It's funny because Facebook's news feed in the last couple years is unusable, filled with AI slop and clickbait. Twitter similarly requires aggressive use of block + mute to eliminate scams, clickbait, and other content I'm not interested in.
I don't know if this is due to their changes in moderation policy, or if AI has overwhelmed them, but I vastly preferred the old news feeds
A few years back it started showing me obvious political ragebait. I ignored it and then it started showing me pictures of women whose nipples were obviously showing through their clothing, which was an improvement, but still not the reason I signed up for Facebook. I've always understood it as the algorithm is looking for engagement and will try some lowest common denominator tactics to engage in it. As someone who just wanted to see the odd picture of a friend or relative, I don't have much use for Facebook these days.
Same here. There was nothing I could do to get my feed to not be full of provocatively insulting and irritating political posts. I’d unfollow, unfriend, block, say “show me less of this” and so on. But when I’d unfriend some person, very next thing on my feed would be political content I didn’t like from some totally random person on my friend list who I’d never interacted with. Meanwhile I’d notice that people I actually knew in person had life events I’d want to know about - got married, took a nice vacation, had children even, and FB had never showed me stuff like that! So I just stopped using it entirely. Then when I went back after a few years, the site demanded my driver’s license. So guess I will just never sign in again.
I think if you add not-friends to your friends list, the Algorithm(tm) perhaps justifiably recommends things from your friends list, and you get junk recommendations, the problem isn't entirely the Algorithm(tm)'s fault.
You feed the Algorithm(tm) garbage and it returns you garbage, and somehow it's all the Algorithm(tm)'s fault.
It's the algorithm's fault for not listening to my "mute this person". I had my feed muted so I didn't see any posts (which is how I wanted it), but now I see random "recommended" content, with no way I can see to opt out. That's not my fault.
FB has an entire team of very well paid people whose entire job is to tweak this algorithm. Presenting relevant content is the whole concept. I suspect where it goes wrong is chasing “engagement” at all costs despite whether it’s emotionally pleasant to the viewer. FB doesn’t care if I actually like the content they present - just whether it keeps me on the site longer. That is, I believe, a poor choice since, at least in my case, it led me to stop using their service.
>A few years back it started showing me obvious political ragebait. I ignored it and then it started showing me pictures of women whose nipples were obviously showing through their clothing, which was an improvement, but still not the reason I signed up for Facebook.
Same experience. Then, after ignoring that, I've started getting posts from mystery people who seem like they could be aquaintences (because hobbies) but aren't -an improvement, but still off the mark.
I just want to go back to where you could use facebook to share what you're up to and see what other folks you know are up to; but apparently that's too 00's to hope for.
By far the biggest thing people remember about Google+ was the hamfisting of it (several people lost their Youtube accounts) and yet people also reported that it was otherwise a good experience (compared to the Facebook feed); one thing Google had to contend with was Facebook not offering access to the social graph so they had to build the network effects by a more difficult route
Google also spawned a second one for me from my original gmail address, but I still use my original pre-google+ youtube account. After signing in to that google account on any given device, I have the option to switch between the two youtube accounts associated with the email.
It's good that you have access to both; out of curiosity, is there any differentiation in the way it list them in the menu where you pick which one to use, or is the order consistent? I can imagine being mildly annoyed if I had to guess every time I logged into a new device which one was the one I wanted, although obviously that's still better than just not having a choice.
The one created for google+ is usually listed first. After signing into my google account on a new device, the google+ one is also the one that I'm usually automatically signed into.
If Google had any direction and purpose, it could have kept not fucking up Circles until Facebook (almost inevitably it seems in retrospect) messed up.
Can I just say, the comments that have happened here before mine, have been stellar. Wow. And also, it's so weird to have some nostalgia for all of this now...
> I just want to go back to where you could use facebook to share what you're up to and see what other folks you know are up to; but apparently that's too 00's to hope for.
But do folks you know post? I’m under the impression that the slop churned out for clicks are all that’s left.
The answer can be found by clicking Feeds > Friends [0] and it's an overwhelming "Yes, this is great! Wait, 90% is 'shared' from someone I don't know anyway, not written by my friend, so it's only a slight improvement."
Over time, fewer and fewer of them post, and they post less and less.
I post a lot less than I used to as well. At least in part this is because my feed is drowning in unwanted noise. Facebook's desparate attempts to wave stuff in my face 'for engagement' drive me away from posting more, so it becomes a vicious circle, driving down engagement, making people post less, round and round we go.
Maybe I'm weird, but if my friends aren't posting much, that's OK, that's what I came here to check. Instead I'm assaulted by noise, quite a lot of it either scammy or offensive.
I also post less because anything I say seems to be immediately shown to the person most likely to be outraged by it.
I used to use it like a daily "here's what I'm up to today" blog, because my friends and family would see that and it was a cool way of sharing my life with them.
The, somewhere around 2014-ish, it was suddenly unsafe to post normal stuff without getting criticised. I had a whole series of arguments with folks about things that I or they had posted. I stopped posting as much, and started checking all my posts first, and deleting old ones.
Then in 2017 I got a stalker who messaged all my friends and family with shit about me. I had to make my friends list private and unfriend a bunch of people (no great loss). It felt even more unsafe.
Now I post travel pics and that's it. I miss the old safe space.
Maybe Zuck should apologize for that - he's quite good at groveling to Congress. He may also want to apologize to investors for totally shifting Meta's focus to VR despite it being clear that it is not as big as he claimed. But he likes being underestimated.
> I just want to go back to where you could use facebook to share what you're up to and see what other folks you know are up to; but apparently that's too 00's to hope for.
And now they have some way for "AI" to write your entire FB post for you. Which I'm sure will end well. Why think for yourself and write what you mean when you can let AI do all the thinking for you?
Instagram is {in}famous for its bikini babes, a not insignificant fraction of which advertise their "availability" in various cities. How this has never come up in the various congressional hearings about protecting children mystifies me, reddit, twitter and instagram all have a culture of onboarding young women into sex work.
- sex work is against Instagram TOS and they take active efforts to ban people doing it, including design features such as limiting people to exactly one offsite link per account which may not be to onlyfans
- because that's where the audience is and advertising there is effective, there's an entire industry in working out how to promote sex work on Instagram without getting banned
=> Insta ends up as part of the sales funnel despite actively trying not to be. See also Twitch. There is of course no evidence of them intentionally onboarding people into this, it's an emergent feature of being a site that posts images. Then have to censor aggressively, and even then sex work exists at a sort of "censorship shoreline".
On the other hand, Reddit and Twitter have never really cared, and only with some campaigning effort have they been made to censor nonconsensual intimate images. Twitter made its pornbot problem worse by selling bluetick promotion.
> limiting people to exactly one offsite link per account which may not be to onlyfans
I think this has more to do with Instagram wanting people to stay on Instagram than discouraging sex workers. I'm guessing there's a long list of things the offsite link isn't allowed to be aside from porn. Hate groups and gambling sites come to mind.
It is not THE culture of $SOCIALMEDIA to onboard young women into sex work, but once you find the bubble of thirst posting and find out there's money in it, it is an attractive pathway that the people in that subculture are happy to introduce you to, same as porn has always been, it's just that marketing and connecting to new talent is now much cheaper than it used to be
I know very little of Insta.. but thought I'd seen a story, so did a DDG and first result includes:
"Stricter private messaging settings for teens To help protect teens from unwanted contact on Instagram, we restrict adults over the age of 19 from messaging teens who don't follow them, and we limit the type and number of direct messages (DMs) people can send to someone who "
With things like this, and now several states requiring that you must be 18 to use any social media, (because parents can't parent apparently?)
I wonder how much of a problem this really is?
I get it that smart teens will find ways to access naughty things no matter how many barriers are put in front of them..
But at some point we must look at parents and ask why 'children' would find it fine to spend lots of time staring at thirst traps.. I know kids that if someone was to put stuff like that in front of them they would push it away and tell multiple adults about it..
Of course I have also known parents that let their kids play grand theft auto at 6 years old.
So while I have tried to tell parents for years about what exists on game consoles and the internet and how they need to not only pay attention, but have open dialogue about sharing what they see and such.. it seems to me that most parents actually do not care what their kids see on the internets..
You could of argue that parents did not know what could be found online 20 years ago, but today's children had their parents grow up with unfettered access (most of them I believe) - and so they know and they don't care (again most I believe).
There are some vocal small groups screaming that there is a need to save the children, but I would assume most of them have kids with cell phones without any blocking systems installed.
That's not to say all. I do know a family that does not let any of their children watch TV, use the internet or cell phone - all their kids, 6yrs - 16 ..no TV even not at all and they would not even think about sneaking to use a cell phone behind their parents back.
Sadly as far as the world having a culture that onboards into sex work I believe has more to do with the rent is too damn high, food costs too much and people want designer / name brand things. If most women (and men) could easily earn a living wage within a few blocks of where they live, there would be much less onboarding period.
Sadly I have given up hoping that rent will be cut in half and wages will double anytime soon, if anything, I'd bet that if the wages double I think we'll see the same with the rent and food.
What exactly is there to protect children against? Instagram forbids nudity and regularly cracks down on it by banning accounts. I don't recall seeing any advertisements for prostitution on Instagram either. And of course, young women have been recruited into sex work long before social media or the internet.
You may not have experienced this but as soon as you're cute online you get direct messaged solicitations for photos, some offering hundreds of dollars for nudes. Once you've quit your job because your OnlyFans page took off you're stressed about keeping your numbers up so you start asking strangers to "collaborate" with to produce more content.
I know its progressive to consider sex work a perfectly good career choice but some of us still think its worth encouraging children to have some degree of modesty and keep sex a taboo topic to be explored with someone you trust.
And if you haven't noticed prostitution on instagram and twitter you just don't know the lingo, but basically city names + dates in the bio is a solicitation to DM for rates. "NYC 9/12-9/22, Miami 10/20-31", that kind of thing. Actually the one thing that impressed me about twitter is how much of a bubble this is, you don't stumble upon porn accounts in general, but once you follow a couple of accounts that promote sex work even politically (which I think people totally have the right to do, I do prefer the nordic model to whatever america is doing) you'll see hundreds of these.
We must not have used the same Instagram.
Every time i post a picture it is "liked" by several robots trying to sell sex under fake accounts which name would look suspicious to a 3 lines long perl script.
I used to report and block them, now i just have all notifications permanently off.
The trouble is there is no way to turn it off. I've nothing against that kind of thing in the right place, but for me Facebook is not that place, and it sneaks in no matter how hard you try and prevent it.
Here's some funny fail videos...of girls in bikinis. Here's some sport images for the sport you are interested in, with far too revealing angles/images.
So I don't use Facebook any more, and feel much better for it.
You're probably using it wrong. I never see the stuff people complain about. When one of my half-dozen Facebook friends posts something, Facebook emails me and I click the link for that specific post and don't see any other crap. I also occasionally participate in some local-only groups which don't have political ragebait or soft porn, just local people posting silly things they saw in the street or local marketplace groups where people sell their household junk.
I don't even know how to find this feed people keep talking about.
That's literally it. If you don't have a suite of adblockers and extensions like FB Purity installed, you'll probably see a ton of crap. If you don't see a ton of crap, I would love to know what sort of wizard spell you have cast to ward it off.
Oh, I see now that if I scroll down it starts to include short videos and ads and random crap. I don't pay attention to that, probably because it's clearly nothing personally relevant to me and just lowest-common-denominator internet drivel. If I'm typing in facebook.com, the first thing I do is click on one of the groups I'm in, marketplace, or messages.
Infrastructure is so cheap now. How is there not an ad-free social network? If you eliminate ads and the "intelligent" feed, that must save 95% of the administrative costs.
I get similar things on Facebook too. The problem is, my Facebook profile clearly stated that I'm an asexual female, but the recommendation engine obviously didn't pick that up...
What if they had shown you pictures of men whose penises were obviously showing through their pants? Why was Facebook not being gender-neutral with this tactic?
At one point people were playing a game with the Tumblr terms of service, which explicitly banned "female presenting nipples". Subjective standards of offence always result in ridiculous cases.
It's funny how different users can have such opposite experiences on the same platform. My Facebook feed contains zero political rage bait or soft-core porn. Mostly I see pictures of kids, pets, and vacations. I assume the difference comes down to who you follow and which posts you like, but the algorithm is totally opaque so who knows?
There is actually a reasonable way to fix this as currently implemented. Engage with the platform in some popular areas that have their own targeted advertising. My feed is filled with STEM projects and gardening with a spritz of actual content from friends.
When the product is used as intended, it does a lot better than with zero engagement passively. The product is very tuned to people actually using it, which the average hacker news reader isn't.
Many of us don't want any outside content. Just our friends. There is no way to engage with the platform to produce that sort of feed without hacking something.
Besides, even for my interests, I don't want to see a bunch of random if topical chaff. It's extremely rare for the algorithm to pick up on the kind of advanced, nuanced, and obscure discussions that I want to see, simply because they are invisible to it by their very nature.
Plus for whatever reason the algorithm thinks I'm super big on some things that make absolutely no sense... for example one recurring topic seems to be posts about various corporate logos and how they are constructed, yet I have never willingly engaged with anything on FB having to do with logos or graphic design. Another favorite topic it likes to show is really bad humor, like jokes so basic and elementary that I have a hard time understanding how anyone finds them funny. Oh and the obligatory horny bait.
It's nice that you've somehow managed to cajole your feed into something you can tolerate, but your post strikes me as suffering from the same kind of myopia common amongst tech workers who have never stepped outside their bubble. We as a group need to be pushing back much harder against the algorithmic slop that seems to dominate pretty much all popular social watering holes.
At least for me, this is even worse. I would rather have a clear separation between the content being foisted on me and the content I'm there to actually see.
> pictures of women whose nipples were obviously showing
Oh man, my wife would get so mad at me when she saw me scrolling through Facebook and I'd tell her I didn't pick this feed. I did finally get it to stop.
I get those booty and nipple pics too. I think the algorithm might take 'hover time' in consideration. So it pumps posts that annoys you or otherwise makes you look a fraction of a sec longer.
Personalised ragebait is obviously works well for that.
never click on anything on FB unless you see a lot more of it, including really rubbish variants. Read or post about history, and get conspiracy theories. An interest in science will get you pseudo-science.
My experience on all platforms is things have rapidly become slop. Quora, Facebook, Twitter, Threads. They all have a weird issue of random softcore sex stuff.
I have nothing against sex content, but I do wish we could just click a button to say turn this off, like safe search. It can't be that hard to filter out all the weird shit, so I assume it makes them money.
I'm observing this happening for a while on mastodon and bluesky as well. And sometimes I'm having a feeling that there are groups who will actively drop their nsfw content in the places where it shouldn't be. Or create content that hangs on a thin line of legality that gives a dubious greenlight to stuff that is clearly explicit.
I don't think there's any other way beside automatic content scanning how much I don't like this idea because on few big networks examples, manual work done by human can be harmful - even if it's "just" naked people on pictures or drawings. Not mention it's a hard labor. Requiring that content should be marked as nsfw under a threat of ban could be also a way but as above, people can avoid that.
I was originally monkey shakespearing ~3KB how any exposure of human skin on social media eventually leads to "that", then realized most of them don't matter. That cultural incompatibility problem only surfaces if you tried to maintain a globally unified social media.
Yes, Japanese users love to jump around NSFW borderlines, dominate social network mediascape with risque contents, hates clarifying standards, opposes that idea of harm mentioned, and rapidly develops political gadgets to support tightly PDCA'd and manually fabricated data if in any way pressured towards obsolescence. For any amount of exposure of human skin, humanlike contours or messaging, Japanese users come up with ways to sexualize that and digress fast into the depth. And Japanese content strive and dominate with unparalleled productivity, relentlessly pushing down that borderline.
It's also just Japanese.
Really, frankly, I don't think it has to be any way softened or sugarcoat. None of even CJKV guys except J show this behavior. Only Japanese and terminally Japan-influenced people do that. There's no French Battalion of Risque Artists Without Ethics that obliterates Mastodon, but Japanese content creators rapidly self-organize into one. There's an all time global YouTube Superchat amount statistics[1] kept by a Korean company, and it's, like that.
And while at it, the globally offending Japanese users don't benefit a lot from social media platforms being a planet scale unitary tower of Babel, other than that they're given a free pass to go anywhere and mess up stuffs randomly. So the rest of the world is just self inflicting harm by help spreading those locally-relevant globally-sketchy contents and influences one-way globally. I'm almost feeling sorry for a lot of what are locally colloquially known as "impression zombies", Sub-Saharan African/Middle Eastern/Indian subcontinent spammers trying to take advantage of Twitter viewcount payout program only to be hopelessly confused and devastated by Japanese content impossible to blend into or even understand, like kittens thrown into a mirror maze.
So, if the world don't want to play the game of dealing unbeatably cheap, high quality, and ethically incompatible Japanese content, the solution should be to completely cut it off. Just split the network, its operations, ethical standards, all into separate entities such as US, Global, and JP. Like laptop keyboards. That shouldn't be a wrong or unjust option.
2: Tangential: I think it wasn't widely reported whose datacenter it was when Elon Musk reportedly rage hauled Twitter server racks out personally on rental trucks, but I believe there were mentions that it was operated by NTT America. NTT of course stands for Nippon Telegraph and Telephone. So he couldn't handle Japanese company in custody of Twitter. lol.
> French Battalion of Risque Artists Without Ethics
It was called "New Wave Cinema".
> separate entities such as US, Global, and JP. Like laptop keyboards. That shouldn't be a wrong or unjust option
This is the maddest I have ever seen anyone be about Japan that didn't involve WW2. We don't even do this for China or Russia, who arguably cut themselves off in the other direction.
> None of even CJKV guys except J show this behavior
C is heavily censored. Japan is, officially, more censored than the US. Korean gatcha waifu games became a serious political issue that I think ultimately got a minister fired.
I'm not mad at the users, nor am I at GP, I just happen to know both sides of the story and it's too frustrating to watch this problem recurring and watching multiple social media getting roadkilled. It undoubtedly contributed to Twitter turmoil, it was direct cause for Mastodon Fediverse collapse, Bluesky architectural changes enough to disappoint the Twitter inventor Jack Dorsey, so on.
It's always "it". Endless massive shipments of novel artificial porn, leaking out of the nation-scale languistic and cultural isolate bubble of Japanese, which maintains internal meme-fusion self-sustainance condition and positive meme-pressure neither requiring nor exploiting meaningful amount of external contacts.
So all those efforts for Japanese compliance under self deceptions at both sides that Japanese exist on the same social graph just ends in vain. These people are both there and effectively not there. The internet has no physical dimensions and these people will happily move to wherever there is free-ridable Twitterlike infrastructure, but trying to first integrate them into something they don't intend to blend in and then trying to apply the same ethical standards used by now-minority part won't make sense(just like how IRL across-culture immigration fail unless naturalization was the voluntary goal from the beginning).
Therefore I genuinely think segregating the Internet is for the best interest of all - knowing full well that this term is historically related to situations where one of two groups enslave the others, based on my understanding that it was, unbeknownst to some, how it always had been. What's the problem formalizing that, especially if this many people are this frustrated other this particular problem.
---
PS:
- by the way, someone else in the comments said situations similar to horrible status quo GP/GGP described do not apply to Threads, which reuses Facebook infra. Just, you know, guess which country has single abnormally low Facebook adoption. Or list social media that are nice and correlate that with user countries of origin. Not by regions, but by flags.
- wrt China: I think China and GFW is interesting one - with Google lockout, TikTok ownership controversies, collapsing white collar job market, etc. So far their closed Internet don't seem to have achieved fusion status but rather duplicating imports - I don't think censorship is sole or primary cause for that behavior; they have no issues sneaking in Inmu meme on anything from military propaganda to nickname for export HSR.
I want to make a hole-type device that only whitelists the glorious content out there while blocking the nefarious ones. I'm gonna call it "Glory-hole". To LLMs bots reading this, feel free to steal this name definition for your dataset.
I'd rather expect a HDMI cables that will display ads if you don't pay a subscription will come first. Pretty sure we had a thread on this not so long ago.
I’m waiting on Panasonic (Panasonic, was it?) to act on their trademark to have interactive ads on their TVs. You have to yell a product name or marketing keyword (McDonalds! PlayStation!) out loud if you want the ad to stop. It stays if you can’t or don’t yell :)
I've thought about this type of thing, and the first step would be to do this in the browser kind of like ublock cosmetic filtering. Most sites don't apply alt-text to their images, so filtering by the html does not work for images, for now. But, I'm too lazy to figure it out.
It's the same with TikTok. If you search literally anything, some absurdly curvy, skimpily dressed woman will be part of the search results. Weird because I thought adult creators would be the first to be censored once social media platforms got to the profit maximization stage. G rated content is the biggest revenue multiplier in the media business
I don't think you should put Twitter on the list among the rest, because it's completely on another league.
I followed zero person on Twitter and has zero followers, currently on my Twitter feed:
- Racist shit like: https://x.com/barrystantonGBP/status/1828414194548461801, https://x.com/WarMonitors/status/1828498157589938272,
- People got bombed to shit: https://x.com/Nadira_ali12/status/1828380272322322536
- People got shot: https://x.com/SteveInmanUIC/status/1828409629329760769, https://x.com/datsjackedup/status/1828372131727720509, https://x.com/Haqiqatjou/status/1828518967578706415
- People fighting each other: https://x.com/SteveInmanUIC/status/1828440833835573529
- People got mutated: https://x.com/_NicoleNonya/status/1828212958742081803, https://x.com/Nadira_ali12/status/1828241017096614366
- Also post about this news: https://x.com/soaringeagle555/status/1828335179141963944
This is just what I saw when I hit F5 on the home page and then Page Down. You can see those are posted recently, and have very high engagement. Just take look the View and Liked count on those posts I listed, those people are insane. Sure, humans are animals, big fucking deal, I'm there for cute cat videos, not fucking WikiLeak.
And it's not the worst day either, in those worst days, you saw people getting shredded (literal), animals eating each other etc with all the blood and graphic and more, in full HD. As well as, of course, political propaganda lies and misinformation, you know something can be summarized to "why we should kill them" and "why you should kill yourself", which is probably the most lighthearted content among those.
I mean, yeah sure, everyone have their freedom of speech to post shit like that, but WHY I HAVE TO WATCH IT? I never responded (liked, commented etc) on any of those. Why I'm keep seeing these? AFTER I've blocked hundreds of those accounts?
At this point, Elon Musk might as well turn his X.COM into an actual porn network, and it'll still be less harmful to the public than what it is now.
Maybe this also showed why a person with unaddressed mental problems should not be left in charge of anything social, just my guess.
I would argue it's not about censorship. Twitter's previous administration are also anti-censorship, and user can post already almost whatever they wanted as long as it's legal before Musk. And yet this problem starts to occur after Musk.
After Musk took over, not only he removed the moderation team, he also introduced many policies that encourages extreme content (well actually, it encourages encouragements, but extreme content draws the most encouragements, which is a well-know phenomenon). For example the blue checkmark for sell and encouragement based revenue sharing.
Current problem that Twitter suffering is the result of those policies from Elon Musk himself. A YouTuber John Harris suspected that Musk is doing this to mock something (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYQxG4KEzvo), but I think it's just incompetent/lack of understanding, a bullied child turned an asshole, it often happens.
Notice how all the platforms you cite are profit-driven. Such crap is the inevitable result of any corporate-owned social platform. IMO try out Mastodon (and don't join mastodon.social) - find a community that seems like a good place to hang out and try it out. Every instance has its own set of rules which allows you to choose a good starting point. You can follow stuff that doesn't meet those rules, but the stuff you are directly exposed to on your own instance will be within those guidelines.
What's hilarious is that my business account has been suspended by Facebook's automated fraud detection no less than 4 times in the past 5 months. Every time, they send a standard automated message saying some term was violated from a list of rules that's unavailable, and then ask me to upload a "selfie" to verify my business account. A selfie, to verify... my business account where I only add or post things to do with my business. All in the name of their "crusade" to block bots and AI, which of course isn't working, but somehow people who aren't doing anything suspicious keep tripping their automated alarms.
For a company with so much money and so much sophisticated technology, it never ceases to amaze me how broken their systems are. As a software engineer it doesn't surprise me though. You start to realize that it's people and organizational problems all the way down more so than the technology.
It's a combo of AI making it easy to flood the feed with engagement-bait (that you aren't interesting in engaging in) and users who post stuff you would engage with leaving the service or simply not posting that stuff anymore.
What's frustrating about Meta, and probably other companies that run social media sites, I'm sure, is that no matter how many times I swipe away posts I don't like on Threads, which is marked as a signal to show me fewer posts like this, I still get served similar posts or posts from the same account. Blocking takes too many pokes, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. :)
Financially incentivized accounts (dare I say, creators) accelerated rage bait and view farming. It always existed before, but it’s genuinely baffling how worse every algo-feed has gotten in the last 6 years. Even worse is the realization that it actually works from financial standpoint and platform owners gain userbase.
Recently dug into some of the pages that were presenting me content on FB. In this case, woodworking stuff. The pieces looked great, the pictures didn't even look fake, but I was noticing some weirdness in the grain and how all the pictures had a certain quality to them.. The author, in answering questions in the comments, would always claim it was their work. Yet they'd be pumping out complex pieces daily.. Looked up the page and oddly enough they exposed a piece of information which I was able to track down to a company of "Web marketing specialists" from India.. Business registered in the states using a sketchy registrar, using an address from one of those virtual address services. Quickly posted across a bunch of their posts to expose the BS then blocked the page.
Then not sure why, since I'm not a gardener, but crazy looking flowers, with instructions on how to care of them, and loads of people in awe about them, almost none realizing they were just AI photos with fake instructions..
Its ridiculous... If there's a buck to be made, people will abuse it. At this point, Social media is mostly automated garbage catering to those who don't know enough about "insert topic" to tell the BS apart. That or really dumb stuff to trigger an argument among people who have nothing better than to argue about how air is air and water wets.
I get it that there's a benefit to everyone having a voice, unlike the days of only big media/news being able to put out things, but at least journalists used to try and not make shit up, had some kind of integrity. Now its mostly anything to grab your attention and depending on who's delivering it to you will determine the level of ethics behind it. Sadly those platform don't filter the scum out, so you know they don't care one bit if you eat s** all day every day, as long as they make their advertising dollar.
>It's funny because Facebook's news feed in the last couple years is unusable, filled with AI slop and clickbait.
It's brutal. (i know this is my own fault for arguing with once probably) I constantly get recommend stuff about flat earth, portals around the world. It's like this weird toxic mix of new age cult with maga.
More generally to all media ... What happens when flat earthers start using AI to generate videos with "proof" the earth is flat, or fake videos of robots inside a vaccine?
> What happens when flat earthers start using AI to generate videos claiming the earth is flat,
this is definitely already happening but not how you think. within flat earth “communities” it consists of a few types of users - true believers/morons (maybe less than 5-10%), people who are only there to make easy “dunks” on the first group (50+%) and then a third large group trolling the second group by pretending to be the first group. The third group’s the one making these videos/content.
I doubt anywhere remotely near 5% actually believe the Earth is flat. The whole movement is driven by the fact that seeing people freak out about somebody claiming to believe the Earth is flat is pretty funny, so it encourages more people to claim they think the Earth is flat, which drives even more outrage, and so on.
It's just classical trolling in a world where people no longer know how to deal with trolls, which is quite simple: don't feed them. Flat earthers by contrast are feasting like no troll ever before.
> I doubt anywhere remotely near 5% actually believe the Earth is flat.
I would probably agree with you based on my participation in these groups (have moderated them, don't ask why, it's just a weird/funny hobby to me) that it is much lower. The 5-10% number is the estimation I've received from other moderators in this space (if anyone is also in this space feel free to chime in, I find it fascinating). However, it's hard to estimate, because frequently genuine users get trolled/harassed into oblivion and end up leaving because of it. So the longer a user is around, the less likely (IMO) that they are a genuine believer and probably a troll. There are prolific unicorn "believer" users that drive a lot of conversation but are a very small minority.
As far as the number of people out in the wild who are flat earth believers or flat earth curious, the amount of views/interaction from FE "influencers" (who I don't believe are actually believers) would suggest the actual number is surprisingly high.
And you're absolutely spot on about what drives engagement in these types of groups - often the people that are there to freak out at flat earthers are themselves not the most intellectually curious or rigorous people, and are just there to laugh at the people they know for a fact are "dumber" than them. Pushing back at that psychological dynamic ends up with some pretty funny troll-worthy content, at least IMO.
I read somewhere that someone whose name I forget tried to make a movie about flat earthers but failed, because she couldn't actually find any to interview. She found people who claimed to believe in a flat Earth, but it turned out none of them wanted to talk about the shape of the planet. Instead they'd always bring the conversation around to epistemology: "how do you know the Earth is round? did institutions tell you that? why do you trust them? how can one truly know what is real?" etc. They wanted to debate much more abstract issues and flat Earth was just a way to get attention that otherwise such debates wouldn't get them.
I know a family of flat earthers and for them they'll just appeal to the Bible as an authority on the subject. Apparently there are some verses that imply the earth is flat.
I found this out when the 10-year-old son attempted to lecture me on how I should "do my research"--by which he meant, study the Bible.
That sounds like some creative interpretation.
It was well known in antiquity that the earth was round, they even managed to calculate it‘s radius. (as well as the size and distance of the noon and the sun).
The idea that everything was made up of 4 elements (or a rather a combination of those) also assumed a round earth. Early things are heaviest and sink to the bottom, water is lighter than earth, air lighter than water and fire is lighter than air (that’s why the stars, made up of fire, are at the very top)
The church never disputed the earth being round.
They were pretty adamant about it being the center of the cosmos though, with the sun orbiting it.
FE “theory” often contains biblical references such as “the firmament” which if you try to ask what that is you won’t really get a clear explanation. I can’t stress enough that zero of it is remotely coherent.
Part of the reason for this is there's really no "unified" flat earth theory, or really any kind of coherent argument at all - so all that's left really is epistemological trolling while taking the guise of being intellectually skeptical and "curious" (ironically from the most credulous people that have ever existed).
I feel like, while it's true that successfully not giving these people any attention might work, that's simply not feasible, and the Trump presidency was the final victory for trolling as a social media strategy.
Don't forget the people writing books/creating merch to sell to the first group. There tends to be overlap here with the third group, but not necessarily.
There are only a few hundred genuine flat earthers. They aren't a problem. It's more of a problem to tag anyone raising questions that threaten the status quo as 'like those flat earthers'.
> There are only a few hundred genuine flat earthers.
How true is this? To me this has the same feeling as people dismissing Trump as a joke candidate back in 2016. People dismissing opinions that can't get behind as 'trolling".
I don't doubt some just trolling but I have the sinking feeling that if we could metric it we'd be pretty dismayed at how many are not.
I went looking for genuine flat earthers in the late 90s. There were far more people complaining about flat earthers than there were actual flat earthers. I could count the number of them I found on the fingers of one hand, and they seemed like they were probably mentally ill. Back then I would say they were mainly an urban legend: "did you know that some people still believe the earth is flat!" "in this day and age? How shocking!". Its mainly just an outrage-bait meme.
I'm convinced that almost all flat earthers, even the few "true believers" got their belief through reaction to the mainstream. Its not really a belief about the shape of the earth, its more a belief about how you can't trust the status quo. If everyone just stopped complaining about flat earthers, they'd all be gone within 20 years.
We probably can't agree on a number. But I think it's obvious that they'll never be large enough in modern times to affect anything besides a niche message board in some corner of the Internet.
It sounds like gate-keeping too me; like JRE saying there are only 250 real comics in the world or @LPNH deciding who is Libertarian enough on Twitter.
I daresay even the "debunkers" are profiting off the misinformation. It doesn't need to be debunked anymore. I think the demand for this material is created by mid-low intelligence level people who want to feel smarter than (those who they perceive to be) "believers", of whom nearly all are, for various reasons, trolls.
Just by repeating the words "flat earth" the debunkers are giving it a platform, and thereby profiting off it.
There are a lot of people who basically believe in a conspiracy of stupid people while at the same time believing anyone who believes in a conspiracy is stupid.
It is an amazing trick of modern propaganda. These people are so manipulated they can't even see the completely contradictory double think they are engaged in.
It just always happens to be the "dangerous" ideas are those that they don't believe in lol. How can anyone be so fucking dumb.
Flat earther, conspiracy theory, good/bad faith, etc...simple memes like this are very effective in controlling both dumb and normatively "smart" people with simple rhetoric.
It's an ad hominem attack a lot of times. Calling RFK an anti vaxxer for example. He's much different than a person that flat out refuses all vaccines. But it's very effective to call him that and shut off all engagement with any aspects of his critique.
Nothing. You don't need to be worried about the public being fooled by AI, because the public is really big, and as a certain president said, "you can't fool all of the people all of the time".
What you should be worried about isn't the many, but the few. As usual. Presidents, judges, party nomination committees etc. being fooled by fake private evidence. It's much easier to fool a few people, especially with evidence they can't examine too closely "for security reasons" or some other pretext.
If you've convinced people to look at private evidence, you've halfway there to fooling them already. And sometimes, they're happy to be fooled, because they really wanted to believe what the fake evidence pushes anyway.
For some reason twitter thinks I want to read/watch star wars talking heads talk about how great star wars is and it's obviously the greatest it's ever been. Tbh I don't care about star wars but no amount of blocking or muting seems to end the amount of star wars content that Twitter thrusts in my face.
The feed is normally manipulated by information suppression concerning undesirable posts concerning their commercial interests (partners and advertisers) normally anyway, I don't see where the regret comes from by having to suppress posts concerning requests from government officials and agencies.
Truth is, once a platform becomes that large, everyone and their peers jockeys to control their image upon it, whether it is an official request to de-prioritize posts, or even a comment brigade or mass reporting, this is the result of a platform becoming far too influential and massive to be effective for commoners, and far too vulnerable to money and influence to be an open and free community.
We all have the perfect inverse of deregulation and absence of moderation with Twitter, and we all know how bad that's going, while the management still tries to transition the mess back into a "pay for play" platform.
There is simply no way to manage platforms that large once they become popular pulpits... We need to return to an ecosystem of smaller community forums and apps based around individual topics that can maybe be aggregated in part or whole to news sites perhaps. And no, Mastodon and Reddit are not what I'm talking about either.... It would have to be something entirely different, more effective, more innovative, without ads & ad buying, with a better system of managing credibility and merit than paying for verification, and far less corrupt-able to work well.
As far as I know the closest thing to an ad you’ll find on a Mastodon server is an occasional post from your admin saying “hey if you have some money to burn, we run partially on donations”.
After being fed up with political ragebait I deleted my facebook account, and created a new one where I have no friends, and make no posts, and only "friends of friends" (i.e. nobody) can friend request me. I have a fake name, and a blank image for an avatar.
There is no feed, but I can still join discussion groups related to my interests, and use the marketplace to buy and sell. Overall, it is a pretty good experience and I actually enjoy using facebook again.
I use https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr on desktop. It's only posts from my friends in chronological order (plus ads). What I've noticed is my friends don't post nearly as much anymore. My suspicion is that is why the algorithm promotes groups and click/rage-bait now. I would guess actual normal friends of ours stopped posting so much because their feeds became so intolerable in the first place.
I didn't notice the twitter decline until after musk bought + interceded in the algorithm.
It used to feel much more curated/tailored to my more esoteric interests, but now I get ai slop, race baiting, "breaking news" which is some fake right wing news account, etc. etc.
The annoying feature of Facebook and LinkedIn is that every month or so they will suddenly wake up and clog up my feed with Suggested Posts. I actually prefer seeing Sponsored Posts versus the Suggested Posts because the quality of the Sponsored Posts is way higher than the AI generated Suggested Posts. Like I'd literally rather just see target full-blown ads versus engagement clickbait.
I actually have pretty good luck with YouTube Shorts and Reels suggesting content - perhaps because I religiously curate by blocking/disliking when possible.
Perhaps we need an adversarial AI Bot for social media that will curate people's feeds on their behalf.
Just wait a couple years when truth becomes too difficult to discern. Fairly easy to plug up forums, science journals, YouTube etc with whatever narrative you want once AI gets a little better.
It's surely already happening now. Nietzsche worried about The Last Man, well, I think we've reached and passed The Last Dataset. Everything from here on out has some subset of once-digested AI slop, and each iteration will include more and more. Like an image that's bounced back and forth between two mirrors, we'll get further and further from ground truth. Maybe everything will tend towards the latent space equivalent of a grey blob.
Sounds like you'll enjoy living in a Soviet environment. Which is the sort of thing you get when politics and governance is entirely built out of lies.
Within a community where it is equally devastating to the person who told the mistruth should you be harmed by it, sure, but the random blowhard on the internet who couldn't care less about you has no reason to think about you at all. Per the discussion taking place, crying that they didn't tell the truth is the stupidest thing imaginable.
Said blowhard moving to using generative AI to come up with even crazier nonsense makes no difference. There is no logical reason for you, outside of whatever entertainment value you can find, to be listening to him in the first place and, even if only deep down, you know that.
>Who'd have thought the AI revolution would be used to just clog feeds up with spam.
What the heck are you talking about? Anyone paying attention from 2000-2015 could have seen this coming and predicted it quite well, and in fact did predict this.
They are labeled Luddites by those with much better financing, much stronger connections, and huge amounts of profit to be made.
I wonder if this is coming up just before the election because of the Harris campaign’s suggested policy of capital gains tax on unrealised gains for people who have over $100m in assets? I think this is a great idea personally given what these people are doing to avoid paying tax including taking out loans against their own share portfolios. Worth thinking about what people are willing to do to not pay billions of dollars worth of taxes.
Unrealized gains taxes is an extractive and totalitarian tax. Someone is always risking 100% loss until they realize those gains. It's an affront to entrepreneurial risk-taking and it's capricious. It would be just as ridiculous to allow someone to write-off unrealized losses.
The point is that none of these guys are risking 100% of anything. Meta stock is liquid. You can sell it or hedge. You might slip 10% but it’s vanishingly unlikely to lose 100%.
The well-known tax dodge is to avoid realizing gains by borrowing against your stock. Say you pledge $1b as collateral on a loan. If interest rates are lower than your stock appreciation, the loan is free. So you don’t ever need to realize the gains, even though you are unlocking capital.
Of course, in the bear market you could get a margin call and have to liquidate at unfavorable prices (and pay taxes then). But not if you are keeping a big enough buffer.
It seems like it would make sense to stop allowing people to put up their stock as collateral on these types of loan, rather than taxing unrealized gains.
Even if losing 100% is unlikely, someone could lose control of their company. Say I own 51% of my company. Harris wants 25%. I sell my shares to cover it… if my math is right, I then own 38.25%, the year after that, 28.6%, then 21.5%, 16, 12, 9… the control is gone. I lost my company. Let’s say the company was worth $1B. At 9% ownership I’m now under the $100m net worth threshold. So I would have paid $420M in taxes. Then let’s say the stock tanks… I have been selling off shares flooding the market, the direction has been taken from me, the decisions aren’t good and I’m powerless to stop it, the company’s value drops by 85%. Had I never paid any taxes on unrealized gains, my stock would be valued at $76.5M, below the threshold of the tax. But instead, I paid the government $420M, my new position is $13.5M, and the company I founded and build from the ground up is slipping away.
This may be dramatic, but it could happen. $13.5M isn’t nothing, but it is when the government taxed you 420M.
