No, I don’t. I remember when the internet would (it did!) and Usenet would (it did!) and irc and open source and the web (they did!) but social media was always about entertainment and (one way or another) monetization of those technologies. It’s the cancer of our collective mind and achievements.
Why did you trust what The Atlantic and Foreign Policy had to say at the time? Anyone can tell you anything ; that's no reason to take them so seriously you're disappointed if events years later show their claims to be wrong.
At some point societies are going to have to reckon with the fact that democracy, free speech, and unrestricted capitalism simply aren't a sustainable mix. A system that allows people to amass incredible fortunes and use those fortunes to influence other people's beliefs and votes is simply a system that will eventually fall under the control of those ultrawealthy people.
The "proven track record" part of your question is shortsighted. We shouldn't restrict future political thought by past political thoughts. We'd never see any progress that way.
If you're asking which one of the three I think we should focus our attention for change, I think the obvious answer from both a moral and logical standpoint is capitalism. The combination of democracy and free speech means money is political power. Allowing individuals to amass this much political power is both unjust and destabilizing. That goes for companies as well. If companies are going to be amorally motivated purely by money, we need to do a better job of pricing in externalities to put reins on that amorality.
It's not an either/or situation... we can improve on the capitalist system we have today (in the US) through government policy (taxes, whatever). I fear we're actually too late, and ceded too ,much influence to the billionaire class, but that's not totally proven out yet.
Marginal tax rates on income and wealth that make being a billionaire impossible? The US was prosperous with much higher marginal tax rates for instance.
We should treat existing fortunes as bugs and correct them.
The Islamic system does not permit uncontrolled capitalism, requires fair financial transactions, is pro rights for both rulers and the population, enforces Zakat (alms tax / a form of wealth tax).
Neither does democracy nor free speech. It's interesting that you felt the need to quibble over only one of those three definitions.
I used those words in the context of the rise of companies like Meta and people like Zuckerberg. I trusted the people reading what I wrote to know that. A response telling me the US is a republic adds nothing to the conversation but allowing an individual to bask in their own pedantry.
Depending on your definition, it may actually exist in many places around the world. As long as criminal CEOs/executives/engineers are not prosecuted under the laws they break everyday, one could argue "unrestricted" is the norm here in France, or in the USA. Two small examples out of a widespread issue:
- fascist-owned CNews keeps spreading illegal (under french law) fake news yet noone is jailed, the fines barely make a dent in the profits, and their nationwide TV channel continues to receive license despite breaking all regulations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNews#Warnings_and_sanctions
It can and does. The power of social media to spread ideas and accelerate political action is why fascists took it over and co-opted it. That's why we're fed the narrative that social media is evil and needs to be regulated or banned at all costs.
> That's why we're fed the narrative that social media is evil and needs to be regulated or banned at all costs.
Social media prioritizing algorithms that feed off division and anger is evil.
If Facebook & Twitter were still ways to simply keep in touch with friends, family, and interest groups, I don't think anyone would care (other than the ads).
There have been plenty. Surely you aren't arguing that social media has never done so. Arguably social media has been one of the most catalyzing political forces in human history. And bearing in mind that "political action" can be in any direction, I found some examples. I didn't work very hard because this could have literally been a Google search on your part.
Meta is the worst of the worst. I don't use it other than a tombstone account with some family connections and a separate burner account we use for Facebook marketplace.
This is how everyone talks about their use of Meta products: "I don't use them except for those times I use them...". We all need to actually boycott and actively help create alternatives or these little bits of fabricated need will keep them in business forever.
I doubt my semi-monthly marketplace usage is contributing more than it costs. If everyone used just the bare minimum free feature set, the company would not be viable.
Do you boycott Apple and Google too? Because they have to comply with debatable laws just as Meta.
See drama about Apple maps for Taiwan/China for example.
Do they have a choice? It’s either that or they are shown the door, in which case they will probably be replaced by worse local alternatives in terms of freedom of speech and gov influence
“If I don’t sell drugs, guns etc at the street corner, someone else will. Might as well be me, I’d like to make a few hundred Billion while I am at it”
Is this a good justification though? I get what you’re saying, but the same argument you’re making for social media can also be applied to everything else, isn’t it?
