyone from Telegram onto some "Max" app? How has China managed to keep the likes of Meta out?
B-but the EU can't do that!
It absolutely can. Just like it can push Chat Control down everyone's throats even though if you held a referendum on it it would be voted down (no, most Jacques the plumbers on the street don't want mass surveillance even if it's "against crime").
> They are beholden to the current US admin - as always
They have, as the joke goes, more money than God and influence all over the world. They are beholden to no one. They have the resources to fight in court against decisions they don’t believe in, and all the lobbying they need to shape established laws.
They choose their actions, and their actions are their own. Every single dollar they donate to the current president but not the previous one is an admission of their allegiance and (lack of) morals.
Having principles and standing for them costs money, and these societal parasites subsist on money and influence. Make no mistake, they will sell their own mother to further their goals, but they don’t have to while they can keep selling everyone else’s.
Or maybe the reason more bribes are paid to the current administration is that the current administration is more receptive to bribes? The ROI on gifts to Trump is probably higher than on gifts to Biden so it makes sense to give more.
> They have, as the joke goes, more money than God and influence all over the world. They are beholden to no one.
The administration can take over them with the snap of a finger if they so desire. They have absolutely no power.
The best example of that is the BBC suit, where the only reason it's happening is because the US doesn't have any control over the entity because it's British.
> The administration can take over them with the snap of a finger if they so desire.
No, no they can’t. They sure want you to believe that, though, and the longer that fantasy is left unchecked, the more power it gets. The current administration is not omnipotent, and that is exemplified by the times it was pushed back (not by the bootlicker CEOs at major US tech companies, obviously).
Jimmy Kimmel is still on the air, despite Trump doing what he could to take him out. Like John Oliver said, use the four key words that make weak bullies go away: “fuck you, make me”.
That’s not the argument. Unfortunately, reading comprehension and engaging in good faith continues to decline rapidly on HN.
Not being beholden to someone does not mean you have power over them. For example: you are not beholden to me and thus don’t have to do anything I say; but that doesn’t mean I have to do anything you say either, I’m not beholden to you.
I look for stuff I need on a search engine, watch the video I need only (mostly tutorials) and then leave. I never follow YouTube recommendations anymore - that’s how it keeps you hooked and feeds you what they want you to watch. (It’s also nonsensical and blatantly obvious these days - I went in to watch a video on how to tie a bow tie, why is there a recommendation on “Bolsonaro has Lula shaking in his pants, find out why??”
We banned YouTube for casual entertainment at home years ago - one of the best decisions we ever made, other than the toxic content pushing, it’s also so ad-infested it’s totally worthless anyway.
I remember when YouTube was “better than tv! Content on demand, no ads!”. Those days are long gone
At this point sociala media has become a television, on twitter I just unfollowed everyone who have't followed back and I keep seeing the same antisemitic, antimuslim, anti-EU, anti-woman, anti-immigrant shit. My SO happens to see very similar posts to the point that I can't show her a funny post because she would have already seen it. There are some different posts of course but the money shot is mostly the same.
They probably show posts based on location and background, so essentially just like Fox, CNN, MSNBC but everyone sees theirs from the same screen with the same agenda pushed from all of them.
I have almost no reason to look at my facebook feed, check it perhaps once every 1-2 weeks in case something important was only posted there (not that this helps as they don't show me all actual friends actual updates). Recent visit was 50% ads, 25% recommended or weirdly boosted content, including a post from Mark Zuckerberg promoting his AI, and a post whose content I forget from the White House (I live in Germany, the last time I even visited the USA was 2018).
Even out of political reasoning, they are rigged for engagement and as it turns out fear mongering and hate bring a lot of engagement.
What are people going to watch between a 3 hours in depth debate about the future of the country on topics such as ecology, finance, social security and pension systems VS hundreds of reels about ImMiGrAnT RiOtS in paris?
Or maybe AfD hasn’t targeted you for other reasons, so you’re not fighting against a marketing team to avoid the videos, only against the “pure” form of the algorithm.
From my experience Youtube simply recommends more of the type of videos that you actually watched. Watch history overpowers basically anything else you do, your subscriptions have little to no influence. A single click on a 'wrong' video, and you'll get tons of similar ones in your recommendations feed for weeks to come, especially when you end up clicking some of the newly recommend videos. It requires purging unwanted topics from the watch history to actually get rid of them, which so far worked very reliable for me.
I find a lot of social media algorithms are "dumb" in that they will see someone share something saying "x sucks" and interpret that as one being interested in "x".
Either that or it's deliberately showing people stuff it knows they will hate to harvest hate scrolling.
Indeed. US tech has been actively conspiring in lying to the American populace about everything in Canada from politics, election results, public opinion in Canada, resources needed by the US from Canada, etc. They're interfering in the affairs of any country that won't bend to their will.
A lot of bots of US origin are propagating false narratives posing as citizens of these countries.
I love how everyone from every political background thinks big tech has it out for them specifically. No, it couldn't be that algorithms are stochastic and random and sometimes ban random people. The tech companies are trying to manipulate everyone, every single side, into some goal only they understand.
Somehow none of the hundreds of thousands of software engineers that have worked there have managed to uncover exactly what this purpose is despite having access to the monorepos and visibility into the recommendation engine pipelines.
On the modern internet, people confuse conspiratorial thinking for well-reasoned thinking. But an idea is not correct just because it is interesting or exciting.
The manipulation is not in the algorithm but in the controls the algo offers, either to the company or to financial friends of the company. It's pretty blatant the way Meta is pushing far right politics everywhere in Europe, pushing pro Israeli propaganda while silencing opposing opinions.
It's not a secret that Meta is selling political preferences on its platform, as they have been for decades. Several Meta employee have blown the whistle about it already.
I think the most charitable explanation for this is that it's because polarizing content (aka ragebait) gets views/plays, which the ranking algorithms directly optimize for.
Also, this isn't a new phenomenon. If you're interested, I'd recommend reading Shoshana Zuboff's 2018 book: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
You can say many bad things about Google, but I think they are still "California liberals" on social issues.
I get AfD content recommendations (lurid, trashy stuff of uhm uncertain truth value) a propos of nothing in the village I grew up in - they are popular there with about 25% in the 2025 election. The region is not even in the east or particularly suffering economically. I don't get these recommendations in Berlin. It seems regional.
The owners of these companies are very much conservative though, not out of any ideology mind you, but because they correctly identify that this is the party that best suits their class interests of fucking over everyone and everything else in order to get richer.
I was careful to say socially and I generally agree with you, but Trump is currently just turning everything into shit that he touches. If you don't directly participate in his grift, you probably lose economically because of him. So I'm not sure how useful it is to back him for economic reasons.
To be more precise, capital only seeks to grow its relative power over labor. Making everything shittier is part of it. If you want a clear image of what it is that these people want, look at Russia: a shithole where a few oligarchs hold absolute power, are bound to no laws and lord over a poor, indoctrinated and hopeless populace. Sure, these oligarchs would be richer if Russia was more prosperous, but they don't care about that.
Sure, mass censorship by a tech elite captured by a wave of liberal identity politics in california has nothing to do with the right wing cultural backlash.
Being censored from expressing the view that gender is principally a product of sex, or dissenting from state polices of vaccination, or being in revulsion at mass media (liked by mainstream demographics) being hijacked on the alter of fringe "representation". These have had no effect. None.
This hasnt caused everything from the election from a far-right US president to the collapse of the western video games industry, hollywood and the western media ecosystem. A total sucide of western soft and hard power "isn't" something the US has just done in revenge against californian liberalism.
The obliviousness, and arrogance here is, I guess, in keeping with that very same californian liberalism which has "done no wrong" -- other than demanded a world-wide internet echo chambre which reflects only its own values on pain of mass censorship. Values rare even in the US, let alone amongst the whole west, and the 8bn people on the planet.
Gender is factually, as evidenced via a multitude of highly respected scientific studies conducted by a vast majority of respected experts both medical and psychological, distinct in every way from biological sex.
There is genuinely no room for opinion, disagreement, or dispute on that subject, at all. To disagree is to be, objectively, incorrect.
I can see where you are coming from in a purely politically motivated sense, yes. But the medical and psychological facts do not actually care about politics, and transgender individuals exist regardless of your belief in them.
This is how leftists operate. You destroy the language and refer to things as their contradictory opposite. Through principle of explosion [0] you can now provide proof, justification, of anything, even falsehood.
The economic problems hit people, then they (if they are white and / or male) are called bad people with an unfair advantage on top. Seems like not such a great way to get their support tbh.
Why should I believe your claim that AfD content is getting pushed on YouTube? Isn't it more likely that you personally hate AfD and so you find it salient and enraging whenever you see any AfD content at all yourself, regardless of exactly how YouTube's recommendation algorithm works on your account or whether they treat AfD particularly differently than any other political content? Are you actually measuring this?
To be clear I think it's entirely possible that YouTube is adjusting its recommendation algorithm to show AfD content to people more (or perhaps less) than would happen "organically", because AfD is a salient political party in German politics and YouTube knows this. But how do you determine what is the correct amount of AfD content to be recommended to people in a politically-neutral way, that doesn't end up amounting to you arguing that the YouTube algorithm is only fair if it censors political content you personally think is bad?