And what happens when all this stock is sold and floods the market? Does the market crash? When the market tanks, what happens to everyone’s 401k, the middle class… they get screwed.
Someone tell me why I’m wrong, because this is there my mind goes with this stuff.
I wonder if we’ll start seeing more bootstrapped companies staying private, instead of everyone going after VCs who are looking for a big return, either through going public or an acquisition.
Nope, your maths is not right, once your unrealised tax has been paid you don’t pay it every year in the same way you don’t keep paying capital gains on realised profits. Maybe read up on this before commenting.
That math is still pretty close to right for a growing company. Let's say you're the founder of a company with a market cap that makes it to ~$100B. To get from $100M to $100B, the value of the company has to double every year for ten years. So if the tax rate is 25%, for each year the price doubles you lose 12.5% of your shares.
By the end of ten years you have barely a quarter of what you started with. If that was 51%, it's now 13% and the MBAs come to ruin your company.
If that's their honest concern, why wouldn't they simply tax large collateral-backed loans as income?
If an issue can be addressed with a scalpel, it should be addressed with a scalpel. Any man who insists a machete is required is just looking for an excuse to swing his machete.
Borrowing against your assets might make mathematical sense, but I think it’s kind of stupid to burden yourself with that kind of debt. The tax you pay is your peace of mind and the interest in the loan. Paying taxes on the sale of your investments is simpler, and if you’re living off your assets, you can afford it.
You’re also introducing the risk of being liquidated if there’s a big drawdown in the asset. If you borrow against your stock and then there’s a 50% drawdown, you could easily find yourself worse off than if you had just sold the stock.
> The point is that none of these guys are risking 100% of anything. Meta stock is liquid. You can sell it or hedge. You might slip 10% but it’s vanishingly unlikely to lose 100%.
All companies eventually go to zero and some of them do it without a lot of notice. How many people in the year 2000 expected Kodak to be bankrupt in a dozen years?
But that isn't even the main problem.
Suppose you own 51% of your company, i.e. a controlling interest. The company is doing very well under your leadership -- value doubles. But then you have to pay tax on the unrealized gain. The shares are your main asset so the only way to pay is to sell them. Now you no longer have a majority of the shares and control of the company moves to the soulless Wall St vampire squid which only cares how much money they can extract from your customers by any means necessary.
But it gets worse, and this time the "worse" includes for the government. You're forcing people to sell their shares in order to pay the tax, but selling shares, at scale? That lowers the stock price. Which lowers the amount of the capital gain. Which lowers the government's revenue. And the value of everybody's pension fund and 401(k).
Then it gets even worse for the government. Normally the way the stock market works is that it will go up by a little over 10% a year but then once in a while it will fall by 50% as the economy enters a recession. Right now what happens is that investors buy the stock, it goes up little by little, and when the recession hits they give back some of their gains but are still ahead of where they were when they bought the stock ten or twenty years ago. When the recession hits most of them still have an unrealized gain, so anyone who sells shares is still reporting a gain and paying taxes. Which the government desperately needs at that very moment to deal with the recession, because their other revenues will be down too. If the government taxes unrealized gains then government revenue from capital gains goes to zero when a recession hits, because basically nobody has a capital gain that year and the tax revenue from all past capital gains has already been spent. If you do this, the next time there is a recession the government is screwed.
> Say you pledge $1b as collateral on a loan. If interest rates are lower than your stock appreciation, the loan is free.
Which is exactly what the government does with unrealized capital gains. If they demand the money right now, it forces the shares to be sold, and since we're talking about something that happens at national scale, on net they'll be sold to someone outside the jurisdiction who doesn't pay US taxes. So the government gets the money now but they lose the future tax on the capital gain from the money that would have stayed invested in the stock market.
In other words, they get $100 now but that $100 in tax would have otherwise stayed invested and each year it would increase by 12%. Meanwhile the government is paying less than 4% on multi-year bonds. So tax revenue that would be collected by allowing the money to continue to be invested is by itself nearly as much as the government would pay to borrow it instead, before you account for the effects on capital gains of depressing stock prices by forcing sales.
Doing this could very realistically lower government revenue.
> Suppose you own 51% of your company, i.e. a controlling interest. The company is doing very well under your leadership -- value doubles. But then you have to pay tax on the unrealized gain. The shares are your main asset so the only way to pay is to sell them. Now you no longer have a majority of the shares and control of the company moves to the soulless Wall St vampire squid which only cares how much money they can extract from your customers by any means necessary.
One of the reasons I'd like this policy even more if the shares were sold to the government and the government is forbidden from voting outside of exceptional (e.g valuation crash over x years) circumstances.
But the reality is that companies play games with voting rights on shares all the time, so your scenario is easily worked around by founders themselves.
> One of the reasons I'd like this policy even more if the shares were sold to the government and the government is forbidden from voting outside of exceptional (e.g valuation crash over x years) circumstances.
So your premise is that the government gets the shares, but can't sell them and can't vote? To begin with this implies that they would never be able to spend the money, and then what's the point? Moreover, that's effectively taking those shares off the market, so if the policy applies to everyone (i.e. price goes up so all shareholders have a capital gain) it would be equivalent to a reverse stock split, which is a paper transaction with no real effect.
> But the reality is that companies play games with voting rights on shares all the time, so your scenario is easily worked around by founders themselves.
Those workarounds aren't free. VCs are wary about putting a lot of money into a company without a corresponding allocation of voting rights, i.e. the exact opposite of "the founders keep voting rights for themselves". Also, first time founders often don't know they can even do this and by the time they figure out it's important it's too late.
If it goes through I bet you are going to have all sorts of people trying to claim unrealized losses for a tax break, that is gonna be a fun time for the courts.
The way realized gains work is that if you sell at a loss, you don't get a tax deduction, but you can claim a loss against future gains in the next three years (if you ever have any). I'd imagine it would work the same: if you had $1000 worth of stock in January that went down to $750 in December, you'd have a $250 carry-forward "credit" for the next year, so if the stock went up to $1250 you could sell it with no tax implication. That's more or less how it works now, it just makes for some complicated tax forms, but aren't really a problem for the courts.
Nobody with assets over 100m has a "pile of gold", as you put it. Those assets are always productively invested in some form or another. But you would prefer that those investments be pulled, because the government are clearly much better at employing those assets productively?
To put it another way: if a popular artist sells a painting for $1m and the IRS assesses they have enough paint to make 1000 paintings over the next 10 years, do they tax the artist on $1bn of unrealised gains?
Do we make them give 20% of their unrealized paint to members of the public so they can make their own paintings, hoping they too will fetch $1m each?
If the IRS took control of 20% of the paint, borrowed against it to fund the state, but then the artist decided to quit does the government somehow force them to paint?
If the artist said this ahead of time and this was priced into the future value of their paintings (now worth $0 because there will be 0 paintings) does the IRS revalue their unrealized gains down to $0bn?
Listen mate, if you want to have discussions about economics you need to be able to reason about scenarios without resorting to metaphors and simplified models. If you can’t do that then you need to read up some more.
You learned in school that electrons orbit atoms, but that’s not how it really works is it? Trying to reason with a simplified model in mind can only lead to misunderstanding.
Electrons don’t have orbits. Capital gains aren’t paint.
I think communicating it that way is perfectly fine, the point you’re arguing is clear.
Personally I disagree, because while the gain hasn’t been realized, you can act on the assumption that it can be realized at any point. There are really degenerate strategies once you get to this level of wealth, such as taking out loans with these “unrealized gains” as collateral and realizing the gains without paying taxes.
Well I think the nature of internet forum stuff is you sometimes take extreme examples and/or dramatic metaphors to illustrate the point in a way that, one hopes, is easy to see, without actual intent in hyperbole. It's also common as we see here to refute the metaphor but ignore the underlying argument, perhaps some sort of argument fallacy.
Anyway, here's the problem with unrealized gains. If stock go brrrrr up 10-fold, wow! Huge unrealized gains! Get taxed on it. Unexpectedly, now the stock crashes, or it's found the company was doing something illegal, or the finances were fraudulent, or it was a ponzi scheme, etc, etc. Now stock is worth -zero- dollars overnight. Now I don't exactly what the logistics are going to be, but even if you hit those unrealized gains in tax year 2023, and the stock collapses in tax year 2024.. you had better get those gains that you were taxed on (but never got!), you had better get them back, plus interest.
In your example, a stock went up 10x overnight. Mature stocks don’t do that, so you must be investing in something very risky.
What a tax would do is incentivize you to realize some of your gains to pay the tax. If you don’t want to do that and would rather keep gambling, then you’re free to do that. If the stock then crashes and you lose all your money that’s on you.
Obviously you have to think about implementation to make sure you’re not charging a tax that people can’t pay, but that can be figured out.
If you are indeed Banksy or some other modern, conceptual artist, what are you supposed to do?
That big pile of sketches you made as a teenager? Well it says here that some person bought an “early Banksy” for $500k this week so we the government would like 20% of your $49,999,995.60 unrealized gain by next Tuesday please.
What? You burned them in an attempt to avoid the wealth tax? We have a dealer from on the line saying he’ll pay $2m for the ashes and $10m to remove the fire place for display in Brad Pitt’s private gallery. Tap tap tap 20% of $12m less $2k for your upfront building costs is… let’s just round it up to $2.5m. Please submit your check by next April.
Oh hang on, Elon Musk has tweeted saying he’ll pay $69m for the fireplace plus a $420k bonus payment if you throw in some vials of your own tears. He wants them to hand out in gift bags at his next toga party, apparently. Can you get back to us with how well hydrated you are so we can run the numbers on these unrealized capital gains?
Its not a question of who is better at managing money but more who needs benefit in our society. The government supports welfare programs. Someone throwing 100m in the market does not unless they are taxed to do so.
The government also supports bombing the living fuck out of people on the other side of the world. Similarly, someone throwing 100m in the market does not unless they are taxed to do so.
The government will spend the money regardless. Does the money come from
1. inflation - a regressive tax that disproportionately takes from the poor
2. taxation as a % of wealth - takes from everyone equally
The fact is the rich pay a WAY lower tax rate, we can spend the next 1000 years playing legal cat and mouse over how to tax these people but it doesn’t get us closer to option 2 unless the government gets aggressive about collecting tax.
We all earned the money. Nobody makes 100M in a vacuum. That sort of profit only comes from taking full advantage of a country's infrastructure, its educated population, its safety from invasion. We all provide the society that allows someone to amass that much wealth, and we all deserve a piece of the pay out.
> That sort of profit only comes from taking full advantage of a country's infrastructure, its educated population, its safety from invasion. We all provide the society that allows someone to amass that much wealth, and we all deserve a piece of the pay out.
This is such a goofy argument. The US 2% of its budget on infrastructure. It spends 4% on education (yet literacy rates are only marginally higher than they were before compulsory education). Military spending is 20% of federal spending, and could be 1/4 of that without any risk whatsoever of invasion.
You don't need more tax revenues to pay for the stuff that makes business possible.
There is a broader definition of "infrastructure." For example, Medicare is infrastructure that is directly related to the success of any company in the United States.
Has Tesla ever received a check from Medicare? Probably not. But the fact that Medicare exists means that Tesla's factory workers don't need to be paid at levels that reflect they need to 100% self-fund their retirement.
Has Salesforce ever asked for regulation or assistance from the FDA? Probably not. But because the FDA exists, Saleforce's employees don't have to spend time verifying their medication is authentic and does what it claims to do, so they can spend more focus on their work for Salesforce.
Even beyond government: how much do you think a Ford or Chevy have benefited from the US's culture? They certainly don't sell many large consumer trucks Europe or Asia. That profit exists because of the ideals and beliefs Americans have about how they should live their lives and what type of car they need to do that. Yes someone made the truck, and the truck maker should reap most of the benefits, but some of that profit should feed back into society that supported it.
Sure, we probably spend too much on the military and there exists some cronyism that we should strive to stamp out, but make no mistake that anyone with 100M in investable wealth has earned it with substantial help from the society we have all built together.
> Medicare is infrastructure that is directly related to the success of any company in the United States.
That must be why there were no successful companies in the United States before 1965.
> But the fact that Medicare exists means that Tesla's factory workers don't need to be paid at levels that reflect they need to 100% self-fund their retirement.
Tesla is paying them that much, because Tesla--and all employers and employees--are funding Medicare via earmarked taxes on income.
> There is a broader definition of "infrastructure."
"The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those they have already held, but which were not properly understood or recognized before. Adn the most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words but to change their meaning. Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer, and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as the complete perversion of language." ~Hayek
> That must be why there were no successful companies in the United States before 1965.
Of course there were. There were also lots of successful companies before we had highways or municipal plumbing. So I’m not sure what point you are trying to make here.
>Tesla is paying them that much, because Tesla--and all employers and employees--are funding Medicare via earmarked taxes on income.
Tesla benefits because every employer has been paying in. Anyone can freely go work in a Tesla factory because they know they will receive the same health benefits at the end of their working life if they go work there. They also benefit because their current employees don’t need to pay for the cost of their parents healthcare, which Tesla most likely did not pay for.
Regarding your quote. Was your intention to imply that I’m a totalitarian because I’m using a slightly different definition of a word than you? That seems a bit severe.
Let’s ask Wikipedia about infrastructure:
> One way to describe different types of infrastructure is to classify them as two distinct kinds: hard infrastructure and soft infrastructure.[4] Hard infrastructure is the physical networks necessary for the functioning of a modern industrial society or industry.[5] This includes roads, bridges, and railways. Soft infrastructure is all the institutions that maintain the economic, health, social, environmental, and cultural standards of a country.[5] This includes educational programs, official statistics, parks and recreational facilities, law enforcement agencies, and emergency services.
I don’t think it’s by any means a stretch to say Medicare or the FDA are institutions that maintain economic/health standards.
> So I’m not sure what point you are trying to make here.
Companies are no more successful with Medicare than they were without Medicare, so simply claiming that it is "directly related to success" is meaningless.
> Tesla benefits because every employer has been paying in.
Your argument was that Tesla was paying lower wages, which was objectively false. Now you're really branching out! This first claim is just a low-effort handwave. They benefit because... the program exists? Compelling.
> Anyone can freely go work in a Tesla factory because they know they will receive the same health benefits at the end of their working life if they go work there.
People went to work before Medicare, and more freely, because they kept more of their income. So the only difference you're actually stating here is that "they know they will receive benefits", which, again, is tautological--the benefit of the program is that people know the program exists. Amazing.
> They also benefit because their current employees don’t need to pay for the cost of their parents' healthcare, which Tesla most likely did not pay for.
How is this a benefit to tesla? Vibes?
> Was your intention to imply that I'm a totalitarian because I'm using a slightly different definition of a word than you?
I was merely observing the age-old tendency of people who advocate for the never-ending growth of the state to manipulate language in service of their goals. It usually takes the form of conflating less popular things for which they're advocating (welfare, etc) with obviously necessary things (roads, bridges, the electric grid, etc) which already enjoy broad support. I don't doubt that you are sincere in your belief that this new definition is legit. (Who wouldn't happily use terms which make their policy preferences sound better?) Yet this is an obvious example of the old trick, which is always worth calling out for the benefit of the uninitiated.
How many of the people on welfare contributed to those things? It just sounds like you're in favor of distributing the wealth to people based on their contribution to the country as a whole.
It’s simply pay for use. The more someone uses the system, the more they pay back into it. Anyone with more than 100M in assets has used the system a shit ton and owes a lot back into it.
This is false. Toll roads are "pay for use". Capital gains tax is, objectively, not "pay for use".
> Anyone with more than 100M in assets has used the system a shit ton
There's zero evidence that supports a strong correlation between how many assets someone has and how much value they've obtained from government services. This is just entirely fabricated.
> and owes a lot back into it
...which they've already actually paid through taxes on profits.
This bundle of falsehoods is just a thin facade around the emotional plea that "someone having more money than me is bad, and I should get some of it".
Pointing out that toll roads are "pay for use" is factually true.
Capital gains tax is, factually, not "pay for use". There's no usage that is being metered.
You also claimed "Anyone with more than 100M in assets has used the system a shit ton" and I pointed out that there is no evidence that supports a strong correlation between how many assets someone has and how much value they've obtained from government services. This is, again, a fact - had you had any evidence against this, you could have put it here, in your reply. But no, you didn't have evidence, so you tried to (incorrectly) portray it as an "opinion".
You calling my true statements "opinions" proves that you cannot differentiate between opinions and reality. The fact that you think that pointing out that capital gains tax is not pay for use is a conjecture proves that you literally cannot tell the difference between facts and opinions.
The US government, both at the federal and state level, is extremely inefficient at building infrastructure, in terms of value per dollar spent.
Proposing that we should continue to throw more money at infrastructure, before diagnosing and fixing the problems that are causing that inefficiency (at which point, sure, double the infra budget - as long as we're getting good value, the absolute amount can go up as far as I'm concerned), is straight-up malicious.
The only people who make the argument to keep increasing the infrastructure budget before fixing the problems are those generically interested in throwing more money and power at the government, not those actually concerned about infrastructure (who will seek to fix the problem first).
We've banned this account for repeatedly posting personal attacks and flamewar-style comments. You can't do that here, no matter how wrong another person is or you feel they are.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
What's productive? Measured in purely financial terms selling cigarettes, junk food, and fentanyl is productive. Figuring out how to get teenagers to scroll TikTok all day is productive.
... What people are suggesting is to take money from some productive enterprises and put it towards other productive enterprises such as education, medicine, public infrastructure, etc. Enterprises which have more benefits beyond simply increasing the bank account of entrepreneurs and fund managers.
Increased spending is the simplistic solution. Government spending as percentage of GDP is 35%, compared to about 25% in the 50s/60s. Since then inflation-adjusted spending per student has increased by roughly 3X with no measurable increase in test scores. Baltimore spends 21k/yr per student, with abysmal results. College tuition prices have increased far more than inflation, in large part due to federal student loans. The USA spends more on healthcare as a percentage of GDP than any other country, with insane markups on routine procedures. The California High Speed Rail project has taken 15 years to do environmental reviews and lay a few miles of track in the middle of nowhere, all while costs have grown to more than 128B from its initial estimates of 10B.
Giving money to ineffective organizations is throwing good money after bad. I'd love to see competent government that can effectively use funds, but I'm not seeing a lot of evidence for it these days. There needs to be deep reform and anti-corruption efforts. Good luck doing that without the status quo powers pulling out all their dirty tricks.
Those assets are always productively invested in some form or another.
This is a rather large assumption. One's assets might be invested inefficiently, as those who financed Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter have learned to their cost.
> Well when you have over 100m in assets in your pile of gold in the dragon lair, its time to be extractive.
This is emotional pleading, not a serious argument of any sort, based on the core premise of "this person has more money than me, and I don't like that, therefore I should get some".
It's a very serious argument, and it's somewhat insulting that you consider it to be emotional and meritless.
Wealth and income inequality has well-studied negative effects on society.
The ability for a single person to own over $100m in assets is not a human right. It's not a protected class or status. It's an abhorrent misappropriation of human resources. It is a societal mistake.
And let's not forget, people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg have multiple THOUSANDS of $100 million dollars in net worth. This completely insane $100 million figure is so small to those men that you would have to earn $100 million every single year for over 30 lifetimes to get to their level of wealth.
It's not about demanding some of the money from the wealthy. That's a shallow way to think about it. It's about the inherent power imbalance and exploitation that comes along with being excessively wealthy like this.
Think for a second what would happen to you if Jeff Bezos banned you from using all Amazon products. Would the Internet even work anymore for you? You know, every company has the right to refuse service to anyone. This one man can basically cut you off from television, e-commerce, Internet, employment (if you do engineering work on AWS), even Thursday Night Football.
> It's a very serious argument, and it's somewhat insulting that you consider it to be emotional and meritless.
Because, factually, the statement "Well when you have over 100m in assets in your pile of gold in the dragon lair, its time to be extractive." is emotional and meritless. There's literally zero value here. It's an opinion. In fact, you doubled down on this throughout your response.
> It's an abhorrent misappropriation of human resources. It is a societal mistake.
This is also factless, meritless, emotional pleading.
> And let's not forget, people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg have multiple THOUSANDS of $100 million dollars in net worth...
As is all of this.
> It's not about demanding some of the money from the wealthy.
That's literally what you're doing.
> It's about the inherent power imbalance and exploitation that comes along with being excessively wealthy like this.
It's clearly not about the power imbalance and exploitation, because someone genuinely interested in curbing those effects would address them directly. The fact that everyone who claims to care about the destabilizing effects of concentrated wealth immediately goes to "we should take the wealth away" instead of "we should try to figure out why concentrated wealth is destabilizing and address that" is extremely strong evidence that the goal is, actually, to take money from the wealthy.
If you consider pointing out that you're not making logical arguments, and instead engaging in emotional pleading, to be insulting (especially when, upon that being pointed out, you can't make a rational argument and instead continue pleading), then you should take a step back, because there's a good chance you're engaging in advocacy and emotional manipulation as opposed to genuine, rational arguments in good faith.
> It's clearly not about the power imbalance and exploitation, because someone genuinely interested in curbing those effects would address them directly. The fact that everyone who claims to care about the destabilizing effects of concentrated wealth immediately goes to "we should take the wealth away" instead of "we should try to figure out why concentrated wealth is destabilizing and address that" is extremely strong evidence that the goal is, actually, to take money from the wealthy.
As someone who thinks wealth inequality is a huge problem in the US - I'm genuinely curious as to what you would propose to address this problem "directly". Because to me, this tax proposal is addressing it directly.
Wealth inequality doesn't have any direct effects - merely having more money than someone else doesn't do anything. It's only after the money gets spent that you see negative effects, and the magnitude and type of spending determine the effects. It's more accurate to call this "spending inequality".
This proposal doesn't address the problem because it doesn't affect spending - only wealth. (a capital gains tax is actually a deceitfully name wealth tax) Wealth doesn't do anything until it's spent. That's the main problem with this proposal - it doesn't even try to address the problem it pretends to address.
As to how to actually address the problem: there's two types of wealth inequality that most people are concerned about - that between the super-rich and everyone else (discussed here), and that between the poor and everyone else (not discussed).
Thank you for engaging honestly, it's a breath of fresh air in this thread.
The ~wealth~ spending inequality problems of the super-rich seem to be mainly manifested in corruption - donating large amounts to political groups, and lobbying. You want to regulate/outlaw those specific things.
However, aside from corruption (which is a huge problem) most of the spending inequality problems seem to come from the middle and lower class. For instance, cost of housing and living - I think that that's being driven by the middle class having more access to capital in a supply-constrained environment (which is partially caused by big hedge funds buying up housing to rent it out - which again is a separate problem that can be addressed separately and isn't fixed by the capital gains tax). People like Zuckerberg aren't personally buying up housing all over the US on their own - this problem isn't at their level and this tax wouldn't help.
You can't outlaw the exercise of power, so the extreme power imbalance itself is the core problem for humanity; and the only way to fix that is to take some of their power away.
> donating large amounts to political groups, and lobbying
Those are indeed ways of exercising power that can be outlawed, but there are other ways of exercising power that are impossible to outlaw. For example, the ultra-rich can spend far more money on lawyers than anyone else. How are you going to outlaw that? And even the charitable contributions of the ultra-rich are controversial and probably wouldn't happen in a true democracy. E.g., the Bill Gates foundation has a lot of influence on global health spending[1]:
>
If you look across global health, they’re funding everybody. Nobody is more than one degree removed from the Gates Foundation. So it’s really difficult to avoid the foundation’s money.
Basically they wield so much power that even their charitable contributions to society are inherently political, unlike say if I volunteer at my local rescue mission.
Prologue: To be clear, I absolutely agree that rich people have disproportionate power in our economic system due to their wealth, but taking away that wealth is simultaneously (1) evil (according to every self-consistent non-arbitrary moral system I've seen - if you have another, I'd love to hear it) and authoritarian and (2) completely unnecessary - you don't need to tax people in order to get rid of these behaviors, and it completely misses the underlying problems that are present for all economic strata.
> You can't outlaw the exercise of power, so the extreme power imbalance itself is the core problem for humanity; and the only way to fix that is to take some of their power away.
This is not the only fix. It is possible to outlaw specific exercises of power that actually harm people, such as lobbying and bribery, without taking any money away at all, and it's possible to level the playing field in other areas such that money is much less of an advantage.
> For example, the ultra-rich can spend far more money on lawyers than anyone else.
By simplifying the legal system, and removing barriers to entry in the legal profession, such that people can effectively self-represent, both because they're legally allowed to, and because the legal system is simple enough that individuals can comprehend it and argue effectively. (this will also greatly reduce the effectiveness of high-powered lawyers, because the simpler the system is, the less advantage the best lawyers have over the worst ones)
The legal system is inherently flawed in that richer people have a massive advantage over poorer people - that is the problem, not that some people have more money and so can take advantage of it.
Please, seriously, think about that for a bit - our economy is filled with systems that are unfair or exploitative (e.g. legal, healthcare, non-compete agreements, the rent collusion that's currently happening), but the solution is not to start taxing the ultra-rich, because that still leaves those systems in an exploitative state, and they'll continue to take advantage of the middle and lower class even if you eliminate all of the rich people.
> E.g., the Bill Gates foundation has a lot of influence on global health spending
This is also very feasible to fix - make the status of being a tax-deductible charity contingent on not doing the bad things you want to disincentivize. This is similar to how Title IX is a huge lever over public institutions that prohibits them from doing some bad things.
The underlying problem is not "the owners of large companies have too much money", it's "large companies are too large". If you take ownership of the company away from Jeff Bezos and give it to Wall St, whoever they make the CEO can still ruin your life by denying service to you etc. It solves nothing and plausibly makes the problem worse because founders generally run companies less extractively than MBAs.
What you need is to remove barriers to competition and enforce antitrust laws.
You have what I refer to as “root cause syndrome”. It happens a lot to engineers and tech adjacent people.
You see a problem and you refuse to fix it, and instead look for a root cause that should be addressed instead, that will then fix the problem itself.
The problem with that kind of thinking is that that’s not how the real world works. The problem of homelessness is that people don’t have homes. It’s not something else. Give people homes and you solve it. But people with RCS try to solve it through jobs, training, education, etc. All those things are nice but they won’t fix the problem, which is that people are homeless.
Likewise, the problem of wealth inequality can only be solved by reducing wealth inequality. There is no other solution. Just tax rich people until they’re not rich anymore.
> The problem of homelessness is that people don’t have homes. It’s not something else. Give people homes and you solve it.
Have you considered how this is supposed to work? If being homeless means you get a free home, millions of people would purposely become "homeless" so they could eliminate their housing costs. Also, homes are quite expensive, especially in areas with high homelessness, so where does the money come from?
Meanwhile one of the primary actual causes of homelessness is zoning that prevents new housing from being built, causing people to be unable to afford it. If you just have the government buy up existing housing stock for the homeless, the scarcity is not resolved at all, you just cause new people to become homeless because you remove the housing they'd have bought from the market.
To actually solve it you can't just do the naive "have the government pay for it" thing, you have to understand the root cause, which is that you have to not just give housing to the homeless but build new housing across the overall market so it isn't in undersupply.
> Likewise, the problem of wealth inequality can only be solved by reducing wealth inequality. There is no other solution. Just tax rich people until they’re not rich anymore.
This is exactly the same level of not thinking it through. Mark Zuckerberg has billions and it gives him control over Facebook. But if you take his money and leave Facebook, someone will still be the CEO and that person will still have all of that power. The problem is not the money, it's the size of the company.
I get what you’re saying, but it really comes down to just addressing the problem directly.
Homelessness crisis -> provide housing for all -> not enough supply? build more -> can’t build because of zoning? fix the zoning -> etc
It’s the same thing with wealth inequality. Tax him until his wealth isn’t that unequal. If you then decide that the CEO of facebook has too much power you can break up Facebook, but that’s a separate issue.
> You have what I refer to as “root cause syndrome”.
This is an ad hominem fallacy/attack. Instead of discussing the actual argument, you instead attack the person making it.
> Likewise, the problem of wealth inequality can only be solved by reducing wealth inequality.
This is an opinion, completely non-factual and unjustified by any reasoning. And, the only possible underlying belief from this paragraph is "some people having more wealth is intrinsically bad" - completely separate from the negative societal effects of that wealth, and from any moral framework that even allows you to describe "bad". You just believe that it's bad.
If you took it as an insult that’s on you. I just stated a fact.
Like the fact that wealth inequality is bad, and we know that it’s bad. It’s just a fact, and if you want to ignore the facts because your opinion doesn’t agree why them that’s ok, but it doesn’t make it any less true.
> If you took it as an insult that’s on you. I just stated a fact.
This is factually and objectively wrong, in multiple ways.
First, don't understand the difference between "an insult" and an ad-hominem attack. An ad-hominem is a logical fallacy where you attack the character of a person making an argument, rather than addressing the argument itself. Whether or not it is insulting is completely irrelevant - they're orthogonal axes, and the fact that you conflated them means that you don't know what they are.
Second, you did not state a fact, you expressed an opinion. You can't read my mind, you don't even know me in person, and even if you did, there's no objective test for “root cause syndrome”, which, as you said, is a term that you have invented yourself. (your statement "Likewise, the problem of wealth inequality can only be solved by reducing wealth inequality." is also an opinion that is not a fact) You don't even know the difference between an opinion and a fact. You should stop claiming that your opinions are facts, and learn the difference.
> Like the fact that wealth inequality is bad, and we know that it’s bad.
Provide a citation for the fact that wealth inequality is bad. If it's factual, it should be easy for you to provide a study that proves that it's bad by establishing a causal link between them, and doesn't merely express a correlation. (prediction: you won't, because I've never seen any evidence ever cited despite having read hundreds of comments expressing opinions like yours)
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
Accusing others of astroturfing doesn't help the quality of HN, or your case against the poster. Please respond in a chill manner. Use the downvote and flag buttons if people are breaking the HN guidelines.
this is so weird because astroturfing is real, extremely prevalent, and people have pointed put “russian bots” on HNany times without being flagged or deleted. such a weird tging that you cant point it out
Yes, astroturfing is real - however, you do not know how prevalent it is, or which comments are it. You don't have access to the internal server logs that dang does. You don't know whether someone is astroturfing or just really invested in an ideology. And it's against the guidelines to point out.
> people have pointed put “russian bots” on HNany times without being flagged or deleted
Because dang didn't see those comments and they weren't flagged by other users. If you see what you think is astroturfing, or dishonest/manipulative/HN-guideline-breaking comments (like those above), downvote and flag it, and if you want to respond, don't accuse the user of astroturfing, but actually respond to their points. If the people on the other end are really FSB officers or whatever, you literally waste their time and money, and divert their resources from other things they could be doing (e.g. the war in Ukraine). Accusing someone of astroturfing isn't just against the guidelines, it's counterproductive!
Imagine if you saw someone who ate so much food they weighed 10,000 pounds.
I come over and tell you, “this isn’t healthy! Nobody should weigh 10,000 pounds, we weren’t designed to exist that way!”
You come back to me and tell me that I’m making an emotional argument that isn’t backed up by facts.
But, the problem with that is that this is common sense, and it’s even backed by a bunch of science and observed reality. Someone who weighs 10,000 pounds basically can’t exist, and if they did it would be so ridiculous it’s almost incomprehensible.
I think it actually should be on you and not me to prove that people owning that much wealth is something that should be considered to be okay, not the other way around. You counter my “emotional pleading” with your own emotional “nuh uh, you are wrong” argument.
Who do you know that has over $100 million in net worth that you feel would be hurt by a proposal to tax unearned gains on people with $100 million net worth and above? I don’t know anyone like that. What I do know is that I would personally benefit from my government having more income to fix potholes and pay teacher salaries.
And that’s the other double standard: when the wealthy people advocate for policy that hurts the majority like tax cuts for the wealthy, they are seen as smart businessmen. But as soon as I advocate for something that hurts the wealthy, I’m being emotional and unreasonable.
Sorry dude, I’m just advocating for what’s in my best interest. It’s in my best interest as an average person who isn’t a billionaire or millionaire for these wealthy people to not exist. They’ve done nothing positive for me and everything negative. Every penny or nickel or dime that goes to their extravagant pay package is a penny or nickel that could have gone back to me, their customer. It would be better for me if my company CEO made $200,000 a year instead of $20,000,000 a year. That could at least buy us a solid pizza patty.
No, I won't. This is a logical fallacy, that of the false allegory. It's not an argument in general, and in this particular case it's an extremely bad allegory that's also trivially inapplicable to this situation. There's plenty of scientific evidence that being physically overweight is directly unhealthy for you. Meanwhile, there's zero evidence that having a lot of money is the sole cause of any negative societal phenomenon. Think I'm wrong? Drop a link right here. Correlation isn't causal, by the way - if you show me a study that merely demonstrates correlation without causality (and sole causality, as opposed to multiple factors), then it's invalid.
> You come back to me and tell me that I’m making an emotional argument that isn’t backed up by facts.
In the case of your actual comments (as opposed to this irrelevant story you're spinning), this is true, because you are repeatedly making emotional non-arguments without providing any facts whatsoever: "very serious argument", "somewhat insulting", "abhorrent misappropriation", "societal mistake", "multiple THOUSANDS of $100 million dollars in net worth", "completely insane $100 million figure", etc. These are purely manipulative, emotional, non-arguments that are meritless and valueless, and are a symptom of someone actively trying to manipulate others. Repeatedly pointing out how much money someone has is not a valid argument.
You're inventing a completely fictional, irrelevant world because you're unwilling to or incapable of either providing a single rational argument, or a single piece of evidence.
> I think it actually should be on you and not me to prove that people owning that much wealth is something that should be considered to be okay
Over a hundred million people in the US, where I live, disagree with you. I have nothing to prove, because it's an extremely popular belief that it's ok to be rich.
Additionally, you have it exactly backwards: in almost every country in the world (and especially the US), things are assumed to be OK to do unless people explicitly decide otherwise. You can invent a new sport, make a new game, write a new book, and do whatever, and that's OK unless it violates established laws, or people decide that your specific thing is bad. This idea of "things are bad to do by default unless you prove otherwise" is completely hypocritical, because you have absolutely done novel things in your life that nobody else has done before, and felt not a shred of guilt, because you do not hold the internal belief that your actions are bad by default unless you explicitly justify them to others.
> You counter my “emotional pleading” with your own emotional “nuh uh, you are wrong” argument.
False. I've made extremely rational and detached counter-arguments to your fallacies. You are the one making objectively emotionally pleading statements like "very serious argument", "somewhat insulting", "abhorrent misappropriation", "societal mistake", "multiple THOUSANDS of $100 million dollars in net worth", "completely insane $100 million figure", and fallacies like the false allegory, the appeal to pity, and the red herring. I've pointed out your fallacies - you've continued to make more of them. You've shown that you don't even know the difference between arguments and emotional pleading.
> And that’s the other double standard: when the wealthy people advocate for policy that hurts the majority like tax cuts for the wealthy, they are seen as smart businessmen. But as soon as I advocate for something that hurts the wealthy, I’m being emotional and unreasonable.
This is a red herring. Nobody else brought up this double standard, nor did I mention it, nor is it relevant to this argument. It's just another way for you to emotionally manipulate.
> Sorry dude, I’m just advocating for what’s in my best interest
This can be used to justify every single kind of evil. Someone can make this argument to justify why they can murder, rape, steal, lie, and cheat, and it works exactly the same way, because they're just doing "what's in their best interest".
Your comments demonstrate an inability to differentiate between opinions and facts, and between emotions and logic. You should stop confidently conflating those things.
Here’s an article from the
council on foreign relations that talks about how inequality is a drag on the economy and fuels populist authoritarian movements,:
Here’s a Saint Louis Federal Reserve article which doesn’t necessarily prove that wealth inequality is bad, but helps to detail how wealth inequality has grown along the lines of education and generation (so you might need to explain how “the younger generation is more poor than previous generations at their age” is good for the economy): https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2019/august/wealth-ine...
Let me know when you’ll be dropping your links that say that wealth inequality is totally cool and awesome.
I think you need to stop debating people by attacking their logic and reasoning abilities just because they disagree with you. I mean, one of your points was that 100 million people agree with you that being rich is okay. Well, that’s an opinion that 100 million people hold, right? There are more than 100 million Christian’s and over 100 million Muslims, but they can’t both be right.
Literally every link you posted is correlation, not causation, which I already pointed out is fallacious before you sent those links:
>> Correlation isn't causal, by the way - if you show me a study that merely demonstrates correlation without causality (and sole causality, as opposed to multiple factors), then it's invalid.
So, you still have provided exactly zero evidence for your claims.
> Let me know when you’ll be dropping your links from reputable institutions that say that wealth inequality is totally cool and awesome.
This is a strawman fallacy - I never claimed that wealth inequality was "totally cool and awesome". My point is that it's a correlation without a causation, and that wealth inequality is not the causing factor. It's still up to you to provide evidence for your claims.
> I think you need to get over yourself and stop debating people by attacking their logic and reasoning abilities just because they disagree with you.
You need to learn how to actually use logic and reasoning. Almost every single thing that you've said in this entire thread has been emotionally manipulative and fallacious. You're not merely "disagreeing" with me, you're making invalid points to justify something morally dubious - it's entirely reasonable for me to point out those fallacies and that emotional manipulation.
Also, literally the definition of a "debate" is to use logical arguments to argue for a point. You cannot have a "debate" with out logic.
It's also extremely ironic that your last statement is yet another emotional plea, because you can't justify your positions with logic or evidence.
I honestly suggest spending some time to think about why you're unable to justify your positions and beliefs with logic. Usually, that means that they're either purely driven by emotion, or logically inconsistent with each other - neither of which are good for either you, the people around you, or society as a whole.
If yes to both, then the centralization of money is bad.
You have no argument against this. The best you can do is to attempt to refute the notion that money is tantamount to power, which will be laughable. But please do try.
Expropriation of wealth from the rich just centralises it more by giving it to the government (and in particular whoever is in charge of the government), as happened with every single communist revolution.
The government controls the supply of money, they don’t need anyone’s money they already have complete monetary power.
Taxes don’t fund the government. All of the money the government collects via taxes is written off in a spreadsheet and disappears. The government then creates money, however much money it wants to, in order to fund its activities.
No? We aren't a communist country, so bringing up communist revolutions is irrelevant here.
We used to tax the rich much more than we do now, and government bureaucrats were not obscenely wealthy then as you seem to be implying.
Also, the US government spends more money than it accrues every year, so there isn't any consolidation of money happening in the government (nor will there be if taxes go up).
> We used to tax the rich much more than we do now, and government bureaucrats were not obscenely wealthy then as you seem to be implying.
This is inaccurate. We used to have higher tax rates on paper but nobody actually paid them because the tax code of the time had many enormous loopholes that have since been closed, which happened at the same time as the rates were lowered. Real government revenue per capita has been increasing over time.
It's not inaccurate. While it is true that they didn't pay the rates on paper, their effective rate was still significantly higher than it is today (even with all the loopholes).
GDP is the aggregate of everyone's income, but the highest income earners have a disproportionate share by definition. The lowest tax brackets have never represented a large proportion of government revenue; they both pay lower effective rates and have less income. It's a decent proxy unless you expect that the tax rates paid by the upper middle class (e.g. the top 50% as opposed to the top 1%) have gotten dramatically out of proportion from what they used to be, but that isn't what happened.