If I don’t do human cloning, someone else will. If I don’t make bio weapons, someone else will. And so on
>Meta is not people, it's a publicly traded company that's practically legally required to make money and grow infinitely.
Has a company ever faced any sort of legal repercussions for sacrificing profit for moral reasons? That isn't rhetorical. I'm not aware of this ever happening, so I'm dubious of your claim.
Neither the UAE nor Saudi Arabia have extradition treaties with the United States. (On a practical level, they wouldn't be able to enforce one if they had it.)
Saudi could - I think people accept Saudi is a religious oligarchy - but the UAE is a playground of international people avoiding tax and ostensibly a first world country, Facebook being banned would highlight how ridiculous the government that did that is.
It's an authoritarian autocracy. I'm not using that as a slur against them as it seems like quite a nice place to stay for a while, but it's simply what it is. An American spent the better part of a year in a max security prison there for the high crime of making a video mocking youth culture. [1] I'm rather surprised to find out that Facebook isn't already banned! In looking it up turns out you can get into legal trouble there for things as small as using suggestive emojis, and they are watching. Kind of funny in a way.
Anyhow, yeah - Facebook being banned in UAE would surprise exactly nobody that's familiar with their government. People are willing to tolerate a whole lot of nonsense for 0% taxes!
Even disregarding the ability to criticize the government, Western expats seeking 0% tax want to be able to talk with their family, friends, and business partners elsewhere in the world. UAE banning Meta platforms reduces the country's appeal for foreigners
Right, but it should be acknowledged that this is likely an amoral decision on Facebook's part (or more charitably, a pragmatic decision) not an immoral one.
The governments that forced these changes in the first place are of course acting immorally, that's not in dispute.
I don’t think that’s what amoral means. It’s not malicious but doing something that hurts others just because you gain money from it isn’t amoral just because you’re not doing it just to inflict pain.
Hyperbolic example:
If your boss tells you to kill the next customer or you won’t get paid, doing the killing isn’t amoral.
Good point. Even if Facebook is being threatened they're still ultimately responsible for their actions. Maybe amoral isn't the right word to describe this.
I guess it just feels like a lot to me to expect a company to break the law on purpose, even in the service of a greater moral duty. But maybe it shouldn't. Obviously if they did pull out of the UAE and Saudi Arabia over this rather than comply that would be a laudable stand.
People here all complain about social American social media companies defying the law when they refuse to cooperate with EU censorship, then they complain about them not defying the law with Saudi censorship, it's a double standard.
Social media companies post record earnings year after year from their ads business while increasingly proving to be harmful to society. They do the bare minimum in terms of content moderation and bots while priming the algorithms to maximize revenue. The good ol' privatized profits, socialized harm model.
In a just world, would social media platforms be taxed higher on corporate revenue and how would that pan out? Maybe we'll be left with small federated platforms without algorithms and ads.
In a just world what Zuckerberg and his cronies are doing - the sheer unrelenting tidal wave of destabilising societal damage (nationally, internationally, globally), not to mention the negative consequences of bullying and the exacerbation of mental health issues at individual and group levels over the course of, now, decades - would be considered crimes, and they would all be put on trial, held to account, and appropriately sanctioned for them.
What he's done to individuals, to marginalised and oppressed groups, to societies, and to global stability is far worse than any damage that, for example, Sam Bankman-Fried managed to do and yet somehow SBF is in prison for 25 years and Zuck walks free.
Not OK.
(Not to say SBF doesn't deserve his criminal penalty but to highlight the disconnect where we're not seeing similar treatment of these social media moguls who, at very best, are completely indifferent to the harm they cause but whom, one starts to suspect, are actually gunning for that harm in order to cement their own power and positions.)
I think what social media companies are doing is both immoral and criminal. In a just world this behavior would count as a crime against humanity and the people responsible would be tried in a court of law accordingly. In a just world we would have strong consumer protection laws which would protect users against the behavior your parent described. And consumer protection agencies would shut these companies down before they were able to cause this much harm, The worst offenders like Zuckerberg would be criminally charged and go to prison.