The risk of voter manipulation is just way to high. This also isn't just about manipulation by US companies, the system they created is just to ab-usable by others, too. To make it worse the more ethical values a person has/upright and honest they are the less likely are to use such means but the more likely they would make a good elected politician for the general population. At the same time humans are just way too easy to manipulate.
(Naturally there is also a case for _any_ personalized ads being a high risk for societies, especially democracies, and in turn the concept if it should be banned. Important here is to note that often just basing ads on the "non ad content" they are displayed alongside with is getting you quite far. So if there even is a need for highly personalized ads can be put in question. Through the topic gets far more complicated with highly personalized non ad content recommendation systems..)
Things like these happen if a state fails to secure its information space. Giving control over it to foreign entities means providing population wide manipulative power to foreign entities with adversarial intentions.
Every state should have foreign agent laws (NGOs must register and must be transparent over their financials). Every state should have control over their information space (especially educational, social and news media). Russia and China understood, Brazil and Europe did not.
It is not so black white. It is a dilemma. There is great value in freedom of expression. But fake expression with the explicit intention to mislead is not so good. It would be best if the population would be better at distinguishing truth from falsehood. Unfortunately much of the population seems to be at a level close to cattle.
The idea that you can't have a foreign nation control the main channels that the population gets their news from, and that their population spends hours a day of their free time staring at, is black and white. And that's the core.
> Unfortunately much of the population seems to be at a level close to cattle.
Not you though. You're a wolf among sheep. A true seer among the blind.
Everyone else is too dumb to know what's right, just manipulated by the media they consume on the Internet.
Not you though. You get all your information from trustworthy sources. Sure, they happen to agree with you 90% of the time but,hey, nobody's perfect, right? Well, except you. You've got all the answers.
If only everyone else would just let you make all the rules. You could get to all the bad people and make sure they stopped saying the wrong thing. Maybe provide them the resources they need to learn the truth and, if they don't want to learn the truth, we'll just keep them away from everyone else until they figure it out.
These are thoughts that occur to me too when a safetyist progressive (for want of a better term other than "woke") suggests shutting down information to prevent people seeing the wrong ideas.
But you must see that it is a genuine conundrum. In a free-for-all information landscape (something which did not exist until yesterday), people need to be able to distinguish good information from bad for democracy to survive.
>Giving control over it to foreign entities means providing population wide manipulative power to foreign entities with adversarial intentions.
Alternatively, this blatant use of any tool available to influence non enemy states is disgusting, and forces everyone to a "everyone loses" scenario. Shifting the focus to an insufficiently defended victim removes the focus from the nature of the aggression.
One think I'm wondering is how much are the various searches AI invocation etc. personalized, and how much could this turn into a "self fulfilling prophecy" in due to you _or people close to you(1)_ checking if the search is biased the personalization will make it biased. (Assuming this is accidentally, at least from Metas site.)
(1): Might be worth pointing out here that Meta has a long history of basing personalization not just on what you do but what people "close to you" do. E.g. if Meta knows you are in the same location (e.g. same WiFi, not sure if they use that today) and then shortly after the other person searches for idk. air purifiers the chance of you getting air purifier ads is largely increased.
Ask any neurologist near you, and they will readily confirm how Trump exhibits all signs of dementia and mental decline on national TV every single day.
Which is evidence of how extraordinary his actions were in January 2021, and how extraordinarily well the billionaire owners of American media (including Zuck) have managed to retcon it as something else.
He was given far more leeway than any user in the history of social media.
The fact that they didn't ban him for so long weighs toward being partial to not banning politicians. Which seems to be the opposite of the point you're trying to make.
The surprise is not that he was kicked off the main social media companies, the surprises are that the wheels of US justice turned so slowly that Trump got a chance to be re-elected rather than life in prison, and likewise that the US electorate went for him.
The whole point of the left is to censor their opposition.
Leftist ideas don't survive long in the real world/critical debate
.
So censoring opposition opinions (and jailing opponents) has been the lefts go to for more than 100 years.
It's literally happening in a new way, for one. Also, the alternative to reporting this story is not reporting this story, which might lead us to the impression that interference in South American elections had ended.
There is some phrase (it was actually on my sons vocab study materials) for a mental disorder where when you become emotionally attached to a conspiracy you begin to see it everywhere.
We forget this but hard right content is still highly promoted on X, especially related to white supremacy and anti-immigrant, and it is also protected from content violations.
Isn't turning money into influence over people"s behavior more or less their core business model. The company shouldn't be allowed to exist, buy since they are, well of course they're going to keep doing what they're made to do.
I have a feeling the problem isn’t that malicious unfortunately.
Right-wing folks are driven by social media since ~2016. Their content is emotional, aggressive and naturally conducive to more engagement. It’s what their base feeds on. So a lot of the situations described here are just standard ranking algorithms doing their job.
But that begs the question: is the existence of these platforms that amplify divisive and inflammatory content the problem itself? I vote yes. The power of reaching a wide audience should not be handed off without any cross-checks.
I couldn't agree more, in the past TV, newspapers and radio were paid by a specific party to flood the citizens with their own truth without any algorithm. Currently, there aren't a simple way to control information, the ask here is to manipulate the algorithm in favor of something which could later facilitate other sides too.
Dirty b@stards the lot of them, it's gone from "well, we better tow the line to protect our market position", to full throated support of outright fascism.
It's interesting times where American Billionaires are deciding the politics in USA, South America and Europe.
I am sure that everyone involved must be feeling invincible but this is how you build resentment that will last and in most cases result in conflicts or regulations. Probably Musk, Zuckerberg and Thiel will be fine but they will destroy the prospects of the upcoming libertarians and cement the Chinese dominance as they don't have a problem of unruly billionaires and the problem of someone getting rich by doing one thing getting the right to do decide on everything and screw it up for everyone. Sad, I really don't want to live in a China-style political system.
You can resent them all you like; they don’t care as long as nothing is done to them, and nothing is being done. Resentment is worthless without action.
Resentment isn't worthless, the current political climate is a result of overshoot of a resentment towards some liberal policies. The next cycle will overshoot too.
The difference is that US Billionaires are doing it without being elected or officially assuming power to do so. In Europe it is important to keep it official as you can just burn their palaces and run them through the guillotine, which even feels wrong saying it in open on US based forum but that's how it has been since many many generations. Europe has seen so many January 6th over they years.
You know how they say that USA is a very new country and that even some pub in Europe can have longer history? Well, that's true but it doesn't mean that European countries have centuries of continued administration, most are a few decades old as a result of revolution or a war.
Europe is a very violent place for politicians, politicians being oversees and untouchable is a very new phenomenon.
Basically with corruption you can control what democracies do. We see this with the orange mafia in charge of the USA right now - even though sometimes it also yields entertainment, indirectly:
“The average IQ of the bottom third (lowest 33.33%) of the population is approximately - 83.6 - on a standard IQ scale (mean of 100 and standard deviation of 15).” - MM
The real question is do idiots rolling 83.6 iq have the right to self determination no matter the cost to everyone else? Or should the more intelligent reading club context clues able take over management for the good of all?
Let's face it: Tech CEOs have aligned with fascists (techno-fascism) because - and that's a general rule throughout history (see pre-WWII industrial titans aligned with Nazi-leaders): Industry leaders of large corporations and authoritarians share the same goal : ultimate control and power over others.
I think tech ceos
follow one simple variable: $CURRENT_POLITICAL_POWER
have lefties in power for the next of the decade and you'll see how datacenters become all about clean energy investment, climate change starts to matter, "don't be evil" starts to take shape
Exactly! When it comes to liberal movements, it's a 'blue outfit that they were', but when they support authoritarians , it's much closer to their true colors since the way they came into private power and hold it shares the same mindset (unequal distribution of power versus more equal flat distribution).
How does internet censorship 2016-2024 fit into your model?
It’s more simple than that. Industry tends to align with government because they have power and they want that power to be benefit them. If you’re a large company it would be stupid not to try to maintain that relationship.
Yes, I think we actually agree, and maybe I should have been clearer. Of course industry leaders always try to play nicely, e.g. if liberal/democratic party is in power, they will 'wear their liberal outfit'.
Yet, from a pure intrinsic values perspective, people that are power-seeking are alike in industry and politics, and when they support an authoritarian state/movement instead of a democratic one, it shows their true intentions.
What might give for some pause, if you listen carefully to the more "alt right" voices, Trump is the "moderate" or even "liberal" by their standards, by their own words.
The Supreme Federal Court in Brazil has been notorious for censorship. The New York Times has found that it has ordered 223 account-blocking orders since 2020.
Everything is biased. There is no view from nowhere. What you perceive as bias-free is just a reflection of your own bias.
With that in mind, why shouldn't it be in favor of the locals and reflect the values of its own society instead of some tech bros with imperialist ambitions?
> With that in mind, why shouldn't it be in favor of the locals and reflect the values of its own society instead of some tech bros with imperialist ambitions?