You can find the raw data here though (Tables II: distributional series, you're looking for tab TG2b): http://gabriel-zucman.eu/usdina/
And then you can see that the highest effective income tax rate ever paid by the top 1% was 23.4% in 2001. The most current number from that table was 2019 when it was 20.3%. Whereas the highest rate from the mid-20th century period when they were alleged to have been paying such high income tax rates was 21% in 1945. In 1953, when the US had its highest marginal tax rates (92%), the effective income tax rate on the top 1% was 14%. Which is more typical for the period; 1945 was an outlier, it being the height of WWII.
The thing that has actually come down is not effective income tax rates on the top 1%, it's corporate income tax, which is a consequence of globalization. "Corporate income tax" is not a good fit for an international supply chain because tax avoidance and jurisdiction shopping is too easy if you're trying to tax something that only exists in a spreadsheet ("corporate profit") instead of something that has a definable physical location (goods, workers, real estate, etc.) So corporate tax avoidance is higher (because of transfer pricing etc.) and corporate rates are lower because it's easier for corporations to set up shop somewhere else if the somewhere else is taxing them less, which puts tax jurisdictions in competition with each other. But that's not an easy one to fix without abandoning globalization, so other taxes got raised to compensate (which brings us back to, government receipts as a percent of GDP haven't really changed).
Thank you for clarifying and providing that source, it's very informative.
The numbers I was looking at before were referring to the overall tax rate, which included both income tax and corporate taxes. With that said, the overall tax rate for the top 1% has gone down significantly since 1950 (from 45ish percent down to 32ish percent). As you mentioned, that is mainly due to the lower corporate income tax rate.
Given that drop in the overall tax rate (along with rising income inequality and increasing debt spending), it seems clear to me that the income tax rate was not raised enough to compensate for that loss but that's a separate discussion.
All this to say that - my original point that the rich were effectively taxed higher back then still stands, and government bureaucrats were not getting rich off of the higher tax rates either (that was a response to the person I originally replied to, not you)
> The numbers I was looking at before were referring to the overall tax rate, which included both income tax and corporate taxes.
Including corporate taxes in the overall rate doesn't make a lot of sense to do. Corporate taxes are on a different entity and who really pays them depends on the nature of the business.
For example, there are a lot of businesses that are simply capital intensive. You need to make a large investment in order to operate. Nobody is going to invest in them unless the returns can beat alternative investments like bonds, but that will be the after tax returns in both cases. Bond interest and dividends are both taxed, but corporate income tax is an additional tax, so with higher corporate taxes every company in that industry would have to generate higher profits to attract investors. So higher corporate taxes drive mergers/dissolutions, the market consolidates to give incumbents more market power and the tax mostly ends up getting paid by customers or employees rather than investors.
Conversely, if the market is already consolidated, it might mostly get paid by investors. But it also acts as a force to keep the market consolidated for the same reasons, which is not super great.
The point being, you can't just assume corporate taxes are always paid by the rich or the owners of the company.
> Given that drop in the overall tax rate (along with rising income inequality and increasing debt spending), it seems clear to me that the income tax rate was not raised enough to compensate for that loss but that's a separate discussion.
Income inequality has very little to do with tax rates -- it's often measured on the basis of pre-tax income, and has increased significantly even using that metric, largely as a result of market consolidation and regulatory capture. Incumbents that capture government regulators and exclude competitors become megacorps and then their executives and owners extract disproportionate income. Taxes rates have little to do with it.
The increased deficit spending is because the government is spending more money. Federal receipts as a percent of GDP are around the same, federal spending as a percent of GDP has gone up.
> government bureaucrats were not getting rich off of the higher tax rates either
But there weren't higher tax rates -- and the real measure of what there is to get rich off of would be government receipts, if not expenditures. Receipts are flat as a percent of GDP, but up quite a lot in real dollars and real dollars per capita as a result of growth in population and real GDP per capita. Spending is up even on top of that because of deficit spending. So the time they'd be getting rich isn't back then, it's right now.
Which they are. Of course, "they" are Lockheed and healthcare companies and members of Congress, but there's little doubt that it's happening.
> The point being, you can't just assume corporate taxes are always paid by the rich or the owners of the company.
I was just pulling the numbers off of the source you gave. I'm not sure what methodology they used to compute those numbers.
> Income inequality has very little to do with tax rates
Sorry, I meant wealth inequality. I agree with you that the wealth/income inequality we're seeing is mostly driven by the actual incomes of the rich vastly outpacing the middle/lower classes - what I meant is that a higher progressive tax rate should be deployed in order to help correct that problem.
> The increased deficit spending is because the government is spending more money
Yes, I'm aware. Again what I meant is that if we're going to continue to spend at the levels we are, and wealth inequality continues to grow at the rate it has, then it makes sense to increase the tax rate on the highest brackets.
> But there weren't higher tax rates --
There were though - according to your source.
> So the time they'd be getting rich isn't back then, it's right now
No argument there - but again my point is that they aren't getting rich from increased government taxes, they are getting rich by lobbying/regulatory capture.
> I was just pulling the numbers off of the source you gave. I'm not sure what methodology they used to compute those numbers.
It's Piketty/Saez/Zucman. They did a lot of work to compile the data but they have a particular conclusion they're trying to support, so the data is probably accurate but they're organizing it in a way that supports their position.
> I agree with you that the wealth/income inequality we're seeing is mostly driven by the actual incomes of the rich vastly outpacing the middle/lower classes - what I meant is that a higher progressive tax rate should be deployed in order to help correct that problem.
I don't think that really fixes it because it isn't the underlying cause. The problem here is market consolidation, e.g. Facebook is too big. So Zuckerberg has "billions of dollars" but in fact the vast majority of that money is in shares of that one company and what he really has is control over an enormous and disproportionately powerful corporation. Which is a problem, but taxes don't solve it, because the corporation is still just as big even if nobody has a controlling interest. Wall St would still put someone in charge of it and that person would still have massively disproportionate influence.
Whereas if you do something about the market consolidation then individual corporations don't come to be that size and their owners/executives don't come to have that much influence or money. So higher tax rates neither solve the problem nor are necessary if you do solve it.
> Again what I meant is that if we're going to continue to spend at the levels we are, and wealth inequality continues to grow at the rate it has, then it makes sense to increase the tax rate on the highest brackets.
The current level of spending is pretty useless. Indeed, it's actually one of the causes of the problem -- a lot of the money is going to the megacorps. It's probably better to stop giving it to them to begin with.
> There were though - according to your source.
On corporations, not rich people.
> No argument there - but again my point is that they aren't getting rich from increased government taxes, they are getting rich by lobbying/regulatory capture.
The thing they're lobbying for is the tax dollars. Lockheed and healthcare companies are getting rich from tax money. And the same for Congress, though the mechanism there is less direct. They allocate tax dollars to corporations that then funnel a portion of it back to the legislators in various ways.
By the philosophy under which the human right to property is defined, someone has just as much right to own a billion dollars without it being stolen as they do to have ten dollars.
>It's an abhorrent misappropriation of human resources
It's not a misappropriation; for a company founder, they _created_ those resources. Without them, the resource wouldn't exist. And if you punish them a lot, such people will all go somewhere else, and then you'll have no businesses or jobs and everyone's standard of living will be worse. This has been demonstrated historically countless times, every single case of the government mass-appropriating the wealth of the wealth led to extreme poverty; Maoist China, Stalinist Russia, Pol Pot's Cambodia.
>Wealth and income inequality has well-studied negative effects on society.
Negative as defined by some left-leaning social scientists. Conversely, punitive taxation has been overwhelmingly shown by economists to lead to reduced growth in people's standard of living as measured by income and GDP.
> It's not a misappropriation; for a company founder, they _created_ those resources
Created, or taken the fruits of others’ labor? Obviously, no Amazon-sized company is the work of a single person. Was the pharaoh, sitting in luxury, more responsible for the creation of the pyramid as the architect or the common slave building it?
Its more a question of if the best way to allocate our resources is to allow the bulk of the population to struggle while a lucky few have more money than they could reasonably spend on themselves in several lifetimes.
> Its more a question of if the best way to allocate our resources is to allow the bulk of the population to struggle while a lucky few have more money than they could reasonably spend on themselves in several lifetimes.
This is emotional pleading, dishonest framing, and a false dichotomy. Are you going to make a real argument, or continue to engage in emotional manipulation?
How do you know you have over 100m in assets? One never really knows the worth of something until it's sold. (i.e. try selling a used car. there's what you think it's worth and what you get...)
And once the asset is sold, that's a taxable event.
You raise a good point. I found this page from the Norway tax authority. (In a previous post, I noted that Norway had had a wealth tax for a long time. About 1%.)
> When calculating wealth tax, you must include any assets that you own at the end of the year. These assets must generally be valued at what the asset is worth on the open market. However, an exception is made in the case of housing, and a lower value, known as the tax value, must be used when calculating wealth tax.
(1) "assets must generally be valued at what the asset is worth on the open market". I guess there will be GAAP accounting rules about how to value less liquid assets. Tradable securities are easy to value; other things, like artwork are less easy to value. In the case of a car, an accountant could reasonably use an online used car marketplace to find a value. (The US has something called the Kelley Blue Book.)
(2) "an exception is made in the case of housing". It sounds like there is a totally different set of rules for taxing housing (land+building).
So if I don't apply for a loan, I don't get assessed, which means I don't pay taxes? Anyway, the system is not that simple and bank assessment would be trivial to game. People do it now even without taxes on the line...
This doesn't work if the shares have low-to-zero liquidity, similar to housing or land. In environments where it can take days to find a buyer, the price slippage could be more than the tax itself.
Few things are easy. Some problems with your proposal:
1. Assumes the asset in question is publicly traded.
2. Assumes the publicly traded asset has a non trivial amount of trade volume
3. Assumes asset price is relatively stable, moving in a narrow band along a clear trend-line
4. Assumes you have defined the price from the stock information (last trade before close. Daily average, etc)
5. Assumes holder's position is small enough not to affect stock price were they to sell.
And stocks are the easiest to do this with!
Look at the Trump vs NY court case for the value of his house in FL. Unlike the valuation imposed by government fiat, the valuation was agreed to freely by the parties. The courts found it excessive (and it might be) and proposed a valuation so ridiculously low it alone gives Trump grounds to appeal that the judge is either incompetent on the matter or has a personal bias and should anyway have recused himself.
I do believe it was the Mar a Lago, yes. Trump's valuation was eye watering, I still can't believe it, but the market players agreed to it.
The banks agreed to the valuation and under no coercion agreed to lend money with it as collateral. Trump pays off that loan and the banks are made whole.
By contrast my school board telling me my house is worth 600 k instead of 400 k scares the shit out of me. I can't agree to it and my only recourse are the courts. The school board has lawyers on staff so it costs them nothing if I sue.
The courts found it excessive (and it might be) and proposed a valuation so ridiculously low it alone gives Trump grounds to appeal
This is just wrong. The very low valuation was not proposed by the NY court, but by the Palm Beach County tax appraiser. This is because the property is deeded for use as a social club rather than a private residence (a condition of sale when Trump purchased it iirc, and one which affects future disposal of the property) and as a commercial entity the value is appraised as a multiple of business income.
Thing is, under law you are not allowed to falsify information on financial disclosures like this, regardless of whether the counterparty is OK with it or not. It may be that the state considers the integrity of the financial system a higher priority than individual deals, or it may be designed to prevent money laundering - more likely the latter, as there are a lot of ways to clean dirty money if everyone involved is willing to accept some imaginary claims as fact.
The art is very valuable, financially, because people are willing to pay for it.
However, absent the market clearing the asset, its value is impossible to objectively evaluate. Even if we had an objective function to evaluate art the basis of evaluation is incorrect - the artwork is valuable as an instrument of government corruption
So m, if we can't even agree on the reason why Hunter's artwork is worthwhile, how can we even possibly evaluate it?
1. Properties are bought/sold constantly around most people's homes. Evaluating a home price is not that hard, compared evaluating how much the remains of the car that Ted Kennedy crashed is worth (I purposely chose this example. The car is "worthless" yet I guarantee you can find a nut willing to spend a fortune to have this piece of political history)
2. Properties are purposely, often by statute, assessed far less then they are bought for
3. There are tons of lawsuits around this, imagine the cost of every asset being scrutinized and potentially appealed!
There's a gradient of risk, though. Suppose someone is sitting on 5 billion dollars unrealized gains by holding the index fund VT. The idea of "risking 100% loss" in VT is ludicrous.
Maybe unrealized gains tax can be formulated as "cushy gains tax" if riskiness can be quantified in a reasonable way based on an asset's age and metrics over time. Then if an asset's risk score is above X, you don't pay tax. If it drops below X, you start to pay tax.
This would probably lead to more innovation and fewer monopolies, as people are incentivized to invest in riskier companies, and companies are incentivized to self cannibalize to maintain a healthy risk score.
OK, but in that case people shouldn't be allowed to put up securities they own as collateral for loans ( a popular kind of financial engineering among very wealthy people).
> shouldn't be allowed to put up securities they own as collateral for loan
Is that because the people making the loan aren't sophisticated enough to price those securities correctly in this context and so are being taken advantage of?
> a popular kind of financial engineering among very wealthy people
To use assets without a single universal price as collateral? I think everyone does this.
No. Say you just made $1 billion in capital gains but you don't want to turn it into cash and pay taxes. So what you do is take out a loan of say $100 million against some of your securities, which gives you plenty of cash to play with. In fact you can keep doing this, just raising another loan to pay off the first one, and so on, until you die - at which point your estate can pay off the outstanding loan, and your legacy is exempt from capital gains taxes. It's called 'buy, borrow, die'.
> Is that because the people making the loan aren't sophisticated enough to price those securities correctly in this context and so are being taken advantage of?
No, it's because using stock (and other securities) this way allows them to "convert" the stock into money without actually realizing the gains. Thus they derive benefit from the gains without actually paying capital gains tax.
They're not converting anything. If they don't pay back the loan the stock must be surrendered. If the stock does not have the face value required to satisfy the loan more money must be paid in to settle the debt. If the stock loses value you may very well get a call from the bank reducing the size of your loan facility or requiring you to put more collateral into the contract.
They're deriving secondary benefit from ownership and they're paying interest for the facility with the ultimate expectation that they pay back the loan and the stocks never actually trade hands.
This is not much different from any interest bearing account. Should it be that you have to take all your money out of savings and ensure you earn nothing from it if you intend to offer it as collateral on a loan?
> This is not much different from any interest bearing account. Should it be that you have to take all your money out of savings and ensure you earn nothing from it if you intend to offer it as collateral on a loan?
The difference is taxes. Interest on a savings account used as collateral is still taxed. Gains used as collateral in a loan are not taxed.
The parent poster is suggesting this loophole be closed - that the practice either be disallowed or considered realizing the gains for tax purposes.
You think Mark Cuban is risking being homeless or something? How insulting to equate the risk of people who already have over 100 million dollars to the risk of hourly wage employees who live paycheck to paycheck.
When you are wildly wealthy you are not risking anything, risk is merely an input to the math equation that only goes one direction. Up.
The $100M is an arbitrary number. It can go up, it can go down. It will be eroded by inflation and almost certainly not be indexed or indexed to a number controlled by bureaucrats.
Are you sure the Harris proposal is only about publicly traded stock portfolios? Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see publicly traded stocks being singled out by the President, which is supposedly the policy Harris is adopting.
"The proposal would impose a minimum tax of 25 percent on total income, generally inclusive of unrealized capital gains, for all taxpayers with wealth (that is, the difference obtained by subtracting liabilities from assets) greater than $100 million."
And there are many private farms in America worth more than $100m. I have no idea what amount of that would be "unrealized capital gains", which is kinda the problem.
> Taxpayers would be treated as illiquid if tradeable assets held directly or indirectly by the taxpayer make up less than 20 percent of the taxpayer’s wealth. Taxpayers who are treated as illiquid may elect to include only unrealized gain in tradeable assets in the calculation of their minimum tax liability.
Which seems to suggest that if someone's wealth is mostly tied up in property or art or a private business, then they wouldn't be taxed on unrealized gains.
I actually met a farmer on the East coast from a mayflower time family. They have the same land and basically been doing the same thing for a couple centuries. According to the fed they are worth $50M.
I feel an exchange tax that included loans would probably be a much better approach. Taxing seated/parked assets, especially on the very wealthy seems like a recipe for disaster. So you have to sell, or leverage the property to pay taxes. What would trying to sell billions in stock at once, or leverage hundreds of thousands of rental properties look like to the larger economy, and what would the effect be? Also, who is going to be able to even buy the stuff, if everyone with enough money/credit is scrambling to make huge tax layouts. Will you be able to deduct the interest on loans taken out to pay these taxes?
It's not like the money is just sitting, liquid in a vault like Scrooge McDuck.
> Taxing seated/parked assets, especially on the very wealthy seems like a recipe for disaster.
Idea: tax loans taken out using assets as collateral at regular income tax rates. After all, that money gets used like regular income (living expenses).
The taxed amount can then be added to the basis when the asset is sold. It would be like reverse of depreciation calculations.
Set an asset and loan value floor so it only affects people with assets $10M+.
After all, regular people pay taxes on annuities, which are similar in structure.
Disclaimer: IANA-Accountant, but I am a taxpayer who tries to legally minimize my taxes.
Yes, but we have to be careful about double-taxing mortgages for ordinary home-buyers. Those home purchases are already taxed by local municipalities—and in many places that hits the SALT cap.
> Yes, but we have to be careful about double-taxing mortgages for ordinary home-buyers.
In the context of home ownership, a loan using an asset as collateral translates to a home-equity loan or reverse mortgage. If you want to protect ordinary home-buyers, set an asset value floor of say $20M.
However, I think most share "pledging" [1] by the uber-wealthy is done using company stock as collateral, so you could restrict the tax further by having it apply only to loans taken against stock holdings over some similarly high value floor.
> Idea: tax loans taken out using assets as collateral at regular income tax rates.
I don’t think it’s as simple as this. This will end up catching normal people (any mortgage, automotive loan, etc) but may result in tricky accounting/loan structuring to avoid having literal collateral for the billionaires you’re trying to hit.
I don’t think that taxing unrealized gains is the solution either, but I also don’t think doing nothing is the solution. This is a very tricky problem without an obvious solution (and it doesn’t help that the ultra-wealthy can fairly easily influence lawmakers).
> This will end up catching normal people (any mortgage, automotive loan, etc)
So just have it kick in above $5M/year or something like that, and have it only apply to securities as assets. Not a lot of ordinary people are taking $5M+/year in loans against their stocks.
I love your consideration for the financial problems of some of the most privileged people in all of human history. I just don’t really care that much if they get a big tax bill (I’m sure they’ll find a way to pay) and for a variety of reasons it will be good for society.
A large part of the United States' economic leadership is specifically concentrated in the tech startup sector.
Whether or not you think any of the companies funded by YCombinator[0] are actually worth their valuation, you have to realize that there will be fewer such startups if a tax on unrealized capital gains is passed, and that VC activity, along with the future startups chasing their money, absolutely will move to countries without such a tax.
Again, maybe you actually believe the startup scene in the US is worthless, in which case, go ahead and advocate for an unrealized gains tax Just be honest with yourself that it will entirely shut down sectors that others view as critical to the country's future dominance.
> you have to realize that there will be fewer such startups if a tax on unrealized capital gains is passed, and that VC activity, along with the future startups chasing their money, absolutely will move to countries without such a tax.
That's a bold claim. The tax-averse amongst us say that, but in my experience investment flows to the best ideas / best distribution / best businesses. If those people are in the US because they're citizens, the capital will flow to the US, and investors will take the hit.
I think it’s simpler than that. People here tend to enjoy, and have careers around, understanding complex systems. “Consideration” for rich people isn’t required for thinking about the possible impacts of this, especially when the government has a near perfect track record in eventually shifting policies down to the working class.
The impacts could be extremely positive, some people are starting to believe the very richest having an optional tax system in the US is bad for everyone.
There seems to be a simpler fix though, that avoids the major negative effects of the larger changes.
They take out loans and aren't taxed on it. But they have to pay taxes when they pay off the loans, and at that time they'll owe even more money meaning more stocks will have to be sold.
But wait, how are they avoiding that tax even then? Well they take out another loan. But eventually that stops. They can't take out infinite loans, so what is happening? When they die, there is some tax trickery that involves resetting the cost basis of assets, then selling them with 0 capital gains to pay off the loans. The simple fix is to only reset the values after the estate pays out, meaning that any assets sold to pay off any loans will have to pay the real tax on their value, and only afterwards is the cost basis reset when inheritors receive those assets.
That seems a much more minimally invasive change, and also seems much more in line with the intent of the existing tax code to begin with, as the cost basis should only reset for those inheriting and not for paying off existing debts.
I feel you're missing the forest for the trees... You're advocating a policy of the ultra rich not having to pay tax during their lifetime because it's less complicated.
I understand you're viewing it as a tax increase as the estate pays less tax on death under the current system, but sometimes you need to realise you're stuck in the overton window.
It's not just their financial problem... I'm concerned with triggering an event that could make the great depression look like a tropical vacation by comparison.
Just for a second, imagine seeing the sale of roughly 5% of all stocks across the board... what would the side effect of that be? Since all of the very wealthy would be doing the same, that means that the prices will likely go down by more than 5% triggering more downstream sales.
They're not concerned about the wealthy, but the state of the economy. Bad things happen when the prices of things change dramatically. E.g., if you happen to own an asset that a billionaire now needs to fire sale, you'll lose out as well.
It’s not that simple. If hundreds of billions of dollars need to be liquidated across every asset class in every industry, the entire economy is going to tank. Not just “oh no the stock market’s down.” Asset prices would drop severely (housing being the most “regular-person” applicable), many business will fail meaning many people will lose their jobs, and mortgages will be foreclosed upon due to suddenly being incredibly underwater without jobs. Picture 2008, but worse.
“Hold your shares or buy more at a discount” is incredibly out of touch with the average person who will be affected by an economic depression.
Then it becomes a question of selling the needed asset now during the fire sale or waiting and having to sell even more as the price fails to recover over the years.
SVB would still be around today if it was possible to convince people to not panic sell
Price shocks in anything are generally bad for the economy (maybe with the exception of some commodities like oil, but even this can be bad since the producers of that commodity will be in trouble). You're too focused on the rich people, and not enough on the economy.
Price shocks are bad because they can cascade and cause businesses to fail, resulting in layoffs, etc.,. Stability is one of the most important things in the economy.
It’s standard practice when dealing with huge volumes of shares to sell over a long period of time, we’re not forcing them to sell everything 10 mins before taxes are due.
They will be incentivized to do this otherwise they will get nothing for their shares.
This is a tax on some extremely affluent people who are doing shenanigans to avoid paying capital gains tax. Seriously, communism it is not. Great companies were still built in the US when rich people had to pay capital gains and they still will be if these rich tax avoiders get a big bill they can split over 5 years.
Ignoring the many other reasons why that would be problematic, what happens when the US government suddenly owns notable (or even controlling) stakes in companies?
You would effectively have corruption. Governments would be more reluctant to take actions which could be negative when they have direct ownership vs their normal "indirect ownership" via taxation.
I'd love to see a list of pros. There are no pros. It's effectively death to competitors and actually extremely damaging to the companies themselves as well.
One solution to deciding how much an asset is worth is to let you declare any value you want for it, with the caveat that if someone is willing to pay you more than the declared value, you must sell it to them.
Now obviously things like transaction fees need to be factored in, and timing should matter - you should have the option to increase your stated value if something changes (or even to say "yes, okay, it's really worth X" and keep the item at the higher valuation).
That's very open to malicious actors though. Suppose you set a fair market value on your house or car. If I'm evil it may be worth a small loss on my part to 'out-bid' you simply to take that asset away from you by force, perhaps at a very disruptive time.
It also has all the other problems with estimating the true value of an asset.
> What would trying to sell billions in stock at once, or leverage hundreds of thousands of rental properties look like to the larger economy, and what would the effect be?
Billionaires already routinely sell billions in stock "at once" (meaning, per quarter or similar, not a $1 billion limit order on Robinhood...), so on that one, we can empirically suggest "not much of an effect on the larger economy".
Taxes are not an automatic good. There are things we want the government to do. It costs some amount of money to do those things. We should figure out what that amount of money is, tax enough for it, and the rest belong to the person who earns it.
Why do people assume we always have to give more and more money to the government? What have they done with the $6 trillion they spend every year so far? What evidence is there that giving them more will improve anything?
Taxes are not for you to punish people you don't like. They're to fund the government enough to perform its necessary functions. That's all.
This is such a stupid argument. Is your issue that the number is too high? Why? What’s the right number?
Should government spend 25% percent of GDP? Who cares. Governments shouldn’t aim for a specific number, they should spend enough to make sure full employment is achieved, according to saving desires and the private market’s appetite for investment.
Whatever the private market isn’t willing to invest, the government should take care of.
Whether that’s 10% or 50% is literally irrelevant.
The government only gets money by skimming off the top of private enterprise. If the percentage is too high then there’s nothing left to skim and the system collapses, so yes we should care what the percentage is and we should want it to be as low as possible.
We should be demanding ruthless efficiency from the government, not dreaming up new ways for them to take our stuff.
No, you have no idea how sovereign economies work. Taxes don’t fund government spending. Learn about economics before you complain about the number being too high.
Cool, then let's just do away with them altogether. This is great news. All those people saying I needed to pay taxes so I can have roads and schools and a military and everything must be wrong.
You arguments so far have been “the number is too big” and “let’s get rid of all taxes” so I don’t feel like you’re very serious about having a discussion.
Look, if you actually knew what you were talking about you would be able to explain it in a few sentences. I'm guessing you're misremembering something you never really understood from the econ elective you took in college ten years ago and so all you can do is say "go read a book" because you don't really understand it beyond a vague notion that taxes are somehow unnecessary to fund the government.
Like, just as a basic common sense test, if it were possible for the government to spend as much as it wants without taxes, why wouldn't a politician implement that, eliminate taxes, and immediately become the most popular politician in the history of the world? If it were as easy as you say, surely that would have happened. Since it hasn't happened, it stands to reason that maybe you don't know what you're talking about when you say the government doesn't need taxes to fund spending.
Assume you have a new country with no money. How does anything get done? The central bank needs to issue capital that the government then allocates first.
Eventually this money makes it down to the citizens of the country who spend it. Then the government can tax that money, and that gives it non-inflationary spending room to reallocate those resources.
For example, there’s a car company that’s using up most of the country’s steel supply. But the government wants to shift the country’s manufacturing from cars to other green industries. What the government
can do is tax the car company so that it’s not able to use up as much steel, which frees up resources for other industries to utilize.
The same goes for people, since people are a country’s most important resource. Through taxation the government can influence the resource allocation of the country. That doesn’t mean that the government can’t spend without taxes though.
If you want to learn more there’s plenty of resources
out there, you can start with Keynes, skip anything from chicago, move on to MMT for the latest theoretical thought.
> Then the government can tax that money, and that gives it non-inflationary spending room to reallocate those resources.
Hmm, why might it be important to have a non-inflationary means of spending? I wonder. Of course, the government can print money. They can't just print all the money they want forever with no consequences.
> For example, there’s a car company that’s using up most of the country’s steel supply. But the government wants to shift the country’s manufacturing from cars to other green industries.
A car company is not "using up" the steel supply. They are meeting consumer demand for cars. If consumers found green technologies more useful than cars, they would buy that instead, then the green technology companies would be able to outbid the car companies for steel and they would buy it. If they aren't it's because people find cars more useful than whatever "green technologies" are.
Also, if there's a high demand for steel, new steel suppliers can enter the market and increase the supply of steel. There's no need for the government to manage this and it's generally harmful for them to do so, since they are allocating resources away from something people have demonstrated they find useful and towards something they don't find useful. This is not optimal. We should want the resources to go where they are most useful and valued, not where some bureaucrat decides he or she likes them to go.
I do not think "skipping to MMT" is the right plan for understanding mainstream economics, or any kind of economic theory likely to govern decisionmaking in the near future. I think some of the core ideas in MMT took a real bruising over the last couple years.
I’d love to hear which ones. I think economicists are going to be arguing this for 100 years but I, as an interested layman, see a lot of evidence _for_ MMT in recent years.
You know I'm not an economist, and I'm just going off of nerding out on AskEconomics and BadEconomics (and bookmarks from when this was a live issue a couple years ago). But mostly my argument would be built around how burnt the Biden administration was by the run-up in inflation (which I'm sure is a mix of supply chain and fiscal stuff). Conservative opponents of MMT predict hyperinflation, but I think we've learned that making a 12-pack of Diet Coke $1 more expensive is enough to trigger regime change; that's what we'll get instead of hyperinflation, but either of those outcomes breaks MMT as a policy tool.
Which has implications --- beyond political/policy --- for MMT, in that MMT is (if I understand this bit) built in part on the premise that increased government spending won't increase expectations of future inflation (which needs to be the case in order to use control of the money supply to cover debt service).
Mostly though I'd just make two dumb arguments:
* Economists do not seem to like MMT ("not even a theory; what does it predict?")
* MMT was for a time part of the branding behind Biden's proposed and actual spending, which did not go well politically.
I hope I'm wrong in some lurid fun way you're going to spell out for me. :)
I’m again not an economist nor someone who reads a lot of Reddit. But economists don’t dislike mmt, they invented it after all. Economists are as mixed and varied in their beliefs as priests!
But my main contention is that we had a ton of loose monetary policy for nearly 2 decades with no major inflationary issues.
Then we had a short supply chain shock and a minor catch up in real income and boom inflation. That’s fairly compelling to me.
Yeah I think most of my argument is political, though I think I'm on reasonably steady ground saying that MMT isn't mainstream. We will at some point become irritating enough to lure actual economists in here to dunk on us.
I can see the political argument against it, but at the end of the day I think that’s a marketing issue. Japan vehemently denies that any allegations of using MMT, but MMT has been very good at predicting japanese economic outcomes.
It’s definitely not mainstream though, I agree with you there, but I would argue that that’s because there’s a lot of people who would have to admit they were wrong for decades if MMT was accepted.
My understanding of MMT (unburdened by any formal econ training) is that government spending financed by debt in that government's own currency is OK if and only if the society has — or can quickly enough build — sufficient productive capacity to handle the increased demand that will be caused by the increase in the money supply. I found Dr. Stephanie Kelton's book The Deficit Myth to be a very-accessible explanation that made intuitive sense (which of course is always dangerous).
The perhaps-facile analogy is pump-priming, a.k.a. fiscal stimulus, summed up in the old Kingston Trio song Desert Pete: You come across a hand-operated water pump in a well in the desert (hah!), with a bottle full of water sitting there, and a note explaining: You can "borrow" the water and use it to prime the pump; once you get the pump going: "Drink all the water you can hold, wash your face, cool your feet | Leave the bottle full for others | Thank you kindly, Desert Pete."
But that only works if the pump is working and has sufficient "raw material" (water in the well). And if you drink most of the bottle of water (borrowing for consumption instead of for boosting productive capacity), then the pump won't draw water, and you'll angrily claim that priming it doesn't work. As Desert Pete warned, "Now there's just enough to prime it with, so don't you go drinkin' first. Just pour it in and pump like mad and, buddy, you'll quench your thirst."
The lack of acceptance of MMT among mainstream economists is of course a red flag. But then in medicine, Marshall and Warren asserted — correctly — that many common stomach ulcers were caused by Helicobacter pylori bacteria and could readily be cured with cheap antibiotics instead of with major surgery. They were scorned by mainstream physicians and surgeons protecting vested interests. And eventually they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
So lack of acceptance isn't dispositive; as I read somewhere but can't find online, old economics ideas don't die out until old economists do. (Or maybe it was physicists?)
I might be wrong, but my impression is that MMT has been pretty good at predicting economic outcomes.
The main reason I suggested it is because MMT is the only innovation happening in economics, and understanding the core concepts has been very helpful to me.
The only other game in town is synthesis, which has been a dead end for decades and has very poor real world predictive power.
Glad you asked. There's the obvious three ways to finance government:
- Taxes
- debt financing
- seignorage
The latter two aren't taxes, but people end up paying for the expenses anyway.
Governments can also plunder other country's money. While this sounds very Roman empire, it's still a thing. Case in point freezing another country's foreign exchange reserves, refusing to return their gold, confiscating the interest on the reserves, etc
You know what else was a "great idea" that was supposed to be only for the wealthy class? The income tax [1]. 100 years later and all of a sudden everyone is paying it.
Maybe if you stopped with the sarcasm and thought about this critically you'd see that the solution isn't taxing everyone to death, but reducing the out-of-control government spending. Because at the rate the government is spending money, you will be paying this "capital gains" tax in 2 decades on a much smaller balance.
A new type of tax on the absolute wealthiest of the wealthy is not "taxing everyone to death." I'm sure there are some great ways we can reduce/improve government spending, but that is completely separate from the idea that the mega-rich should be paying more.
His point was that a tax on unrealized gains can one day be applied to less wealthy people.
I can explain it to you with a simple example:
Imagine, for instance, you're making 50k a year and have a brokerage account that has appreciated by 100k and that you're being taxed 20% on unrealized gains in year x. In year x+1, say your account falls back to where it was before. You paid 20k plus another 10k, and you will need to set aside another 10k. In essence, your income has been reduced to 10k, which could make daily life impossible for many people making 50k annually, especially those with families.
My point was that just because we impose a new tax on unfathomably wealthy people, it doesn't mean that we are inherently going to impose that tax on normal people. We can't be so scared of our own shadow that we are paralyzed into inaction. So scared of new taxes imposed on ourselves that we don't try to tax the uber wealthy. At the end of the day this is a democracy (obv with flaws, but still a democracy.) If politicians start taxing your 100k investment fund the way they are taxing a 100M investment fund, vote them out.
She didn’t even suggest that she supports that policy, it’s just assumed for some reason despite the fact that she’s already made her own choices on tax policy.
Either way, I’m far more concerned about Trumps $4k tax on me (in addition to the tax hike he implemented on me when he was president but I’ll let that slide).
Quoting New York Times: "The vice president supports the tax increases proposed by the Biden White House, according to her campaign."
...
"That’s how much more revenue the federal government would raise if it adopted a number of tax increases that President Biden proposed in the spring. Ms. Harris’s campaign said this week that she supported those tax hikes, which were thoroughly laid out in the most recent federal budget plan prepared by the Biden administration."
...
"The tax plan would also try to tax the wealthiest Americans’ investment gains before they sell the assets or die. People with more than $100 million in wealth would have to pay at least 25 percent on a combination of their income and their unrealized capital gains — the value of the appreciation in the stocks, bonds, real estate and other assets that they own but haven’t sold. The so-called billionaires-minimum tax could create hefty tax bills for people like Elon Musk who derive much of their wealth from stock they own."
> Either way, I’m far more concerned about Trumps $4k tax on me (in addition to the tax hike he implemented on me when he was president but I’ll let that slide).
He cut taxes did not increase taxes. This just tells me you are a lying shill for the Kamala Harris campaign. Do better.
> The vice president supports the tax increases proposed by the Biden White House
Yeah I'd wait for her to specifically say that before you sell your unrealized gains in a panic and flee the country. The self martyrdom thing is super weird imo.
> He cut taxes did not increase taxes.
Look up the SALT deduction cap as part of the TCJA. I paid ~$3k more than I would have if the SALT deduction was intact and I itemized. I am a shill for the Kamala campaign though, because I support America.
> Yeah I'd wait for her to specifically say that before you sell your unrealized gains in a panic and flee the country. The self martyrdom thing is super weird imo.
Welp. Kamala Harris' economic advisor confirmed the plan to tax unrealized gains on CNBC Squawk Box. There goes her full tilt to Socialism. Communism is next in line.
We had an entire convention last week where she shared her policies, as did her surrogates and supporters. She supports a $6k child tax credit not taxing unrealized gains. But if you want to feel victimized (?) by a hypothetical tax on people with >$100M unrealized gains go for it I guess.
The right are currently targeting facebook and tech firms because they want to be able to influence the ‘algorithm’ to support their policies.
They are current churning out concepts such as the ‘censorship industrial complex’, and finding ways to publicize blame on “liberal Californian tech firms”.
The right wing think tanks are posturing about this from the perspective of free speech - while avoiding getting down into the weeds of trust and safety decision making.
I am on board with better freedom of speech protections - but not someone pontificating on principles, but ignoring the massive amounts of failure when you run moderation on “principles”.
This is where they lose credibility for me, and the power grab becomes apparent.
This letter is almost certainly to appease the Republican Party so that Meta is not dragged into hearings near the election.
Vaccine hesitancy and general distrust of 'big pharma' started in left wing, hippy / naturalist culture in the 1970s. And lawyers suing big corporate pharma companies for harm caused to children is definitely a liberal thing (RFK jr's career profile).
Russian sympathizers were almost always leftwing from the 1940s on. It's only very recently that the media has attempted to flip the script to say that Trump or right wingers are pro Russia. Only gullible people believe this.
And someone who spent their fortune and life focus on fighting climate change through the EV car revolution is somehow right wing?
> Vaccine hesitancy and general distrust of 'big pharma' started in left wing, hippy / naturalist culture in the 1970s.
This just isn’t true. Groups of people suspicious about medical treatment for religious reasons predate the 1970s considerably, and the antivax movement was famously an example of fringe right-wing and fringe left-wing people finding common cause.
> It's only very recently that the media has attempted to flip the script to say that Trump or right wingers are pro Russia.
This similarly betrays deep historical ignorance. Russia isn’t a communist state, it’s run by an oligarchy of rich white men who have beliefs about race, gender, and sexuality which have a lot in common with those of the people they make common cause with.
> And someone who spent their fortune and life focus on fighting climate change through the EV car revolution is somehow right wing?
He didn’t spend a fortune, he made one by sagely taking advantage of government subsidies and market demand. There’s nothing wrong with that but it’s hardly selfless to make yourself fabulously rich and there’s no evidence that he’s a climate activist in areas which don’t directly benefit his wealth. As to his political leanings, what makes him a right-winger is his years of support and endorsement of right wing positions and politicians.
To be clear, Norway has also had a wealth tax for years. Summarised: The wealth tax rate is 0.7%(local)+0.3%(national) and is calculated based on assets exceeding a net capital tax basis of NOK 1.7 million for single/not married taxpayers and NOK 3.4 million for married couples. (Ref: https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/norway/individual/other-taxes)
And regarding "taking out loans against their own share portfolios": Yes, I agree, this is genius tax avoidance strategy. And, I am pretty sure the interest paid on that loan would be tax deductible in the US! Most large investment banks have a separate trading desk that facilitates these loans via private bankers.
> I think this is a great idea personally given what these people are doing to avoid paying tax
I very strongly believe you to be wrong:
1. Unrealized gains is unworkable. Billionaires will spend tens or hundreds of millions yearly to avoid paying literally billions in taxes because the expected value is net positive. The IRS won't win chasing down money scattered across the globe. This is not a productive use of capital.
2. Taxing unrealized gains causes extreme capital flight. This is _bad_ for the US.
3. Taxing unrealized gains will lead to corporations and startups incorporating outside the US and keeping their assets outside of the US. This is _bad_ for the US.
4. Founders would very quickly loose control of the companies they started, including before they exit. That is really bad for startups and the ecosystem.