I’m taking it as a given that any sufficiently large social network is a gigantic propaganda machine of interest to domestic and foreign nation-state actors.
Entertaining the thought experiment where all the normies join the fediverse: now you’ve got a big juicy target maintained by hobbyists.
When it’s Lazarus Group vs Randall, the over-worked sys admin who stood up a node in his spare time, who do you think wins?
Social networks are cancer. Just ban the lot of them and move on.
You are worrying about domestic nation state actors, and you are calling social media to be banned by whom? Some mysterious administrative entity that is surely not a part of the domestic nation state doing the very propaganda you are railing against?
Surely the people with the power to ban the lot of social media don't have their own propaganda to shove down your throat. Surely they will only ban the bad ones where foreign agents spread dangerous ideas and keep the good ones where only upright citizens of their own country can talk about how great everything is.
They should be rattled. The US didn’t vote its way to independence from the England. Freedom never comes without a cost paid in blood, but people don’t want to admit that anymore.
How do you define social network, though? Is Facebook a social network, even though it includes a marketplace? Is HN a social network? Is Newgrounds a social network....? Seems difficult to stomp out effectively
We can come up with a definition and refine it. Maybe something like: algorithmic content suggestions trying to maximize engagement and time on app (leave out chronological + explicit follow).
Banning is not the way to go about things. India is always ban happy -> a competitive exam in a state? Take down internet in the whole state to curb cheating. Outright banning hard to deal with stuff sets a bad precedent.
You don't ban the users or the internet, you make it illegal to do shitty psyops on the public. They were making plenty of money on chronological friend feeds.
How do you ban psyops? Require every user register with a gov ID so there’s someone to go after? What’s a psyop vs a grassroots contrarian movement like LGBT used to be?
Anonymity online seems the ultimate double edge sword. I prefer privacy over government prescribed safety.
I know I'm in the crazy minority but I'm over anonymity at this point. I want to know who's a real person and sincerely who they claim to be.
The harms of trolling, scamming and societal mis/disinformation, for me, outweigh whatever benefit exists in anonymity. I've never assumed I was anonymous from the government anyway so really, we're just anonymous from one-another. Seems like a classic method of divide and conquer now that I think about it.
All that said, I have no idea how to safely enforce ID'ing without some kind of authority (goverment or ideally something else).
You investigate and punish groups found to be running psyops, simple as. No need to automate the whole process with ID checks, these organizations make and spend money so the tracks are there to find. If suspected drag them into discovery and gather evidence like you would for financial fraud or criminal conspiracy.
They are often in other countries, and there are much worse crimes to focus attention on with a limited budget. This does happen and should more often, but it’s far from a full solution.
Sure, let's just give the state a pretext to jail anyone espousing opinions they don't like for running a psyop. Surely no government will abuse this power and brand anyone in their opposition as a psyop bot army that needs to be removed from the internet.
If they want to they'll do that under any pretense they can get away with. See the current administration declaring intent to treat pro-LGBT speech or anti-fascist speech as indicative of participation in terrorist groups.
You just can't let a government get this bad, and the set of rules and procedures you need to reign in a tyrant are pretty different from the ones you need to keep a system stable and functioning under normal operation.
Right now you can in fact express pro LGBT or anti fascist opinions despite the administration's efforts to stop you precisely because there are no such regulations.
Had a previous US administration thought that the US is a stable and functional democracy that can be entrusted with such a law, you will be in trouble.
It's not for a lack of laws granting the necessary powers; anti-terror laws passed in the wake of 9/11 allow for basically arbitrary use of warrantless surveillance and specifying any enemy as a terrorist. The reason this admin hasn't been successful in vindictively prosecuting its enemies is because they've only captured the Supreme Court, not the majority of the legislature. It's up to judges to interpret the law and decide if it's being applied appropriately. If you write an anti-psyop law it's far from impossible to make clear in the text what sort of organization it is meant to apply to. That's the case for all laws. Where it breaks down is when the legislature changes its interpretation standards. And at that point any law can be interpreted to mean anything and rule of law breaks down, so it doesn't really matter what laws you have or don't have on the books.