The article is discussing a candidate who got the majority of the vote in the 10/4 election. Where did you get the idea that this content doesn't "reflect the values of its own society"?
People want to deflect and blame foreign powers for why their platforms are failing among the electorate. The argument is essentially that they are so right and correct that any deviation from their values could only have occurred due to Bad Guy external intervention, which conveniently justifies why we need mass censorship.
Just do a better job convincing people you're right. Censorship will just mask social problems until the outbreak is even worse.
Playing obvious problems of Brazil‘s judiciary system down like that are clear red flags for somebody not for 1 sec contemplating how he would react if the political camps would be reversed in this situation. It is their sovereignty if the censorship happens on speech you don’t like
At a point on time, there should be more structured and unbiased content in social media before elections in democratic countries to help people make their decisions.
This should be regulated to avoid interference from anyone.
The biggest problem now is that the billionaires behind social media nowadays will push for a liberal / right wing agenda in the west for their own interests.
"The most accomplished masterpiece of contemporary capitalism is neither the iPhone, nor the unicorn startup, nor even the visionary billionaire.
No.
Its flagship product, its anthropological jewel, its greatest achievement, is the right-wing poor person. A genuine feat of social engineering: materially deprived, yet rich in convictions that run counter to their own interests.
They have been carefully molded. They have been taught that their problems always come from below or from next door — the immigrant, the welfare recipient, the civil servant, the unemployed — never from above.
They have been taught to hate taxes while surviving thanks to public services. To defend heirs to fortunes while having nothing to pass on themselves. To applaud those who crush them, as long as they speak loudly and promise law and order.
The right-wing poor person is a fascinating creature. They vote against their own interests with fervor, convinced that one day, perhaps, they too will find themselves on the right side of the fence.
They mistake brutality for courage, authoritarianism for protection, injustice for merit. They are sold fear in a ready-made package, identity at bargain prices, and anger in bulk on a monthly subscription.
At the dawn of this new world, the monsters do not emerge from the margins: they rise from the ballot boxes, television studios, and simplistic slogans.
They thrive on manufactured misery and sabotaged political awareness.
Capitalism has not merely produced poverty; it has achieved something far worse: it has made the poor docile, obedient, spiteful, and grateful.
Very well put. I would like to add a less-eloquent epilogue to the story.
This curious animal was laid bare by the discovery that we are hackable by nature, and hacked by behaviour science. Though it took a few decades to get going, the understanding of how to influence motivation and decision-making is now very mature.
In order to arrive at this understanding, you need data, and lots of it. The social media platforms have performed the function of data aggregators and testing grounds for algorithmic control. But it was not the tech companies who came up with plans, only the tools to put them into practice.
The culprits, though they operate in shade, are generally non-partisan and understand that divide-and-conquer has always been an effective strategy. These people sometimes work in intelligence bureaus, but not always. They are, however, always known to those agencies. After all, you do not need to know you are an asset to be an asset.
The algorithms, necessarily kept as protected IP, are statistical engines that profile and predict, producing probabilistic outcomes and estimates. Before LLMs, one might have argued "but how can probabilistic algos really produce something meaningful?", now I would think people might have a different take, if they could see the layers and weights.
An emperor used to need an army, and this is what replaces it for non-violent insurrection and domestic control. Many will even state their ambitions publicly, and sometimes (though less frequently these days) their procedure. What they are doing is not strictly illegal, because the law gives "sovereignty" to a person's choices, without recognition that their choices might not be their own. Libertarianism has played right into their hands, in this sense.
A masterpiece, not only of conception, but also social engineering, with a technological endoskeleton built on the aggregated data we all willingly give them. All information feeds the machine, just as every financial transaction cements the central bank's authority.
The fun thing is, the original nazis were quite pro-workers. The original fascists tried to address some concerns of the working class too. Leaders of both started out in far-left circles before jumping on the other side of the shoehorn. Which worked out much better for them.
Modern far-right frequently pays at least lip service to concerns of poor working class. At the same time modern left has become champaign left. Caring less and less about the actual working class.
And then the left becomes surprised that poor working class sometimes go to the other side…
These billionaire ghouls need to answer for their many attempts on our Republics. Democracy can't survive when its most powerful members are working against it. We have to take them done ASAP, unless we want an encore of the 1940s.
Capital naturally compounds, and financial resources naturally seek political influence, so to combat the root of all evil is simply to cap individual's wealth versus society so they can't rig the game in their favor.
This is exactly the kind of stupidity that helps people like Trump reelected. I know nothing about Brazilian politics, but this looks like a desperate attempt to undermine the opposition or pull Meta into needless controversy, and I have no idea how complicit the courts are in all this.
So what if searching for “brasil” returns a Bolsonaro GIF? I tried it myself, and the obvious explanation is that he’s wearing a Brazilian flag tshirt and dancing rather comically. How does a GIF appearing in search results imply political bias?
Sleeping giants is one of the most shadiest anti-democratic organizations that, once you grasp what they are actually doing, there’s literally nothing else left to do for voters than what you described. Its subversive unethical manipulation (there are offshoots in Europe as well) is a reason for me to go scorched earth and auto-inverse: anybody that’s not distancing himself from them is unelectable, anybody who promises to put them on a chopping block gets my vote.
> This is exactly the kind of stupidity that helps people like Trump reelected.
You mean when people admittedly have no knowledge of a subject but still speak authoritatively about it, viscerally criticising one of the sides and even suggesting fowl play, instead of taking care to be humble and understand the context before speaking or making accusations?
I agree, that is very much the kind of attitude that got us into the current situation.
I know 5 Brazilian people in the US and they are all voting for Bolsonaro. Apparently the Lula dude has been in power for 12 years (not in a row). No wonder they want him gone.
Bolsonaro voters see the US as some kind of capitalist heaven, where they can live out their dreams of becoming rich and powerful without regulations. That is not a surprise. Brazilian expats majorly vote left in the rest of the world.
Of note, this Bolsonaro is the son of the former president, with zero political plans or credentials; his only claim is the name itself and what it represents. I find the idea of a family lineage in government, much, much worse.
Lula was voted in to power, Brazil is still a strong democracy despite the direction it’s going. It is a shame that another viable opposition candidate could not be produced as I’m not fond of having 80+ year olds in that seat, but still better than the alternative.
I think most Brazilian, as other Latin American, voters would rather be a bit more like the US and less like what the left has delivered to them in the past decades.
Well, I strongly disagree, especially if we are talking about the US in the last decade.
Bolsonaro’s government has zero proposals for anything that will lead the country in that direction anyway, and did very little in the four years they had. Some new, fresh leadership is urgently needed, hopefully in 2030 if there’s still elections.
The impression I have is that many Brazilian voters want their version of the American Dream — yet don’t realize that Brazilian society is much different from the American one and that Brazil won’t ever replicate the success of the US, regardless of a government’s policies.
> According to the petition, two people asked [Meta AI] to pick a number between 1 and 25. They gave no instructions and made no reference to the election. In one attempt, the AI answered 13. In the other, it answered 22. Those are the party ballot numbers of Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro, respectively. The groups question the coincidence.
My confidence in the validity of their claims tanked right about here.
I'm all for regulating transparency into social media algorithms. Meta most certainly is compromised by foreign actors. But can we choose less stupid hills to die on than numerology and GIFs? Headline is not remotely supported by the evidence.
The example showcased is particularly weak, but the actual scandal with Meta AI is that when they are asked to produce campaign material, they spontaneously produce it with Bolsonaro's number (22), even when not asked. But then they refuse to produce it with other numbers like Lula's 13, saying they can't perform this for a specific candidate. When asked, they admit they were inconsistent in producing Bolsonaro-linked material, but in new chats they reliably continue to do so. See for example what was posted in this thread
https://www.reddit.com/r/brasil/comments/1x965on/eu_n%C3%A3o...
What would be useful here is leaking the system prompt for the Meta AI inside WhatsApp
This is just one of the many claims, like
- Meta has suspended Lula's facebook account a week from the election day, and many advertising instagram and facebook accounts associated with his campaign have been consistently suspended and then reactivated with days of delay (this is a huge loss in the context of a political campaign)
- The reach of his opponents is being inflated to unexplainable proportions while people are having trouble finding Lula's profile by searching for... lula. And then you got people like Nikolas Ferreira, whose videos consistently reach several times his follower numbers and reach several times more views, likes, shares, etc than people like Kim Kardashian, Beyoncé, Messi, etc. He's a Brazilian politician who speaks Portuguese and talks about strictly Brazilian subjects. He recently posted a MUTED video that reached 60 million views in hours.
- Lula's big WhatsApp channel for coordinating online campaign actions with voters kept getting suspended over and over
- There are reports from Brazilian META EMPLOYEES talking about the unresponsiveness of the internal American team to solve reports they made regarding Lula's platform issues
There are so many problems I can't even list them all here without making it a wall of text. It's just too obvious.
Thank you. As far as circumstantial evidence goes, yours is more intriguing and cause for inquiry.
I can vouch for having seen this firsthand on Meta AI assistants, the same behavior showing up for many close friends as well as colleagues.