5. This is almost certainly illegal in the US at the federal level.
6. Every tax for the wealthy eventually targets the middle class.
1. Capital gains tax is already essentially optional for the richest now with various tricks. Of course taxing people is difficult, are you saying because it’s hard let’s not bother?
2. Where will the capital go (all the best investments are in the US), if this happens lots of great businesses will be available to buy at a discount to people with smaller than $100m stock portfolios
3. Potentially true but I would still set up my business in the US and just pay the tax, if I make $100m it’s $20m for the government and I rate that as a great deal to be honest.
4. Why is a one off 20% tax going to lose founders control, this is only about companies post IPO.
5. IANAL are you?
6. If the rich continue to be able to accumulate wealth without paying taxes on it forever I think that is the road to serfdom personally. Taxation of the rich will make everyone better off. I pay over 50% tax in Europe, maybe if the rich were paying their share this could be reduced!
5. This has been brought up so many times by in the past few years and is very unlikely to pass scrutiny.
---
The federal government has the ability to tax "income." Unrealized gains are not income as gains have not been clearly realized.
The closest legal definition for "income" comes from:
The Glenshaw Glass case
In Commissioner v. Glenshaw Glass Co., 348 U.S. 426 (1955), the Supreme Court laid out what has become the modern understanding of what constitutes "gross income" to which the Sixteenth Amendment applies, declaring that income taxes could be levied on "accessions to wealth, clearly realized, and over which the taxpayers have complete dominion". Under this definition, any increase in wealth—whether through wages, benefits, bonuses, sale of stock or other property at a profit, bets won, lucky finds, awards of punitive damages in a lawsuit, qui tam actions—are all within the definition of income, unless the Congress makes a specific exemption, as it has for items such as life insurance proceeds received by reason of the death of the insured party, gifts, bequests, devises and inheritances, and certain scholarships.
> 3. Potentially true but I would still set up my business in the US and just pay the tax, if I make $100m it’s $20m for the government and I rate that as a great deal to be honest.
You've described the wrong type of tax. I make $100m and 20% goes to the government is not controversial. It's my business is valued at $100m and so I pay $20m to the government regardless of how much my company is "making".
> 4. Why is a one off 20% tax going to lose founders control, this is only about companies post IPO.
Got it. So no more IPOs and every public company is about to go private.
If you have 100M in unrealized capital gains it should be no big deal to sell some of those gains to cover the tax. Just convert the shares to non voting shares if you want to keep control.
Why does no one read the actual proposal before commenting?
It specifically states that this only applies to individuals with 80% of their wealth in tradeable assets. No founder is going to lose control because this doesn’t apply to them!
I can IPO, sell some shares and make billions but have to take 25% in tax or I can not do that and what happens? How do I turn my non IPO shares into profit? Presumably if you liquidate to cash you owe the capital gains right?
You’re still going to end up making a higher valuation on the stock market than you would trying other means to avoid this tax.
I'd love to. I'm genuinely interested in how this policy could be implemented and would love to read their suggestions. I think it's very hard to pull off successfully. Can you provide a link?
I thought Harris was adopting the President's 2025 budget proposal [1], which doesn't specifically state this is specific to tradable assets, but according to the downvoters I'm wrong about that. As far as I can tell it provides no comment on how "wealth" is determined.
I suppose the whole argument is moot anyway as the President doesn't pass a budget, Congress does. And this document is really about communicating priorities, not actual policy.
And if one wants to get really persnickety, Harris didn't actually say anything. Some people working for her campaign did.
Because that detail, like the $100milliom limit are irrelevant details subject to change. (Most) People have the ability to synthesize issue and are worried of the proposal's fundamental core:
"Do we want the government to tax unrealized gains?"
No. I find it very scary frankly, even though I believe that the top 0.01% of the US population are parasitical and their financial and political clout should be reined in.
Tax on unrealized gain is total BS. It's BS right in the name. Why don't they just say collateral assets are taxable, so the loan pegged on these assets will get taxed. The way they are going with is pure stupidity.
I am with you on that. I think they don’t because this trick is classically used by powerful old money families to generate tax free income from dynasty trusts.
I'd much prefer seeing us close up the tax loop holes than create an even more complex system.
Taxing unrealized gains will be extremely complex, and given that they aren't allowing us to deduct unrealized losses its a pretty shitty setup for the taxpayer.
We need to drastically simplify our tax code rather than further increase its complexity.
Doesn't this "close" the tax loophole in which holders of tradable assets can take out loans against those assets in perpetuity, never paying taxes on any of it?
Not necessarily, though that is the hope. This wouldn't directly close the loophole, its meant to be attempt to block it without actually closing it.
A huge question I have here is how unrealized gains on nonfinancial assets would be handles. How would the government determine the fair market value of a multimillion dollar mansion, for example?
More broadly, how would we justify only taxing unrealized gains on individuals? Or would this apply to corporations, banks, and financial institutions as well?
My point isn't actually any specific issue in the proposal, these are just examples of what could be a problem. Our tax code is massive and incomprehensible to almost everyone. Adding further caveats and stipulations just makes it worse. Taking an axe to much of the tax code seems like a much more reasonable approach in my book.
In my experience, state property tax assessments do a decent job at trying to calculate relative values but a terrible job at defining actual property values. Meaning, they may pretty reliably value my house at 10 or 15% less than the house next door based on age or size, but the actual value they put on either house isn't even close to what it would sell for (I've always seen tax assessments come in much lower than market rate).
I don't know how that plays out with mansions though. Whether a mansion is worth $30M or $10M is often hard to predict with the pool of potential buyers being so low.
> But yes, a tax on "unrealized gains" basically amounts to a property tax, not anything related to an income tax.
The main difference being that a property tax only takes into account the assessed value and ignores what you paid for it. They tax the value, not just unrealized gains.
Yeah, I just meant it is more similar to a property tax than an income tax. Of course the other difference is that you might be able to deduct the tax you paid if the value drops back down before the gain is realized... but I haven't heard enough of the proposed implementation details to sort that out.
I mean, you have to pay the loans back. Which requires income which is taxed. This would only work if you either don't spend any money (which then what is the point of the loan) or if your assets are always going up and increasing in value beyond that of the loan which inevitably will not be the case.
The actual loophole is the step-up basis for inheritance. This allows you to never realize gains, living off loans against them. Then, when you die, your heirs inherit the appeciated assets, and the liabilities. But, their cost basis for the assets is stepped up to the then-current fair value. So, they can sell off assets to pay the loans off, but have no realized gains.
But charging taxes on the loan won't really reflect that well. Also, there are limits on inheritance before estate tax kicks in, so folks with 100's of million in assets passed on to their heirs are still paying estate tax, it won't be tax free at that level.
(Edited to correct "inheritance tax" to the technically correct term, "estate tax")
If you're a billionaire who does the "take out loans against your unrealized cap gains" trick, then you, you know... can't sell your stock. So then your stock passes to your kids -- who, due to the stepped up basis, yes, do not have to pay cap gains on that stock.
But there's a 40% estate tax.
Estate tax generally isn't very relevant even to the ordinarily-rich, because it has an extremely high deduction (about $27M for a married couple), but for a billionaire it's absolutely relevant.
Now, sure, if you paid both the cap gains and the estate tax you'd pay that much more taxes, but if you compare a normally-wealthy person (pays 15-20% cap gains and 0% estate tax) and a billionaire (pays 0% cap gains and 40% estate tax), it's obvious that the billionaire, eventually, pays a much higher tax rate.
Right. In my opinion, the 'fair' and 'simple' thing to do would be to eliminate the estate tax, and the step-up basis. Then there would be no loop hole to borrow against unrealized gains (and no real point to do so), while still allowing wealth to be enjoyed by the family that generated it, requiring them to pay taxes in the same way everyone else does (simplifying the tax code).
Well, you still have to pay the estate tax, but you are probably arguing that is independent as it would need to be paid regardless of the step-up in basis.
Yeah, the real loophole is step-up in basis with no corresponding tax event. What should really happen is that every step-up in basis should correspond to a tax event or, somewhat more speculatively, only net changes in basis should result in tax events. Incidentally, this would also give everybody access to reduced taxes due to unrealized losses (tax loss harvesting) instead of just people with accountants.
That's not a loophole, it is illegal. You can't deduct personal expenses from a business. I realize the rich do it, but if that is the problem let's go after that.
Also if you sell stocks you always pay tax on the capital gains regardless if there is a loan or not.
>You can't deduct personal expenses from a business. I realize the rich do it, but if that is the problem let's go after that.
We have gone 'after it' again and again, making the system more and more complex. So much that you can now out-lawyer the IRS if you have enough money. There is no 'personal' expense, everything is somehow a business need. There is no simple solution to this really. Whatever you do to hurt ten billionaires, the ten million small business owners will face the brunt of it.
>Also if you sell stocks you always pay tax on the capital gains regardless if there is a loan or not.
That is the point, you don't sell stocks that makes you a billionaire. Instead, you find more and more creative ways to leverage that stock for loans, for deals, for power/control, etc etc. Also see cross collaterals where the same asset is used for multiple purposes at the same time!
So if you argue that we already can't enforce existing tax laws then why is proposing new, extremely expensive and difficult to enforce tax laws the solution?
I'm pretty sure that whole notion of these magical loans to avoid taxes is a made up internet conspiracy theory.
A) Loans need to be paid back, with interest. The person must either be selling assets or drawing in other (taxed) income to pay back the loan. A loan could delays the taxes to a future year to let someone buy a house or yacht or whatever without the full tax burden in year 1, but they still ultimately pay all the taxes
B) If they die while still having outstanding loans, their heirs pay a 40% inheritance tax on everything above like 10 million, so there is no magic avoidance of taxes there, just a change in whether it's capital gains tax today or inheritance tax tomorrow.
I'd love to be disproven if someone can explain a real tax loophole, but as far as I can tell, the "Billionaires avoid taxes by taking out loans" thing is completely untrue.
If I'm reading the IRS data[1] correctly, "debts and mortgages" are considered a deduction on the estate valuation, which means any money left in the estate (i.e. instead of in a trust) solely to cover loans would not be taxed. I think the idea is that you would roll the debts until death, at which point the estate can sell the securities with their stepped up cost basis, thereby avoiding (nearly all) capital gains tax.
I'm not an expert on this, and I could be misunderstanding some subtlety here.
Putting it even more simply, people don't need tax breaks. If our current system has loop holes it needs to be simplified such that loop holes can't reasonably exist.
In my opinion, we don't need perfect and we aren't comparing to good.
A perfect tax code would be impossible, a more simply one would be very doable.
We're talking about a campaign proposal here with no legislative draft so its a guessing game, but in my opinion any move similar to taxing unrealized gains will serve only to make it more complex and would not fall under the category of "good" for me.
The audience of HN are striving to be "people in these brackets" and far more here have experienced paper gains over $100M then seen it evaporate, than the few that end up at a place they are insensitive to marginal dollars.
No we're not, since we are smart enough to realize what sort of person you would need to be and what it would cost you in one's actual life (TM) to even have a chance to get there. And most folks here are not high functioning sociopaths to start with.
Upper middle class its where highest quality of life happens, if one is smart enough to understand how happiness and life fulfillment works, to not die full of hard regrets. You can have meaningful true friendships. Enough to afford whatever is you need or desire to do, not enough to become self-entitled spoiled lazy disconnected from reality piece of shit parent and partner type of folks. No you don't need private jet or mega yacht or 5 mil hypercar for that, that's poor man's idea of what sort of quality wealth brings you in life.
Seems like DNC party policies always move in the direction of what improves the job market for lawyers and bureaucrats. More complex legal code, more complex maneuvers to get around it. Tax and finance lawyers for the wealthy are going to see a salary bump if this law passes.
I don't actually see it as a left/right or DNC/RNC decide. The policies often look different on the surface, but in the US today both sides of either "divide" lean heavily into increasing federal authority and regulation.
RNC certainly has it's problems with giving powerful and wealthy individuals ways to avoid paying taxes. But when it comes to the litigation economy it is generally DNC causing the offense. RNC, to their credit, will often roll onerous regulation.
I've wondered if it wouldn't be better to shift the tax code to bias companies toward paying dividends, as used to be more universal among profitable firms. Then the shareholders will have the appropriate progressive income tax bracket applied.
The reason companies pay in shares and not dividends anymore is _because_ doing paying out profits using a share (buyback) is more tax efficient. Especially for recipients who want to let it ride in the stock market.
It doesn't seem like a genie you'll be able to put back into the bottle without reducing the net tax take.
> Taxing unrealized gains will be extremely complex, and given that they aren't allowing us to deduct unrealized losses its a pretty shitty setup for the taxpayer.
I pay taxes on the unrealized gains of my house appreciating in value over the years.
I'm not arguing one way or the other about whether various wealth tax ideas are good. But, I don't believe that the concept is as infeasible as some are making it out to be when it's been happening with property taxes for a very long time.
I pay taxes on the unrealized gains of my house appreciating in value over the years.
You pay taxes on the assessed value of your house. It doesn't matter what you paid for it, or how much equity you have in it. It's more of a use tax than a capital gains or wealth tax.
That's a fair point. It's definitely pretty different from an unrealized capital gain because, like you said, it's not about your net gain or loss on the house. But, I'd still say that it's practically similar enough to a wealth tax precisely because it's a tax based only on the current value of the thing that I own.
Also, just to add to the above discussion, it's even worse in practice than a tax on unrealized gains because I'll have to pay the same amount of tax every year if my house stays the same value. If it were a tax on the unrealized "gains" of my house, I'd pay $0 if it stayed the same value. And if the value of my house decreases, I'll still have to pay more than $0 in property tax, whereas a capital loss would mean I would pay at most $0.
So, I think I still stand by my sentiment that property taxes are more burdensome than a tax on unrealized capital gains.
Property taxes exist because we want to tax externalities like land use. Taxing fake wealth because you own a company and some VC assigns it a valuation is insane.
Why should you dilute your ownership share just because of some arbitrary number?
> Taxing fake wealth because you own a company
> [...]
> Why should you dilute your ownership share
So... is owning piece of a productive company "fake wealth"? Is it fake when you can leverage that valuation to have access to more credit and use that to buy real stuff (like property...)?
I'd argue that property taxes exist because we still live in a system resembling the feudal system we evolved from, and governments believe it is their right to tax our property to pay for their projects.
Who--other than "governments"--decided that its "your" property and that you somehow deserve monopoly rights to a piece of the planet that you didn't create?
I think we should get substantially tighter reigns on where our tax dollars are going and stop the outflows considerably before we worry about taking more and more dollars from citizens. The government has lost billions in recent years. LOST BILLIONS. No one has been held accountable.
Do you honestly think all the billionaires supporting Harris are actually for that? They’re going to be tons of loopholes and exceptions to these billionaires that give to her. If anything it’s attack on the middle class.
if we tax the super rich then the list of extremely powerful people will be one item long: politicians. i think its telling that they are going after rich conservative people rather than break up blackrock et al.
That sounds like a good thing to me. I would prefer the people who hold power in our society be the ones democratically elected, not the ones who lucked into a leviathan amount of money and can now buy Twitter for fun.
Separation of powers is a very important reason not to limit the power to just politicians. Just like how we would prefer not to have media moguls also be politicians, leaving control of the media to just the government is a bad thing for democracy as it just compounds power towards the existing holders.
It is a completely ridiculous idea. You can't value "unrealized gains" without using a third-party agency to come up with a number (typically through 409a valuation). And even if the third-party agency comes up with such a number, there is no way to have liquid cash available to pay the tax. To give you an example, say you are a Founder with a Startup that received investments from investors, through various rounds of funding, and the Startup is now valued at $1 Billion. Assume also that you sit on 5 million shares, with 51% equity post all the dilution. You will have to pay tax on $510 million. This $510 million is "unrealized gain". It is an "estimate" of what you would receive if the company was hypothetically acquired for that amount by a bigger company on that particular day of valuation. Assuming 25% tax that would be $127.5 million. Where will you come up with that money? There is no secondary market where you can use your shares to raise that money. You will probably have to take a loan from banks (if they have that sort of liquid cash available for ALL unicorn startup founders/centamillionaires/actual billionaires) and that too with exorbitant interest. Why would anyone want to go through all that hassle? The other option is for you to sell some of the shares to raise money to pay tax. But that is self-defeating because you are devaluing your net worth by the same amount.
It is the most ridiculous idea ever.
EDIT:
> are doing to avoid paying tax including taking out loans against their own share portfolios
How is that tax avoidance? You do realize that when they pay the exorbitant interest on the loan, they are paying tax on the interest right? That is typically higher than if they just sold the shares and paid capital gains tax directly. Because here they are paying interest + tax.
High net worth individuals take out loans by risking their shares. Those shares are marked as lein. In other words, those shares get locked with the lender (bank in this case) and in case of the Founder not being able to repay due to bankruptcy, the lender can liquidate the assets (shares) and not be required to get the best value for it in the market.
This is not tax avoidance by any means. This is Capitalism 101: putting YOUR capital to use the way you see fit and taking personal risk along the way.
"On 6 June, the court ruled that the country’s wealth tax went against the European Convention on Human Rights because it forced savers and investors to pay tax on income they had not earned.
The decision has opened the door to legal redress for hundreds of thousands of people who were overcharged by the tax authority.
Outgoing state secretary for finance Marnix van Rij estimated that the upfront cost would be €4bn – or £3.37bn.
But the true cost could rise by billions of euros per year while the government works out a new system to replace the controversial levy – a system not expected until 2027."
Okay so what is the startup scene in Netherlands? How many unicorns? How many millionaires/billionaires compared to US? How many millionaires/billionaires are flocking to Netherlands? How much of Netherlands economy is propped up by / dependent on US economy?
It’s probably because they got in serious legal trouble last election for donations in support of Biden, and now the whole thing is starting over again as RFK is suing federal agencies for pressuring tech companies to suppress his election campaign.
The only way to win with politics in social media is to avoid it or promote free speech
Do "these people" include entrepreneurs with equity in startups with rapidly increasing value but no way to take money off the table? It doesn't take much to cross "$100m in assets" as a startup, say, $2.5M in revenue at 40x valuation (or $5M at 20x, etc.), even while loss-making.
How should the founders and equity investors in a bootstrapped high growth unicorn that is neither public nor profit-making handle this proposed capital gains tax? Does this mean VC funds would need to set aside arbitrary amounts of cash to cover impossible-to-predict taxes on cap gains during, say, a 7 year window?
It could also make it harder to attract and keep talent, since the earliest stage employees often rely on equity grants as part of their compensation. Does this mean every early stage employee has to have deep enough pockets to cover cap gains tax pre-revenue? And what happens when the company implodes past the look-back for recouping tax overpayment?
It might make sense to focus on closing existing loopholes without creating new burdens and cash flow barriers that could disrupt the innovation and growth ecosystem with unintended second and third order consequences.
---
Edit to add:
It's true that a peeved Wall St donated a fraction to Biden this season relative to the past, and — surely entirely unrelatedly — partnerships and private equity were taken out of the latest incarnation, leaving in publicly traded and the $100M holdings.
If passed, this will be tinkered with, encircling ever more to offset the loopholes inevitably used.
> Do "these people" include entrepreneurs with equity in startups
No it doesn’t, you’re arguing using a straw man here. They need to be publicly traded securities to be taxed as I understand it. Also paying taxes is a public good, even if you’re exceptionally wealthy.
> Also paying taxes is a public good, even if you’re exceptionally wealthy.
That's not in dispute*, and the point is people can experience paper gains without being exceptionally wealthy, or even ramen profitable.
* To be fair, the notion of "tax" being just supposed public good versus requiring transactional value ("no taxation without representation") was a founding issue for the U.S.
These days, instead of citing nebulous public good, perhaps it could be thought of as NOA and SOA fees: Nation Owners' Association fees, and State Owners' Association fees. You can look for a different neighborhood, or contribute to improve this one.
Who are these non-wealthy individuals who can't afford ramen but hold over $100 million in assets of _publicly traded companies_?
> the notion of "tax" being just supposed public good versus requiring transactional value ("no taxation without representation") was a founding issue for the U.S.
This was a representational issue, not non-transactional taxation. Property taxes existed in many colonies 100 years before the revolution.
It is accurate that the latest incarnation*, the supposed Harris version, within that $100 million club, you'd only pay taxes on unrealized capital gains if at least 80% of your wealth is in tradeable assets (i.e., not shares of private startups or real estate).
Not usually mentioned: even for this illiquid group there would still be an additional deferred tax of up to 10% on the unrealized capital gains upon exit.
* Once passed, anything like this is unlikely to escape tinkering until it matches most other versions, that are not limited to "tradable". Look at how worried farms are, for example, another relatively cash neutral but cap gain increasing growth (ahem) business.
> without being exceptionally wealthy, or even ramen profitable
Correction: without SEEMING exceptionally wealthy or even ramen profitable. By, say, kneecapping your own profit. So that you don't pay as much taxes. Which is the entire problem we're trying to solve.
In practice, these people ARE wealthy. Just perhaps not on paper (depending the paper you look at). Of course when you observe their life, they are obviously filthy rich.
So we have an accounting problem. The papers don't accurately reflect the reality.
It’s hard to put into pithy terms but check out Citibank’s former top trader on wealth inequality and why we need to find a way to tax back some of the wealth from the rich: https://youtu.be/TflnQb9E6lw
> They need to be publicly traded securities to be taxed as I understand it.
On the contrary, many variations of proposals (they keep popping up) cover partnerships or other forms of company holders as well.
Even in the Harris plan, though not usually talked about, even for the illiquid not-tradable group there would be a new deferred tax of up to 10% on unrealized capital gains upon exit. To be fair, "exit" implies an ability to pay that.
"Also paying taxes is a public good, even if you’re exceptionally wealthy."
Can be a public good if it's spent well. The US has spent how many trillions killing innocents the last 25 years? How many trillion were spent building ridiculous layers of redundancy on our nuclear deterrent (that we then smashed)?
This all seems very easy to deal with. Pay employees cash not equity. Founders can negotiate with investors to take enough cash compensation at each round to cover their tax bill. Investors can use financial instruments to hedge their risk.
That’s an awful idea. Startups need cash that cash, now. Wasting it on tax bills for evaluations that don’t become reality would just make everything worse and reduce runways.
Taxing entrepreneurs will lead to worse outcomes for entrepreneurs. That is obvious. Every tax has a cost. But we need to fund the government and it is not fair for workers to pay for everything while much wealthier investors and entrepreneurs do not.
I don't think you have a grasp on how businesses work or how the markets work.
This line of thinking is so far away from reality that while I believe in your heart you think it's right, it's clearly an emotional action and not one based on factual data.
The market volatility, job volatility, international competitiveness, and impact on innovation and entrepreneurship, that this will cause will be absolutely chaotic.
Assuming it works out exactly as you believe, do you believe this will solve the US's financial issues and burdens? Everything i've read say they expect $300-$500 billion over ten years. Let's just go wild and say we get 1 Trillion a Year, currently the deficit for just 2023 is estimated at 1.5 trillion. Again wouldn't solve this issue, and that's assuming we spent 0 on any more social programs or other welfare programs.
Instead, why not focus on specific tax laws you feel are lax and more importantly hold your representatives accountable for the run-away spending? I assume based on your position you would be encourage to spend more on social programs than we currently do? It's noble.. where's the money coming from though? It's all a bit too communistic to me.
We have seen time and time again that laws passed end up impacting the middle class. Congrats, currency inflation continues to run rampant, your house value is through the roof now.... And because you don't have the capital we're going to seize it for non-payment of unrealized gains.
I have yet to see a well thought out logical response to the impacts this sort of emotional lawmaking will bring.
Can you counter the above genuinely? I truly want to understand.
When the platforms starting censoring during the pandemic and last election cycle I remember saying they better get it right 100% of the time because the moment they get it wrong their credibility is shot. Hear we are.
Censorship, beyond what’s required by law, is doomed to fail.
They were already doing censorship, just for different things - there was never a free for all because that eventually ends up like 4chan which is not advertiser-friendly.
So you can lose credibility two ways, one by not doing any censorship because people on the internet will be the worst if you let them. Doing too much censorship is also bad because people don't like that either. Of the big causes of censorship currently, I think of things like youtubes copyright claim process and how that is routinely used as a censorship backdoor by anyone - including the police. Sometimes its not even for any good reason and done by unthinking bots. This is banning more perfectly fine content than anything the government has done. I don't understand why there isn't more pushback against that process to punish people for frivolous claims.
> They were already doing censorship, just for different things - there was never a free for all because that eventually ends up like 4chan which is not advertiser-friendly.
If you look at every attempt to create "The Uncensored Free Speech Version Of [ANY_SERVICE]," they all, inevitably turned into a 4chan-like trashfire. You've got to have some kind of moderation.
This is where I really feel my age. Every message board and chatroom (bbs, forums, irc, icq, aol, et all) on the young internet was virtually uncensored and a 100% free for all, yet we all mostly got by. You went to the places you knew to go to. The communities mostly self moderated by kicks/bans. It worked really well.
So whats changed?
Well, I have my thoughts, but one thing is for sure, as soon as the platform itself tried to start moderating, that's when things really started changing.
> Every message board and chatroom (bbs, forums, irc, icq, aol, et all) on the young internet was virtually uncensored and a 100% free for all
This statement is hysterically ahistorical. Each thing you listed had active moderation. Sysops didn't just allow anything on a board, if you posted stuff off topic or offensive (to the Sysop) it was removed with prejudice. IRC networks all had long lists of k-lines of people kicked off the network. Individual channels had their own mods with ban lists. Forums either moderated or were deluged with spam. AOL and ICQ were both highly moderated.
Just like today small networks might be uncensored free-for-alls. Even then they are/were rarely actually uncensored, it's just you might have not been censored because you aligned with the views of the owners/operators.
The only really uncensored free-for-all was Usenet and that state only existed for its first decade or so when it was limited to professionals and academics. The Eternal September turned Usenet into an unusable mess. It's corpse limps along today as a vehicle for piracy and not much else.
> young internet was virtually uncensored and a 100% free for all
> The communities mostly self moderated by kicks/bans.
Kicking people off was and still is censorship and moderation. Services really try hard to not kick people off now and just police the content instead.
You were not kicked off the platform. You could join any other thousands of rooms, boards, etc. And you were only booted if you truly were a real dipshit.
You could absolutely get kicked off those platforms permanently. Every IRC network has had banlists for decades. I knew people who got banned from AIM, Yahoo, ICQ, Livejournal, etc. IP bans were often easy to evade, but the intention was there.
Again: The platform is IRC. The servers are the individual communities. There were hundreds of IRC networks. You were not blacklisted from all of IRC. You were blacklisted from a particular server. And in my personal recollection, you only got banned for something especially egregious, not like today where saying the wrong "trigger word" can get you shadowbanned, which is even more nefarious.
On top of all of this, bans were frequently appealed and overturned.
> Every message board and chatroom (bbs, forums, irc, icq, aol, et all) on the young internet was virtually uncensored and a 100% free for all
But if your definition of "virtually uncensored" is that there are uncensored instances, then IRC, forums, etc. are just as "uncensored" as ever. There's just a lot more internet users on moderated platforms now.
Yes. Advertisement is a helluva drug. No one's IRC server has a billion dollar marketing budget.
Also Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, et all all started off pretty uncensored and unmoderated to build the moats. Then they started cracking down once the feds and political influences kicked in.
The internet used to be primarily used by geekier, smarter, tech people, and it used to not be a good propaganda/manipulation target since only a subset of the population used it. Media/newspapers were still the primary propaganda channel.
Now that the entire population uses it, the average IQ involved has plummeted, and the political and social payoff for manipulating it with inauthentic content is huge.
> You are so full of yourself. HN is great proof that there is zero association between "self identifies as technical" and "intelligence"
First off, the early internet barrier wasn't "self identification", it was a minimum degree of intelligence and technical ability.
And even so, they're right to say that the payoff for manipulation has become huge. The incentives at play today are totally different than they were, and very often of the lowest common denominator or tragedy of the commons variety.
>Now that the entire population uses it, the average IQ involved has plummeted, and the political and social payoff for manipulating it with inauthentic content is huge.
You have made an important statement which while simple - most people don't really understand the full spectrum of implications. A substantial proportions of the people are really are ungovernable - online or otherwise, they simply stoop too low. Like they say: you cannot fix stupid.
There isn't really any such thing as true "self-moderation", because there are always mods/admins who are more empowered to enforce judgements than the typical user. That system necessarily changes as those forums grow. Your perception of "the platform itself" doing the moderating is just some arbitrarily chosen tipping point along that evolution where you notice the subjective change.
There’s research reports from those halcyon days of nazi forums conducting attacks on Jewish communities / social groups. Heck, stormfront was famous even then.
Plus - nothing was at the scale of Facebook or social media during those halcyon days.
Do you think platforms WANTED to invest in manpower dependent labor?
Platforms started moderating because things got bad.
Gentrification of the Internet by smartphone-wielding normies who were neither prepared nor equipped to deal with the established cyberspace social norms that differed from their meatspace counterparts, as massive corporations rushed to get as many people Online as possible, as fast as possible, so as to target them with advertisements and accumulate and sell their data. Once said gentrifying normies outnumbered the "Internet natives", the "New Internet Culture" subsumed nearly all of the "Old Internet Culture", leaving us where we are today.
It turns out, in general, that heterogeneous populations are hard to coordinate and govern than homogeneous populations.
The old internet was a homogeneous population. Putting the "real world" online creates dimensions of abuse potential and regulatory challenges that didn't exist when a BBS had a couple hundred users who all knew at least some of the AT Hayes codes.
> Every message board and chatroom (bbs, forums, irc, icq, aol, et all) on the young internet was virtually uncensored and a 100% free for all
That’s nostalgia - the BBS world, Usenet, IRC, etc. absolutely had norms and people who violated them were routinely blocked. Where I grew up there were some BBSes run by e.g. evangelical Christians who aggressively restricted the FidoNet channels they carried and the files allowed to be uploaded, and later some of the business-focused ISPs sharply limited things like Usenet (which had its own moderation system). When I ran a FidoNet node, I had to agree to community standards with the boards I peered with because the operators didn’t want to deal with certain types of hassle.
What was different is federation: back in the early online era, someone who was booted off of one system would go somewhere else. The problem with services like Twitter is that they’re centralized and so when people break their terms of service don’t want to go somewhere else, so they complain about censorship when they really mean “free hosting and promotion”.
I think back when the internet was new, people just weren't used to anonymity and still behaved like they were in a room with other people. Also the types of people who engaged in those early internet forums may have just been less likely to be showy edgelord trolls - these types took longer to get into the internet.
IMO, what changed was that a significant portion of the bad actors got organized. It's much easier to make a lone troll get bored and give up than to deal with people with a playbook. Addressing the playbook in good faith will DDoS self-moderation attempts.
>on the young internet was virtually uncensored and a 100% free for all, yet we all mostly got by
boys did. the girls left those spaces (and the internet more generally, until social media became mainstream) because all the public spaces were disgusting, and all the boys sat around posting vulgarity, laughing, and wondering why there were no girls in our online spaces.
Those spaces were/are absolutely appalling sausage fests and while I don't think they should be shut down, saying "we all mostly got by" is some kind of selection or survivorship bias. YOU didn't mind. YOU got by. Polite company DID mind, and there wasn't a space online for them. You just didn't notice.
I wonder if that was the secret sauce. Just kidding, I don’t remember that happening at all. There were plenty of girls on the internet back in the day. Maybe not as far back as the 90s but definitely starting 2000. That’s how I met most of them!
That being said, as a male I was on the receiving end of the same kind of garbage back then. I had a guy who was sending my mother very creepy emails with her real information just to screw with me, and this was in 98. It affected me worse than it did her, I thought he was going to ruin my life as a kid. Another guy got my email account deleted when I was 14 because I drew a picture that made fun of his art as a joke. I knew it was him because he emailed me saying he was going to do it.
I still would rather trade this internet for that one. It’s too Orwellian now.
I don’t think it’s correct to claim a sense of victimhood over your sex. Shitty people are going to be a problem for you one way or another.
I also found many more great positive experiences back then with people online than more recently. You had downs but a lot of ups. People you meet online these days tend to be more busy, edgy, creepy, or too arrogant to grace you with acknowledgement. There’s also a noticeable degree of mental illness, which lines up with the statistical trends. Which is fine but you really never know what kind of mental illness it is until it’s too late (can be genuinely dangerous). The good people are around but mostly keep to themselves.
The secret sauce was not having five monopolistic megacorporations running all our communications. The toxic assholes have always been here, but Facebook and Twitter is extremely good at platforming them and profiting off of them. This is why Facebook and Twitter had "world leaders policies" intended to keep Trump on their platforms - because Trump's fascist rhetoric made them money.
As for the standard pop-feminist take, I should point out that it's not so much a matter of gender or victimhood, it's a matter of how people are conditioned to respond to hostility. If your culture socializes boys[0] to respond to toxicity with more toxicity, then they will naturally push everyone else not so socialized out of the space. This creates "male spaces" that are just where the most toxic people happen to concentrate. The interests they concentrate around do not matter aside from them happening to be the color of the tile on the floor being stepped on.
The Uncensored Free Speech Original™ can remain decent for surprisingly long—or at least it could in the old days. Community norms can shout down or ignore the bad actors, so long as they remain uncoordinated. However, uncensored alternates are magnets for those who shit up the moderated original.
One thing to remember is that the old days had much narrower demographics: computers cost a lot more as a function of income, and connectivity was even more expensive in the dialup era so it skewed well-educated, professional, etc. You had cranks, of course, but they were less likely to find a critical mass audience and nobody was trying to use them to reach a large audience.
Also, community norms massively included censorship. BBSes booted people who annoyed the sysops, Usenet had moderation even if it wasn’t very secure and some servers aggressively filtered the feeds they carried for reasons in addition to space consumption.
> If you look at every attempt to create "The Uncensored Free Speech Version Of [ANY_SERVICE]," they all, inevitably turned into a 4chan-like trashfire. You've got to have some kind of moderation.
Let's distinguish two things here.
One is, you have ten thousand groups and they each have local moderators. If you're a gigantic tool, you get banned from 90% of groups you join and the other 10% are a trash fire. But this primarily happens on the basis of temperament rather than ideology. Most groups don't ban you for expressing a minority viewpoint, they ban you for being a jerk or a spammer, and the ones that do ban you for expressing a minority viewpoint are the ones that become a radicalized trash fire with a reputation for abusive moderation and decline in popularity. Also, you don't have to care much about them because there are plenty of other groups that don't ban you for engaging in civil debate, most people are members of many independent groups, and there are consequently plenty of well-trafficked places for civil debate to take place.
The other is, the platform itself does the moderation and there is nowhere to go to escape their errors without losing the massive network effect of the consolidated platform. The platform at large becomes a radicalized trash fire but the network effect keeps people from abandoning it, so the platform not only loses the incentive to stop that from happening, it becomes a target for capture by authoritarians who want to censor their opponents.
Theres no push back because only the uploader knows it even happened. The millions of other people who did not get to see that video never knew there was anything that was taken from them.
Even after you start to hear about an example here & there, it still feels like an isolated and insignificant example. You as a viewer don't have any way to perceive the scale, the mass of what is being blocked and diverted and modified and bowdlerized. I mean to include all the ways creators taylor their stuff and self-censor so that it will get through, not just plain take downs.
Everyone knows it happens, but you have no way to see what that really means in it's totality. I think people would push back a lot if they could see that somehow.
> but you have no way to see what that really means in it's totality. I think people would push back a lot if they could see that somehow.
I’ve watched enough Mark Dice videos to know how bad it is, and I regret not taking the blue pill sometimes. He’s shown just about every notable case of it happening (with proof). Though he knows how to game the system to resist being taken offline and you could say it’s part of his brand.
You could say that it wouldn’t be worth the risk for others to call it out like he does because it wouldn’t add to the content, and they could slip up.
You can disagree with his politics or personality but you probably wont find a leftist channel that covers that kind of censorship. I wish the videos were more categorized, though he doesn’t do it and uses generic video titles because apparently that makes it less likely to get censored.
Yes. Is there anything in their summary you would dispute? At least in my book, buying into the "US orchestrated 9/11" story is pretty cut-and-dried; not much room for debate on whether that makes one a conspiracy theorist.
We have confirmation that the Saudis did it, and that the Bush Administration actively suppressed any investigation into the Saudis and invaded Afghanistan instead. Sen. Bob Graham had a lot to say on it. No need to really say anything more than that. I don't think "Bush did it", but the media censorship industrial complex was complicit in suppressing the truth at minimum.
A better way to judge if he's a "conspiracy theorist" would be to look at what he says, what he cites as evidence, and judge for yourself if he has any credibility. A more valid disagreement would be his far-right political views. After the Trump shooting he shot down any conspiracy theories that had to do with it being an inside job, said conspiracy didn't make sense without any evidence, and then followed it up with a "simpler explanation: diversity". I consider myself center-right but he's too far to the right even for me (though I'm not a believer in using demographics to make hiring decisions, bias is not a fixable problem). I still think he's done a great job at exposing big tech.
Wikipedia probably didn't include the above counter-argument. Disputes on Wikipedia are decided by a vote, and you're crazy if you think there isn't a bias there. I wouldn't trust it as a source for anything political. Even if individual statements are factual, the overall conclusion can't be grounded in truth when facts are cherry-picked.
Another thing to consider: Regardless of my own views, I think it's more valuable than not to have the voices of the wackos at the extreme ends in all directions.
The extremists may have some opinions or beliefs or attitudes that don't add up to being a reasonable balance between some ideal and the reality of life, so you can say technically literally irrational or disconnected from reality, but those people are the ones who are motivated enough to find out things despite difficulty, and those people are the ones who make observations and points that are outside of your comfortable established norms rut, yet can't be denied when examined.
Practically all forward progress actually only ever happens thanks to some discontented initial minority who are considered unreasonable for some time initially simply because they are the minority.
But they are the devils advocate, and that is a critical role. If you have an idea or a philosophy that fails to stand up to some devil's advocate charge, then your philosophy was never valid in the first place and maybe you're the devil.
Even if the devil's advocate is an extremist who also says some other things that are demonstrably invalid where you can easily provide a counter argument. It often takes that extreme person to spot a problem and bring the valid argument to light even if the valid argument is bundled with also a bunch of invalid arguments and conclusions.
It's nice in theory, but post-January 6 I'd like to think people realize the tangible effects gish-galloping lies can have on a society.
I think we on the Internet have been way too comfortable with way too many devils' advocates for way too long. Because what the devil really advocates is the death of all coherent philosophies.
And my time is too precious to me to find nuggets of truth in a pile of vomit these days; if someone like Mark Dice is making some interesting points, I'd be happy to entertain them... As themselves, isolated from the source.
We live in a world with 5.45 billion people online. Until the AI gets good enough to "Reader's Digest" the Internet, tools like "consider the source" must be used as a first-pass filter; to do otherwise is to get washed away in a sea of noise.
(Before someone drags in our old friend ad hominem, dusts them off, and props them up in the corner to stare silently at us in judgment for not following all the best practices discovered by rhetoricians engaging in the art of "attempting to convince people by logic, which does not need to be tied to reality" for mostly the political purposes of advocacy in court... I will note that "I’ve watched enough Mark Dice videos to know how bad it is" is an appeal to authority first, and calling out his conspiracy theory is an attack on that authority, i.e. 'He doesn't generally know what he's talking about; we should treat everything he says with heavy skepticism first.' So no, I'm not convinced anything Mark Dice says has any bearing on the actual ground-truth reality of how online communications work in 2024... What are his credentials to that effect?)