I'm sorry if my comment came off dismissive, I was just remarking the idea of banning social media seems like we're going down the wrong alley. I like other commenter's ideas of outlawing the underlying tech. I'm more-so just asking how to make a distinction between a post on Reddit (commonly called social media) and a post on Stack-Overflow (not commonly referred to as social media). Discord vs Teams...etc.
I think user 0x5FC3 correctly identifies the root of the issue, and any (if implemented) regulation should be based on the algorithmic serving, but I hold a firm belief that you cannot and should not try to outlaw math. From my first glance at this issue, it seems tricky
It still reads like a bunch of deflection, which is the usual response from industries from big oil to fast food to tobacco to pharmaceuticals.
Delay delay delay and continue reap the profits in the meantime by making people talk in circles instead of addressing the problem. Let Q4 figure it out, just keep the Q2 gravy train rolling.
Also, nobody is trying to outlaw math. That's just a silly hyperbolic talking point.
Mate understand I am not the industry trying to deflect, I am a human asking how to clearly define 'social media' to encapsulate all of the sites we consider 'social media' without damaging perfectly fine applications, or if we can come up with a better solution than 'ban it all'.
HN is usually pretty good about brainstorming as a group on topics like these, and I value the insights of others.
I'm a SysAdmin. I'm not about to write the law, just trying to partake in the discussion
Also, the comment I referred to was quite literally talking about banning the use of algorithms to serve content. I'll ask you what that is, if it's not banning math?
Saying “ban social media” is a lot like saying to solve lung cancer we must “ban cigarette lighters” when lighters are actually quite useful outside of smoking cigarettes and banning lighters doesn’t really fix the problem.
No, but a good first step would be to widely acknowledge that the problem is hard. And thus is not solvable by a quick fix of a type "let's ban <something>". Otherwise we will keep trying quick fixes and local optimizations that will be just as quickly subverted by the deep pocketed incumbents.
> now you’ve got a big juicy target maintained by hobbyists.
You'd have a much larger number of targets which makes things somewhat more difficult for those looking to exploit them since they'd have to track down the various platforms and navigate a variety of systems each with their own rules and culture. Fewer of them would allow ads at all and none of them would match facebook in terms of being as easy to weaponize. "Pay us to attack this platform's userbase" is a core part of facebook's business model.
You'd also be much better off when the people maintaining the system are hobbyists because they actually care about the platform and moderation. That's a massive improvement over facebook which does as little as they possibly can, only enough to be able to claim that they do "something" at the next congressional hearing, while still making sure that they can actively censor what they want. Moderation on major social media platforms seem to frustrate the efforts of legitimate users more than spammers and scammers.
I'd put my money on "Randall, the over-worked sys admin" over the half-assed AI moderator bots employed by Musk and Zuckerberg
Randall’s eagle eye friend and fellow US-based sysadmin notices attacks on his own server, reports it to his congressperson, and the fed stands up protection for the whole fediverse in short order.
The government in the US will prevent others from immediately physically infringing on your rights, say to brew beer. So they’d help us online too even at the expense of corporate platforms right?
What exactly would you like banned and how would you define what should be banned and what shouldn’t?
I assume you want FB and Insta banned. What about Reddit? YouTube? Hacker news? Discord? X? Dating apps? Snapchat? WhatsApp? iMessage? Gmail? Just curious where exactly you draw the line, and how you’d implement the ban.
This is the exact opposite of what you think. The problem is the governments in those places, and not the private company. The private company would gladly connect everyone.
If you remove one viewpoint because of government mandate, while still carrying the other, your platform is creating a biased viewpoint to influence people, that’s on the platform.
The choices between not operating in that jurisdiction, accepting the legal consequences that jurisdiction can enforce or obeying the laws in that jurisdiction is certainly on a choice of the platform. And the resulting product is their responsibility and a reflection on them for better or worse.
There have been numerous cases of companies ignoring local law for both good and bad.
Strong disagree on this one! The problem is the company will do anything to stay operational in these repressive countries, including helping them hide human rights abuses (among other things).