This used to be an under the hood and frowned upon type of maneuver, but now it is much more rampant and far reaching thanks to AI
Ok, but what about Vote + number? As stated so: "On Instagram, a search for the same word showed a GIF reading “Vote 13.”"
It's one thing to discard it as "numerology and gifs" but it's another to willfully disrupt legal elections in a soverign country.
Or is a decade a really long time and we've all forgotten about Cambridge Analytica?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica
> ... but it's another to willfully disrupt legal elections in a soverign country.
Especially if they're the same exact people who whine at the top of their lungs that our elections are the subject of foreign interference (even when it isn't). If one does a thing to someone else, they have zero leg to stand on when they think it's being done to them (even when it's not). Some of our first childhood lessons are "Lying is bad" and "Two wrongs don't make a right". Beyond ridiculous that the (supposedly adult) people in charge of our nation and corporations aren't able to handle lessons that most of the rest of us learn and understand as tiny children.
Facebook certainly hasn’t forgotten; they were just fined $25 billion over that.
Well let’s make the next fine 250B, they clearly don’t care enough yet
If the company putting at risk underlying social contract is not completely dismantled and its head is not sent in jail, the message they get is clear: go on as long as you can sustain the loss and profit. Or at least it's apparently the only way they can interpret it.
Reinforcement feedback loops, etc
Or the public could grow up, learn that algorithms are stochastic, and not let their vote be influenced by the number that pops up when they type in "vote" in the search bar.
If this is influencing your votes your democracy is already lost.
I'm not sure looking down on the general public helps anything. People are obviously influenced by spamming them with information. It works in marketing, it works on election billboards, it works in lots of contexts.
Now look through this thread and be amazed at how most posters are apparently satisfied by this level of evidence and some are even calling for China-style Internet censorship in response. A good reminder that even enlightened progressives are helpless against cognitive bias when they want to believe the worst about their enemies.
Yup, it seems unfathomable to some commentators that the likes of AfD or Le Pen or Bolsonaro would get popular support were it not for US big tech (interference). Which truly boggles the mind, it seems to be the same narrative that couldn't believe Hillary lost the election and it was the russians fault. Even if that were true, you should still review your policies and how you ran the campaign and learn something from it. Here it's like we're in a world with no reinforcement learning feedback loop.
It seems similarly unfathomable to other commenters that US big tech is ideologically aligned with the rightwing parties in EU and SA. Further that the current US administration is openly rooting for leaders to get elected that serve its interests and not the electorate’s interests (which makes sense) and that US big tech is entirely controlled and thrall to the US administration. Truly mindboggling
Censorship is when you don't leave an information manipulation and mind control tool in the hands of a hostile foreign power. Sure.
As for the evidence, it has been well documented beyond the parent comment's silly examples and it includes shadowbanning popular profiles with certain opinions.
Shadowbans have a high base rate. You notice when it happens to your side and take it as a sign of bias. You don't notice when it happens to the other side, because that is not your circle and you don't track them as closely.
I guarantee your political opponents also think Meta is trying to shadow ban then.
>Censorship is when you don't leave an information manipulation and mind control tool in the hands of a hostile foreign power. Sure.
That sarcastic comment justifies all Putin's laws about "foreign agents", "undesirable organizations", "extremist organizations" and such.
Do you deny that:
A: social media is a mind control tool that can be used for targeted political manipulation, as shown by the cambridge analytica scandal and plenty of other research.
B: the US is a hostile foreign power in relation to South America, as proven by its continuous threats, embargoes, tariff wars, coups and more recently the unashamedly declaration of a "Donroe doctrine"
?
And all foreign agents should be allowed to freely operate everywhere simply because Putin has falsely accused at least one person of being a foreign agent? Espionage sure is easy these days.
The perfidy of Putin (and many other authoritarian regimes) is that they can clothe their anti-democratic and anti-human policies in the language of their opponents.
So Putin can justify anything with words - what they say doesnt really matter or reflect reality. The actions and outcomes matter.
You were satisfied with the level of understanding the person you replied to provided.
That person was then politely told to rtfa and given more substance than they thought was in there.
And what did you do?
That’s quite ironic.
I mean, ideally I'd have Zuckerberg, Musk, Dorsey and friends in jail forcreating social networks where conflict is rewarded and pushed in front of everyone, leading to the collapse of the social fabric we're seeing throughout the world right now, but censorship is fine by me in the mean time.
your own country flipped its shit and said that Tiktok was CCP propaganda less than a year ago and tried to ban it, so it seems like foreign influence on your politics does seem to be a bad thing.
Look at this thread and you could think that the quoted example was the first, or main one, in the article.
When in fact, it comes after
> The petition describes a GIF search on WhatsApp for the word “brasil.” The first result was an image of Flávio Bolsonaro. It showed his ticket number and identified his running mate.
> According to the records sent to the court, the same result appeared on three separate accounts. The groups use this to ask whether its top position comes from systematic ranking criteria.
> A similar check on Instagram also showed images of the senator among the first results. Users who searched for “brasil” found three images of Flávio Bolsonaro in the top positions
> On WhatsApp, a GIF search for the word “ladrão” (thief) returned a caricature of the president in a striped uniform, a reference to prison dress. Another result carried the message “Supporting the Workers’ Party is a mental illness.”
> On Instagram, a search for the same word showed a GIF reading “Vote 13.” That is the Workers’ Party election number, tied to Lula’s candidacy.
And you could also think that the authors would be for censorship and completely crazy, when in fact:
> They are not claiming that they have proven bias in Meta, choosing instead to posit the question to the Superior Electoral Court.
That's all ignoring the fact that Trump and the US openly support Bolsonora, who is in jail for attempting a coup after losing the election.
And Brazil, AFAIK, was a military dictatorship until, what, 40 years ago? To my knowledge, without a "hard cut" that would have investigated this part of the country's history.
I am not Brazilian, who knows, I can't tell whether Lula is corrupt, or anything, what I have not seen is prove of the election fraud claims put forward by Bolsonaro sr.?
Not irrelevant since his son of course rehabilitates him and wants to "correct the public record".
And, yeah, I know, I won't get love for this on HN, but Trump's "election fraud" claims seem unsubstantiated to me from the outside, doesn't make me think Bolsonaro's claims would any more believable.
I've lost much of my naivite around politics, but if we can't agree to draw a hard line around this kind of interference with open and free elections, it seems like a swan song of democracy.
And this is coincidentally what many supporters of the current US admin see as positive.
Regarding censorship, before the age of Social Media, there already was all kinds of regulation around what kind of electoral advertisement is allowed and when, also regulation against defamation as a campaign strategy, but of course it's different from country to country.
Meta has a long history of not giving a shit whether their engagement algorithms at best... "damage" democratic processes, so I don't see any reason to be smug about it.
But it would be cool to limit political content on platforms with non-audited, non-public and intransparent engagement algorithms.
Just as it would be good to stop intransparent flow of big money into politics.
The latter is a sentiment that Trump catered to when he became president for the first time. Of course, only in a twisted, cynical way: "the system is broken, so I alone can fix it".
Have you considered that Meta could simply be compromised by Meta's own Management, which leads to inference in the elections of foreign countries?
That is what seems to be happening here.
Need to see details, but it's perfectly plausible that geolocated requests from Brazil get a special treatment during this specific period of elections.
Human hallucination. It's the equivalent of seeing Jesus portrait in toasted bread.
“ Meta most certainly is compromised by foreign actors.”
How is meta compromised by foreign actors? And who are the foreign actors?
Well if you're Brazil, the entirety of Meta is a foreign actor - Meta is headquartered in Menlo Park, California, the United States of America.
Yes we can. How about this one: https://sleepinggiantsbrasil.com/biblioteca/visualizacoes-de...
That seems a bit schizophrenic
To assume that Evil Corp Inc. does evil things? They should just turn the platform off because it seems is only thing that works as a bargaining chip with such powerful entities.
This is not numerology, 13 and 22 are synonyms for Lula and Bolsonaro, used in common speech by every Brazilian.
Ok but then the question is: why would AI pick two numbers, out of 1 to 25? Should that not be evenly distributed instead? Why is the AI so skewed?
Why should it?
I believe though it is an old phenomenom that if (given the default context) you ask a random number, it will more often than not give numbers from a very small set.
I just used a "Temporary chat" with ChatGPT twice to "Give a random number" and it gave 42 both times (this shuold be rather understandable why it ended up with this). Then I asked "Give a random number in 1-10" twice and it responded with 7 for both (and this too is an old "magic number").
Why would it be evenly distributed? Humans pick 7 out of 1-10 most often. LLMs should do the same if you force them to zeroshot it. This comes up every week on twitter and reddit. Eg https://www.reddit.com/r/AgentsOfAI/comments/1x6doo3/can_any...
btw today's models run random.randint() by default unless you prohibit python by choosing one of the dumb models, disable thinking, disable tool calls, etc.
> Why is the AI so skewed?
We are talking about 2 trials, right? Or did they do more repetitions?
What would be the "correct" numbers to get from 2 trials that show an even distribution?