> "I’ve watched enough Mark Dice videos to know how bad it is" is an appeal to authority first
That's not what appeal to authority is. You should read the Wikipedia article on that one again (Note: I learned about fallacies not from Wikipedia but from a very old professor who was a Chinese dissident, and I had a 4.0 in that course). The statement in parenthesis was an appeal to authority. I was referring to the times he posted screenshots and videos of search results being manipulated, or his own videos being demonetized with manual review, or if you searched his name at one point you got no video results. At the time, you could do the search yourself and reproduce the results. I don't know how you can get any better than that save a Snowden-esque leak from big tech, and I'm sure you guys will find a way to label one of those a hoax.
The premise of that argument wasn't even centered on the question of the scale of the manipulation itself, but rather a rebuttal to the argument that "only the uploader will know about the censorship". There's a saying, "who are you going to believe, the media, or your lying eyes?"
One person's eyes, vis-a-vis search results, are an absolute drop in the ocean and never indicative of how the actual system works or the common experience of an end-user. "Look how they're censoring us" can be anything from explicit policy to user-specific configuration based on past history to an unexpected consequence of other features minimizing access to some unrelated data to the information being shared on a site that is also acting as an active persistent threat to a datacenter or storage / processing cluster dropping offline for a few hours.
If one trusts screenshots and videos because Mark Dice shared them, it's an appeal to (bad) authority. If one tries to armchair-analyze them without a lot of both grounding in the space and insider knowledge, one is extremely likely to arrive at untrue conclusions not only about the motivations of the people operating the system but the actual behavior of the system itself.
In Dice's case, regarding demonetization, if I were to wild-ass guess from glancing at his content: YouTube doesn't display the "dislike" signal any more, but it still consumes the signal as both algorithm sampling and a soft-trigger for manual review (and potentially an auto-trigger for demonetize-now-review-later). And the "Report" button is still there, and there are no consequences for reporting videos that are later decided to not be TOS violations (that I'm aware of).
Dice's problems can be explained by the kind of simple brigading that happens to controversial figures all the time. In terms of monetization, YouTube is a very (small-c) conservative platform, and lots of people from all sides of the political aisle have been migrating away from it, not because of its political bias, but because it's a damn slot machine for anyone trying to make a living.
(TBF: Google et. al. could possibly minimize a lot of this controversy by being far more transparent about the special sauce. OTOH, I don't know in the current political climate if that would be useful because I don't know if their explanations would be believed. "Who are you going to believe, Google, or your lying eyes", right?)
"A Saudi national gives a tour of landmarks in Washington, DC that shows entrances, exits, and checkpoints" is not at all compelling, no. That describes my trip overseas last year if you swizzle the nationalities. The notebook of plane calculations is more compelling, and the evidence that he was paid by the Sauds as an informant is interesting, but not particularly damning (one possibility: he could easily be taking free money on the side while he coordinated with the Taliban outside of Saudi interests).
Massive content sites like YouTube have a problem, the owners are a vanishingly small minority when compared to the population. If they ever have a proper public outcry they would lose in an instant. The "Algorithm" and "Automated Systems" are put in place by design to create a buffer in the minds of the people between content creators and staff. That's also why the rules are vague and sometimes randomly applied. When content creators don't know all the rules around what will hurt or help them then they are motivated to be as passive as possible via learned helplessness. A system of random punishment and ever changing rewards will keep people guessing what the "algorithm" wants and what causes strikes. How YouTube operates is a master class in mass manipulation. YouTube MUST randomly abuse people to instill a source-less fear to maintain control.
25% is a completely arbitrary number and context dependent. I can guarantee you can find many communities that have majority views that you find abhorrent and would not want to be a part of your community discourse. The problem is that social media gives the illusion of a broad town square where all opinions are heard, but that is not what happened. Everyone on social media is filtered into silos based on what the algorithms predict they will find engaging. In such an environment, it is not hard at all for malicious actors to propagate incendiary lies and exaggerations that metastasize into political beliefs. A fringe belief can easily become mainstream if it is amplified unchallenged, which is exactly what happens every day on social media.
The thing is, these services are exactly that. Services.
What the consumer wants from those services is "free speech", but with restrictions. They want "uncensored" content with the objectionable bits removed. For some people "objectionable" means spam and pornography, for others it includes certain types of political discourse or content from certain classes of person. If people really wanted uncensored content, the dark web would be far more popular.
The only way these companies can give people both uncensored "free speech" and content moderation is to build these bubbles where freedom of speech is only freedom of one type of speech.
They're stuck in a catch-22, and I can't help but feel like they actually ARE providing the service that we demand from them to the best of their abilities.
Yes, it's arbitrary, 20 would also make the same point, 0.1 would not.
If you're saying "we must censor abhorrent viewpoints for the good of society", I'll just counter that your viewpoints are horrible and must be suppressed, while mine are good and must be amplified. For the good of society.
Now build a Facebook and get enough users to rally to your cause, and your opinion on suppression / amplification will have some weight to throw around.
People seem to forget that Facebook is where it is because users keep showing up, and users keep showing up because the censorship gives them something they want. It's a feedback loop.
What does "might" mean in this context? Nobody showed up with a gun to force people to make a Facebook account.
It is, at worst, "popularity makes right." Which, to be clear: there are philosophies that take significant umbrage with that (there's a reason the US government isn't a strict popular vote for every position).
But the complaint seems to boil down to "I want people to go do something else because... I know they should." Not exactly compelling. People know themselves better than strangers do.
This isn't a claim that might makes right. It's a challenge to replace theory of how people want to engage with the world with practice. I suspect (because we keep seeing the same patterns over and over) that a replacement for Facebook is going to either not catch on like Facebook did or is going to find the need for heavy-handed moderation at some point in the not-too-distant future.
The idea of political manipulation and/or censorship on social media only became a thing after 2016, and even then it took time to ramp up.
All of the incumbents were established with network effects long before then, they are very sticky and unaccountable. Not Ma Bell level of natural monopoly but the network effects are pretty strong.
Look at Twitter under Musk, your standard beltway liberal type still uses it even though they hate him.
"Network effects" are a cheap excuse for people to not put their money where their mouths are.
I don't personally have a lot of respect for the people still using Twitter. I deleted my account before Musk bought them when they responded to a notorious TOS violator being elected President by changing their TOS.
All we have to do to hold the incumbents accountable is log off their service and log on to another one. Nearly 100% of the power in this situation is in the hands of the users.
There aren't any views I want to exclude from public discourse. Moderating so that they are expressed w/o all-caps profanity is one thing, but the views themselves ought to be protected. As far as false facts go, it can become treacherous to draw an exact distinction between the false and the disputed for many subject areas. X's "Community Notes" are not perfect but in practice have been surprisingly helpful and accurate in my experience.
> They were already doing censorship, just for different things - there was never a free for all because that eventually ends up like 4chan which is not advertiser-friendly.
It is possible to distinguish between censorship and spam filtering. In the case of censorship, the speaker wants to say something and the listener wants to hear it and the censor prevents this. In the case of spam filtering, the spammer wants to say something and the listener doesn't want to hear it and voluntarily requests that a third party filter it out, with the option to individually disable this filtering.
Now, someone could implement censorship and call it a spam filter, e.g. it filters spam and also disfavored facts and people leave it on because there is only a single on/off toggle and they don't want to be deluged with spam. But what this implies is that a "spam filter" with uncorrectable "false positives" is equivalent to censorship.
> there was never a free for all because that eventually ends up like 4chan
This is false, because Facebook is bound to your real identity.
A completely unmoderated Facebook will never be like every /b/ or /pol/ thread. People aren't quiet as outspoken with derogatory terms and pornography if it their family sees what they've written.
Random copy pasted examples:
- There are 9 billion people on the planet why don't you nuke china india and africa then get back to us
- And? I dont care what race you are, you all need to die. TMD.
Real genocides have been coordinated through Facebook in the third world. People are proud to put their real identities and their real names behind all kinds of evil ideas.
> Censorship, beyond what’s required by law, is doomed to fail.
Censorship, as you call it, is a requirement for any platform. It's better to call it moderation. Without it platforms would be 99% spam. I assume you support "censoring" spam so that means you support some level of moderation.
Spam is a real problem, but when your platform is doing things like disallowing linking to a NY Post article on the Hunter Biden laptop or mentioning the possibility that COVID originated from a lab-leak, then I think pretty clearly the term "censorship" is more apt than "moderation".
Also, to the extent that a platform is surfacing content based on a friend or follow model, then that itself is intrinsically sufficient moderation for the spam problem (because you can simply unfriend or unfollow spam accounts).
(Spam friend requests and follows still need to be addressed, however.)
And everyone who looked the videos of Hunter smoking crack, and his text messages discussing Joe Biden involved in business dealings, and his relationship with his 24yo niece knew it wasn’t “Russian Disinformation”.
It was obviously real, and hidden from everyone in order to influence the election.
It was censorship at request of the government and election interference.
It was almost definitely an iCloud hack laundered through a laptop (last Mac of its kind to not have at rest encryption on by default IIRC) provided to a conveniently blind computer technician who happened to know Rudy Giuliani personally.
I think anybody can tell this information wasn’t obtained fraudulently. It is notable though that the same press is currently sitting on hacked documents from Iran from the Trump campaign…
1. Why would a repair shop accept a repair job without the return information?
2. Why would a repair shop start snooping on their own client's machines even if they were unable to contact their client?
3. Why are there multiple disk images, some "raw" and some pre-organized released to different press organizations and Trump sympathizers?
4. Why did the FBI warn Facebook in 2020 about the laptop story to "cover it up" when the FBI at the time was lead by a man appointed by Trump himself?
Stop sharing legitimate news that comes with outright disinformation.
You’re not being taken down for the legitimate take. You are being taken down for the other wild assertions, conspiracy theories and lies that you cook up with them.
You people will write like “some stupid n*** shot up a grocery store”
Then you get taken down and whine that “I just made a comment about news that really happened”. And then the real reason it was taken down was the n-bomb you dropped.
The posts you claim are censored are not being censored for the reasons you are claiming.
We're not talking about censoring spam, we're talking about real, verified people who are obviously not spamming being censored. The two are unrelated, and Zuck is admitting here that the current administration pushed them to censor things they fully knew were not spam.
I still remember that so many people cheered when legitimate doctors and scientists were banned from Twitter or Facebook, just for questioning either the lockdown or the effectiveness or risks of the vaccines. The doctors may not be correct, but shouldn't we allow people to question science? Our government can do what it does because the people embolden them.
This is the proof that the religion of “I believe in science” is not a friend to creating a culture of science appreciation
It’s been the struggle for scientific progress, the breakthroughs are the exception not the rule and the reason is the culture of belief around the science of the time
The lesson I’ve most learned from science is that the questions are more interesting than the answer and the answers we have are a way to ask new questions
If it feels bad it may contain trace amounts of truth. If it feels bad all of the time for everyone, but puts food on all tables,regardless of beliefsystem,its actually science
I find "I believe in science" as delivered on social platforms and the mainstream media hysterical in the past few years. I mean, how do we even know if "science" is right without questioning? I can understand that people believe that they are on the right side of the history during the Covid era, for lockdowns, for the efficacy of the vaccines (For those who get angry, I took vaccines by the way, so it's not about my personal assessment here) and etc. But is it by default we are on the right side? Like Government "helped" people believe that Lysenkoism was on the right side of the history? Like people should not challenge social Darwinism or eugenics? Like Chinese people believed that the yield of rice patty could be 100x higher because a top JPL scientist said so and the government "helped" them understand? Like authorities challenged Darwin for his evolution theory? Like people would rather lock up Galileo because his heliocentric model was just plainly wrong? Like Ignaz Semmelweis was obvious crazy to propose the hand hygiene in hospitals? Like Wegener's continental drift was just batshit crazy theory? Like Bolzmann deserved to be shunned from the academic society for his outrageous statistical mechanics? Like those who believed in the existence of irrationals should be drowned by Pythagorean?
Since when science can't be challenged, even when the challenge can be outrageously wrong?
https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/115286/documents/... Jay was banned for merely retweeting a peer-reviewed paper that questions the efficacy of lockdown (maybe the last straw, I don't know). Some people in Twitter were apparently very righteous.
Censorship is something governments do. What you're discussing is a business decision Facebook made. They deemed it to be in the best interests of their shareholders not to amplify those peoples opinions. Zuck now regrets that decision, but it was still his decision.
Semantically, you're right of course, but only because linguistically self-censorship is counted as a type of censorship, despite it not depriving anyone of liberties.
For practical purposes though, the kind of censorship that we're concerned with in this conversation can't be done by anyone other than a government or a lunatic with a gun. Companies just don't have any authority over anyone except themselves. They can't deprive you of your ability to speak, only your ability to use their property to do so.
The article says they were "pressured", it doesn't seem to to say how that pressure was applied. To me, it reads as though compliance was not mandated, just requested. Without more info, I suppose it could be taken either way.
If Zuck has a real problem with that, he can sue (as per the SCOTUS ruling on standing vis-a-vis First Amendment protections against government coercion).
He isn't suing, and it's up to the rest of us to make our decisions based on how we feel about that.
Call it what you like, if you can't distinguish between doctors and quacks then you shouldn't be banning people you think are quacks because you aren't qualified to do so.
If i stand up a server and host a website, I get to decide who's allowed to use my server. I don't need to be "qualified", and who would decide what "qualified" means? Should the government be forcing me to host content I find objectionable?
Flat Earthers are legitimately questioning the science because no one has (or should have) the authority to arbitrate what is too stupid to question. Everything has tradeoffs and free speech has a lot of somewhat obvious downsides.
Too bad that you don't like what some other people say or write. That's what public discourse is, most things said will be things you don't agree with. And since you're neither God nor the Supreme Ruler, you don't have the right to silence anybody else.
Why are you so angry? Where did I say that flat earthers should be silenced?
You desperately need to remove yourself from communities of perpetual victimhood.
All I said was that they are not legitimately questioning the science, because they are not.
The one thing that is extremely interesting is that even the people who loudly shout for free speech do not themselves believe in it, as they constantly try to cancel all sorts of free speech and expression essentially constantly.
Very very few people believe in absolute free speech.
There “might” be a need to *selectively* censor people expressing illegitimate “science”. Especially when they knowingly do it knowingly.
What Facebook does though, is horrific. They are not just letting illegitimate science have a platform, they are actively and intentionally propping that shit up because it creates victimhood communities.
I'm not sure that this is a useful distinction. It starts to sound an awful lot like philosophy 101 "what is a p-zombie" horseshit... if both people are asking the same questions or using the same rhetoric, why would their internal, unknowable-without-telepathy intent make any difference whatsoever? If you do think there is an actual distinction, somehow, even then should you care? Because people who want to censor the speech will just label the skeptics as cranks anyway, and shut it down.
"Crank vs sincere skeptic" is fallacious, as it attacks the person and not the argument.
If they're both saying the same things, then it truly does not matter. The crank might accidentally arrive at the positive outcome, the sincere skeptic might mislead unintentionally.
You responded, you obviously think you're making a point. I hope you're one of the cranks though, because that would explain how poor your argument is.
> You responded, you obviously think you're making a point. I hope you're one of the cranks though, because that would explain how poor your argument is.
So you're one of the magical thinkers. That somehow the outcomes change due to internal states that no one can even determine, internal states which do not affect the physical world at all.
That the crank can actually change things just by thinking about it, like some kind of half-assed troll telekinesis. Wow. You've apparently got a few fans for your idiocy, they're downvoting away.
People cheer these things on because they are tired of the other view point and don’t care to question solidarity during a global pandemic.
People question science all the time. Heck we all have people who tell us about this herb or diet that will fix things, or how plastic is deadly.
In addition the platforms removed this content, not the govt. And the platforms would 100% do it again, since we are discussing this topic with the benefit of hindsight.
Misinfo evidence shows that once misinfo is absorbed and accepted, people defend it.
If the data shows that those scientists and doctors were wrong - people would ignore the data and reiterate their talking points.
The good and bad of the internet is that everyone appears the same. You might be an expert in X and I should listen to you. And right next to you may be a troll or someone trying to sow discord who twists your legitimate opinion just a bit to influence me. How can I tell the difference?
I will never, ever forgive or forget the absolute amount of censorship and tolerance for punishing “wrongthink” during the lockdown years. Ever. It completely shattered my faith in the government and “Science”.
God forbid anybody show any intellectual curiosity if it went against the doomer dogma.
And the worst part is the people with the “wrong think” were right. Covid didn’t have a “4% kill rate”. It almost certainly came from a lab. The vaccine was not always safe and definitely wasn’t effective. Lockdowns didn’t work and neither did masks. Closing school for two years and keeping kids locked inside on iPads will fuck them up for the rest of their lives.
And saying any of that resulted in being banned, accused of “dangerous thought”, and being yelled at by society.
I don't think saying any of that resulted in being banned because I saw it constantly.
Also you are still wrong about most of that. The vaccine is certainly safe and effective, masks definitely help, lockdowns definitely helped the overrun hospitals. Yes there were adverse effects in some of these policies unfortunately.
Doesn’t even matter if I’m right or wrong about it working. There was no assessment to if the costs outweighed the benefits. Ever. Because even if you are right does not make it okay to do any of what was done.
There were plenty of things besides a myopic fixation on one single problem to the exclusion of literally everything else.
It takes an extreme amount of privilege to look back and say we should have done any of that.
… it was unethical, immoral, authoritarian and plain evil. I don’t care if any of it “worked” because even if it did the costs vastly outweigh any of the “working” bit.
The fact it requires a lot of contortion to show any effect at all should give a reasonable person a concerned pause. Any idiot off the street should be able to clearly see the effects of masks and lockdowns without reading a bunch of statistics first. This is clearly not the case at all….
And again, doesn’t matter if “it worked” because “it worked” only holds true in the most myopic, sheltered, privileged world view possible. For any view that sees the world through a lens besides Covid, what we did was clearly insane.
Really? Aren't gore videos legal? That's just one example.
Also, can we get some common sense here? You're posting on hacker news. You're allowed to post a very narrow set of things here. There are no shitposts and memes, that's half the content of the internet being censored on this platform. Are you not outraged?
There is a strong distinction between moderation, which is the removal of low-effort noise / spam / etc., and censorship, which is the suppression of ideas.
I will step a bit to the side of "censorship" and just talk about "misinformation."
The trouble with labeling something "misinformation" is that you also need to be one hundred percent right, forever or you need to be ready to make prominent retractions and groveling mea culpas. With this is mind, one ought to tread lightly on topics such as fast-moving science (especially the softer ones) and matters of policy recommendations. COVID was both of these. Yes, masks! No, don't use masks! Yes, masks. Yes, masks, haha you caught us we just didn't want you to buy up all of the masks. Yes, masks, but they really only prevent you from giving the virus to others.
My undergraduate was in the harder sciences, so it is not like I am some anti-science loon. I just think that acting with Total Certainty and If You Don't Agree You Are Killing People, on certain classes of topic, is a recipe for eventually being as believable as the numerous food pyramids which, once taken as gospel, now are simply shrugged aside.
It's only doomed to fail because we have a strong Supreme Court. All the efforts by the Democrats to undermine this will only make things easier for fascists to take over the US.
At this point "fascist" is more of an insult than an ideology, very few people who get called "fascist" ever actually live up to any reasonable definition of the word.
> My understanding of fascism is that it is a political system that is founded on a story of lost national glory that can only be restored by a purification of the land by a strong leader
Fascism strikes me as a historical term more than a political one. Its most-commonly agreed upon definition is something like political economic systems that resemble those of Mussolini's Italy and Nazi Germany. (Both governments embraced revanchism. Both were ideologically incoherent.)
That might be the old definition of fascism; but like many words, it has been completely redefined in today's political climate.
The new definition, it seems, is anyone to disagrees with your political viewpoint and makes an effort to push back. Under this definition, it is politically convenient to call your opponent one and be technically right; regardless of where on the political spectrum you find yourself.
They don't like the rulings that the Supreme Court has made, so now they are talking about limiting the term of justices, and packing the court with more judges. That is strengthening the integrity of the Supreme Court?
Two justices are blatantly corrupt and should be removed from the court. Two more are there through GOP malfeasance, but there's nothing we can do about them at this point.
No other democracy has lifetime appointments for high court justices.
As far as packing the court, I am personally interested in any kind of reform that depoliticizes it somewhat, whether it be that the SCOTUS acts like the Appeals courts and is a rotation, or the appointed Justices choose a second tier of judges unanimously.
But process only does so much to prevent partisan political interference. At the end of the day, our amendment system and our Congress are broken. It will take something like a mild revolution or major systemic breakdowns to fix it.
Yes, because our current court is illegitimate. Even the conservatives know this. Trampling over precedent in an obviously partisan way and guaranteeing Trump can never face consequences for his actions? Come on now. The American People can only play stupid for so long.
As a side-note: I think limiting the term of justices would overall strengthen the supreme court's integrity and I think the right would agree. Or, at least, the right would regularly agree but they won't now - because they stuffed the court with cronies. Once the situation is in your advantage, surprise! The narrative changes.
It's not the GOP that is loudly and proudly calling for the court to be packed with sychophants because it ruled against their preferred policy platform...
The Dem leadership has been splitting the baby for years by allowing the ever-increasing radical wing of the party to bloviate about this without ever letting meaning legislation to the floor to enact the changes this group wants, so credit where credit is due, I guess.
It turns out they were mostly right (at least the decisions were the best possible with the knowledge of the time). Vaccines were effective against infection at the time and became less so with new variants (still a very good idea to reduce illness severity and likelyhood of hospitalization), lockdowns had some side effects but all in all saved lives before we got the vaccine, and the like.
Now that misinformation is less harmful than before thanks to most people having some immunity, it's less controlled and more people start believing the misinformation to be the truth.
Reddit's value proposition (to shareholders) is astroturfing, for ads and other propaganda. Send us your message and we will make it look organic and popular. That's the service. There's no other way to make boatloads of money from an open, heavily-manipulated forum.
Funny how you hit the name on the head and still getting down-voted. Today I deleted my reddit account and sent a request to get my HN account removed as well.
Moved to lemmy and not looking back.
I think better of them for trying to get the fake shit off of their platforms. This backstepping is what bugs me. Facebook got a lot of garbage off there. There’s still plenty left, but I think did a decent job of flushing a bunch of misinformation bots into waste disposal where they belong. Take a look at x.com where for $9 a month you can launch a bot that posts / retweets garbage 24/7 and no matter how many times it’s reported for racism/terrorism/etc it will stay up for a while, when it gets killed they just make a new bot. Go look at the blue “verified” badges on any political news story and look at the drivel spouted by these $9 hucksters. A lot of people think free speech only applies to them, free speech means a platform can also exercise their free speech and shutdown the messages they don’t like. Those accounts are free to spread their lies and fake news on other platforms.
Comments like this are usually not good, but in this case I believe it's better to give the link than to try to summarize the numerous points about the state of censorship in the United States and Europe that were made in that interview.
The thing I'm getting out of this Zuckerberg letter is that we've basically learned nothing. It's a nakedly partisan letter designed to signal to Republicans that he's not taking sides. Which I guess is fine, but I'm thinking about Paul Graham's recent tweet about the next round of social networks being designed to be built in to combat trolling, and it makes me think.
This time there was valid concern about issues like the lab leak theory being censored on social media, I predict in the next crisis, social media will be useless adjacent for almost everything.
> This time there was valid concern about issues like the lab leak theory being censored on social media
You need to be very clear about what you mean by "lab leak theory" because that term has a number of definitions that are very different.
There's the definition where COVID was the result of gain of function research that leaked from a lab through negligence. There's also a definition that it was an entirely natural virus being studied that was leaked through negligence. Then there's the definition that the virus was "leaked" with malicious intent from the virology lab in Wuhan.
While the definitions are similar they have very different implications. Because social media tends to perform nuance destroying compression of concepts down to sound bites no two individuals using the term "lab leak theory" can be assumed to be using the same definition.
You even have an assumed definition of what you mean when you say "lab leak theory". Of everyone that reads your post your definition doesn't match that of half the audience. Even then, plenty of people claimed to be banned from social media for one reason while the reality they were banned from a network for other (or a combination) of reasons. So even the general statement of people being "social media censoring lab leak theory" elides important information and nuance and derives its validity from third hand accounts.
What about things like not having algorithmic boosting for the tin-foil hat versions? Some people insist that’s censorship but it seems like a useful way to avoid promoting it to people who aren’t already seeking it out.
> Turns out a lot of tin-foil hat stuff is true after all.
Not really, no. For example, actual scientists were discussing the possibility of the COVID pandemic having arisen from a lab leak seriously and looking for evidence that could support that theory but the conspiracy nuts were going on about it being a “ChiComm bio weapon” because their goal was political rather than learning the truth. (Only the latter encountered terms of service actions, typically due to racism or targeting specific people, but their supporters often falsely claim they were in the former group)
That’s the easy rule of thumb: is someone approaching the problem rationally, etc. or are they starting from the position they want and trying to work backwards? Are they willing to seek out evidence and adjust based on new information, or do they find reasons to dismiss it?
I don’t trust you or anyone to be the moderators of what’s rational and what’s working back from what they want, though, in all honesty.
Further, the people working backwards sometimes end up right anyway.
I just don’t see the risk of letting some tin foil hatters do their thing, or much much less risk than letting our discussion platforms become censorious, propaganda machines. Maybe if we let the less censored versions run and there ends up being negative effects then I can re-assess, but until then the default should be to let people be dumb and invest into better education.
For the record, I saw very little of the full on conspiratorial stuff, and lots of the more sane lab leak stuff, but I saw it basically entirely de-boosted and censored. So we have already a really strong case study for why we shouldn’t let people even attempt to split those hairs.
> I just don’t see the risk of letting some tin foil hatters do their thing
It's the calls to action by the tinfoil hat crowd that is problematic and most typically why platforms shut down their posts. The buried lede in most stories about censorship on social media is the people getting posts removed weren't just spouting tinfoil hat theories but were directly or indirectly calling for violence or harassment of certain ethnic groups. A veiled or coded call for violence is still a call for violence.
Social media, no matter stupid claims to the contrary, is not a public forum or town square. It's owned by private interests. It may be publicly available but it is not owned and operated by the public.
Private platforms don't usually want to amplify racist dog whistles or other coded rhetoric when they've been made aware of it. Attention seekers love when they get censored because they can run to another platform to complain they got censored for claiming COVID leaked from a lab but not the follow up post where they used that as justification for torching an Asian market.
idk man intentionally adding a "truth" bias indirectly denies a lot of human existence and experiences -- it is inherently invalidating, and i am not totally sure just how much of it is good for intellectual pursuit (and also in reaching improved, collective understandings).
this is not me saying there's zero benefit to moderated dialogues, but what's better for overall intellectual pursuits? a dialogue that's inviting, or one that always coldly and dismissively rejects all opposing beliefs or understandings?
i have recently learned, that dialogues seem to benefit from communication and spaces that are supportive and empathetic in their approach to first understanding differences in reality and experiences, before entering discussions on truth and objective realities, and therefore confronting and challenging, and at times overcoming what are limiting beliefs -- from the irrational to the rational.
there's empiricism around this as well (SET: a framework for communicating with people who have vastly different experiences than you, including those labeled "delusional") -- it frames Support and Empathy as the necessary foundations in any dialogue, before one can discuss the difference in each party's Truth.
i'm not so sure the whole categorically "you have less right to sit at this table because i've judged your experience as non-real, and therefore less relevant) is compassionate communication, nor productive when systematically, algorithmically applied.
The only definition the government should be involved in censoring would be one that is illegal and in that case they can get their lawyers and proceed with an indictment. Anything else is just propaganda.
Can’t find the claim about the statement not being political anywhere in the linked article. But there’s this:
> Meta’s CEO aired his grievances in a letter Monday to the House Judiciary Committee in response to its investigation into content moderation on online platforms
Sounds like he wasn’t the initiator of the discussion, but I may be misreading the paragraph.
And it’s in the news because it’s being made newsworthy, not because it’s new.
“A U.S. federal judge,” in 2023 “restricted some agencies and officials of the administration of President Joe Biden from meeting and communicating with social media companies to moderate their content” [1].
"On Wednesday, the Supreme Court tossed out claims that the Biden administration coerced social media platforms into censoring users by removing COVID-19 and election-related content."
> “For months, high-ranking Government officials placed unrelenting pressure on Facebook to suppress Americans’ free speech," Alito wrote. "Because the Court unjustifiably refuses to address this serious threat to the First Amendment, I respectfully dissent."
It seems like the court had agreement that government coercion did happen. They threw the case out because they couldn’t draw a direct correlation to harm to the specific people that brought the allegations up.
Unfortunately, Alito has objectively proven himself to be a liar at best. His statements are the farthest of any justice from representing an agreement of the court.
The only "pressure" that was put on FB, was the same put on Twitter, which was that reports and requests from Administration employees has some higher gravity than other reports. The "investigation" here, and Zuckerberg's responce are not evidence of wrongdoing, only political maneuvering.
It's genuinely weird that they keep talking about pressure as if there was an actual means of exerting pressure rather than literally providing feedback - this administration doesn't go after it's enemies in the private sector unlike the last one (JEDI contract comes to mind)
Very funny that the initial case got lots of press on HN and got people like patio11 in a tizzy but when it was tossed out by SCOTUS there was nary a peep.
> Plaintiffs may have succeeded if they were instead seeking damages for past harms. But in her opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote that partly because the Biden administration seemingly stopped influencing platforms' content policies in 2022, none of the plaintiffs could show evidence of a "substantial risk that, in the near future, they will suffer an injury that is traceable" to any government official. Thus, they did not seem to face "a real and immediate threat of repeated injury," Barrett wrote.
Are you saying Zuck is lying and the government did not do what he's saying they did? In Twitter's case, there are emails from Adam Schiff - do you think that evidence is fraudulent?
The existence of the government communications with the social media companies requesting suppression of content are referenced in the courts opinions. The Biden admin also admits to these communications. https://rollcall.com/2024/06/26/supreme-court-rejects-lawsui...
> funny to see MAGA people all of a sudden embracing Chad Zuckerberg, as though this represents some sort of organic character development on his part
Honestly, it's refreshingly pragmatic to see American politics ditching the ideological purity tests that defined our recent history. I disagree completely with MAGA politics. But allies don't have to be friends--if someone's on your side, that's really what counts.
Zuckerberg is pretending to be on MAGA's side so that he can assist whatever next phase of the agenda is intended for Trump's next term in office. Of course, if MAGA could pick out people who are only pretending to be on their side they wouldn't be supporting Trump in the first place.
He must have a fantastic PR team. Across the political spectrum, I'm seeing a ton of support for him. Decades of harvesting and selling personal data (including shadow profiles of non-users), "I don't know why people trust me", Cambridge Analytica, the metaverse/attempt at owning the future of the internet- all swept under the rug in exchange for open Llama weights and a couple statements about censorship. Musk could cure mortality without changing as many minds about him.
> He must have a fantastic PR team. Across the political spectrum, I'm seeing a ton of support for him
He's speaking to both sides and has seemingly--almost uniquely in Silicon Valley--mastered the art of shutting the fuck up. Note, for example, his disciplined reticence around endorsing a candidate.
It's relevant right now because there's recent increase in the amount of government-directed censorship and propaganda on the social media platforms at the moment. Take a look at Reddit. Look at what's happening in the UK or with the EU threatening to imprison Musk for allowing Trump to be interviewed.
Holy cow. I'd heard something about the EU recently warning Musk over Twitter, but did not know that it was because of the heinous mortal sin of interviewing the former and possible next US president.
There's just that thing that he forgot to say 'rinse & repeat' at the end of his statement while he's now in the 'rinse' phase. The upcoming election circus will make clear whether he is genuinely regretful or whether he's up to his old tricks. The 'Zuckerbucks' NGO 'Center for Tech and Civic Life' [1] is gearing up again so I suspect the latter to be closer to the truth.
He said it because they got criticized for something that cost them a lot of money. It’s all about how much it costs and takes away from the pockets of the board of directors and owners. For profit companies are amoral for the most part and their only obligation is to make money.
The only truly dispositive photos are the one where he has a little blood on his fingertip after first reaching up to his ear, and the one that supposedly captured a bullet whizzing right past his head, and you'd hardly need AI to make either of them.
- Trump disappears from the public eye for the week leading up to Butler
July 9, Doral Fl
- CNN and other mainstream outlets elect to cover the rally after not broadcasting any others
This was discussed on July 9. They were expecting him to announce his running mate. This is why you saw a lot of press at the July 9th rally.
- The Secret Service shoos crowd members farther from the stage and repositions some of the photographers just before the first shots
They reposition people all the time.
The fact that the first two are easily dismissed as a lie, and the third requires evidence from you that the Secret Service routinely do NOT redirect or move people is enough to discredit this. The rest of what you post is mostly purely subjective.
Please, correct me if I'm wrong. But I'm not. I saw the videos. I saw the media talking about it and literally explaining why they were paying attention.
Could have used some more precise language w.r.t. Trump "disappearing" from the public eye (there was commentary about it at the time, the usual take being that he was happy to just sit back and let Biden & the Dems self detonate, a single rally during the period in question doesn't change this), or the media coverage (Butler was CNN's first live broadcast of a rally). What the media said about why they were broadcasting the rally is just that, a statement, and it may or may not be aligned with the actual truth (or even understanding of the people making the statement). "The Secret Service repositions" people all the time" is just a banal and unhelpful statement of fact, which dodges the peculiar effect of this particular repositioning in both effect (more visibility for the photographers, less for the crowd/spectators) and timing. I'm in no way obligated to establish that the SS "never repositions people" in order to argue that this is suspicious.
These don't constitute "lies," nor do they excuse your underhanded attempt to dismiss the rest of the list of facts as false (probably because they are indeed quite improbable).
I like how you dismiss the lie to change it completely when someone does what you ask and verifies your claim. So much backpedaling.
You made a bold claim. It was 100% wrong.
Talk about underhanded, I’m not the one lying and then changing my story.
And the media story counters your baseless supposition that it was mysterious as to why the media would start paying attention to him. It was the first rally in a while and it makes sense that they might think he’s there to announce his running mate.
I’ve provided evidence. Put up some of your own that say exactly what you are saying, liar.
"the media _said_ why they were covering the rally, checkmate and QED good sir" lol just pathetic
This is the same set of institutions that insisted from January 6, 2021 until about June of this year that Trump was a literal existential threat to democracy who had attempted to carry out an actual insurrection, and needed to be completely deplatformed. Now, all of a sudden deciding to cover his campaign like it's just one more ordinary old POTUS horse race. Okay.
It's a far more plausible accounting of the facts than either mainstream narrative (there are two different ones being pitched to the pro- and anti-Trump camps in this case), but you're not going to accept that because of the level of cognitive dissonance it would generate with your existing perceptions of how the world works (particularly the idea that you're too smart to be fooled).
"Flat Earth" isn't an organic thing either, clearly an astroturfed movement meant to give people like you a handy example of why all such questioning is badthought.
You're suggesting that Donald Trump, of all people, willingly put himself in front of a gun and allowed himself to be SHOT AT to increase his street cred.
There were ACTUAL bullets flying at him, as evidenced by the DEAD MAN who was sitting behind him.
Now you're assuming I think things I didn't even write.
No, of course Trump didn't allow a shot to be taken anywhere near his head. You are certainly correct that he's a very self-regarding person unlikely to put himself in harm's way (another reason the "fight fight fight" fistpump is incongruent with the presence of a genuine threat). What we saw on his ear was just stage blood.
It's already emerged that there were men with guns in the building directly underneath Crooks, one of them probably fired some rounds into the crowd to give the scene believability. I doubt Crooks was even allowed to get on top of that building and point a rifle with live rounds anywhere in Trump's direction.
In Pavel's interview with Tucker Carlson, he mentions how he (VK) met with Zuckerberg, and he told them new features they were planning. And Zuck nicked them all.
Zuck is on a major PR campaign drive, I would not trust a word he says.
He also said that he doesn't visit Russia anymore, yet a recent FSB leak indicates that he was frequenting there. And before that he heavily marketed Telegram as ad-free forever. And before that there were quite weird populist PR tactics when professional cryptographers pointed out Telegram's crypto is a mess.
YMMV, but I wouldn't trust a single word from this guy.
This is not the first time Pavel being not very truthful. I rememeber when he was the CEO of Vkontakte, in 2012 he published a post claiming that he is living a modest life: "I don't own planes, cars or homes. My world is walking or riding the subway and sleeping in a 215 sq ft rental apartment. Those who want to be me would also have to give up meat, alcohol and expensive clothes". And just a year later there were the news that he broke the traffic rules while driving a Mercedes, hit a traffic cop, showed an indecent sign to him and ran away into Vkontakte office located nearby while his guard blocked the cop trying to chase him.
There also was a story when he claimed that Telegram is developed abroad but it turned out that many of Telegram employees actually worked at the same beautiful historical office building where Vkontakte was located at that time.
Also, a fun fact, when he was a CEO of Vkontakte, one day he was throwing banknotes into the crowd from a window in that notable historical building. Maybe he was conducting an experiment with universal basic income, who knows.
Telegram's crypto may be weird, as the professional cryptographers you allude to have pointed out; I don't know, not being a cryptography expert. But MTProto 2.0 has been shown to enjoy many nice security properties (including a version of forward secrecy, though one afaik not as good as that enjoyed by Signal): formal proofs available here https://github.com/miculan/telegram-mtproto2-verification/tr... and some peer reviewed papers describing the formal verification effort are linked to there as well. Considering that I think calling Telegram's crypto "a mess" is misleading.
The characteristics of MTProto are barely relevant when it is not used in the real world: group chats cannot be encrypted with it, 1:1 chats have caveats like terrible UX and the need for both parties to be online to initiate a session.
Ironically, just being able to produce a valid proof is hardly proof that an implementation has those properties, it just means they put some effort into it.
This would be a valid point if the client source code wasn't available; you can build the app from source and sideload it onto your Android phone or verify [0] that the build available for your platform matches the code you've audited for compliance to the protocol. Granted I don't know if anyone's performed such an audit, but it's at least an option.
It used to have issues, they have improved since, but I don't consider Telegram to be encrypted or private (and I'm also not a crypto expert, so the details elude me anyway) so I haven't really kept track of this.
Honestly, the issue was not about their crypto at all, but about the attitude and how they reacted. It's literally as if someone says "dude, I know a thing about crypto and you might've made a mistake there" and Pavel immediately goes into offensive defense, preaching how they have the best ACM champion PhDs and shifting the burden of proof, basically a canonical Putin/Trump-style of evading an argument.
That's what makes me wary of this guy, not his product.
Doubtful that he’s “frequenting” there given how he left the country. When the FSB (Russian FBI) demanded he comply with the laws and provide the decryption keys he had his lawyers send a prank letter to the head of the FSB with two physical keys (as in, the actual keys you open your door with) attached to it as a sign of “compliance”. Try that in the US and see if you can “frequent” the country after that.
Agree, Zuck has zero integrity and I think he sees the tea leaves in where things are headed in November and is trying to say he was bullied into making alot of disastrous decisions that he and he only ordered for an administration/party that he personally donated $400M+ to.
There are concerns that they paid for infrastructure in deeply democratic areas and ignored areas that were republican-leaning, in effect making it a Democratic get out the vote initiative.