The logic that if the local government was more open about their repressive policies then Meta would happily help spread that information is probably true but I don't think anyone has ever disagreed with that.
Not sure what anyone expects Meta to do differently here. Meta has basically two choices: they can obey the local law in places where they operate, or they can choose to not operate there.
Mark said, "But there’s this mission belief that connecting the world is really important, and that is something that we want to do. That is why Facebook is here on this planet."
He also said he wanted to make an impact, but I always felt like this was misguided, because what matters is whether the impact is positive or negative.
If we give him the benefit of the doubt that he actually wanted to achieve something positive, maybe he sadly became subdued by having to make an outsized return from VC money. I don't know that we should give him the benefit of the doubt, but imagine if he had sold to Yahoo for a paltry billion dollars and then created a site to truly connect people with a foundation or some other entity that gave him more freedom to ignore profit.
Meta has more luxury of choice than most companies. They can choose to make positive impacts if they so choose. "He chose poorly" and "You have chosen wisely" comes to mind from the the ancient knight in the 3rd Indiana Jones film:
Maybe he's choosing to connect the 99.998% of Facebook users in Saudi Arabia and UAE who have not been ordered blocked by their governments.
But, honestly, I think all he ever really wanted to do was make money, and control the narrative. The connecting the world stuff makes a nice sound bite, and it was the motivation for some of the others at the company though. Read Careless People.
And, additionally, it should be noted the corporate structure gives Zuckerberg near absolute power. So you can't really blame the decisions on anyone but him.
The United States and its businesses are continually faced with a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation when it comes to operating in countries which have poor human rights records claims, whether that's China or Saudi Arabia or others.
If the company doesn't operate in the country, a competitor will, and the United States in particular will be criticized for failure to compete, losing ground to China (or some other actor), and of losing soft power. If the American company does decide to comply with the laws of the host nation, they're evil and bad, and they're an example of fascism or being complicit in human rights violations. These charges are never levered at other countries or their companies, strictly American ones. For example, France sells weapons to Saudi Arabia.
Certain loud groups also like to complain when the United States takes forceful action to prevent those same human rights violations. They want the US to withdraw from the world, but they also want the US to be at fault for withdrawing and leaving others to suffer. We should ignore what they say and do what we think is right and in our best interest.
We're not going to change these countries by refusing to operate in them and we're just going to cede ground to a competitor for on change and no advantage. We're unwilling to fight or go to war over these things either, so we might as well learn to live with some countries doing some bad things or having some human rights violation and hope we can change them over time. In other words, it's fine that Meta operates in the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia even with the human rights violations.
EU member states are happy to sell weapons to these countries. Who cares if we let them on Facebook too?
Agreed, the company chasing infinite growth convinces itself that it must work with these repressive regimes. How could we not acquire these users! We need to keep growing, and growing! It shows that under capitalism there are no morals, no humanity, only profit and growth. When push comes to shove human rights abuses are forgivable, failure to maximize profit is not.
Maybe only a handful of people morally consistent or geopolitically neutral. It's unlikely that Saudi Arabia actually cares if Meta gets themselves kicked out of the nation, but it's easy to blame Meta because money in their pocket is money that isn't in mine. Meanwhile, oil money is ultimately what enables Saudi Arabia to get away with human rights abuses, but don't you dare do anything that makes me pay more at the pump.
Unless the moral position is something akin to realist self interest, in which case the apparent "inconsistency" is actually internally quite consistent. Perhaps the lack of consistent moral positions in competing paradigms is less an interesting phenomena to point out and more a tell that someone is laboring under an extremely naive conception of human morality.
> The private company would gladly connect everyone.
They'll gladly connect everyone except those people/places they personally don't like, or anyone their friends/business partners don't like, or anyone they are paid/bribed to leave disconnected, or anyone who it isn't profitable to connect, or anyone who is profitable to connect but not profitable enough to be worth the bother, etc.
One could (naively) hope that goliath corporations used their massive lobbying power for good. There was a time, long, long, ago, Google refused to operate in China because it refused to censor itself.