Because it is not a prng. If you want a prng, don't use the thing that is not a prng (or at the very least, ask that thing to use one)
Most of the "algorithmic transparency" people are activist members of big NGOs
The truth doesn't matter, what matters is getting more government money, and more regulation to get more financing, etc
NGOs are big business, and be assured, they don't care about fairness one bit more than Meta
One big company says things should be secret, another says that things should be transparent, and your conclusion is that both are equivalent and therefore any attempt for transparency is meaningless. I don't buy that logic. A party being biased doesn't mean that its stance on every issue is automatically wrong; at the very least, it's possible as an individual to have a mutual interest with a company.
"Algorithmic transparency" sounds good on paper but it is bound to be as disappointing as people were when shuffling songs was truly random
And you can always claim it's biased towards one side. So, which one is which then?
You phrase this as a "gotcha" but I don't think you understand that NGOs and nonprofits are the exact kind of entity that would naturally be involved here.
Algorithmic transparency is a deeply unprofitable and difficult task, with people from all sides screeching at you thinking you're biased against them. Governments obviously shouldn't be involved (unless you're a fan of state-controlled media), and so the only people that will take this on are people that care enough about the impact of social media on society to give up careers in the private sector.
If you care so much, you can always join one of these NGOs! You won't. I guarantee you they are not as biased as you think they are, and they certainly don't hold a "shadow ban this guy" hammer.
Wtf that’s just crazy. What a bunch of crackpots and conspiracy theorists
It's the same here. AfD content gets pushed on YT. No matter how often I ignore channels.
Big tech is so rigged (intensional or not), the question if it is socially net negative has become rhetorical.
They are beholden to the current US admin - as always - only good thing is that the current admin is so blatant that maybe one day even the Germans will realize that you need to have your own social media just you have your own national tv, newspapers etc.
one day they will realize - everobody realized long time ago, its info war friend. Germans for example own 90% of polish media and are growing our younglings to be ashamed to be polish
> realize that you need to have your own social media
How could that be made to happen? Should EU somehow move to federated (let’s say per country) instances of Mastodon or something? Or one big platform? How would regular folks get used to it? And how could those initiatives be prevented from falling into irrelevance when network effects are at play?
I agree with the idea, it’s just that there’s the usual hurdles there aren’t necessarily good answers for that I know of.
The Chinese did it. We broke Boeings monopoly with Airbus.
I realize these are heavy handed approaches - but shows what can get done.
Perhaps smaller scale things can work as well: Ie supporting alternatives when they occur - ie tiktok back when it was kinda Chinese - use the China threat to enforce objective standards - rather than just following the us stance.
Use existing monopoly legislation.
All creating an open market place for social media that allows for newcomers and local alternatives rather than the single monopoly that is the situation now.
> I realize these are heavy handed approaches
They are the minimum.
Notably Germany used to have its own social media. SchülerVZ/StudiVZ/MeinVZ was like Facebook, but German (and with three networks targeted at school kids, university students and everyone, respectively). They did well initially. But by 2011 Facebook had the lead, and from there network effects did the rest to cement Facebook as the winner
The way it should've happened is that over the last 20 years EU governments should have tried to keep tech companies doing well in Europe.
We had video streaming sites like youtube. We had cellphone manufacturers. We had chat applications.
But the conditions for these companies were better outside of Europe. Now we're stuck with everything not made in Europe. (South Korea is more relevant in consumer tech than the EU.)
European governments still haven't swapped off MS.
I’m not following. Youtube has always been an American company. YouTube was founded in San Mateo, California, USA, and it was an American company the whole time before Google bought it.
Perhaps I wasn't very clear - we had video streaming sites before youtube. The local sites could not keep up with youtube.
Could a European competitor have even existed when even youtube struggled with the GEMA lawsuit for over half a decade? And that by the end of it they still had to pay?
You can still have Facebook, its just if you're german your home server is a german one, with algorithms running on german servers, staffed by Germans and subject to German oversight. It would still even be one big global network.
Right until the Germans decide that something should be blocked globally, not just in Germany. And now you have a problem, because there are going to be 150 other countries demanding the same kind of treatment.
It might work, but it also might bloat the whole operation so much that the social network becomes non-functional.
All which would be owned by a US entity after all, and still at the whims of Meta executives. CLOUD Act makes stuff like that impossible to trust, anything going through US infrastructure or administration needs to be considered compromised at this point.
Amazon/AWS tried this route with their "sovereign cloud" which still ends up being beholden exactly the same way as "real AWS", so what's even the point? Who is even falling for these "tricks"?
Well the solution is pretty simple: geo block US owned social media and wait a two days for people to move to the best EU alternative. One you remove the foreign subsidized option with complete market share capture, there will be options that can finally compete.
Both the US and the EU are already doing this exact thing with cars, basically.
As a EU citizen I believe in the citizen's freedom to pick their social media platform, but when it comes to official accounts (e.g. government, the president or prime ministers, etc) I've always believed we should favour open protocols and federation. Public funding of course. Probably an unpopular opinion.
How is Russia currently moving everyone from Telegram onto some "Max" app? How has China managed to keep the likes of Meta out?
B-but the EU can't do that!
It absolutely can. Just like it can push Chat Control down everyone's throats even though if you held a referendum on it it would be voted down (no, most Jacques the plumbers on the street don't want mass surveillance even if it's "against crime").
> They are beholden to the current US admin - as always
They have, as the joke goes, more money than God and influence all over the world. They are beholden to no one. They have the resources to fight in court against decisions they don’t believe in, and all the lobbying they need to shape established laws.
They choose their actions, and their actions are their own. Every single dollar they donate to the current president but not the previous one is an admission of their allegiance and (lack of) morals.
Having principles and standing for them costs money, and these societal parasites subsist on money and influence. Make no mistake, they will sell their own mother to further their goals, but they don’t have to while they can keep selling everyone else’s.
Or maybe the reason more bribes are paid to the current administration is that the current administration is more receptive to bribes? The ROI on gifts to Trump is probably higher than on gifts to Biden so it makes sense to give more.
yes, I think if anything its the other way around - the current US administration is behold to them.
The problem is that the same is true for many politicians. They do a lot of lobbying in Europe too.
> They have, as the joke goes, more money than God and influence all over the world. They are beholden to no one.
The administration can take over them with the snap of a finger if they so desire. They have absolutely no power.
The best example of that is the BBC suit, where the only reason it's happening is because the US doesn't have any control over the entity because it's British.
> The administration can take over them with the snap of a finger if they so desire.
No, no they can’t. They sure want you to believe that, though, and the longer that fantasy is left unchecked, the more power it gets. The current administration is not omnipotent, and that is exemplified by the times it was pushed back (not by the bootlicker CEOs at major US tech companies, obviously).
Jimmy Kimmel is still on the air, despite Trump doing what he could to take him out. Like John Oliver said, use the four key words that make weak bullies go away: “fuck you, make me”.
https://youtu.be/ohPToBog_-g?t=1610
If they were some almighty supreme being then everyone in China would be on Facebook and Instagram.
> some almighty supreme being
That’s not the argument. Unfortunately, reading comprehension and engaging in good faith continues to decline rapidly on HN.
Not being beholden to someone does not mean you have power over them. For example: you are not beholden to me and thus don’t have to do anything I say; but that doesn’t mean I have to do anything you say either, I’m not beholden to you.
I wonder if it has something to do with profiling. Because as far as my eyes can see my youtube is strictly educational, scientific and engineering.
YouTube definitely provides recommendations based on your watch history and overall profile.
So don’t follow the recommendations?
I look for stuff I need on a search engine, watch the video I need only (mostly tutorials) and then leave. I never follow YouTube recommendations anymore - that’s how it keeps you hooked and feeds you what they want you to watch. (It’s also nonsensical and blatantly obvious these days - I went in to watch a video on how to tie a bow tie, why is there a recommendation on “Bolsonaro has Lula shaking in his pants, find out why??”
We banned YouTube for casual entertainment at home years ago - one of the best decisions we ever made, other than the toxic content pushing, it’s also so ad-infested it’s totally worthless anyway.
I remember when YouTube was “better than tv! Content on demand, no ads!”. Those days are long gone
At this point sociala media has become a television, on twitter I just unfollowed everyone who have't followed back and I keep seeing the same antisemitic, antimuslim, anti-EU, anti-woman, anti-immigrant shit. My SO happens to see very similar posts to the point that I can't show her a funny post because she would have already seen it. There are some different posts of course but the money shot is mostly the same.
They probably show posts based on location and background, so essentially just like Fox, CNN, MSNBC but everyone sees theirs from the same screen with the same agenda pushed from all of them.
Similar, but more slop and less evil.
I have almost no reason to look at my facebook feed, check it perhaps once every 1-2 weeks in case something important was only posted there (not that this helps as they don't show me all actual friends actual updates). Recent visit was 50% ads, 25% recommended or weirdly boosted content, including a post from Mark Zuckerberg promoting his AI, and a post whose content I forget from the White House (I live in Germany, the last time I even visited the USA was 2018).
This is anecdotal, it's not evidence. The whole point of this discussion is figuring out the difference.