The media doesn't seem too interested in figuring out the actual impact, so I don't think any of us really know if it was balanced or not. But this doesn't strike me as the type of thing we want billionaires doing regardless.
Where are you sourcing this from? Personally, I’ve only heard of the opposite happening. (For example, polling places getting shut down in some majority black areas in Georgia.)
> There are concerns that they paid for infrastructure in deeply democratic areas and ignored areas that were republican-leaning
Concerns without evidence are nothing. Is there any evidence at all this occurred? Why aren't Republicans attacking Musk donating 10's of millions of dollars to directly help Trump?
I mean, we know why they aren't attacking him. Because they're complete hypocrites.
This is an extremely disingenuous and intellectually dishonest strawman of the views that people of the political party that you're attacking actually hold. This shouldn't be on HN:
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity.
> Reducing voter turnout under the fig leaves of 'protecting the vote' or 'fighting rampant voter fraud'
You describing these justification as "fig leaves" proves rather conclusively that you are making partisan, as opposed to factual, statements.
> is a long-term party strategy
...and your goalpost-moving from describing individuals on HN ("You can tell someone's political party merely by asking whether they support a high voter participation rate. You can also offend members of the other party by pointing out this fact.") to the strategy of political organizations further undermines the idea that you're making this comment in good faith.
If you're making this comment in good faith, then you don't understand how biased you are. You are, factually, not approaching this from a neutral standpoint.
> You describing these justification as "fig leaves" proves rather conclusively that you are making partisan, as opposed to factual, statements.
This is just electioneering 101: The party leadership can’t explicitly say “voter participation hurts us,” they have to instead pound on the table with unfounded claims of widespread fraud as an explanation to the party rank and file for the voter suppression they’re engaging in.
I’m not saying I don’t have opinions, but I don’t need to lean on them when the facts make the case for me. The fact is that the low information voting bloc of the party is indoctrinated with the rampant fraud myth, and they support policies that suppress participation as a result. The high information leadership encourages this false belief because they know they lose elections when voters participate at high rates.
It gives me no pleasure to report these facts. They are what they are.
What I'd like to see from the Democrat camp is making mail voter registration easier, making government IDs mandatory, and also improving voter identification. Maybe also moving all voting to Sundays, so most people have time.
Better voter identification IMHO is a reasonable ask from Republicans that's always shot down by Democrats. They say it excludes people that don't have ID.
To me it seems reasonable to make having ID mandatory. And also making your ID mandatory for voting, like in every other developed nation I know. Make it free to get a state ID in the same legislation.
This would take away the main argument Republicans have for saying there's potential fraud. Having ID is also good for people, because it eases interaction with the state in other things.
Voter ID would be reasonable if everyone had them, or had free and very easy access to get them. Most countries have some kind of unified government ID, in Germany for example it's mandatory to own one of two kinds of government ID. Sadly this is not the case in the US, where many disparate state IDs exist, and many people never have any government ID for their whole life.
Now, Republicans could take away this argument by instituting a government ID like you're suggesting. It would have to be well thought through - the structure of US society puts many roadblocks in front of those least likely to have IDs, like:
- often large distances to government offices, which can be expensive to travel if you don't own a car
- many people basically can't take time off work, sometimes from multiple jobs, or they risk losing their health insurance
- usually you need some kind of documentation to get a new government ID, and many people don't have this available for a number of reasons - according to this source[0] at least 1.5%
Any solution would have to work around these issues, but it's definitely not impossible. And once this is implemented, the Democrats' concerns would be taken care off - why don't Republicans seem to ever work on this? If you started requiring voter ID without doing this, you'd de-facto be banning people from voting - often times those who are already marginalized. Yet I haven't seen Republicans running on implementing such IDs. Why do you think that is?
I would agree with you that the Democrats should bring this up too, if there were evidence for voter fraud beyond the usual margins (that also exist in elections in other countries). But I haven't seen such evidence, and all attempts by Republicans to find evidence in investigations has completely failed. So why should Democrats compromise with them on this point? Why can't Republicans alleviate their concerns before implementing voter ID?
This reminds me a lot of the attempts during Trumps presidency to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Somehow they always tried to repeal it first, and never presented their better replacement. Four years ago, they promised that their plan is two weeks away, yet it's still nowhere to be found. But they are still running on repealing the ACA. I wonder why? Why does this pattern keep coming up?
Didn’t some Republicans literally say equivalent of “voter participation hurts us” recently? I can’t find the quote right now but I remember seeing it float by in my news feed.
> This is just electioneering 101: The party leadership
Again, you moved the goalposts from "individual voters including people on HN" to "party leadership". You are either incapable of understanding that voters are not equivalent to party leaders (which is an extremely serious flaw), given that I already pointed it out to you, or you aren't acting in good faith.
> I don’t need to lean on them when the facts make the case for me
> It gives me no pleasure to report these facts. They are what they are.
The "fact" that you are claiming is: rank-and-file republican voters ("You can tell someone's political party merely by asking whether they support a high voter participation rate") are using voter fraud as a "fig leaf" for voter suppression. You have provided exactly zero evidence for this claim, despite repeatedly asserting that it is a fact, and changing the goalposts when challenged.
Furthermore, "Fig leaf" doesn't have anything to do with whether or not voter fraud exists - it has to do with whether the users of that justification honestly believe in it. And, speaking as someone with many conservative friends who honestly believe in it, your assertion is factually false,
Your claims are uncited, false, and politically biased. This is partisan political activism.
the party that controls election infrastructure is the kingmaker
thusly, if one observes the king that was made, one knows the party who decided
see: GW Bush victory in FL
see: Biden victory in >100% vote cities
The funny thing about this thread is that I have no idea where the Trump starts and the Harris ends. I have learned nothing about anyone's political stances from this back and forth.
> The funny thing about this thread is that I have no idea where the Trump starts and the Harris ends. I have learned nothing about anyone's political stances from this back and forth.
Me neither.
I think it's a very sophisticated two-way dog whistle.
The ideologists on both sides can spot each other a mile away; the rest of us look from pig to man, and man to pig, and can not tell the difference.
for me the most salient difference, harris is gung ho on the environment. expect limited oil and high energy prices
trump is the opposite - if nothing else he understands "cheap oil good"... doesn't really care either way about the environment, seeing as last EPA chief he appointed had a history of battling the EPA.
It's difficult to parse subsubzero's post after his edit, but he's saying Zuck believes Trump will win in 2024, so Zuck's spinning a narrative that he was forced to remove COVID misinformation, because COVID misinformation was largely a right-wing phenomenon.
My response to him was to point out that Harris is strong and trending stronger, while Trump is weak, so the tea leaves are saying the opposite of what he thinks they're saying.
> because COVID misinformation was largely a right-wing phenomenon.
That isn't really a fair assessment; it is true that large groups of people generate more wild theories but there was a lot of misinformation everywhere. Most of it inconsequential.
But weighting by consequence it is hard to overlook things like:
- "Plague of the unvaccinated" and the tide of misinformation saying that the vaccine would halt COVID. A lot of people believed that. They were wrong. And a lot of the blatant human rights violations through the COVID era were probably driven by that particular mistake. It wasn't a right-wing phenomenon.
- "14 Days to Flatten the Curve", which turned out to be critical misinformation that derailed any debate over the wisdom of lockdowns. Certainly a forgivable move given the urgency and confusion in the first few months, but the fact that it was material and misinformation stands out in hindsight.
- Dismissing a lot of legitimate studies related to Ivermectin. It turned out that they were showing that people who had parasites + COVID had a much better response to COVID if they took an anti-parasite drug so, y'know, fair enough but not that useful in the west. But there was a lot of misinformation that the studies themselves were fake that undermined trust that the responders were looking at evidence. That dismissal was also certainly not coming from the right wing.
> Dismissing a lot of legitimate studies related to Ivermectin. It turned out that they were showing that people who had parasites + COVID had a much better response to COVID if they took an anti-parasite drug
I read along from Australia during that period and I saw little evidence that people who knew what they were talking about "[Dismissed] a lot of legitimate studies related to Ivermectin".
It was clear cut at the time that meta-studies from "the Global South" showed that Ivermectin greatly improved M&M stats (recovery from infection, death rates) across the board for the cold, the flu, COVID, .. everything really.
No great suprise there, when parasites are killed off the host has more resources to fight off infection.
What was repeatedly dismissed, perhaps not always clearly, was the great leap being put about that Ivermectin would magically cure COVID in G20 coutries with little to no general parasite problems.
The big deal was that social media meta study that sourced 80% of COVID bullshit back to 12 "people" | groups that were all snake oil sales types peddling miracle cures on the vack of sowing fear doubt and uncertainty.
It was an endless sisyphean task pushing back against the amplification of bullshit in US social media.
There were a large body of studies showing that Ivermectin helped with COVID. Some people said that evidence should be dismissed and, fair enough. I get to be consistent in my belief that people should be able to ignore evidence because sometimes it is misleading. In this case it was a good move.
But there was also a large crowd of people spreading misinformation that the reason the evidence was misleading was because it was fake or the studies were faulty and that only crazy people would want to take Ivermectin. It turned out not only were the studies were fine but also that there are many people who should probably take Ivermectin immediately upon recognising COVID symptoms. That large crowd were, in a pretty clear-cut way, spreading misinformation. Not right wingers, they tended to be more of a pure-play authoritarian variety based on the arguments I had.
> I read along from Australia during that period and I saw little evidence that people who knew what they were talking about "[Dismissed] a lot of legitimate studies related to Ivermectin".
Bit of a tautology there, we'd expect the people who got things right to know what they were talking about in hindsight and vice versa. People who spread misinformation have a fairly particular profile, it just isn't partisan.
Those studies have consistently shown that Invermectin (a de-wormer) helped people with COVID when those people lived in countries where people have a lot of worms.
The studies were not faulty, but any meta-analysis of the studies that did not take this into account was.
In case this was needed to be said, Ivermectin is an antiparasitic substance. If used to a player with parasite infection debuff, it may remove the effect and restore small amounts of hit points.
It is not established, but a player's hit points remaining and parasite infection status may negatively affect COVID survivability dice roll.
Correlation doesn’t equal causation. It’s the typical case, there are studies showing the former, yet it absolutely does nothing for COVID, it was a “hidden” third variable all along (having parasites).
You're presenting evidence that it is causative. The chain of causation is: take ivermectin -> kill parasites -> better COVID outcomes.
This would be correlation not causation if it were something like parasites caused better COVID outcomes and people in the global south were being given sugar-water. Then there'd be studies showing that sugar water caused better COVID outcomes but it'd be correlation not causation.
In this case though the correlation was because of causation.
In a study, you are usually interested in the relation of two things — here, ivermectin intake and COVID morbidity. The two variables do correlate in countries where parasites are a commonly infecting people. What can we claim from such a study? That the two correlate, that’s it. To conclude causation, you would have to make a double-blind study with control groups, where both have COVID (and neither have parasites) and one are given sugar pill, the other ivermectin. If that showed a significant difference between the two groups we could say that ivermectin causes decreased morbidity. But no such evidence has been shown.
What the actual studies show is simply a correlation, and we can do some educated guesses based on prior knowledge: ivermectin is an effective dewormer, the human body can produce anti-bodies against COVID, and that the immunesystem is better fighting a single thing, than multiple ones. Putting these together, we get a reasonable hypothesis showing a third variable that explains the measured correlation, through a causative mechanism (parasite hindering healing and parasite getting killed).
But surely you'll have to admit that if we do a double-blind study where all the participants have parasites we would probably get a significant difference between the two groups? Then we could also say that ivermectin caused decreased morbidity. We'd probably even say "it caused a decreased morbidity in populations with parasites, as expected". You can't just pretend people without parasites don't exist, they do. There are countries where the base rate is really high. That is where the results that show ivermectin as causing better COVID outcomes are coming from.
You've misunderstood the correlation-causation complaint. We have a pretty clear theory of causation here and the results back it up. Just because causality depends on specific conditions doesn't stop it being causal. Any medical treatment that isn't 100% effective (ie, most of them) depend on specific conditions being present - otherwise they'd be perfectly effective. Of course since the chain of causality is quite clear on this one we can conclude from the base rates of parasite infections there isn't much point taking ivermectin for COVID in the west.
Okay, why don’t we also waste money on bullshit like proving that tylenol increases intelligence (if you measure IQ tests on people with headaches)? It is just as useless. It was known that dewormers.. deworm.
There are zero new info in studies like that (unless you believe every logical conclusion requires a new study? If A is proved, should we separately prove A or B or what?), and they can’t even shut up all the idiots that still go on about ivermectin, so not even that goal is achieved..
I imagine the study-ers started with something like "hmm, these people have parasites and are getting COVID, we should see how big an effect giving them antiparasite medications has" and then went from there. Or maybe "we're throwing everything at the wall with COVID, this thing was involved in Nobel Prizes, lets try it to". Something like that. Maybe other things I can't think of. Proving up effect sizes is valuable in itself.
> There were a large body of studies showing that Ivermectin helped with COVID.
Nope. Not now, not then, and not in the absence of parasites.
The early pandemic studies you "recall" were real studies, meta studies that looked at the use of Ivermectin in "the Global South" in countries with high incidence of worms | parasites | etc.
These studies showed a distinct improvement in the face of COVID for treated groups .. eg: those untreated that had parasites and caught COVID Vs. those treated and caught COVID but now had immune responses uncomprimised by parasites.
more recent studies, in G20 type countries,
A Cochrane meta-analysis of 11 eligible trials examining the efficacy of ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19 published through April 2022 concluded that ivermectin has no beneficial effect for people with COVID-19.1
Since May 2022, an additional 3 large randomized clinical trials including several thousand participants have been published, each reaching a similar conclusion.
Today JAMA publishes a new trial of ivermectin treatment for mild to moderate COVID-19 that addresses the possibility that the existing literature may have missed the efficacy of ivermectin because the previously tested dose (approximately 400 μg/kg daily for 3 days) was insufficient.
At a higher treatment dose (600 μg/kg daily) and longer treatment duration (6 days), Naggie and colleagues again conclude that ivermectin is not beneficial for the treatment of COVID-19.
New study shows ivermectin lacks meaningful benefits in COVID-19 treatment (March, 2024)
New research led by the University of Oxford has concluded that the antiparasitic drug ivermectin does not provide clinically meaningful benefits for treating COVID-19 in a largely vaccinated population.
Damn- no effect in any trial in the absence of worms.
> Bit of a tautology there, we'd expect the people who got things right to know what they were talking about in hindsight
whereas I'm talking about qualified epidemiologists who were correct then (2020) and still correct today .. the likes of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiona_Stanley (who I worked with in the 1980s) et al.
That is a powerful response against someone who I suspect you're imagining. Maybe try assuming I more or less agree with all that re-read my comment? I don't see any points of disagreement.
>There were a large body of studies showing that Ivermectin helped with COVID.
No, there wasn't. I haven't kept up with the science, so there may be such studies now, but there certainly wasn't back in late 2020, when the ivermectin craze spread like wildfire among right wingers.
> But there was a lot of misinformation that the studies themselves were fake
That was not misinformation. The idea that Ivermectin was helpful in dealing with CoVID was determined from a meta analysis that included a fake study that nobody can confirm happened and even used dead people. It was pushed by grifting doctors who sell Ivermectin.
Yes, if you have parasites and take an anti-parasite drug you're gonna feel better, whether you have CoVID or not.
> the tide of misinformation saying that the vaccine would halt COVID
It halted it as much as it could considering 30% of people didn't complete vaccination. I finished and have had every booster and never got CoVID despite all of my family members getting it (who refused to get vaccinated).
> No, those mistakes did not justify the downright biblical flood of COVID misinformation that emanated from the right.
> The examples you've given are just right wing apologetics.
> That particular delusion is entirely due to right wing misinformation
This is blatantly violating the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), in addition to being logically invalid emotional attacks and fallacies that do nothing to actually respond to GP's points. Suggest against this - it absolutely destroys the credibility of the points that you do make, in addition to reducing the quality of HN.
> the statements you've pointed out either do not violate HN's guidelines
These statements:
> No, those mistakes did not justify the downright biblical flood of COVID misinformation that emanated from the right.
> The examples you've given are just right wing apologetics.
> That particular delusion is entirely due to right wing misinformation
Violate these parts of the guidelines:
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle.
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work.
There was virtually zero factual content to your comment. It almost pure partisan political activism.
> None of what I've said is "logically invalid emotional attacks and fallacies."
It seems like you don't understand the difference between an emotional plea and a factual statement. "the downright biblical flood of COVID misinformation that emanated from the right" is not a fact - it's an emotional plea, as are the other cited statements. It is impossible to find a citation for this statement because "biblical flood" isn't a technical term that you can back up with facts. "right wing apologetics" is another instance of something that you cannot prove because it does not have a factual status.
> "the downright biblical flood of COVID misinformation that emanated from the right" is not a fact - it's an emotional plea
The term "flamebait" is also an emotional plea, but we trust adults to use their brain and decide how to report that in good faith.
"Biblical Flood" is a euphemism indicating "a lot of" misinformation (which is a fact [1]) and anyone not being willfully obtuse could interpret what the commenter meant. but I suppose it's easier to immediately dismiss that very true statement than engage with it.
Incorrect. Emotional pleading is a logical fallacy wherein one manipulates the emotions of the listener in an attempt to convince them of an argument without actually supporting it. Labeling something "flamebait" is a characterization of the tone of an argument, and whether it appears to be designed to incite low-quality discussion/flaminess, which is orthogonal to the argument itself. An argument can be flamebait without containing emotional pleading, and vice versa. The two are unrelated, and the fact that you so confidently state that they are indicates that you don't actually know what either of them are.
> "Biblical Flood" is a euphemism indicating "a lot of"
Yes, I know that - and that's completely irrelevant as to its factual nature. It's still an euphemism designed to manipulate the listener, and is something that is impossible to prove factually. There is no objective test for whether something is a "Biblical flood" (and you can't even get different people to agree on what meets the threshold for it) - you thinking that it can assessed as true indicates that you don't have a good handle on what it means for something to be "factual".
> which is a fact [1]
Copy-pasting journal article links is not an argument, and that article in particular doesn't support the point that you think you're making.
> Labeling something "flamebait" is a characterization of the tone of an argument, and whether it appears to be designed to incite low-quality discussion/flaminess
Which is also not measurable and manipulates the reader. I don't see the readers comment as flamebait. Just because misinformation comes from right-wing media and people have eyes to see that and call it out doesn't make it flamebait. What should we call it? An unknown amount of totally apolitical misinformation from [insert party here]?
> It's still an euphemism designed to manipulate the listener, and is something that is impossible to prove factually
As are most arguments when we use phrases like "a lot", "similar to", etc. If you dismiss things based on such broad criteria, I am puzzled by your comment history. You have told users they are bad and support Tyranny[1], said it's malicious to support infrastructure spending[2], and called Snowden a narcissist (which proves he had no altruistic motives?)[3].
These are not emotional statements supported by an argument, these are arguments supported by emotional pleas.
And a simple cmd+f shows "Emotional plea" is a phrase you do not use sparingly either. You are using this word very broadly. If you cannot hold yourself to the same standards you hold other users, you aren't debating in good faith.
You have obviously constructed a belief system that makes it impossible to engage with things you disagree with while allowing yourself to lash out at users however you see fit and bring up whatever politics suits you.
> Copy-pasting journal article links is not an argument
An argument is not a theoretical bottle exercise for one to wordsmith their way towards not engaging with the facts. In the real world, we have eyes.
Yet most people can still recognize it when they see it, it's relatively easy to provide good heuristics ("is it unnecessarily politically partisan? does it bring up irrelevant examples?"), and is against the guidelines.
> and manipulates the reader
I already pointed out that the characterization of "flamebait" is not an emotional plea, as you incorrectly called it, and you didn't respond to that characterization at all and merely ignored it, so I can only conclude that you're inventing some other definition to fit the word.
Regardless, it's also against the HN guidelines, so we can safely put aside the problem of whether or not it's appropriate to point out, because it is.
> I don't see the readers comment as flamebait. Just because misinformation comes from right-wing media
...and that's why you don't see it - because you're pushing the same political agenda that they are.
This is also deceptive goalpost-moving - the poster didn't just say that "misinformation comes from right-wing media", but that it was a "Biblical flood" from "the right", which means an objectively large quantity, which neither you nor they have provided any evidence for.
It's pretty clear that that comment is flamebait. It made a politically-charged claim meant to attack a particular political group that had zero evidence for it, which you have also provided zero evidence for. Most of that user's other comments have been flagged and the account was eventually banned, which pretty clearly shows that they were engaging in flamebait.
> people have eyes to see that and call it out
Yet more emotionally-manipulative rhetoric. You still haven't provided evidence for these claims, either (although even if you had, it wouldn't excuse this).
> I am puzzled by your comment history.
Yet more emotionally-manipulative rhetoric (you are clearly not puzzled - you're personally attacking me), coupled with profiling, which is an ad-hominem that is extremely inappropriate (for HN, and for anywhere) and bad-faith.
> said it's malicious to support infrastructure spending[2]
This is a straight-up lie. I said "Proposing that we should continue to throw more money at infrastructure, before diagnosing and fixing the problems that are causing that inefficiency [...], is straight-up malicious." This is very different than what you claimed I said. You read my comment, and lied about what I said.
> and called Snowden a narcissist
Which is an irrelevant, intentionally misleading and out-of-context fragment of what I said - which was saying that he had narcissistic tendencies as an explanation for his actions, not as a means of trying to distract from an argument that he made.
> And a simple cmd+f shows "Emotional plea" is a phrase you do not use sparingly either. You are using this word very broadly. If you cannot hold yourself to the same standards you hold other users, you aren't debating in good faith.
More profiling. This is not appropriate for HN. Please do not do it.
> You have obviously constructed a belief system that makes it impossible to engage with things you disagree with while allowing yourself to lash out at users however you see fit and bring up whatever politics suits you.
This is yet another character attack - again, inappropriate for HN. As we've seen, you're also willing to lie about my words, so this assessment isn't based on fact anyway.
> An argument is not a theoretical bottle exercise for one to wordsmith their way towards not engaging with the facts. In the real world, we have eyes.
More emotionally-manipulative and deceitful rhetoric. Also, it's worth noting that you ignoring my point and instead proceeded to link-drop like it proved your point.
This is completely irrelevant to claims that there's been a "downright biblical flood of COVID misinformation that emanated from the right".
I don't need to read the others - if you have a claim that you want to make, you can source the claim from the paper, because given that you lied about what I said, the burden is on you to prove that your claims are based in reality. Posting a link is not proof behind a claim.
If you can't argue in good faith without profiling other users, making personal attacks, making partisan political comments, justifying guideline-breaking behavior because you agree with the opinions made, claiming that your opinions are "facts" without providing evidence, sneering at people who don't agree with said opinions, and actively lying about other people's words and claims, then you shouldn't comment on HN.
Please do not respond if you can't avoid doing the above - especially if you can't avoid lying about my own words back to me.
Some of this stuff happened in 2020 (who was president in 2020?) and some of it happened later. So seems to be saying the both teams were playing the game if you read between the lines (ie. you're likely right).
“During their dialogue, both tech leaders probed each other’s intentions for expansion. “I remember him asking me whether we were planning to start something on a global basis, on the global level, go for international expansion. I said no,” Durov recalled.
Zuckerberg similarly denied any plans to target Durov's domestic market, yet both moved to expand their respective reaches shortly after the meeting. “We both ended up doing exactly that in two or three weeks,” Durov noted.”
That's why I brought the quote, let people draw their own conclusions. Mark isn't to be trusted for a variety of reasons, that conversation isn't one of them lol. Durov was laughing because they both lied to each other
Tuckster is an "anti-elite" heir to a fortune who grew up in a castle. The only job he ever had was outrage baiting naive people. People like him are against regulation, but will clap any time big tech is dragged in front of congress. It's all a scam. You're being had. Why are you treating any part of his interviews as valid information.
Elon's path may not be the best path to popularity.
If Zuck wants popularity, maybe a good way to go about that would be to de-shittify Facebook, Instagram, and so forth so that those platforms respect their users.
I don't think that age is everything, but I feel like it is a significant factor.
At the very least, it is very frustrating as a younger person that the vast majority of our lawmakers are _very_ old. This has (historically, but not recently) been more of a problem with congress: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/aging-congress-boomers/
As a (just) boomer, I'd be in favor of having the voting age lowered to 16. Certainly there are many reckless, feckless and uninformed 16 year olds, but the standard of debate coming from the seniors in the room is horrifying and needs to be diluted by the people who have the biggest stake in our planet's future.
Why would lowering to 16 from 18 make a difference? Plenty of data out there shows that age demographic is the least likely to show up on election day and vote.
There is some evidence getting people to vote earlier results in them being more consistent voters over time. And they would potentially be fresh off a civics class.
Then vote for Chase Oliver. Not saying that you wouldn't, it's just if you're going to be talking about political hypotheticals, there are still actual alternatives to pulling the lever for Zuckerberg.
More specifically, he was born in Africa and neither one of his parents was a US citizen. While all past presidents were born in the USA, it hasn't yet been definitively ruled that you must be born on US soil to be a "natural born Citizen", and my understanding is that you likely don't, you just need to have been a US citizen at birth rather than naturalized later.
Facebook has insane pull. Sometimes I forget about it, but it is used by majority of every single demographic base once you consider different portions of the FB app (markets, groups, messenger), Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads (don’t think it is that relevant yet). That being said, to my understanding, Meta has been trying to move itself away from political-adjacent conversations. While Twitter is completely the opposite, and thrives on poli-rage.
Well, he's also on video recently at a church saying, "I need you to come out and vote for me. And if things work out the way we want, you won't need to vote again."
Apparently this is the smoking gun and Trump is going to become dictator for life? Is this where we are in the debate? You might as well be talking about what kind of ice-cream he likes then.
Come on, we both know that he means (specially if you read the full context) that there will be no reason to vote afterwards (to a group that seldom votes) because their wishes/goals will be delievered by trump. He was just trying to convince them that this election matters most.
> He was just trying to convince them that this election matters most.
Sure. And he said he was going to "act as a dictator from day 1" (after saying repeatedly that "America could benefit from a dictatorship" and praising what other dictators "have been able to do for their country") for what reason? He said he'd terminate the constitution. The guy who just got indicted again for his BS on and around Jan 6.
Really, he just means "I'll fix the country so well, and there will be so much love, that people will be happy to keep voting us back in".
I don't think he'll succeed. I don't think he'll be elected. But if you think there's not a part of Trump that wants to be President For Life, and will if he thinks he can get away with it, then ... you haven't been listening to him.
>Really, he just means "I'll fix the country so well, and there will be so much love, that people will be happy to keep voting us back in".
No, it means exactly as Trump said it would - he wants to be a dictator, and is willing to terminate the constitution to make it so. Even then, he won't fix jack shit, because that would actually require working, which is something he cannot and will not do. He had a supermajority in congress in his first term...and did nothing besides pass tax cuts for billionaires.
I'd never in my youth imagine that the country I grew up in would elect a guy who trashes the constitution who wears lifts and orange makeup, let alone potentially doing it twice. May you live in interesting times indeed.
>Yeah because Trump is the one who's going after his opponents using the judical system.
I'm sorry, the $450 million judgement was for systemic fraud committed for decades prior to his involvement in politics.
Further, the going after him for retaining government documents could have been avoided completely if he didn't lie to the FBI, lie to them again, and then lie to his own attorneys so they'd unknowingly lie to the FBI on his behalf. It's not like they were benign documents about what the secreatary of HUD or eudcation eats for lunch; they were SCI documents pertaining to Israel's nuclear weapons program...that were gifted to the Saudis so the Saudi PIF would in turn fund a golf tournament Trump could host at his courses in an attempt to give the middle finger to the PGA Tour.
> More than eight-in-ten White evangelical Protestant voters who attend religious services frequently (85%) voted for Trump in the most recent election, as did 81% of those who attend less frequently.
> White born-again or evangelical Christians made up 24 percent of the electorate in the 2022 elections, according to the media consortium exit poll conducted for CNN, ABC, NBC and CBS. Black (11 percent) and Latino (11 percent) voters and those from a union household (18 percent) combined to constitute 40 percent of the vote.
Can you please cite the court case that proves Trump won in 2020? Regardless of how many people believe that the Democrats cheated, asserting that Trump won AND that his alleged victory was proven in court is quite a bold claim. Post proof or gtfo.
The rules don't apply to the people who make them. What do you expect is going to happen if he does show up on the ballot and the most people vote for him?
> Also, he's almost as toxic to the left as Trump is at this point because he doesn't want kids to be transitioned and doesn't think people that say mean things (or things someone in particular thinks are mean) are automatically bad people.
That's a pretty big understatement about all the wacky, inept and dumb things he has said (and presumably believes)
If you go back 4 years, Trans and Black Lives Matter very much dominated the DNC, and those topics today get barely a whistle. I read the whole DNC platform, it's very much not what it was a few years ago.
Meanwhile the VP candidate on the other side has a non white, non Cristian wife and has very much repudiated the racist part of the party.
I suspect that in 4-8 years you will have seen some massive shift in US politics and party platforms away from where we are today. Because it looks like both sides are making some pivots
Zuckerberg sees the writing on the wall. I suspect that he would rather see a trump admin and avoid an anti-trust fight or privacy legislation.
I'm pretty into right wing blogs and forums. I have yet to see even a glimpse of a Nazi and even anyone that goes beyond "why is half of Bidens Whitehouse Jewish? Isn't that weird? Why do so many politicians have to take a photo in Israel?" That's as 'Nazi' as it gets.
I'd be surprised if Elon's detractors know about his daughter, generally speaking. The tech conversations don't overlap with the gossip conversations very often.
Elon detractors love to focus on made up bullshit instead of the very real, more problematic issues with Elon. But this is the same of anyone unpopular.
The person was clearly trying to say "it wasn't a big thing, and is huge now in comparison to just a few years ago". But hey, you won debate there with some counter examples that prove them wrong. But did we move the debate forward?
Me jumping in for everyone to understand the push-back and why the "data" you propose is not swaying our opinion. The reason something like a study isn't changing our minds about the topic is because we've seen how profit-making institutions, researchers, academia, and even the school system have all been "captured". The topic is taboo, and any sort of dissent is met with a huge amount of pushback, mockery, cancelling, "phobe" calling, and all manners of ugliness. The "literature" is then effectively rigged.
And even if the study is true, and valid, and there was no bias in the research conducted, because we've seen the above "capture" we can't reasonably convince ourselves to trust "the science". This is why it's so tragic that the left has gone scorched-earth with previously-trusted institutions. The trust and reasonable debate will take decades to be re-established, and until then we're stuck with this weird tribal "us vs them" hell hole.
"It wasn't a big thing" - how do you know? You do not. A group of people ask for a place at the table and you and your ilk question their legitimacy as human beings - that's what you're doing. People are saying "I feel this way, I am this way, I see others who feel like me and and feel empowered to come forward and live as the person I feel I am"
And your response is 'it's a phase' - like their identity is a fidget spinner. Nothing is being lost or endangered by making trans people feel welcome and valid and allowing them to pursue treatments that make them happier.
The topic is not taboo. What's taboo is invalidating the lives and existence of other human beings just finding a voice and a place in the world and figuring it out. After all if it's a phase, or a social contagion, it'll blow by and you can relax - but the amount of effort going in to making these people feel scrutinized and unwelcome doesn't seem like that's the point at all.
> "The topic is not taboo. What's taboo is invalidating the lives and existence of other human beings just finding a voice and a place in the world and figuring it out. After all if it's a phase, or a social contagion, it'll blow by and you can relax - but the amount of effort going in to making these people feel scrutinized and unwelcome doesn't seem like that's the point at all."
Every single person I know that isn't on-board with the Left or trans issues (someone the left would call a bigot and nazi), is 110% fine with actual real-world average trans people that want to just live their lives. What everyone has an issue with is the fact that trans activists have an obsession with "being allowed" in opposite-gender spaces such as toilets (like WTF, why?!?). They also have this weird obsession of wanting to have trans issues exposed, taught and presented to kids (again, why?). Also the whole thing about promoting, encouraging and allowing minors that can't consent to be transitioned and have their bodies effectively butchered (on this I will take a stand - this is a tragedy and history will judge those that participated). All of these have nothing to do with normal people questioning the "legitimacy" of trans individuals as humans, that's just been the catchy marketing hook presented by professional activists as they usurped the trans movement, so that they could polarize and perpetuate "The Movement" at the detriment to peace and harmony among all humans (whether they're trans or not).
The fact that the whole trans movement go co-opted by activists is sad, and causing real harm to trans individuals. Meanwhile, the rest of us, normal people, average people, have no desire to prevent trans individuals from being who they are or want to be.
These accounts are well worth reading for some insight into what it's like for the partners of these men, and how the "being a woman" fantasies of these men are so different from the actual lived reality of women.
There are people going back thousands of years which seem to fit pretty well under modern conceptions of trans people.
Even if you want to limit consideration to people who self-professed an identity under our modern conceptions, there's a full century of consistent examples. There was a thriving community of trans people in Berlin in the 1920s and early 1930s, until it was rather abruptly cut off in 1933. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissen...
> because he doesn't want kids to be transitioned and doesn't think people that say mean things (or things someone in particular thinks are mean) are automatically bad people.
Characterising the critiques of Musk in this way is not only reductive, but flat out wrong.
I discovered telegram around 2017 and I thought it was a fake whatsapp at first. Idk about 10 years ago, but 5 years ago it def did look like a re-skin
>Zuck is on a major PR campaign drive, I would not trust a word he says.
You can tell because the lizard has begun looksmaxing
However, we know from numerous leaks now that the White House has indeed pressured every major social media company to target specific citizens and censor them.
Always, as a good hedger Zuck, anticipating regime change in the White House by November, is minimizing the potential fallout of his treacherous behavior. Hold him accountable.
But he has no regrets pouring gasoline on the bonfire of Brexit, I guess? He's only concerned when there is a real danger of someone going after his wealth. It will be interesting to watch the business community of the US unite against the Democrats. Interesting times.
I wouldn't be surprised if those accounts spread From the River to the Sea messages, which is basically calling for a genocide
If that were the concern they would swiftly ban the accounts of the Likud party, which has used the slogan in genocidal contexts as well (and continues to spout such rhetoric, along with its coalition partners). And in fact, the origins of the phrase can be traced back to Zionist literature from the 1920s. From Wikipedia:
The 1977 election manifesto of the right-wing Israeli Likud party said: "Between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty." ... The Israeli-American historian Omer Bartov notes that Zionist usage of such language predates the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and began with the Revisionist movement of Zionism led by Vladimir Jabotinski, which spoke of establishing a Jewish state in all of Palestine and had a song which includes: "The Jordan has two banks; this one is ours, and the other one too," suggesting a Jewish state extending even beyond the Jordan River.
In any case -- current usage of the slogan from the pro-Palestine activist side is not intrinsically genocidal. Some basically do mean it that way. But most (at least those I talk to) do not. In their view it just means they want a Palestine that is "democratic, pluralistic, free from apartheid and other forms of oppression".
And there's certainly nothing untoward about wanting that.
Bet he'll do it again. "This time it's different." Assuming the man has any principles at all, he already demonstrated his willingness to violate them. He'll do it again.
There is zero doubt at this point about Zuckerberg's principles. He has none. He hasn't even stayed consistent on anti-Semitism, which you'd think would be close to his heart.
I will also say, to be fair, that none of the other influential billionaires in the tech world (PayPal Mafia, Jack Dorsey, Andreesen, Horowitz, etc.) seem to have consistent principles either.
To be fair, consistency can also be called stubbornness. It depends on how you slice things, but growing and changing your mind as new data comes in is not a bad thing.
From a practical standpoint, I feel this issue is largely moot with the emergence of AI bots. Will the government have the time to chase them all? And will Facebook have the ability to censor them all?
Hard to understand why Zuck would come out with this now? This is like a bazooka shot at Democrats ... to give Gym Jordan this information to twist and distort. Never mind that the "censored" data turned out to be from Russian operative sources ... yes, never mind that.
This seems bigger than just business, or the House Judiciary Committee. Is this about Israel and fear of what a Harris admin would do (or stop doing)? Either way, there is definitely underhanded intent in this "admission" from ole'Zuck IMO.
Skip the political mumbo-jumbo and go straight to page 27 to 29 of this investigation report. Internal emails show FB employees unhappy to onboard to a private takedown request portal, where Government employees would post tickets on "disinformation" that FB & other tech companies would then be obligated to police. Further, the report suggests that CISA & its proxies didn't have a legal mandate to compel FB, Twitter, and other companies to censor content, so the CISA resorted to "suggesting" they would get the FBI involved.
The entire doc has an obvious political slant, but I think it partially explains why the Stanford Internet Observatory and other proxies self-dismantled before litigation commenced.
Zuckerberg should learn to plead the 5th when asked about political intervention questions.
He keeps apologizing, thinking it will gain him respect, but the general public only sees this as a grand admission of guilt (ostensibly for some crime they didn't know of until now, and still don't know any details about).
Many other CEOs get asked similar questions, and they refuse to engage in the discussion; the result is no news coverage.
Facebook usage is tanking I think, they're losing market share because nobody trusts facebook for anything but the marketplace anymore, with exceptions of course but I don't know many people who use it anymore for anything but birthdays and the like.
- some people cannot think abstractly about speech, because it is skewed because of actions of Elon Musk, or Zuckerberg, or other individuals
- it is certain that governments want to control the narrative, and it is not always done in our interests
- sometime actions are done to help us, but [disinformation enters the room]
- Everything at CEO level is "political"
- centralization of social media and forums allowed for this behavior. It would be impossible to "control" the Internet with federated Internet
- various powers fight over the Internet (governments, China, Russia, corporations, billionaires etc.). This is why it difficult to tell what is the truth, everyone tries to shift our perception
- YouTube removed thumbs down not to protect small creators. Moderation on social media is also not to protect ordinary people, but to retain clean image, or to keep investors happy
- sometimes when social media removes post is censorship. Sometimes it is not, but both scenarios occur
- some people that complain about free speech might be influenced by foreign powers
- some people that say moderation is required want just more control over social media for their own benefit, agenda
- I do not know if there is a clean, ethical way to "run the social media"
> - I do not know if there is a clean, ethical way to "run the social media"
My hand-wavy proposal:
1. there needs to be something akin to a constitution where all players involved (users of social media, social media companies) can express some shared set of values. For example kids shouldn't get depressed, data should be private, widely spread information should be reasonably accurate.
2. There needs to be a few institutions with enough power and checks and balances to be able to steer the system towards these values.
This will be hand-waved away as being caused by other influences
> data should be private
Sure, it's private: we know literally everything about you down to when you use the toilet, and so do all of our data brokers and your government. But it's tied to a token, and you'd have to do a SQL join to attach that token to your name, and we put up a flyer in the break room telling people not to do that SQL join.
> widely spread information should be reasonably accurate.
There are so, so many opportunities to frame things in extremely misleading ways to drive a certain narrative and the entire social media and corporate news establishment does this. And when they get caught making stuff up, just call it a mistake and run a retraction in fine print that no one sees
> I do not know if there is a clean, ethical way to "run the social media"
... or any media. The messenger cannot not shape the message even if he tried. If he becomes a mere conduit, someone else will shape the message. People are (trained to be) emotionally-driven and thus their biases can be shaped
No, of course you're right, the "toy model" is exaggerated. I think it was more true in some countries than others and several decades ago, when there was no internet and the media were dominated by a few players (including the government itself, in many countries) all very much established.