AfD is controversial - it's click bait - the algorithm is feeding 'action' - that's the problem.
Yeah. I never get any AfD videos on my youtube feed (living in germany). I guess Meta isnt pushing right wing narratives then. Phew, we got lucky
The answer implies a misunderstandng the dynamics of this system.
There is very little chance that Meta is doing algorithmic political adjustments at the behest of Zuck.
It's conspiracy theory without a shred of evidence.
As much as Zuck is a maligned actor, that's not how these things work thee.
X - yes, that could happen there, Meta and Google are different kinds of organizations.
Meta is feeding you click bait without bother.
YouTube is feeding you clickbait wit some concern, especially for advertisers.
X is almost entirely feeding you clickbait, and very aggressively amplifying clickbait voices, and heavily promoting those voices Elon wants promoted.
None of them are making up and promoting magical weird memes.
Even out of political reasoning, they are rigged for engagement and as it turns out fear mongering and hate bring a lot of engagement.
What are people going to watch between a 3 hours in depth debate about the future of the country on topics such as ecology, finance, social security and pension systems VS hundreds of reels about ImMiGrAnT RiOtS in paris?
I've literally only been recommended their crap once and "don't recommend channel" has been working fine.
You might simply have been engaging with related content unknowingly, even if it's only one critical of them.
Or maybe AfD hasn’t targeted you for other reasons, so you’re not fighting against a marketing team to avoid the videos, only against the “pure” form of the algorithm.
From my experience Youtube simply recommends more of the type of videos that you actually watched. Watch history overpowers basically anything else you do, your subscriptions have little to no influence. A single click on a 'wrong' video, and you'll get tons of similar ones in your recommendations feed for weeks to come, especially when you end up clicking some of the newly recommend videos. It requires purging unwanted topics from the watch history to actually get rid of them, which so far worked very reliable for me.
I find a lot of social media algorithms are "dumb" in that they will see someone share something saying "x sucks" and interpret that as one being interested in "x".
Either that or it's deliberately showing people stuff it knows they will hate to harvest hate scrolling.
Indeed. US tech has been actively conspiring in lying to the American populace about everything in Canada from politics, election results, public opinion in Canada, resources needed by the US from Canada, etc. They're interfering in the affairs of any country that won't bend to their will.
A lot of bots of US origin are propagating false narratives posing as citizens of these countries.
I love how everyone from every political background thinks big tech has it out for them specifically. No, it couldn't be that algorithms are stochastic and random and sometimes ban random people. The tech companies are trying to manipulate everyone, every single side, into some goal only they understand.
Somehow none of the hundreds of thousands of software engineers that have worked there have managed to uncover exactly what this purpose is despite having access to the monorepos and visibility into the recommendation engine pipelines.
On the modern internet, people confuse conspiratorial thinking for well-reasoned thinking. But an idea is not correct just because it is interesting or exciting.
The manipulation is not in the algorithm but in the controls the algo offers, either to the company or to financial friends of the company. It's pretty blatant the way Meta is pushing far right politics everywhere in Europe, pushing pro Israeli propaganda while silencing opposing opinions.
It's not a secret that Meta is selling political preferences on its platform, as they have been for decades. Several Meta employee have blown the whistle about it already.
I think the most charitable explanation for this is that it's because polarizing content (aka ragebait) gets views/plays, which the ranking algorithms directly optimize for.
Also, this isn't a new phenomenon. If you're interested, I'd recommend reading Shoshana Zuboff's 2018 book: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
You can say many bad things about Google, but I think they are still "California liberals" on social issues.
I get AfD content recommendations (lurid, trashy stuff of uhm uncertain truth value) a propos of nothing in the village I grew up in - they are popular there with about 25% in the 2025 election. The region is not even in the east or particularly suffering economically. I don't get these recommendations in Berlin. It seems regional.
The owners of these companies are very much conservative though, not out of any ideology mind you, but because they correctly identify that this is the party that best suits their class interests of fucking over everyone and everything else in order to get richer.
I was careful to say socially and I generally agree with you, but Trump is currently just turning everything into shit that he touches. If you don't directly participate in his grift, you probably lose economically because of him. So I'm not sure how useful it is to back him for economic reasons.
Yes there are economic reasons to back Trump.
If you don't then actions might be taken against you see CBS and other media having to pay.
DoJ choosing who to look at.
To be more precise, capital only seeks to grow its relative power over labor. Making everything shittier is part of it. If you want a clear image of what it is that these people want, look at Russia: a shithole where a few oligarchs hold absolute power, are bound to no laws and lord over a poor, indoctrinated and hopeless populace. Sure, these oligarchs would be richer if Russia was more prosperous, but they don't care about that.
Californian liberalism is one of the principle causes of the far-right backlash you're addressing.
That implies the far-right would have otherwise just sat peacefully at home doing crossword puzzles, until triggered into acting.
I don't think that's ever been true.
Sure, mass censorship by a tech elite captured by a wave of liberal identity politics in california has nothing to do with the right wing cultural backlash.
Being censored from expressing the view that gender is principally a product of sex, or dissenting from state polices of vaccination, or being in revulsion at mass media (liked by mainstream demographics) being hijacked on the alter of fringe "representation". These have had no effect. None.
This hasnt caused everything from the election from a far-right US president to the collapse of the western video games industry, hollywood and the western media ecosystem. A total sucide of western soft and hard power "isn't" something the US has just done in revenge against californian liberalism.
The obliviousness, and arrogance here is, I guess, in keeping with that very same californian liberalism which has "done no wrong" -- other than demanded a world-wide internet echo chambre which reflects only its own values on pain of mass censorship. Values rare even in the US, let alone amongst the whole west, and the 8bn people on the planet.
I was not aware that Hollywood, video games, nor the Western media system as a whole had collapsed.
The only thing true about your statement is that the mere existence of California has been used to justify right wing candidates entire platform.
Holy shit.
Gender is factually, as evidenced via a multitude of highly respected scientific studies conducted by a vast majority of respected experts both medical and psychological, distinct in every way from biological sex.
There is genuinely no room for opinion, disagreement, or dispute on that subject, at all. To disagree is to be, objectively, incorrect.
I can see where you are coming from in a purely politically motivated sense, yes. But the medical and psychological facts do not actually care about politics, and transgender individuals exist regardless of your belief in them.
Science is falsifiable. Otherwise it’s not science.
Identity politics is a liberal, i.e. right wing affectation.
It has nothing to do with the left.
You seem to be very confused about multiple meanings of both "liberal", and "left".
This is how leftists operate. You destroy the language and refer to things as their contradictory opposite. Through principle of explosion [0] you can now provide proof, justification, of anything, even falsehood.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Men are women.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_explosion
Please don't use HN for ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
In general, I'd recommend familiarizing yourself with the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The inherent contradictions of capitalism coming to a rear are.
California liberalism is just a convenient bogeyman.
The economic problems hit people, then they (if they are white and / or male) are called bad people with an unfair advantage on top. Seems like not such a great way to get their support tbh.
Why should I believe your claim that AfD content is getting pushed on YouTube? Isn't it more likely that you personally hate AfD and so you find it salient and enraging whenever you see any AfD content at all yourself, regardless of exactly how YouTube's recommendation algorithm works on your account or whether they treat AfD particularly differently than any other political content? Are you actually measuring this?
To be clear I think it's entirely possible that YouTube is adjusting its recommendation algorithm to show AfD content to people more (or perhaps less) than would happen "organically", because AfD is a salient political party in German politics and YouTube knows this. But how do you determine what is the correct amount of AfD content to be recommended to people in a politically-neutral way, that doesn't end up amounting to you arguing that the YouTube algorithm is only fair if it censors political content you personally think is bad?
I think there is a case for making
- personalized ads
- election ads
by law strictly two different things.
The risk of voter manipulation is just way to high. This also isn't just about manipulation by US companies, the system they created is just to ab-usable by others, too. To make it worse the more ethical values a person has/upright and honest they are the less likely are to use such means but the more likely they would make a good elected politician for the general population. At the same time humans are just way too easy to manipulate.
(Naturally there is also a case for _any_ personalized ads being a high risk for societies, especially democracies, and in turn the concept if it should be banned. Important here is to note that often just basing ads on the "non ad content" they are displayed alongside with is getting you quite far. So if there even is a need for highly personalized ads can be put in question. Through the topic gets far more complicated with highly personalized non ad content recommendation systems..)
Things like these happen if a state fails to secure its information space. Giving control over it to foreign entities means providing population wide manipulative power to foreign entities with adversarial intentions.
Every state should have foreign agent laws (NGOs must register and must be transparent over their financials). Every state should have control over their information space (especially educational, social and news media). Russia and China understood, Brazil and Europe did not.
It is not so black white. It is a dilemma. There is great value in freedom of expression. But fake expression with the explicit intention to mislead is not so good. It would be best if the population would be better at distinguishing truth from falsehood. Unfortunately much of the population seems to be at a level close to cattle.
The idea that you can't have a foreign nation control the main channels that the population gets their news from, and that their population spends hours a day of their free time staring at, is black and white. And that's the core.
> Unfortunately much of the population seems to be at a level close to cattle.
Not you though. You're a wolf among sheep. A true seer among the blind.
Everyone else is too dumb to know what's right, just manipulated by the media they consume on the Internet.
Not you though. You get all your information from trustworthy sources. Sure, they happen to agree with you 90% of the time but,hey, nobody's perfect, right? Well, except you. You've got all the answers.
If only everyone else would just let you make all the rules. You could get to all the bad people and make sure they stopped saying the wrong thing. Maybe provide them the resources they need to learn the truth and, if they don't want to learn the truth, we'll just keep them away from everyone else until they figure it out.
> Not you though. You're a wolf among sheep. A true seer among the blind.
Oh heck no, “it takes one to know one” as they say. Im the sheepiest sheep.
This is a rather stupid caricature.
These are thoughts that occur to me too when a safetyist progressive (for want of a better term other than "woke") suggests shutting down information to prevent people seeing the wrong ideas.
But you must see that it is a genuine conundrum. In a free-for-all information landscape (something which did not exist until yesterday), people need to be able to distinguish good information from bad for democracy to survive.
That is a very mealy-mouthed way of saying citizens should only have access to information that their government approves.
Brazil is not in need to send meat to any meatgrinder.
>Giving control over it to foreign entities means providing population wide manipulative power to foreign entities with adversarial intentions.
Alternatively, this blatant use of any tool available to influence non enemy states is disgusting, and forces everyone to a "everyone loses" scenario. Shifting the focus to an insufficiently defended victim removes the focus from the nature of the aggression.
> non enemy states is disgusting
It clearly is an enemy state. The US, that is.
One think I'm wondering is how much are the various searches AI invocation etc. personalized, and how much could this turn into a "self fulfilling prophecy" in due to you _or people close to you(1)_ checking if the search is biased the personalization will make it biased. (Assuming this is accidentally, at least from Metas site.)
(1): Might be worth pointing out here that Meta has a long history of basing personalization not just on what you do but what people "close to you" do. E.g. if Meta knows you are in the same location (e.g. same WiFi, not sure if they use that today) and then shortly after the other person searches for idk. air purifiers the chance of you getting air purifier ads is largely increased.
Meta, along with every other large platform, had previously banned the sitting president of the United States.
You mean the senile reality tv star who kept breaking their TOS? Yeah totally the same thing…
As opposed to a senile Brazilian felon?
That’s two things they’ve got in common!
We have had a senile president recently but its not that one.
That senile President didn't order a violent coup and call for violence on social media, therefore he didn't earn a ban.
He also didn't rape children and steal billions while destroying the world economy...
Ask any neurologist near you, and they will readily confirm how Trump exhibits all signs of dementia and mental decline on national TV every single day.
Which is evidence of how extraordinary his actions were in January 2021, and how extraordinarily well the billionaire owners of American media (including Zuck) have managed to retcon it as something else.
He was given far more leeway than any user in the history of social media.
The fact that they didn't ban him for so long weighs toward being partial to not banning politicians. Which seems to be the opposite of the point you're trying to make.
There were literal genocides conducted on the platform unobstructed at the same time. They banned him because they wanted to. Be serious.
After this happened, causing him to get double impeached: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Capitol_riot-_Videos_show...
The surprise is not that he was kicked off the main social media companies, the surprises are that the wheels of US justice turned so slowly that Trump got a chance to be re-elected rather than life in prison, and likewise that the US electorate went for him.
Correctly so?
What US companies do to US politicians is an internal matter for the US.
As soon as they start interfering with democratic processes in other countries, it's imperialism.
The whole point of the left is to censor their opposition. Leftist ideas don't survive long in the real world/critical debate . So censoring opposition opinions (and jailing opponents) has been the lefts go to for more than 100 years.
/Yeah this will be censored too. QED.
Funny how comments like this go dim...
Bolsonaro is right wing?
So the United States and its multinationals are meddling with internal affairs of South American countries again? Whats new?
It's literally happening in a new way, for one. Also, the alternative to reporting this story is not reporting this story, which might lead us to the impression that interference in South American elections had ended.
There is some phrase (it was actually on my sons vocab study materials) for a mental disorder where when you become emotionally attached to a conspiracy you begin to see it everywhere.
The daily fine is so meaninglessly small ($99,000 per day) that there is very little incentive to do anything.
This will only get fixed when people get jailed by ignoring court orders, fines for big tech do nothing.
Not just execs, top shareholders. The wold is lousy with people willing to be the CEO that got rich by gambling on getting away with it.
Allocate risk to each according to their reward.
We could start fining in percentage of revenue.
As seen in the recent New Mexico case, it seems not to be enough.
Double the fine every day the entity in question is in violation. They will stop rather soon.
This is the future of elections if Big Tech isn't reined in. The first experiment/test case was X:
- https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/technology/twitter-far-ri...
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/10/29/elon-mu...
- https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/x-has-disproportionate...
- https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/elon-musk-turned-x...
We forget this but hard right content is still highly promoted on X, especially related to white supremacy and anti-immigrant, and it is also protected from content violations.
Isn't turning money into influence over people"s behavior more or less their core business model. The company shouldn't be allowed to exist, buy since they are, well of course they're going to keep doing what they're made to do.
I have a feeling the problem isn’t that malicious unfortunately.
Right-wing folks are driven by social media since ~2016. Their content is emotional, aggressive and naturally conducive to more engagement. It’s what their base feeds on. So a lot of the situations described here are just standard ranking algorithms doing their job.
But that begs the question: is the existence of these platforms that amplify divisive and inflammatory content the problem itself? I vote yes. The power of reaching a wide audience should not be handed off without any cross-checks.
I couldn't agree more, in the past TV, newspapers and radio were paid by a specific party to flood the citizens with their own truth without any algorithm. Currently, there aren't a simple way to control information, the ask here is to manipulate the algorithm in favor of something which could later facilitate other sides too.
We really need governments to force companies to mark bots and allow users to block all of them.
It's getting ridiculous online.
Who cares? Bluesky is where it’s at!
Dirty b@stards the lot of them, it's gone from "well, we better tow the line to protect our market position", to full throated support of outright fascism.
This undue influence of US policies on South American countries is most disturbing as right wing policies increase inequalities.
It has to end. Millions of lives are at sake.
It's interesting times where American Billionaires are deciding the politics in USA, South America and Europe.
I am sure that everyone involved must be feeling invincible but this is how you build resentment that will last and in most cases result in conflicts or regulations. Probably Musk, Zuckerberg and Thiel will be fine but they will destroy the prospects of the upcoming libertarians and cement the Chinese dominance as they don't have a problem of unruly billionaires and the problem of someone getting rich by doing one thing getting the right to do decide on everything and screw it up for everyone. Sad, I really don't want to live in a China-style political system.
You can resent them all you like; they don’t care as long as nothing is done to them, and nothing is being done. Resentment is worthless without action.
Resentment isn't worthless, the current political climate is a result of overshoot of a resentment towards some liberal policies. The next cycle will overshoot too.
Its one of the most Orwellian situations I can think of.
I agree. As an EU citizen, I'm much more worried of spying and election interference from USA than China these days.
If I have to choose between being subject of the Chinese Communist party or American psychopath billionaires, I'll gladly choose the party.
Is this because of your mistaken belief that the Chinese Communist party doesn't filter and censor the Internet for their subjects?
The difference is that US Billionaires are doing it without being elected or officially assuming power to do so. In Europe it is important to keep it official as you can just burn their palaces and run them through the guillotine, which even feels wrong saying it in open on US based forum but that's how it has been since many many generations. Europe has seen so many January 6th over they years.
You know how they say that USA is a very new country and that even some pub in Europe can have longer history? Well, that's true but it doesn't mean that European countries have centuries of continued administration, most are a few decades old as a result of revolution or a war.
Europe is a very violent place for politicians, politicians being oversees and untouchable is a very new phenomenon.
These corporations ruin and sabotage democracy.
Basically with corruption you can control what democracies do. We see this with the orange mafia in charge of the USA right now - even though sometimes it also yields entertainment, indirectly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvfePoni9eM
This reminds me of the iconic hearing where someone asks "Why does Trumps image show up when I search idiot on Google?".
Cuts to Sundar starring blankly.
Uncomfortable reading ahead:
“The average IQ of the bottom third (lowest 33.33%) of the population is approximately - 83.6 - on a standard IQ scale (mean of 100 and standard deviation of 15).” - MM
The real question is do idiots rolling 83.6 iq have the right to self determination no matter the cost to everyone else? Or should the more intelligent reading club context clues able take over management for the good of all?
If you think Brazilian courts are neutral in general, ummm
There is no neutral. But there is a sovereign.
Soberaniiiiiiiiiiiia soberaniiiiiiiiiiiiia
Let's face it: Tech CEOs have aligned with fascists (techno-fascism) because - and that's a general rule throughout history (see pre-WWII industrial titans aligned with Nazi-leaders): Industry leaders of large corporations and authoritarians share the same goal : ultimate control and power over others.