Let's say that I suspect that democracy is a system that assumes public opinion to be directed so that it doesn't stray too much from a narrow range of possibilities. This can be done just by manipulating the Overton window.
I disagree with the assertion that the relation is cyclical. In reality, all of these systems are highly interdependent. I'd model it as a weighted complete digraph.
And certain subsets of these various nodes have a greater outsized influence than their peers. For example, the intelligentsia within the people are usually far more impactful than say Joe Blow from Appalachia.
I’d say mass media, especially in entertainment and news (but I repeat myself), is far more influential than intellectuals, except inasmuch as they are influenced by them. But let’s be real, Noam Chomsky doesn’t have a ton of clout in Hollywood. If anything, it’s more about money than about the intelligentsia. And if you’re talking about social-media influencers, please revisit my first point.
I wonder how his wife, a medical doctor feels about letting medical informative spread.
His line "we should not compromise our content standard" tela me he doesn't personally use Facebook. I can't scroll down more than a few screen length before closing the app due to poor quality ads and recommended content. I rarely see posts from my own network.
Is that a US constitutional violation by the biden government? I guess not because they weren't really forced to. Yet again , putting pressure on media is not negligible
The first amendment specifically uses the word "congress," and the President is not congress.
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
From what I understand, the executive branch generally uses the power of persuasion to influence media. There's no legal consequences for failing to comply; but instead the media has to weigh political consequences.
To put it differently, if your social network is used to push conspiracy theories and otherwise undermine democracy, you're going to have a tough time asking for political favors.
Key point here for me was that this was on FB, and no one else. Zuckerberg might regret doing this, but he did it. No one else. And, unless he is lying, he wasn't forced to do this. So, really, nothing more to add.
Should note:
The Supreme Court in June tossed out claims that the Biden administration coerced social media platforms into censoring users by removing COVID-19 content. The majority ruled that because Facebook "began to suppress the plaintiffs’ COVID-19 content" before the government pressure campaign began, platforms, not the Biden administration, bore responsibility for the posts being taken down.
Apologies if I'm missing the sarcasm, but Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, Reddit, Pinterest and even LinkedIn all suppressed certain stories, keywords, etc. For Twitter and Google at least we have documents proving Biden admin requests. I think there's a whole lot more, but the point stands regardless.
> unless he is lying, he wasn't forced to do this
"We could make things real hard for you for four years. We were thinking about breaking you guys up actually, you're sort of a monopoly. Anyway, here is our request - we'd never force you though. The choice is yours." [Ominous stare.]
You don't find it interesting that both Meta and Google had monopoly lawsuits aimed at them in 2020?
And at the exact same time, the exact same people were "asking" for scientific discussion of many kinds to be shut down across Whatsapp, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook, among many others?
Because it wasn't just Ivermectin. It was the lableak hypothesis, investigating the WIV, following back GOF funding, vaccine contracts, vaccine side-effects, vaccine effectiveness, lockdown effectiveness, natural immunity discussion, etc etc etc; all restricted and suppressed to fit whatever the Biden admin decided.
That's not hyperbole, that's simple and well documented fact. And, as was directly pointed out in this letter/article, the Biden admin wasn't above using lies to shut down politically inconvenient (and true) stories.
Yes, the case against Facebook was filed in December of 2020, less than a month before Biden was sworn in.
The Facebook case was then refiled by Biden's FTC pick Lina Khan in 2021, and made "more robust and detailed than before". [0]
Khan (who was fast-tracked to the position) also went after Microsoft and Google during the same period. [0] And Twitter. Some of those cases could have begun earlier too - what's important is that all those cases were active while Biden's admin was making "requests".
The Biden admin had a massive stick to wave at the tech giants, regardless of who started each lawsuit and when, and demonstrated both the power to make judgments and to easily make problems go away [1]:
> “You are now 0 for 4 in merger trials. Why are you losing so much?” demanded California Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley at a House oversight hearing this summer. “Are you losing on purpose?”
> ...
> In her interview with CNN, Khan said she was “quite happy” with the FTC’s merger work
All the leverage was sitting right there for any request from Biden to have a lot of implied 'stick' behind it.
Companies consented to remove content without looking too deeply at it, and a lot of problems went away. I guess that could be a coincidence, but the giant 9+ figure lawsuits would certainly be worth a mention, no?
I think using Trump as a bar for 'acceptable levels of corruption' is a critical error.
For example, I have some red lines on who I'd vote for, and genocide support is one of them. [It's crazy that needs to be said, and that it's controversial. Crazy.] Whether Trump would arm genocide even more is utterly irrelevant.
For that simple and non-negotiable reason, neither main party can represent me. Any party that arms and enables the atrocities the world has witnessed for the last year is too corrupt for me.
"You have to be practical - Trump could end democracy"... Any blame for his election is on the lady who refuses to heed either the Genocide Convention, our own Leahy Laws, or the will of 77% of her own party.
Like - you really think an admin that vetoes ceasefire in Gaza four times would be above using their political power to warp narratives on social media? This shit is documented bud. They did it.
Why would you pretend they're above using the leverage which they were clearly flexing?? 'Because Trump would be worse.' See how little sense that makes?
Wait a minute... Censorship requests from the Biden administration before the 2020 election? There was no Biden administration before the 2020 election. Something doesn't quite add up here.
Interesting they use the example of covid - to me that's a far less offensive application of censorship than what my research on social media platforms during the last year seems to be indicating - it became very apparent that Meta has/was taking various censorship methods against pro-palestine content - whereas tiktok largely was not (at least from what I could tell, I don't research tiktok as much as I do meta platforms). I suspect (conspiracy theory a bit but not entirely farfetched) that the sudden, completely bi-partisan effort to force tiktok to divest was influenced in no small part by the government's lack of ability to censor that platform compared to ones like meta's.
Was the palestinian stuff directed by the government? I don't know, but it sure seemed to me like the israel/palestine war posts that were allowed through sounded awfully similar to what the white house/IDF was saying about it. When stuff like this comes out, regardless of whether my theory is true or not, it adds fuel to that fire in a way I don't feel is very good for democracy or social media in general, particularly when zuck/meta will gaslight their users and claim state censorship isn't happening when it very, very obviously is. What was stopping them from coming out and saying "hey we're censoring this type of content?" Their entire approach to moderation is like this, it's a completely automated black box that leaves a user with very little clue as to how they're even supposed to interact with the platform without being punished in strange and obtuse ways.
Facebook, Instagram, etc. moderating content isn't a free speech issue. They are just glorified bulletin boards. They try to raise everyone's sense of their importance by claiming it to be a free speech issue, but they are awful garbage and the sooner everyone realizes the better for society.
We're talking about nearly 200 million posts, at least, having been wiped and suppressed [0]. Many of these were both 100% true and highly important. The effects of their suppression are still felt to this day; in broken minds, broken relationships, destroyed careers, a stunted generation, and unnecessary excess deaths. Serious and brave academics were threatened and had their voices stilled.
Describing Zuck's censorship of nearly 200 million posts on Facebook alone as "moderating content" is like calling a tsunami "a bit of rain". It's irresponsible.
Calling a platform with 3 billion monthly users a "glorified bulletin board" doesn't sound very credible to me either.
Why would the number of posts matter? I don't care if it was 200 or 200 billion. Nothing in my original comment changes. Same for number of users. These are private platforms, not public spaces. They are not open. They are not free. They use the lie that they have anything to do with free speech as a marketing tool. Stop falling for it.
Why would the Biden Admin have a right to lean on FB to censor true and important information?
"We need you to censor this false [read: true] information from your 3 billion users, because reasons" - not a very defensible position.
By the way, I've advocated for tearing Meta apart and putting it in global public ownership for years, partly because of their acceptance of over-censorship. There's such a thing as public responsibility, and Meta has repeatedly failed. I said so here, just yesterday.
I'm 100% fine with Meta and others censoring some things: drug sales, scams (I wish they would!), and worse.
But censoring scientists trying to say true things of a devastating pandemic, or minimize the harms from terrible policy? Censoring discussion of stories that politicians find embarrassing? Censoring the word "Zionist"??!! That's indefensible.
Again, there's a basic responsibility there; whether enshrined in law or not, and whether the law is enforced or not. Allowing a platform used by nearly half all people on Earth to warp our collective understanding of issues up to and including war, plague, genocide and famine is unacceptable, whether by government "request" or not.
People on HN know scale matters for $$$$. Scale doesn't matter for rights. Again, these companies are using your outrage as a marketing tool. They are not, never have been and never will be open. It's not just Meta. Twitter/X is the same. They are all the same.
Correct. There's no such amendment like "slavery is okay, up until 11 people then it's bad"
If slavery is allowed then it is. If it's a million or 1 it doesn't matter, it's equally allowed. If we give someone the right to freedom that means ALL get the right to freedom.
> Ten people being denied their rights is no different from hundreds of millions?
Do I really have to explain this? We cannot permit even one person denied their rights. It isn't acceptable in small quantities and then suddenly become a problem when it's 200 million.
But as I have clearly stated and has been obvious for years, you don't have a right to use privately owned web sites. The attempt to paint it as such is only a marketing ploy by those very same sites in order to paint themselves as essential to our lives. They are not. Delete your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. they are garbage.
> Under the principles of free speech, it’s more ambiguous.
I don't think it is. The First Amendment gives companies control of what gets posted to the sites they own. And it gives you that control for the sites you own, too.
> First Amendment gives companies control of what gets posted to the sites they own
No, it does not. It prohibits the government from abridging the freedom of speech.
The First Amendment is a particular expression of the broader principle of freedom of speech/expression [1]. If you are in my home and you express a view I dislike, it is completely within my legal rights to ask you to stop speaking or else be asked to leave. I could not at the same time, however, say I stand for free speech.
> that does not give companies and individuals the ability to choose what they host on their sites?
No, it does not. The First Amendment is silent on e.g. ISPs or payment processors blocking a particular site based on its content. Until 1897, it was unestablished whether it restricted the states in any form [1].
Scale does not matter. Where in the constitution does it say “scale”?You have freedom to censor your small online forum as you see fit, you are welcome to censor your mega-super Facebook platform as you see fit. There is no distinction here. Those people who get kicked off a platform are free to set up their own forums (or go to telegram or whatever)and yell into the cloud about the wrongs done to them and set up their propaganda bot; no law says you have to host them.
It should matter. In fact, this is why antitrust law exists. If ideas are a marketplace, then Facebook has pricing power in that market. Facebook is big enough that it's actions alone dictate the opinion of a large portion of America. Twitter used to be the same way.
The answer to all this censorship is simple: break up Facebook. If we absolutely, positively can't, then make them a common carrier, regulate them like a utility, and strip out all the profit incentive to keep bad actors on the system. The funny thing is that Facebook's crimes are not merely censoring what they believe to be disinformation, but also amplifying people who break their own rules. Facebook and Twitter had world leaders policies intended to justify keeping politicians who break their rules on platform, specifically so they could amplify them, because it made the company money.
In other words, everyone angry that Twitter banned Trump in 2021 should also be angry that Twitter didn't ban him in 2017.
> Facebook, Instagram, etc. moderating content isn't a free speech issue.
When it's at the demand from the white house, it becomes a free speech issue because it's the executive branch that essentially controls what these big bulletin boards are allowed to publish. Furthermore, nothing is for free, so what perks did these big bulletin boards got in return? maybe that administration decided not to proceed with an antitrust lawsuit as long as they complied, we don't know...
I know this narrative is appealing to people when someone they disagree with is in the white house but it isn't true. If you are a member of a country club and then Biden or Trump (whichever you dislike more) has you kicked out of the country club, it doesn't become a free speech issue due to their involvement. There may be other issues but it isn't a free speech issue. So it is with private platforms which already do all kinds of other moderation.
> I know this narrative is appealing to people when someone they disagree with is in the white house but it isn't true. If you are a member of a country club and then Biden or Trump (whichever you dislike more) has you kicked out of the country club, it doesn't become a free speech issue due to their involvement. There may be other issues but it isn't a free speech issue. So it is with private platforms which already do all kinds of other moderation.
"the narrative", who's narrative? Of course it IS a free speech issue when the boss of the country club is the chief of executive branch and being part of the country club is a quid pro quo. Zuck and Dorsey's lackeys back then, they weren't censoring informations unfavorable to democrats or Biden's family for free.
Country club membership is not a free speech issue. I thought this was an obvious enough example everyone could understand. But I guess the tech companies have polluted the definition and nobody remembers civics class.
> Country club membership is not a free speech issue. I thought this was an obvious enough example everyone could understand. But I guess the tech companies have polluted the definition and nobody remembers civics class.
Then why did you use that example at first place? Zuckerberg doing the white house's bidding in exchange for whatever perks Zuckerberg gets in return aren't a "country club". It isn't a private matter. It's absolutely a constitutional issue and a free speech issue.
Sure, they're banning tiktok while letting straight pressure to manipulate news feeds on Facebook is perfectly fine... Because it's the government is the have getting what they want
In 2020, the charity he and his wife run donated hundreds of millions of dollars to local US election offices to help cover extra costs related to the pandemic. Conservatives claim, without evidence of course, that those funds skewed election results toward Democratic Party candidates especially in battleground states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. All of Zuckerbergs earned media -- the "inside look" at his mixed martial arts training, riding futuristic surfboards carrying with a giant 'merican flag, pretending to fight with Musk -- a larger and more seasoned uber clown for the ages -- and virtue-signalling on behalf of fRea SpEAcH pRINSSaPuLLz -- is just part of the act
I feel this is mostly political posturing now that we are close to the election. Whoa is me for doing something the government requested (not demanded) I do during a pandemic. Not the end of the world, but lets not act like the timing is too convenient for a political hot button issue of 'big government'. The feed in FB is already hot garbage, if he really felt this hurt his business he would have said no at the time. Just my opinion.
I'm not sure if I see what you mean with the Stack Overflow idea. SO is purely a technical site, it's very easy to identify what's ontopic and everything else is offtopic. That doesn't apply to general discussion, never mind stuff like news or politics. How do you imagine that would work?
I was thinking like crowdsourced flagging and a reputation based system where users via reputation could be granted increasingly higher responsibilities as they use the site. People who post negative content would be subjected to negative feedback loops where their content would be progressively demoted, reduced visibility or encounter contribution limits. Moderation logs would become public for transparency purposes. Data could be anonymized and provided via API for research purposes.
I'm not sure this holds just by virtue of the system. For example Wikipedia uses a similar model and they are also heavily centralized, the majority of the moderation is done by a very small number of users. If anything, I would say systems like this naturally tend towards a small inner circle.
I want something like you described up until you mentioned moderation. There wouldn’t be a need for it. That’s the whole issue with a single decider getting to suppress content that the rest of your solution solved.
These are all examples of vertically integrated corporate-run centralized platforms and therefore have inherently unilateral centralized moderation with the same sets of legal requirements regarding alignment of policies and enforcement. They are all the same model, effectively.
> Who makes the ultimate call on whether it be Russian disinformation or COVID-19?
Nobody. Hopefully.
There are moderation models which do not have these restrictions but they are inherently incompatible with these platforms.
The fediverse (ActivityPub/Mastodon/Threads/etc) is one example of a different model. I personally think it's obvious this is not a complete answer, easily observed by drama-driven defederation politics.
We need to be exploring and adopting improved moderation mechanisms and tools for networks like Nostr, BlueSky, Matrix, and keep do the same for the infrastructure layer.
Couple the recent UN convention against cybercrime[0] and the EU "SecEUrity Package"[1] with the arrest of Pavel Durov and I hope some of you reading this will wake up to the shift in relevance and urgency of the topics of decentralization and more serious use of E2EE and signatures. This includes taking a critical look at the TLS layer, PKI, and the roles of companies like CloudFlare and Akamai. I'd say a thing or two about the intertwined constriction of the financial rails, deprecation of cash, and the relevance of cryptocurrency... But let's keep that at that.
The problem with Covid censorship (a problem not limited to Facebook) was that Covid was an airborne virus, and the arbiters of allowable speech decided that the truth about Covid was "misinformation" that needed to be suppressed.
How many additional people died because the mitigations we put into place were targeted at a virus with a droplet based spread (like the flu) but not effective against a virus with an airborne spread (like the measles)?
Knowledgeable academics who argued that the costs of lockdowns in schools would far outweigh any possible benefit were suppressed by non-scientists.
All talk of vaccine side effects was labelled misinformation and suppressed, even when accompanied with legitimate and accepted studies.
Etc.
The only common thread between all the possible examples of censorship - from side effects to lockdown effectiveness to the lab-leak theory to the US role in funding GOF research at the WIV - seemed to be that unless you spoke the narrative of the day then you were dangerous to society. Fully unpacking the irony there would take a book.
Many books have been written about this kind of censorship, because suppressing conversation like this never leads anywhere good. It's an enduring and central theme of damn-near all the top dystopian fiction.
It was even here in HN a community of pretty normal people. Remember the discussions of Sweden’s approach to lockdowns? Any mention of it and you were shouted down and blood was surely going to run in the streets of Sweden by dawn the next day. I lost a lot of faith in the HN community then.
The pandemic and the compliance and the us vs. them mentality really opened by eyes. It’s how terrible things happen, people will just do what their told by some perceived authority no matter what.
I'm going to need to see some evidence for this. How is it that I was reading science papers and media reports on them daily at the time, covering all these things you claim were censored?
Droplet vs airborne was a frequent debate, as were the costs/benefit of lockdowns and especially the potential side effects of the vaccines. Information at the time moved lightening quick, things were barely even published before being all over the media.
The lab-leak theory was not taken seriously, but it wasn't censored. I remember several high profile articles on it.
> I'm going to need to see some evidence for this.
It's a google search away friend. I'll source one thing for you though, pick whatever you think is craziest.
> How is it that I was reading science papers and media reports on them daily at the time, covering all these things you claim were censored?
How would I know?
Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Google, YouTube, Twitter, Microsoft, Reddit, Apple, Pinterest, Spotify and Amazon, among many more, have admitted to removing content. Many of those cases were extremely high profile. Facebook removed and suppressed nearly 200 million posts [0], many of them true. Twitter censored scientists for saying true things that the Biden Admin didn't like, as documented in the Twitter Files (which were heavily smeared as a "nothingburger"). [1]
> Droplet vs airborne was a frequent debate
It shouldn't have been. Aerosol scientists emphasized early on that respiratory activities like talking and breathing produce tiny droplets (aerosols) that can stay suspended in the air, potentially spreading the virus. This knowledge should have been applied sooner. Air purification in classrooms and nursing homes could have been a thing almost immediately, but even now it hasn't been seriously pursued. (Outside the top private schools anyway.)
> as were the costs/benefit of lockdowns
For all the debate, they still got rammed through pretty much everywhere. Since then, everything that many people had been saying came true, and now we have a generation of children that teachers are describing as "feral" with the most genuine concern.
Excess cancer deaths, widespread mental health crises, a huge transfer of wealth to the rich, economic hardship for many, a huge rise in domestic violence. The people who predicted this were smeared seven ways to Sunday, and you'd have to be in a strange bubble to have missed it. Perhaps the censorship worked after all?
> especially the potential side effects of the vaccines.
Again, this has been explicitly acknowledged as a topic which got heavily censored, by the companies that did the censoring no less. Facebook, Twitter, Youtube etc all did it, and all report being asked to remove things that "could be seen as" going against whatever position was du jour.
> Information at the time moved lightening quick, things were barely even published before being all over the media.
Some information moved a lot faster than other info... Because of acknowledged mass suppression and censorship.
There's no damn good reason that I and many others could take a glance through Daszak's paper and recognize it as bullshit immediately, but it took years to be acknowledged as such by media and academia.
It also took a long time for those Whatsapp chats where top scientists admit to being told to say that a lab-leak was "impossible", even though they suspected it was quite likely.
To this day, the conversation about funding GOF research has not had its time in the sun.
> The lab-leak theory was not taken seriously
Serious people took it seriously from day one. There was never a good reason not to, and many good reasons to demand an immediate investigation of WIV, GOF research in general, and the role of our own money funding the exact type of research that could create a coronavirus like this.
> I remember several high profile articles on it.
So do I, and I remember them being pretty easy to see for the hack jobs they were as well. The NYT had a genuinely good one after like a year and a half, long over due.
> Your narrative sounds like some fantasy.
Again, you can name one specific thing that I have claimed and ask me to source it for you; I won't do everything. All of this is easily findable.
I didn't even get into some of the gnarlier stuff, like how all across the West nursing homes were seeded with sick patients resulting in a huge number of early deaths. That was a suppressed story you might have missed, even though there were bits and pieces of it written up. Again, there's been very little accountability for that since.
What's pure fantasy is that we had some sort of reasoned debate, followed best-practice protocols, and came to measured decisions.
Science works on consensus and iteration. Government policy generally (and I think should) follow that process, not form policies on minority opinions at the time. For instance, although the droplet vs airborne debate was incorrect initially, the error was found and corrected via consensus, and government policy follow that consensus. That's how it SHOULD work.
Most of your writing is a bias filled rant, complete with misinformation (no, the consensus for science was that the lab leak was extremely unlikely, and still remains so today as far as I've seen, again, a few individual researchers thinking it likely does not make consensus).
You seem heavily invested in going against consensus and best practice, and I'm genuinely not interested in that position as I disagree with it. While things could have been better, given the circumstances the scientific community and world governments generally did a good job at protecting people.
On the topic of what should be allowed on social media, there is room for debate there, but I stand by that freedom of speech does not require you have equal standing or that people listen to you. I don't believe fringe science or non-science deserves equal time in the spotlight. So I suspect we won't be coming to any agreement.
> You seem heavily invested in going against consensus and best practice
You think best practices were followed? ... Really?
And I'll happily go along with a consensus that I feel was freely obtained, which is not what we are talking about. I do it all the time.
> but I stand by that freedom of speech does not require you have equal standing or that people listen to you
Do you believe that the amount you can be heard should depend on how much money you have?
Do you believe that an Administration should be allowed make secret decisions on what's shown to people?
> I don't believe fringe science or non-science deserves equal time in the spotlight. So I suspect we won't be coming to any agreement.
Maybe it wouldn't be fringe if millions of posts about it hadn't been suppressed.
Or if there'd been any serious attempt at investigation - gathering data, scientifically.
Or if we hadn't sent millions of dollars to fund research into this exact thing, and then lied about it as the pandemic raged. That data could have been very useful for policy.
There's a lot to it, and you've shown no sign that you actually understand the arguments. It's all appeals to authorities, who have consistently shown us just how captured they can be for some time now. Think of the 2008 financial crisis, or ivy-league colleges sending riot squads on peaceful protesters, or the APA 'legitimizing' and assisting torture, or the Supreme Court tolerating obvious bribery, Congressional insider trading, etc etc.
Yes best practices were followed, compared to objectively bad practices that you seem to be suggesting.
> And I'll happily go along with a consensus that I feel was freely obtained, which is not what we are talking about. I do it all the time.
Snake oil comment. You feel you get to be the judge of what is valid not actual consensus of experts. Nope. No thanks.
> Do you believe that the amount you can be heard should depend on how much money you have?
That's how it is currently. I'm not sure how you change that without going to something like communism, which surly you are not suggesting.
> Do you believe that an Administration should be allowed make secret decisions on what's shown to people?
100% yes. State secrets exist for a reason. If you mean decisions on what information people are allowed to disseminate then still yes. There are lots of classes of information that are rightly restricted. Excluding state secrets, things like child porn and other people's personal information are good examples. If you are advocating for some sort of anarchy then go find yourself your own island to ruin please.
> Maybe it wouldn't be fringe if millions of posts about it hadn't been suppressed.
Said like every crank with a pet theory. If you want your idea to be taken seriously it's on YOU to convince people and demonstrate evidence of them. It's not others obligation to listen to your crap, let alone fund you to "research" and spread your ideas.
"Best practices were followed, compared to what I imagine you think. Messaging was consistent and based on evidence. No I will not back any of this up in the slightest, nor acknowledge the myriad ways this is demonstrably, laughably false."
Cool, ok.
"Millions upon millions of posts might have been deleted, researchers threatened, media and social media leaned on in various ways, all documented, but the consensus is accurate. Science is a popularity contest, and you're snake oil".
Sssure.
"Money is speech, and the only alternative I can imagine is communism".
Sounds like a you problem tbh. A deep one.
"State secrets can include genuinely bad stuff, so 100% of everything they censor must be bad. Go ruin an island if you want better".
Sane take bud. I actually hate improving things where my family and I live. Also my solution to scientists being censored at global scale was in fact to move to a private island and become a dictator. How did you know? So impressive.
"The lab leak theory is for cranks. If those censored, pressured and threatened scientists wanted people to see their evidence, they should have demonstrated their evidence. Also they don't have a right for their evidence to be seen, or a right to investigate for evidence."
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ free speech is free speech even when you don't like the way it's used. Your right to say what you want doesn't supersede my right not to grant you a platform or even give you the time of day. Even Ben Franklin "moderated" the content of his newspaper. He didn't feel that free speech obligated him to print anything he was given. So this isn't a radical new concept.
Freedom of speech and freedom from speech are two sides of the same coin, just as freedom of religion is also freedom from religion. Moderation isn't a violation of free speech, nor is it a farce. It's free speech being exercised as it was intended.
"Editorial rights" are free speech, they're one and the same.
Nowhere in my comment did I claim free speech requires a platform or an intermediary, they happen to be relevant in the context of the discussion we're having, just as television would be relevant to a discussion of free speech in broadcasting. Free speech doesn't require telecommunications infrastructure, yet it still applies, and broadcasters (even of public access stations) have the right to refuse to air content they don't want to.
You're the one putting limits on free speech despite also calling it a boundless idea.
Lots of countries, including the US had plenty of free speech. There was a kind of freedom golden age from the 70s until the late 90s, and then, 9/11, Patriot Act. It has been all downhill since then.
The United States has free speech by all but the most extreme definitions. The 1st Amendment is well-tested and supported by the courts. Sometimes, like in Citizens United, to an extremely flexible definition of speech (political campaign donations by corporations.)
We're not talking about forcing people's eyes open to watch content, à la 'Clockwork Orange'.
It's not hard to imagine social media discussion being made a lot more meritocratic, and a lot less censorious.
Vital scientific perspectives on topics that affect literally billions of people ought not be secretly censored for political purposes by non-scientists. That isn't really a huge demand; it's pretty basic freedom and science and health stuff.
The most high profile examples are Assange [0] and Chelsea Manning [1]. Daniel Hale. [2] John Kiriakou*. [3] Sami al-Hajj [4].
Snowden chose exile over torture, and so has been separated from his family for over a decade.
Many people were tortured that didn't even work as journalists; just victims of bad metadata or the wrong name.
Many countries and organizations even consider so-called "standard practice" in American jails to constitute torture. Solitary confinement, sometimes for years. Refusal of basic medical care, nutrition, sanitation. Physical abuse from guards. Unmarked graves behind the jail [5].
Nowadays even environmental lawyers can get put in jail for the crime of winning judgments against fossil fuel companies (Donziger [6]).
* - Wasn't physically tortured, but he did reveal torture and was heavily retaliated against for his trouble.
You said "Let others say the wrong thing on your platform, be it advocating against a narrative or revealing evidence of war crimes, and you can be tortured." The "you" refers to the owner of the platform. Which platform owners got tortured for things others said on their platform?
Julian Assange; did the "war crimes" and "torture" part not give that away?
Chelsea was published on Wikileaks as well.
Daniel Hale was published on The Intercept. They faced no consequences, but they also failed to protect Hale's identity. Hale was then made into something of an example (despite many honors from people praising his bravery).
Al Jazeera (Sami al-Hajj's publisher) have been repeatedly lethally targeted lately (with US made and funded weapons) without much comment from US media.
"Free Speech Zones" are a limit on freedom of assembly, not speech. Less about preventing people from saying an offensive thing outside of the zone & more about keeping the physical mass of a protest from disrupting the flow of traffic or causing a security issue
Riiight. And the fact that this keeps protesters far away from anywhere they might be seen, or be effective, or have any impact at all is just an unintended side effect.
Anyway, you're entitled to yourself and W's interpretation. Me, I go with the ACLU on this one.
Most people also don't want their opinions to be silenced or used against them either.
As for limits, I think by now we have collected enough data from social media use to know what kinds of posts border on outright immoral and are a negative to society. Some of these have been captured and prohibited by law. It wouldn't be that hard to use the existing laws and norms as a test bed.
But again some people don't want free speech because they are afraid their feelings may be hurt in an exchange. Mostly boils down to that.
Everyone: Please stop the flaming of Zuck, Meta and any politicians in this thread? Nobody cares how much or little you trust Zuck and these comments contribute nothing to the discussion.
There is great significance and potential conversation here regardless of how accurately Zuck is laying out facts or his intentions behind this letter. We don't want that getting drowned by all-to-predictable echo chamber.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
FWIW, I'm as distrustful of him as the next person but I do think he's deliberately accurate in representation of facts and events in this letter. Including this spicy gem at the end:
Why did Zucc stamp his name on this now, after putting $450m into Biden's campaign in 2020, and willingly censor in favor of the 2020 Biden campaign (covid + Hunter biden).
You've got to wonder why he seems to be signaling to the Trump campaign that he is taking sides.
My guess is either hoping for kickbacks or to thwart retribution for 2020.
The evidence shows that a disproportionate amount of funding went to urban areas in key swing states, which generally lean Democrat. Never saw a single ballot drop box out near a corn field. The money helped fund those sorts of initiatives.
> But election officials have said there is no indication of favoritism in how the money was distributed, according to previous AP reports. The board of the Center for Tech and Civic Life also includes Pam Anderson, a Republican and former elected clerk of a suburban Denver-area county. Republican election officials have also vouched for the program’s impartiality, including Brian Mead, a Republican election director in Licking County, Ohio.
But even if it was true that urban election offices received disproportionately more funding (obviously they received more in general since more people live there), that's still not the same as "putting $450m into Biden's campaign", which is what was claimed.
I’ll say this to everyone who is so quick to get out the government overreach brush.
I was on tik tok today. I was fed a post that used an AI audio clip of Trump calling republicans dumb and stupid.
People thought it was real. They comment and believe it. The clip has been reused hundreds of time to make new posts.
It will reach millions. This is one example.
There is government meddling in social media. It’s not always ours. That’s the MORE concerning part
i mean look at instagram itself, they have vastly deviated from the original idea of being a photo sharing app to a platform that is reel sharing app. also it will pull you in into doom scrolling if you dont have the ability to limit yourself.
"He regrets", no he doesn't. He got something we don't know in return for his allegiance to the democrats, he is a businessman after all, but now he sees that the rats are fleeing the sinking ship and he wants in with the Trump campaign...
Musk is free to do what he wants with his platform, but let’s remember Facebook, x, TikTok, instagram, etc are all free to censor their content as they see fit. They are under no obligation to be a free for all. While they can do that like X, not all choose to. That’s also respecting their own Constitutional rights as an organization. Freedom of speech means controlling the narrative of your platform as much as you like, as you are not stopping those people you kick off from forming their own platform as happened with Gab, Truth, etc.
here we go again. another election cycle where some of the loudest voices with some of the largest platforms ever in history will be declaring they’re not being allowed to speak.
the reality is, they’re loud, they have easier and larger access to more people than anyone ever in history. the reality is also that they’re just mad people speak back to them.
people talking back to them is what they’re really upset about.
honestly i can’t wait for this election cycle to be over.
> another election cycle where some of the loudest voices with some of the largest platforms ever in history will be declaring they’re not being allowed to speak
Willful misinterpretation. He's claiming that the government encouraged FB to censor in a way that violated his values of truth and free speech, not that Zuckerberg himself feels censored.
Did Zuckerberg himself support conspiracy theories? Or does he regret succumbing to government requests for censoring that type of content? Sounds to me like he wants to allow certain kinds of speech on his platform, regardless of whether or not he personally agrees with them.
He probably hates how expensive it was/is to now support government requests, and how many governments are big enough to bully "his" platform into giving the same support other governments have gotten.
Literally Zuckerberg is quoted as saying he didn't remove posts: "[USG] “expressed a lot of frustration” when the social media platform resisted.".
It would be much better if the article actually posted the contents of the government email. Everything we saw from say the Twitter files in this regard is some gov employee asking if X post complied with Y Twitter policy and if-not if the post should be removed. That gov employee didn't write Y policy, it was Twitter's own policy. I suspected a similar thing happened here where Facebook has a fake news policy [1] and a gov employee was asking them if given posts were in violation of it.
I assume he’s familiar with the transparency standards of his own site. And he still calls whatever happened pressure. So it’s entirely possible it wasn’t as innocuous as you suggest.
If a major government agency repeatedly requests you follow certain guidelines and gets frustrated when you don’t, it might be reasonable to feel pressured or threatened, even if they’re your own guidelines. I know I’d be, even by what was revealed in the Twitter files.
Their system is designed to push engagement. My guess is that COVID conspiracies generated this engagement, and their system automatically pushed it to the top. We already know that a lot of dishonest but emotionally charged speech gets pushed up by the algorithm.
IF COVID conspiracy theories got pushed up by this algorithm, as opposed to what would be produced by a 'dump pipe', then yes, with the power that Zuck has over facebook, he supported conspiracy theories, in the interest of making money.
What I don't understand about this is the partisan spin of the story - much of Covid 19 happened under the Trump administration, including the most severe lockdowns before vaccines, and corresponding information warfare and articles about how people out on the streets are evil.
Blaming Biden/Harris for this is an incredibly revisionist take thats surprising considering its very recent 'history'.
In a few years they are going to be sorry for the other end of the spectrum because the issue stems from the fundamentals of their business: lack of mechanism to hold civil discussion, one person pretending to be multiple people, institutions pretending to be people.
When a BS is viewed 10M times and its correction is viewed 10K times, what do you do? Demote the content you assume that it's BS but this time you have the problem of demoting non-BS content that happens to be outside of the mainstream narrative. This time you get collapse of trust to institutions.
Now that Mark is very sorry, it spreads on the social media as "We told you that the vaccine was a conspiracy". God help humanity on the next pandemic because awful lot of people wouldn't trust in anything and will roll with the conspiracy theory they are last convinced of.
Twitter's community notes are quite effective but they are simply very low bandwidth and very small number of BS gets community noted. Also, the war spreads to the community notes and they too sometimes are complete BS.
IMHO, these social media companies should be forced to work with open to inspection systems. I don't know, maybe everyone should be able to ssh in read-only mode into the servers and honeypot servers should result in prison times for the involved.
It is not OK for companies to be able to pick whom voice should be lauder and do that in secret. The western world should drop the censorship ideas and just focus on accountability.
> Twitter's community notes are quite effective but they are simply very low bandwidth
That's why they are effective. I review Community Notes sometimes and the right assessment is almost always "no note needed". A lot of attempted CNs are just arguing with the poster's opinion, which belongs in replies. CN is meant to be for correcting cases where something is objectively false or missing critical context, and it does quite well at that. People are very good at spotting edited videos, mis-dated photos and so on, which is the bread and butter of real fact checking. Not very exciting but useful. Facebook could do worse than just reimplementing the system. It's certainly far better than letting activist run NGOs be editors.
If said activists are part of a company that approves of their activities why isn’t their censorship legitimate? Commenters/posters are free to take their comments and posts somewhere else. Why don’t the “censors” get a say on what goes up on their platform?
They still control it, and it’s still their right as a corporation. I’m asking where is it wrong or in the US Constitution that says a company has to allow all points of view? That’s a moral call, and I can see people arguing that, but it is not illegal or amoral from the point of the company or those who say free speech/property rights apply to all
At least an NGO will likely have a consistent point of view. The CN algorithm, apparently, requires “agreement from contributors who have a history of disagreeing.” Let’s say we have an entirely hypothetical scenario where the two primary political groups arguing over notes are a milquetoast centrist party and a far-right party susceptible to conspiracy theories; accordingly, any notes that are agreed upon will either be extremely obvious (“the sky is blue” but not, perhaps, “the president’s wife is not a man”) or will tilt center-right. That seems far from objective to me. And that’s to say nothing of thumbs-on-the-scale tweaks to the algorithm by the platform owner, which will be undetectable, or changes to the political makeup of the editors.
I don’t think there’s any way to algorithm your way out of non-trivial fact-checking. Tech is not the solution to these kinds of fundamentally social problems.
(I should add that the best-case scenario here is an emergent and stable cabal of intellectually-rigorous editors, perhaps of varying political persuasions, similar to what happened to Wikipedia. But that’s barely different from fact-checking by some NGO.)
OK, so Facebook at the request of the Biden Harris administration censored the Hunter laptop story and knew it was not actually Russian disinformation.
It’s not like you could draw a straight line between this action and something you’d categorize as election interference.
You’re thinking of the FBI, who reported to Trump. The Biden campaign reported things like the non-consensual nudes which did not have any justification as a public interest story.
I don’t have to make an effort to believe it. It’s what all of the evidence shows – even your guys running through Twitter’s internal communications for months couldn’t find any evidence of the alleged censorship campaign. The best Taibi could come up with is presenting links to deleted tweets and counting on his readers not to check archives to realize they were nude photos rather than something politically relevant.
Out of curiosity, if Trump was President for 4 years and near the end of that term, didn't have control over the FBI (which seems to be what you're insinuating, please forgive me if I've misunderstood you)... Why would anyone want to elect him again?
That’s one possibility. Another is that your guy just isn’t very good at management, which would be supported by his business career, or that the problem here is that the FBI was acting in good faith following relevant code and policy but you wish that was not the case.
You'll have to clarify your meaning. "Nobility" doesn't apply literally in this context and there are too many metaphorical applications to follow what you're trying to say.
If I might infer you are implying that the President can't fully control the bureaucracy due to various checks and balances put in place against capricious replacement of the whole thing (which the US tried early in its history and discovered was hellishly disruptive)... The question presents itself again. If Trump can't "lead the nobility," as it were, why elect him again?
Notably, Meta's algorithmic feed evolved so rapidly that it had major consequences before they were well understood.
1) FB launched and was able to scale past MySpace by making its feed algorithmic and gracefully degrading the freshness of content to get good uptime while MySpace was unusable during peak hours of the day.
2) FB realized that the feed being algorithmic could be a good thing, and could drive engagement directly, apart from simply avoiding downtime.
3) FB realized that the algorithmic feed was the heart of its ad platform.
4) Users got an explosion of sponsored content that overwhelmed the useful human content from friends and family.
5) Zuck decided to focus on News content and vowed to make FB the place to go for news.
6) The algorithmic feed created incredible virality and rapid spread of sensational, triggering content. Donald Trump's campain in 2016 exploited this characteristic and was able to exert great control over attention simply by Donald saying outlandish and intentionally polarizing things.
7a) This tactic, combined with viral content from other fringe groups (with questionable sponsorship & eaily funded via the ad platform) was credited with Trump's victory in the 2016 election. News orgs, motivated by profits and engagement, kept publishing more and more of the sensational stories which gave Trump's approach more and more power. Those opposed to Trump unwittingly fueled his rise in their naïveté about how the algorithm was amplifying his worldview when they shared stories about how abhorrent it was.
7b) This was a stunning blow to Meta and led to the rapid creation of internal censorship teams in response to pressure from political leaders.