I think tech ceos follow one simple variable: $CURRENT_POLITICAL_POWER
have lefties in power for the next of the decade and you'll see how datacenters become all about clean energy investment, climate change starts to matter, "don't be evil" starts to take shape
You'll have that in the marketing, but the underlying actions will remain the same.
Exactly! When it comes to liberal movements, it's a 'blue outfit that they were', but when they support authoritarians , it's much closer to their true colors since the way they came into private power and hold it shares the same mindset (unequal distribution of power versus more equal flat distribution).
How does internet censorship 2016-2024 fit into your model?
It’s more simple than that. Industry tends to align with government because they have power and they want that power to be benefit them. If you’re a large company it would be stupid not to try to maintain that relationship.
Yes, I think we actually agree, and maybe I should have been clearer. Of course industry leaders always try to play nicely, e.g. if liberal/democratic party is in power, they will 'wear their liberal outfit'.
Yet, from a pure intrinsic values perspective, people that are power-seeking are alike in industry and politics, and when they support an authoritarian state/movement instead of a democratic one, it shows their true intentions.
What might give for some pause, if you listen carefully to the more "alt right" voices, Trump is the "moderate" or even "liberal" by their standards, by their own words.
And they have their favorite phrase:
May flying spaghetti monster, help us all.The Supreme Federal Court in Brazil has been notorious for censorship. The New York Times has found that it has ordered 223 account-blocking orders since 2020.
As is its sovereign right. It is not Meta's right to interfere with Brazil's sovereignty.
I’m sure that court is not biased and those banned accounts ain’t in favor of some local factions.
Everything is biased. There is no view from nowhere. What you perceive as bias-free is just a reflection of your own bias.
With that in mind, why shouldn't it be in favor of the locals and reflect the values of its own society instead of some tech bros with imperialist ambitions?
> With that in mind, why shouldn't it be in favor of the locals and reflect the values of its own society instead of some tech bros with imperialist ambitions?
The article is discussing a candidate who got the majority of the vote in the 10/4 election. Where did you get the idea that this content doesn't "reflect the values of its own society"?
People want to deflect and blame foreign powers for why their platforms are failing among the electorate. The argument is essentially that they are so right and correct that any deviation from their values could only have occurred due to Bad Guy external intervention, which conveniently justifies why we need mass censorship.
Just do a better job convincing people you're right. Censorship will just mask social problems until the outbreak is even worse.
Freedom of speech for me, censorship for thee.
Playing obvious problems of Brazil‘s judiciary system down like that are clear red flags for somebody not for 1 sec contemplating how he would react if the political camps would be reversed in this situation. It is their sovereignty if the censorship happens on speech you don’t like
Of course. It would be cowardly to not take a side.
People that want to do good things and people that want to do bad things don't deserve the same treatment. Neutrality is complicity.
And once again meta is interfering with election. The scum of the earth…
At a point on time, there should be more structured and unbiased content in social media before elections in democratic countries to help people make their decisions.
This should be regulated to avoid interference from anyone.
The biggest problem now is that the billionaires behind social media nowadays will push for a liberal / right wing agenda in the west for their own interests.
"The most accomplished masterpiece of contemporary capitalism is neither the iPhone, nor the unicorn startup, nor even the visionary billionaire.
No.
Its flagship product, its anthropological jewel, its greatest achievement, is the right-wing poor person. A genuine feat of social engineering: materially deprived, yet rich in convictions that run counter to their own interests.
They have been carefully molded. They have been taught that their problems always come from below or from next door — the immigrant, the welfare recipient, the civil servant, the unemployed — never from above.
They have been taught to hate taxes while surviving thanks to public services. To defend heirs to fortunes while having nothing to pass on themselves. To applaud those who crush them, as long as they speak loudly and promise law and order.
The right-wing poor person is a fascinating creature. They vote against their own interests with fervor, convinced that one day, perhaps, they too will find themselves on the right side of the fence.
They mistake brutality for courage, authoritarianism for protection, injustice for merit. They are sold fear in a ready-made package, identity at bargain prices, and anger in bulk on a monthly subscription.
At the dawn of this new world, the monsters do not emerge from the margins: they rise from the ballot boxes, television studios, and simplistic slogans.
They thrive on manufactured misery and sabotaged political awareness.
Capitalism has not merely produced poverty; it has achieved something far worse: it has made the poor docile, obedient, spiteful, and grateful.
A masterpiece, I'm telling you!"
Maximino Fernández
Very well put. I would like to add a less-eloquent epilogue to the story.
This curious animal was laid bare by the discovery that we are hackable by nature, and hacked by behaviour science. Though it took a few decades to get going, the understanding of how to influence motivation and decision-making is now very mature.
In order to arrive at this understanding, you need data, and lots of it. The social media platforms have performed the function of data aggregators and testing grounds for algorithmic control. But it was not the tech companies who came up with plans, only the tools to put them into practice.
The culprits, though they operate in shade, are generally non-partisan and understand that divide-and-conquer has always been an effective strategy. These people sometimes work in intelligence bureaus, but not always. They are, however, always known to those agencies. After all, you do not need to know you are an asset to be an asset.
The algorithms, necessarily kept as protected IP, are statistical engines that profile and predict, producing probabilistic outcomes and estimates. Before LLMs, one might have argued "but how can probabilistic algos really produce something meaningful?", now I would think people might have a different take, if they could see the layers and weights.
An emperor used to need an army, and this is what replaces it for non-violent insurrection and domestic control. Many will even state their ambitions publicly, and sometimes (though less frequently these days) their procedure. What they are doing is not strictly illegal, because the law gives "sovereignty" to a person's choices, without recognition that their choices might not be their own. Libertarianism has played right into their hands, in this sense.
A masterpiece, not only of conception, but also social engineering, with a technological endoskeleton built on the aggregated data we all willingly give them. All information feeds the machine, just as every financial transaction cements the central bank's authority.
The fun thing is, the original nazis were quite pro-workers. The original fascists tried to address some concerns of the working class too. Leaders of both started out in far-left circles before jumping on the other side of the shoehorn. Which worked out much better for them.
Modern far-right frequently pays at least lip service to concerns of poor working class. At the same time modern left has become champaign left. Caring less and less about the actual working class.
And then the left becomes surprised that poor working class sometimes go to the other side…
https://www.britannica.com/story/were-the-nazis-socialists
These billionaire ghouls need to answer for their many attempts on our Republics. Democracy can't survive when its most powerful members are working against it. We have to take them done ASAP, unless we want an encore of the 1940s.
Capital naturally compounds, and financial resources naturally seek political influence, so to combat the root of all evil is simply to cap individual's wealth versus society so they can't rig the game in their favor.
This is exactly the kind of stupidity that helps people like Trump reelected. I know nothing about Brazilian politics, but this looks like a desperate attempt to undermine the opposition or pull Meta into needless controversy, and I have no idea how complicit the courts are in all this.
So what if searching for “brasil” returns a Bolsonaro GIF? I tried it myself, and the obvious explanation is that he’s wearing a Brazilian flag tshirt and dancing rather comically. How does a GIF appearing in search results imply political bias?
I’m immune to a trillion dollar brainwashing industry. It’s everyone else that is manipulated which makes it so valuable.
Sleeping giants is one of the most shadiest anti-democratic organizations that, once you grasp what they are actually doing, there’s literally nothing else left to do for voters than what you described. Its subversive unethical manipulation (there are offshoots in Europe as well) is a reason for me to go scorched earth and auto-inverse: anybody that’s not distancing himself from them is unelectable, anybody who promises to put them on a chopping block gets my vote.
> This is exactly the kind of stupidity that helps people like Trump reelected.
You mean when people admittedly have no knowledge of a subject but still speak authoritatively about it, viscerally criticising one of the sides and even suggesting fowl play, instead of taking care to be humble and understand the context before speaking or making accusations?
I agree, that is very much the kind of attitude that got us into the current situation.
I know 5 Brazilian people in the US and they are all voting for Bolsonaro. Apparently the Lula dude has been in power for 12 years (not in a row). No wonder they want him gone.
Bolsonaro voters see the US as some kind of capitalist heaven, where they can live out their dreams of becoming rich and powerful without regulations. That is not a surprise. Brazilian expats majorly vote left in the rest of the world.
Of note, this Bolsonaro is the son of the former president, with zero political plans or credentials; his only claim is the name itself and what it represents. I find the idea of a family lineage in government, much, much worse.
Lula was voted in to power, Brazil is still a strong democracy despite the direction it’s going. It is a shame that another viable opposition candidate could not be produced as I’m not fond of having 80+ year olds in that seat, but still better than the alternative.
I think most Brazilian, as other Latin American, voters would rather be a bit more like the US and less like what the left has delivered to them in the past decades.
Well, I strongly disagree, especially if we are talking about the US in the last decade.
Bolsonaro’s government has zero proposals for anything that will lead the country in that direction anyway, and did very little in the four years they had. Some new, fresh leadership is urgently needed, hopefully in 2030 if there’s still elections.
The impression I have is that many Brazilian voters want their version of the American Dream — yet don’t realize that Brazilian society is much different from the American one and that Brazil won’t ever replicate the success of the US, regardless of a government’s policies.