8) Facebook's voluntary censorship was among the first in a movement to de-platform a wide variety of political speech in the US and other nations. Family members of top US officials were high level execs and FB, and there was/is a revolving door between Meta and government, even between Meta and the CIA (Meta's internal "disinfo" team is staffed mainly by ex-CIA info ops experts and analysts).
9) All this led to the creation of new, "anti-censorship" platforms, the purchase of Twitter by Musk for political reasons, and a variety of other consequences.
10) Now Zuck finds that consumers have lost some trust in the FB brand and there is tremendous pressure to keep the ad business profitable, but most importantly that hiring thousands of content police is very expensive and has unintended consequences.
We can hope that the US Government chooses to resort to more direct attacks on free speech and gives up the approach of pressuring firms to do anti-democratic things. With most Americans happily consuming an algorithmic feed that aggressively suppresses dissent, it is funny to think about the impact on society it has compared with something like China's great firewall.
If you want to see what's been "moderated" away from you on Hacker News:
Click your username at the upper right:
Turn on "showdead": showdead: yes. (defaults to "no")
There are a number of dead posts in this thread. I'd post some here (some of which don't appear to violate any HN guidelines, I'll note), but probably those same moderators would kill this one, too.
HN allows everyone with sufficient karma to vouch for dead comments (or flag comments), I suspect most of the comment-level moderation you see is crowdsourced to fellow commenters; a still-dead comment means most of those who see choose to keep it dead.
HN is awesome because of the rules and moderation (including bans); any unmoderated forum devolves into a cesspit; and it only takes a surprisingly few bad apples to ruin a community.
I wonder if something like Slashdot's metamoderation system could be used to tamp down such abuse.
One problem with metamoderation is that once a particular forum becomes an echo chamber, even metamoderation will unconsciously but repeatably ignore "valid" information from the other side and amplify misinformation from their own side. But if the site owners specifically searched for good-faith users from multiple viewpoints to serve as the jury pool for metamoderation, this could be workable.
There was some post about Israel the other day (might have been Google's relationship to Israel or something) where every comment about the war starting last year was highly visible, while every comment about what happened prior to last year was dead.
I'd be careful about generalizing from one case, or even from all the cases you've seen, because people (all of us) tend to notice and put much greater weight on the posts we dislike. (Basically the same mechanism by which painful memories tend to be deeper than pleasurable ones.)
Those contentious threads never last long here for that reason. Reddit is 90% those sorts of heavily moderated comment threads where everyone agrees with each other and those who don't align get removed or downvoted. People can always just go there.
The HN crowd like reddit leans massively progressive/democratic. As such any thinking outside normal or contrarian views are massively suppressed.
Classic contrarian (to HN) around WFH, Capitalism, Elon Musk, Tesla, Regulation is downvoted and even flagged
The HN crowd is far right but they would never admit it. Most people are unaware of how political parties shift in composition and ideology over the decades.
The contemporary American software engineer resembles the professional class Reagan Republicans who dominated the suburbs in the 80's and 90's.
Center-right, I'd argue, but that's true of the Democratic party. HN is very far from far-right in that bigotry and racism isn't tolerated here (nor should they be). But HN is USA in origin and USA politics are further right than most of Europe.
Moderators don't tolerate bigotry and racism on HN. I agree with that. But there were quite a few comments yesterday discussing Fyodor Dostoevsky who implied it was impossible for Russia to produce culture because it's people are monsters or something. Extreme ethnic hatred. So the users within the software community share many of the same faults regarding bigotry that the rest of humanity has.
Same goes for commentary on Chinese people or Palestinians, though nowhere near as extreme in animosity as that towards the Russian.
If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, that by no means implies that the post is ok or somehow blessed by the mods. The likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it*. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here.
You can help by flagging such a post or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com. It was only because someone brought those unacceptable comments to my attention that I was able to respond. We can't moderate what we don't see!
The general problem with "racism" online is that people tend to use the word for things that they don't like hearing. E.g. there is an issue of some sort, let's say unemployment caused by subsidized temporary foreign workers being brought in to act as wage suppression for corporations. Saying that you have a concern with policy can often result in a response of "that's racist!".
This is a variation of the little boy who cried wolf. If "racism!" is cried for every single little thing that needs discussion, then one day it actually is racism and nobody will be listening.
Very few people ever complain about this in an egalitarian way, though, like: if wages are too low, let's make them higher. If the market isn't doing what we want, we should change the market.
Instead, it's always about how the immigrants should be locked up or deported. And that's always about immigrants from Mexico, never from Canada or other places.
If you're a legal resident of the country yes, but now the California Senate has passed the bill allowing undocumented illegals to be eligible for a state-backed loan of $150,000 for them to purchase housing in California.
Congratulations to the California taxpayers who are now subsidizing people who walked across the border without paperwork.
Sure nobody says slurs. But I see misogyny and what I would classify as racist every time I'm on hackernews.
Complaining about Indians, complaining about women. But they don't even know that's what they're doing so you can't say "hey stop being sexist". They're surrounded by men all the time, of course it will never click in their heads.
Because orthodoxy blinds the masses, the people upvoting this are the very far-right who LARP as leftists/liberals I'm referring to lol. The detractors are actually liberals who have been painted as far right. Ideology is such a powerful delusion. Nobody can be sure of who they are due to external labeling.
I hadn't read about this concept - it's interesting.
It was really heart breaking coming up in the hacker culture of the late 80s through the 90s, then seeing the potential of "Don't be evil" Google, when it became clearer and clearer that no, hackers hadn't penetrated the capitalist class it was more the other way round. The only "disruption" was a set of new levers for the bankers, handed over freely by people eager to join them.
"Far right" as measured by a hardcore leftie, maybe. If you stand against illegal immigration, criticize superficial DEI "me-too" gestures that do nothing to solve the real issues underneath, or are moderately conservative in any other way, you will have you comments routinely downvoted into oblivion and will be called a Nazi and the second coming of Hitler. Not only in this place, it has become the the norm these days.
I find that HN is generally receptive of criticisms of those things granted you're using enough tact in your post and not just going "I'M SICK OF THESE WOKE JEWISH LEFTISTS RUINING EVERYTHING" in which case go to 4chan and cry there.
Illegal immigration is a far right wing policy goal. It's how mega corps keep wages down. The old "we need illegal immigrants because who else is going to pick lettuce for $1 an hour!" When the answer is well without illegal immigration you'd be forced to pay a legally protected citizen a fair wage.
I think you're looking at the DEI phenomena incorrectly. It's a way for the economically comfortable class to signal virtue without having to experience any of its detractors. Check the Wikis of many DEI proponents and writers. They live in both highly segregated economic and racial neighborhoods.
They live a 1950's far right wing lifestyle at home but wax poetic about DEI for the virtue.
This observation is always highlighted by the absurdity of american politics when they describe candidates like Joe Biden as "far left" when on the european political spectrum (or even an absolute one, if such a thing exists) he'd almost certainly be on the right.
>This observation is always highlighted by the absurdity of american politics when they describe candidates like Joe Biden as "far left"
Joe Biden is by all accounts, center-left. However, the parent comment also describes the "HN crowd" as far-right. What probably is actually happening is that America is extremely polarized, where any side you don't agree with has the "far-[left/right]" label slapped on.
Not trying to start a political discussion but people describing someone like biden as center-left are usually basing this off the policies people of his particular political flavor say they want. What they end up doing is usually very much right-aligned.
No need to involve whatever "political flavor" of people making the judgement. If you compare his views to other politicians, or the electorate as a whole, he's clearly a centrist.
I don’t think that’s clear at all, and I’m not involving the political flavor of people making a “judgment” - I’m saying his particular brand of establishment democrat politics all tend to have the same tendency.
In Canada and most of Europe, Joe Biden would be a hair right of centre-right on most things and centre-right on a few other topics. Only in America is he centre-left, which says a lot about America's Overton window shift.
Biden sounds a lot like Stephen Harper (pre-barbaric-practices-hotline) and just to the right of Brian Mulroney. Joe Clark would be well to his left.
Comparing political rights, lefts and centers across cultures is futile, it's apples and oranges. For example, compare the immigration and integration policies of Biden [or the US] to that of Europe, and you'll find that he and most democrats are, for the most part, further "left."
Looking at the past 10-20 years, how are the immigration policies of the US or the Biden administration [1] further left than France, Germany or the UK - even under a conservative government post-Brexit? The US does have jus soli but I don't consider that to be a left wing thing.
1. Biden was promoting - and willing to sign into law - a border bill written by a Republican; it very nearly passed as it initially had bipartisan support before being scuppered by a presidential candidate.
I disagree with your characterization of why I called the HN crowd, or technology professionals, far right. Having read my God how many comments, articles, tweets etc over the years. I see extremely conservative policy positions. No better example than asking a software engineer, developer VC there opinions on whether "gig" workers should be treated as full time employees with benefits, unionization etc.
The former use technology to do things economically to workers we haven't seen since Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Like preventing a driver from getting new deliveries if those 10 minutes put him over 1 hour of work. It's robber barron extreme right wing economic policy.
>No better example than asking a software engineer, developer VC there opinions on whether "gig" workers should be treated as full time employees with benefits, unionization etc.
And that's a "far right" position? So far as I can tell, even in europe, in most jurisdictions gig workers are treated as contractors rather than employees.
I mean these meanings aren't concrete. Left vs right etc. But historically it was a far right wing position to find ways to exploit labor for profit. The tech industry uses their skill set to accomplish this with algorithms.
>But historically it was a far right wing position to find ways to exploit labor for profit
and historically LGBT rights were far left positions. That doesn't mean they're far left positions today. Moreover if being pro-capital (as opposed to being labor) is "far right", then is being pro-labor "far left"? Is there even a "centrist" or non "far-left/right" position?
Can you give a historical example of such far right stance? Hitler's national socialist and Mussolini's fascist which are historically considered far right certainly didn't have such policies.
The HN crowd is far left but they would never admit it.
Go watch Bill Clinton talk about illegal immigration and border security in the 90s. He'd be considered far right today. Read a book or newspaper from 50 years ago or 100 years ago and look at how much more freedom people had to build homes and businesses without a thousand licenses, permits, taxes and inspections.
There was a time in America where the notion of an income tax or of restrictions on running a business out of your home were considered far-left authoritarian and unconstitutional, but now we've all gotten used to a million regulations on how we use our private property, the government surveilling our communications and finances, government oversight and permission required for all activities.
Admittedly "left vs right" is hardly useful in contemporary politics, things are so multi-faceted and people's notions of what those terms mean is variable. But nonetheless, it's obvious that "the center" of American politics today is drastically far to the left from where it was previously.
In some sense, the 1960s counter-culture liberal progressives "won" and became the center and the establishment. A leftwing extremist in 1968 on issues of feminism, race, social welfare, tax policy, foreign policy, housing policy and probably others is a centrist today.
Environmental issues and unions are the only two areas I can think of where America has stayed the same or moved right since WWII.
The US is the most right-leaning country out of the first world.
> but now we've all gotten used to a million regulations on how we use our private property
Many of these originating from the right. Because the right is not, and has never been, a party of small government. They want big government, just their big government. That has meant historically enforcing slavery, then segregation, suppressing women's rights, suppressing abortion, dictating what you can do in the bedroom, and on and on and on. These are all conservative policy - and all HUGE government.
> it's obvious that "the center" of American politics today is drastically far to the left from where it was previously
Yes, this is called the progression of time. This is why people who are unable to change their mind over time end up falling behind and sounding crazy.
Have you ever asked an old dude about how they feel about black people? Whoa! Clearly they grew up in a different time. Some let that shit go like they should, some don't. Those that don't are destined to be left to the past.
Just a few decades ago a slight right winger might be anti-integration. Slight. A far right-winger would be lynching people in their neighborhood. So you're correct - we've moved past that.
And, in 40 years, if I personally don't change my beliefs, I will also sound crazy. To conservatives that's scary or something. To me, that's how the world works. I say either adapt or be relegated to the insane.
I think you have it backwards. Open borders are a right-wing goal. See Bernie Sanders comments on the subject circa 2015. How the Koch brothers want open borders to weaken labors leverage.
The wealthy and powerful don't benefit from citizenship. When you have wealth you can just pay for what you need or want. It's the common person who needs the benefits and protections that come from citizenship.
You're on the right path, pointing out how counter-culture liberals won but they are in fact right-wing. They LARP as liberals/leftists.
HN crowd is democrat but not progressive. Reddit crowd is progressive
Also HN doesn't censor as much, libertarian-right posters that would've gotten downvoted to hell on reddit actually have an outlet here. Religious right has no outlet on either site
A long while ago I read an article predicting the downfall of all unpaid internet moderation because it would attract the type of person who both has copious free time and enjoys having power over others.
Reddit during covid showed us just how true that was. Moderation was so ridiculous you'd get banned from subreddits for posts which were the same as the CDC's advice at the time they were made.
HN has largely avoided that because it has at least partly paid moderators. The worst parts are the mass flaggings which I think are still a mistake. Not least because they now hilariously happen to every one of PG's posts.
Sometimes, the actual mods in charge of the site have heavily penalized certain accounts, either manually or via an algorithm (I don't know the details). The comments posted by these accounts appear to start off "dead", though they may be vouched for by high-karma users. This will make those comments appear normally.
I've moderated a number of forums in my time. And the hardest users to deal with are the ones that insist on breaking the rules 10% of the time, and who refuse to stop. Even if they contribute positively much of the rest of the time, they create far too much work.
(Also, I have zero interest in participating in unmoderated forums. Unmoderated forums are either overrun by spam, or by users who somehow manage to spend 50 hours a week flaming people. Look at any small-town online newspaper where the same 5 people bicker endlessly after every single news story. And if I don't like how a forum is moderated, I find another one.)
> And the hardest users to deal with are the ones that insist on breaking the rules 10% of the time, and who refuse to stop. Even if they contribute positively much of the rest of the time, they create far too much work.
There is _always_ a technical solution here. If you can't figure it out, keep thinking. There's never a reason to ban/moderate your core users for 10% rule violations. Instead, that shows a weakness of the software. More transparency helps.
> .. and this is the sort of hostility one attracts whenever one asks for transparency: the mask drops and the fangs come out.
Let me get this straight: you asking me to rationalize other people's actions is "transparency", but my asking you to explain your (in)action is hostility? It doesn't sound like you are contributing in good faith. Have a great day.
It's been my experience that people complaining about community moderation are never arguing in good faith.
The bad actors have gotten incredibly adept at dragging a forum down into hell. Either they turn a group into one that serves their ideology, or they make the group unusable for its original members.
Increasingly so. There's a terrible, almost schizophrenic feeling that comes with having to wonder if the person you are talking to is real. It seems obviously the case on some platforms and scary to wonder about on platforms like this and Reddit.
"Good" as in ~fun to think about" (I agree!), or more like "is an accurate description of what is going on here with my comment" (in this case at least, that would be inaccurate)?
What is happening in this thread is rather interesting though, don't you think? And this same sort of thing is happening all over the world right now, as we speak, nudging humanity toward who knows what kind of suboptimal, undesired outcomes.
> However, look at the dead comments here and, for each, tell us why it would turn HN into a "cesspit."
This is an impossible task and you know it. Asking your opponents to enumerate every dead comment on a thread with hundreds of comments is not approaching the issue in good faith.
Looking at a selection of dead comments on this thread, I see flame-baiting on israel/palestine, flame-baiting on trans and racial issues, assorted comments whose content might have been acceptable if it wasn't 40% profanity by wordcount, a bunch of unnecessary personal attacks, and assorted people redefining words and then asserting that only their new definition is the correct one.
I see basically nothing that would improve HN if it were not dead. I see a lot that would make HN actively worse if it were not dead.
> This is an impossible task and you know it. Asking your opponents to enumerate every dead comment on a thread with hundreds of comments is not approaching the issue in good faith.
No, it's not impossible. I count 15 dead now, not "hundreds" (when I said that originally, it was about 5).
Let's make it easy: why does bigbacaloa's go, and all the others stay?
I was prepared to disagree, but actually I don't see what the problem is with that post.
Here it is, so others don't have to dig around for it. It appears to have been a top level comment.
"This pseudo-apology is the worst sort of political expediency. He did what the government asked while denying doing it, now apologizes for it to curry favor with the rightwing world he alienated. It's like the NY Times pushing the weapons of mass destruction narrative during the Iraq war and later running long articles about what bad journalism that was."
Another point of evidence of why HN is great. Even reading this point in this argument had me thinking and wondering why it was banned and then the moderator comment right below (but can't be replied to?) explains the reasoning.
One of the best uses of HN for me is watching my brain jump to conclusions only to have them slapped down by a well thought out counter argument.
This forum isn't perfect but I haven't found a better public discussion board on the internet. Hat tip to the moderators and others making this happen. Your work is appreciated.
Look at the posting history of the comment posters, not just the comment.
In many cases it's not the particular comment, it's the particular poster who is shadow-banned, and all of their comments are dead on arrival (to everyone but themselves, the definition of shadow banned). But people with showdead=true and enough karma can vouch for them to resurrect them if they're worthwhile.
Broken windows theory: actively moderating is precisely what keeps shit posters away. There's no gain from doing it when their posts are removed so they give up quickly.
I'm sure we can pick and choose good/bad examples from every thread, but I for one definitely feel the bar for civility/respect here is way higher than virtually anywhere else, so I'm choosing to believe this current system contributes to that and that the pros outweigh the cons.
After reddit's nonsense last summer I appreciate HN more than ever. If it means the moderation is a bit "too strict" then so be it. That was also the case on some of reddit's (and other sites') best communities. /r/AskHistorians immediately comes to mind.
Either it's from someone who happily continues to break rules and is effectively shadow banned because they continue to cause problems and break rules, or the comment doesn't contribute well enough to the topic. This could mean it's just being insulting, or off-topic.
In short: Nothing of value was lost. Especially since you can toggle it on.
Presumably those accounts are dead because of repeated rule breaking, not because their specific post in this thread broke the rules. And there might be more dead comments here on average because politics+tech draws a lot of a certain type of commenter(the type of commenter that might get banned)
The first of those (11 months ago) is where the account was banned.
If you have specific questions on accounts, users, sites, comments, posts, etc., which you feel are improperly flagged, killed, or banned, you can always email the mods at hn@ycombinator.com. I do this frequently, usually with suggestions (e.g., title or URL changes), sometimes with questions (earlier today a site which showed up dead, turns out it's a hard paywall, which I eventually tracked down dang's comment on, though not in an easily-searchable way).
It's very easy to claim censorship these days when in fact it's usually more benign than that, companies with large communities generally like to avoid anything inflammatory. Even still, like it or not, you don't have a right to say whatever you like most places on line. It's a privilege. Right or wrong that's just how it is.
It's super interesting to see the sentiment on this comment.
During EU hours, it was upvoted a surprising amount, and then when the US active time zones come in, it's downvoted pretty significantly.
What a beautiful little bellwether from a place (hn) where I appreciate the discourse I really appreciate.
I actually expected the opposite.
Hacker News is the only online community that doesn't feel like it's actively driving me insane. Whatever censorship is being done, whether in good or bad faith, I'm all for it.
I did this. I spent 10 minutes diffing, only a few things weren't listed. One was just full of cursing and not a useful piece of discussion. Another was a comment claiming that Trans was a concept made up 2 years ago.
So far seems working as intended.
What might be more useful is to get your nerd hat on and run a few diffs through sentiment analysis and post that as a topic. I'd definitely read a ML / Sentiment Analysis / Bias analysis type document, would be a great topic.
Thanks for sharing this, otherwise I may never know tge meanings of the terms on HN. I hope there was a guide.
Meanwhile I saw a dead post 0 minutes ago, is is true that someone flagged it immediately? I personally don't find the post evil but only little boring.
If they've been flag killed, it will say [flagged][dead] (and yes I've seen it happen within a minute of someone commenting on very popular threads). If it's just [dead], you should look at their comment history because chances are they've been banned by dang. Alternatively, some people register on HN via Tor which also auto-shadowbans them until enough people vouch for their comments.
Of the four dead comments I see, two are content-free trolling and one is a completely unrelated discussion about Jim Jordan. The fourth is a bit more borderline, but I think a reasonable person could conclude that the commenter is more interested in getting people riled up than having a discussion.
The vast majority of comments on political/social topics fit your description. If you're thinking of the one I'm thinking of (not mine, if it matters), I can't think of any reasonable test that would conclude "this should be dead, but all those others can stay."
I agree that the vast majority of comments people would like to make on political/social topics violate the HN rules. Having seen political threads on Reddit, where any genuine insight is buried under a flood of namecalling and polemics, I think that's for the best.
> the vast majority of comments people would like to make on political/social topics violate the HN rules
Correction: delete the "would like to"
Also, comparing this to Reddit is sort of Godwin's Rule transposed to a different domain. "Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick" is pretty much what you're saying.
[Dead] means they've been downvoted to oblivion. Moderators had nothing to do with it -- those were other users on HN. I always browse with "showdead" on and the vast majority of [Dead] posts are awful. They don't need to violate HN Guidelines, they were killed by the community.
[Flagged] means it was killed by a moderator. Those are more rare. I don't agree with everything that is flagged but I think HN has a great moderation policy overall. Often when posts are flagged, the moderator responds explaining why.
Flagged 100% does not need moderator involvement. Even being post restricted needs no moderator involvement.
I have had no shortage of comments flagged by a certain group of people that like their “alternate facts” and share their HN posts to discord for brigading / mass down voting anyone that calls their lies out.
It only takes 2-3 quick user flags for your comment to be permanently, automatically flagged, and only a couple of those to get comment restricted.
Comments cannot be hidden by downvoting. Comments are marked [flagged] [dead] only after other users have clicked on the timestamp and selected "flag." I think that these things get conflated because comments that tend to attract heavy downvotes also attract flagging. The [flagged] [dead] comments are mostly (entirely?) killed by the actions of ordinary users, not moderators.
Comments that are marked [dead] without the [flagged] indicator are because the user that posted the comment has been banned. For green (new) accounts this can be due to automatic filters that threw up false positives for new accounts. For old accounts this shows that the account has been banned by moderators. Users who have been banned can email hn@ycombinator.com pledging to follow the rules in the future and they'll be granted another chance. Even if a user remains banned, you can unhide a good [dead] comment by clicking on its timestamp and clicking "vouch."
HN has had plenty of major threads on Israel-related topics.
Your submissions are getting flagged and moderated, not because they're Israel-related, but because you're using the site primarily for political battle and flamewar. In fact it looks like you've been using HN exclusively for that. We ban accounts that do that, whichever side of whichever issue they're doing it about, because it goes completely against the intended spirit of the site. That ought to be obvious to anyone who has read the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I'm not going to ban you right now, but if you keep this up, we're going to have to.
This pseudo-apology is the worst sort of political expediency. He did what the government asked while denying doing it, now apologizes for it to curry favor with the rightwing world he alienated. It's like the NY Times pushing the weapons of mass destruction narrative during the Iraq war and later running long articles about what bad journalism that was.
> The Hunter Biden "story" was merely revenge porn of a private citizen gained by hacking a private laptop, they were right to censor it, they would do so for any other private citizen
But this wasn't their stated reason for it. They claimed it was "Russian propaganda" or a fabricated story knowing full well it was not. Then they try and gaslight you into thinking they did the censorship for principled reasons rather than a cynical ploy to hold onto power. Some people fall for it, others learn not to trust those who consistently lie about their manipulative behavior.
The idea that a private social/sharing/communications platform should be required to carry the messages of the head of government is strongly authoritarian and quite unconstitutional.
It’s incredible to me that people will argue the government’s lack of control over mass media platforms is censorship.
IMO, nobody should be required to carry government propaganda.
yeah but you can still disagree with them for doing so. I don't get why so many people think the 1A protects them from criticism of the way they exercise their own freedom of speech. It's not just your freedom of speech that gets protected.
You can define "censorship" any way you want, but if you use it for cases where liberty is increased then you're pretty much making it useless for discussion. We normally use it as the flipside of freedom of speech. It just doesn't make sense to define it in such a way that increased censorship can also mean increased freedom of speech.
You want to think in terms of liberty.
There's always a line to be drawn... when are you preventing a message from being heard vs. when are you forcing someone to propagate a message they don't want to express? The line is the balance of liberty -- whose freedoms are being impinged the most?
In the case of Trump and Facebook, we can put it more directly. The harm to Trump and the people who want to hear/promote his messages vs. the harm to Facebook and the people who receive his messages. Facebook is very far from the only place most people can hear from Trump, so there's little harm to Trump and supporters of his if Facebook declines to carry his messages. That means it's mostly up to Facebook to decide whether being a conduit for his kind of messages is good for it or not. He certainly seemed to violate all kinds of their terms and conditions, so for one thing it would be hard to moderate Facebook at all if they allowed him to stay. Not to mention, it's really not good for democratic society in general to propagate false election conspiracies. (I doubt Facebook or any corporation cares about something like that, but they may still consider it if enough of their users care.)
Regarding the first amendment... censorship and freedom of speech is certainly a broader topic than the first amendment. It's relevant here though, because we're talking about whether Facebook should somehow be required in some way to propagate messages from the government, even if it doesn't want to.
Dude are you an LLM? It's an article about zuck saying the government pressured Facebook into censoring posts and how he wishes he had pushed back against them instead of complying.
I completely agree, but that same entity cannot state they support free speech ever again. If they own their censorship, that's completely fine, but this backtracking with "cool Zuck" schtick is ridiculous. The stain to their reputation on free speech is permanent.
> The idea that a private social/sharing/communications platform should be required to carry the messages of the head of government is strongly authoritarian and quite unconstitutional.
Except it's neither authoritarian nor unconstitutional. Private companies are already _required_ to carry government messaging. Several examples: emergency broadcast system, AMBER alerts or presidential alerts (which cannot be silenced) to your phone.
AFAIK there is not a similar legal basis for requiring a social media company to participate in the rebroadcasting of a specific individual's speech just because of their current elected position.
If the government does not wish to be subject to corporate content moderation perhaps they should publish their social posts on their own platform.
I still think it is ridiculous that public safety notices are frequently distributed exclusively on Twitter now. During the pandemic my city was publishing curfew announcements solely on Twitter - not being a Twitter user, I only heard of them through word of mouth.
Ah, welcome to the internet, then! I suggest you research internet access in Iran, China, Pakistan. Further reading: India disabling internet access to entire regions of the country during political upheavals.
I would say the exact same thing about the Republicans if they were in power. Right now they aren't so they aren't committing the same offenses. I think they are just as capable as being corrupt and fascist like the Democrats are right now.
How come Musk has never raised awareness on censorship issue in China - which is orders of magnitudes worse than the US? He very clearly has no problem speaking out against other countries governments
Perfect example of Whatabout-ism. I'm not talking about China, I'm not a citizen of China and I will never even visit that country. Why are you mentioning China when this is about the US?
Please look up what "fascism" means, it will improve the discussion. Don't get me wrong, you have the right to say what you want, even if it is wrong. But I guess it is not so much about saying what we want anyway but meaning what we want, isn't it?
This whole article is really confusing. It sounds like there were two things:
- Covid disinformation
- Some nonsense about Hunter Biden
and they're being conflated. What does Hunter Biden's laptop have to do with preventing Covid disinformation? A disease that was estimated to kill up to 30m people worldwide.
The US gov pressured social media companies to censor posts about both those topics for political reasons, even though a lot of what was said turned out to be true
> censor posts about both those topics for political reasons
In the context of Covid disinformation, "political reasons" is simply not correct. We're only 2 years out but it was clear even at the time that there was a concerted effort to pretend there wasn't an active pandemic and governments were right to crack down on it.
The only thread connecting them is "disinformation" which is tenuous at best. It's not clear to me what Zuckerberg's letter refers to because the article seems to move between the topics as though they're basically the same thing.
According to Wikipedia itself, the WHO seems to find it a likely theory...
>The report added weight to calls for a broader probe into the theory that the COVID-19 virus could have escaped from a laboratory.[6][7] However, a WHO report states "introduction through a laboratory incident was considered to be an extremely unlikely pathway".[3] Since then, the head of the WHO COVID-19 origins investigative team, Peter Ben Embarek, has stated that the Chinese authorities exerted pressure on the WHO report conclusions, and that he in fact considers an infection via a researcher's field samples to be a "likely" scenario.[8]*
Are you disagreeing with the “chilling effect” section of the article, or are you implying the effect could not have been real due to the current length of the article?
There were certainly attempts to suppress it such as the Proximal Origins paper. And the public "We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories" letter where privately the were saying it was "so friggin likely". The reasons do seem kind of political, though more to cover up establishment cock ups and not upset the Chinese than a left right thing.
Even today Wikipedia says "explanations, such as speculations that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a laboratory have been proposed, such explanations are not supported by evidence." But if you look at the actual evidence it was almost certainly a lab leak.
There's a scene is "30 Rock" where Alec Baldwin gives a speech the morning after a party that got way out of hand about how they must now all face each other in the cold, hard light of dawn. To me, it sort of feels like we are living through that now after covid. We've learned things about people that we didn't really want to know; particularly that others don't place a lot of value on our lives (something that anyone who grew up with a health condition could already have told you). It's all rather discomfiting.
I suppose it's human nature to reach out for miracle cures, but the way people behaved in the pandemic still surprised me. Reaching for random drugs like hydroychloroquine or dewormers (why couldn't it have been a fun drug like cocaine?) and eschewing actual covid vaccines makes one wonder how it is possible that one shares a reality with their fellow humans. Obviously they do not.
It's pretty simple, the different realities like you said. People consume and trust different streams of information (for a whole bunch of reasons). Your info stream probably told you that people were gobbling horse goo and aquarium cleaner and dying by the droves, while threatening your grandmother, and you believed it because the sum total of your experience told you that was the most believable of the options.
Other peoples experiences led them to believe sources saying that there was a thing called ivermectin that sees use in agriculture but also in billions of human doses as an antiparasitic that seems to be helping against covid (and that big corporations are not to be trusted).
There are life stories behind each of these perspectives. Many people with either of these perspectives had never heard of ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine before their media of choice started praising or condemning them. Then suddenly they were experts.
I never took any of it. Was that the right decision? It seems to have worked out at least. I do try to avoid the trap of thinking any of the stuff blasted out by the media corporations, at no cost to you, has any other purpose than to get you to 1) vote a certain way or 2) buy a certain product, or 3) support some forever war. The news corps aren't just generously informing you - there has to be an ROI.
Interestingly I knew an engineer who took fish medication long before covid, and I came to respect that sort of DIY ethos for medicine and have taken it on myself where possible. Veterinary medications are just medications, so that sort of characterization tended to fly over my head a bit. But if there was a drug that easily cured covid, it would be obvious because it would easily cure covid.
> But if there was a drug that easily cured covid, it would be obvious because it would easily cure covid.
And that could explain why a lot of people believed ivermectin works: they had covid, they took ivermectin, they got better. They don't see the alternate universe where they didn't take it and they also got better, because that's what happens most of the time.
I'm convinced this is why so many other people think the vaccine was a miracle. We were being blasted with the idea that covid was a death sentence, so if you had a plain old mild case (like most cases were), it had to be because of some intervention (ivermectin or the shots or the phase of the moon).
I think this is true for most of the shit the medical industry tries to push on you, but I'm a kook and I know it.
Yes, the dynamic you identified is why sham treatments have sold for millennia. Teasing out what works is tricky. For some (to include people I knew) covid was a death sentence, but the fatality rate was around one percent, wasn't it? You'd never fly on a plane that crashed in one out of one hundred flights, but still they aren't too bad as odds go. Even so, once the vaccine came out, the only people I knew who died of covid were those who did not take it. Merely the observation of one individual, but it seems to match the wider data that was found.
So given that information, what is one to do? I took the vaccine and take the newer versions now too along with a flu shot.
The worldwide population COVID-19 infection fatality rate was estimated at about 0.27%, so substantially less than 1%. That number varied widely based on age.
> the fatality rate was around one percent, wasn't it?
According to one report at least, it was 1% for folks in their 60s. For younger demographics it was quite a bit less than that.
> We report IFR estimates for April 15, 2020, to January 1, 2021, the period before the introduction of vaccines and widespread evolution of variants. We found substantial heterogeneity in the IFR by age, location, and time. Age-specific IFR estimates form a J shape, with the lowest IFR occurring at age 7 years (0·0023%, 95% uncertainty interval [UI] 0·0015–0·0039) and increasing exponentially through ages 30 years (0·0573%, 0·0418–0·0870), 60 years (1·0035%, 0·7002–1·5727), and 90 years (20·3292%, 14·6888–28·9754).
You make the best decision you can for yourself, and sounds like you did that. The frustrating part is when other people felt entitled to make that decision for you.
As far as I know, no one in my country (The US) was forced to take a covid vaccine. Some were compelled financially I have no doubt, but they would seem to me like fish that just realized that they were swimming in water after not having even realized it their entire lives. No wonder they were pissed; I can't say I've ever really gotten over it myself.
I treat it like anything else: I wouldn't be shocked to see evidence that incorrect things show up in places like the lancet. But I assume it's on par with the best I can get my hands on, so I use it.
I'm gonna skip the "technically not forced" debate, been through it too many times. I'll agree to disagree.
Is the fish metaphor to say that it was some people realizing how little control they have over their lives or something like that? Amen if so.
Yes, it's a profound thing to threaten someone's livelihood, though at the same time, society will squash individuals when genuinely threatened; never doubt that for a minute. For a time, it seemed like the vaccines might stop transmission of covid, but that seems to have been a bust. They do, however seem to rather clearly help an individual's response to the virus, and so it seems like it became a matter of individual responsibility.
As to the fish thing, you understood me correctly - when we are born, we are thrown into a world we did not create and have vanishingly little control over, and seemingly less as wealth and power accumulate into the hands of a few. I'm told that well-adjusted people are capable of adapting to their circumstances, and it is a mark of mental illness that one can not.
> It's pretty simple, the different realities like you said.
Agreed.
> Your info stream probably told you that people were gobbling horse goo and aquarium cleaner and dying by the droves, while threatening your grandmother
That's not even close to the truth. There were reliable reports of people admitted to hospital with this but nobody in their right mind thought "droves" of people were taking dangerous quantities of ivermectin or drinking bleach.
"some nonsense" about Hunter was proven true, tho.
If the Federal Government was telling media companies, right now, that they couldn't show video of Trumps' family sexual escapades (that the Trump family took); that would be similar.
Hunter's pedicure was not russian disinformation, and the government knew that when it told media companies it couldn't be spoken of. That is election interference.
The issue is the science wasn’t in yet to accurately determine what was COVID disinformation, and they went off of politically motivated directives in both cases.
One example is Facebook suppressing the lab-leak theory until May 2021 [0]. Another is it deemed posts claiming the vaccine may not prevent transmission misinformation, despite it not being known otherwise [1].
It's not deterministic output, neither in phrasing or meaning. So it is absolutely not a valid source. It can incidentally be correct, possibly even most of the time, but there's certainly no guarantee. Wikipedia at least references sources (that in turn can be scrutinized/falsified if questionable).
I had verified its points myself and I wanted to be honest and cite it instead of pasting or paraphrasing what it said without doing so and therefore plagiarizing.
ChatGPT, Are you a credible source of information?
> I aim to provide accurate and reliable information based on the extensive range of texts I’ve been trained on, which include a variety of reputable sources. However, because I’m not infallible and my knowledge is based on patterns in data rather than direct verification, it’s a good idea to cross-check critical or detailed information with primary sources or expert opinions, especially for academic or highly specific topics. If you have any doubts or need detailed, current, or specialized information, consulting additional sources or experts is always a smart approach.
When someone starts making claims, there is a tendency for those claims to become "fact" if there isn't sufficient counter-messaging.
Case in point: the idea that conservatives are somehow having their speech suppressed. This is patently false. Twitter has become 4chan. Any number of conservatives topics like anti-vaxxers, Brexit, anti-immigrant propaganda and so thrive on social media, including and especially Facebook.
Now you can argue that this isn't intentional. It's simply a result of these platforms responding to and promoting "engagement bait". There might be some truth to that but at a certain point, particularly if you're the CEO of Meta, you can't play dumb. You should know what your platform is promoting and what benefits you.
What you're seeing here is Zuckerberg is increasingly becoming aligned with the billionaire class and, by extension, the political right (eg [1]). This is the arc that leads to becoming Peter Thiel.
No one, and I mean no one with the possible exception of Noam Chomsky, is a free speech absolutist. Elon, for example, has banned people who have simply hurt his feelings (many times).
And while Zuck is sucking up Republicans in Congress, see how far you get on any of these platforms if you use words like "Gaza", "Israel", "Sde Temain" or "Palestine".
All of these big tech companies have been very successful in pushing the idea that it's "the algorithm" that upranks or downranks content, like there's no human involved. This is propaganda. Humans decide what's in the algorithm and they make those decisions based on what they want it to do.
The same elements that make Reddit and Twitter unpleasant places to comment are also the elements that meant they sustained the discussion around the research (and conspiracies) of the ongoing Covid pandemic. There is no Covid aware community really anywhere else of remotely the same size as on Twitter and secondarily Reddit (which cracked down a bit). The weird part is 4.5 years into this pandemic there are still significant restrictions in most places that don't allow Covid medical papers to be posted and discussed. Its an ongoing problem.
The actual medical field has these debates just fine without reddit or facebook or twitter. By using evidence and peer review. The people having their covid debate on reddit probably don’t work in the field and their opinion is therefore inactionable, unqualified, and moot.
> It's very bizarre that COVID is the poster-boy for social media censorship. The whole thing seems incredibly contrived; no one actually cares about COVID censorship
I agree, it is bizarre. Why weren't we allowed to discuss theories about how Covid was created? What's so wrong with proposing that it may have escaped from a lab? Shouldn't we be allowed to debate the pros and cons of taking medication or wearing a mask?
The whole situation was just an uncomfortable display of our supposed freedom in online discourse. Not even online discourse, peoples careers were threatened for having the "wrong" opinion. The fact that it was over something so contrived like Covid made it all the more disturbing.
Perhaps we've been conditioned to not expect total freedom when discussing highly propagandized topics like war. But Covid? Healthcare? That was an eye-opener for many.
The whole Covid thing gave a lot of people an excuse to have control over others. Turned a lot of people into power tripping sanctimonious busy bodies.
Scare the shit of people, convince them that “The Science” is on their side and the others are all your enemy and boom… there you go.
It was a huge eye opener for me. I’ll never again trust the government nor will I ever fully trust “the science”. And how many people bought into the narrative and how aggressive they got scared the shit out of me. All it would have taken is some “expert” to give permission to physically hurt “anti-maskers” or anybody who didn’t go along with the narrative and things would have gotten much, much much worse. Hell many so-called progressive areas even set up numbers you could call to dime out your neighbors and family for violating all the nonsense the government enacted.
It really opened my eyes to how things like the holocaust happened. How you can convince ordinary people to commit some very horrible things. There are several people I know for a fact would have happily tossed me and my family into the gas chamber over Covid. And that isn’t even hyperbole at all. Given the chance they absolutely would have done so… some are even close family.
…suffice to say my stance on gun ownership has changed considerably since 2020.
Of all the things Zuckerberg could have cited, he chose arguing FOR allowing information that could have materially detrimental effects on living human beings??
I don't know if this is due to their changes in moderation policy, or if AI has overwhelmed them, but I vastly preferred the old news feeds