Since no matter how much power they have they won't behave good let's go ahead and regulate the shit out of them and tear them into tiny mangable pieces.
If we had a thousand different smaller federated platforms it would be harder for governments to impose rules on them anyways.
Connecting more than none is an admirable goal, but if a company is not objecting this policy in covert and overt ways, they're being just complicit for monies.
Being complicit is something, but being complicit while trying to sugarcoat or hide it is something else.
>The private company would gladly connect everyone.
they do plenty of completely arbitrary censorship voluntarily. no government had mandated the frenzied erasure of certain viewpoints during certain events of 2020-2023, for example.
It's more complicated than that. The US government is currently at war with Iran, alongside UAE and the Saudis as allies. Meta is a US company.
I'd say the US government is more important to Meta than either the UAE or Saudi government. What do you think US government people are saying to Meta about this?
> Do you think Meta will comply if North Korea or Iran requests same censorship?
Those countries don’t allow Meta to operate at all.
> If your answer is "No, they will not comply", then problem is the company
I don’t understand what point you’re trying to make. Large companies comply with the laws of countries they operate in. It’s not optional. If you have a presence there you either comply with their laws or they shut you down.
In some of these countries they might even arrest any employees of the company they can get their hands on to send a message, even if they didn’t have decision making authority. That’s not something you subject your employees to.
Public companies want only one thing, and it’s disgusting.
But seriously, they would gladly connect three people and leave everyone else out if it were most profitable. The fact freedom, such as it still is, is unevenly distributed is no excuse and we are not obligated to shrug and go, “Eh, what do you want this super valuable corporation to do?” We make it valuable as human beings. It should have a responsibility toward us. The fact it does not is a flaw in the system, not a fact of life.
In a just world all companies would be taxed on their overall impact and not just revenue. Coca Cola would be taxed for their contribution to obesity and plastic waste. Exxon would be taxed for their emissions. Meta would be taxed for its harmful impacts on society and childhood development.
It's always amazing how fatties can shift responsibility onto others. The calorie count for Cola is listed right on the bottle. Just don't drink it if you're to fat. And spend a few hours teaching your fat kids to read.
> The calorie count for Cola is listed right on the bottle. Just don't drink it if you're to fat. And spend a few hours teaching your fat kids to read.
it is legal to drink Cola, yes? so I will drink it as I have no control over it... eventually I am going to have serious health issues... and Ray20 will pay for this from his taxes... or alternatively, we can add some tax to companies that are net negative to society and are causing Ray20's money to be spent on my fat asses healthcare, yes?
> or alternatively, we can add some tax to companies that are net negative to society
Or alternatively, we can leave Ray20 alone and not force him to pay for the treatment of a 200 kg fatties with the illegal motorcycle racing and wingsuit jumping hobbies.
> companies that are net negative to society
It is fatties who are net negative to society, not companies.
In a just world, would social media platforms be taxed higher on corporate revenue and how would that pan out? Maybe we'll be left with small federated platforms without algorithms and ads.
Make them put big block ads across ⅓ of the screen with rotating warnings of the harms of the web site people are using, like with cigarette packs.
The problem with this summation is the government is complicit in their actions. Thus it undermines this simple private gain, public pain argument.
A lot of the times when Meta does something like this the fact the governments in question essentially demand that action seems to be ignored. Would you have a better view of corporate power if corporations could unilaterally ignore the laws of sovereign countries in which they operate?
Wouldn't it normatively be more in keeping with a proper distinction between public and private to say lobby your congressman to stop the ceaseless funding and weapon deployments to countries in the ME that don't share our values? I have the same feeling when people complain about Meta and privacy. I mean at least they are giving you a "free" service and you essentially take part in a transaction. The NSA has all your data anyway. Does anyone remember their congressional rep trying to convince them this is a good idea? You can log off from Facebook at any time. In some jurisdictions you can even claim a right to be forgotten. Try sending such a request to the NSA or your local police department. Do you really think such public entities are more trustworthy than their private bedfellows merely because they fall on opposite lines of the public/private divide?
If you want a new public culture you should probably identify the real target is not private companies which really don't care about these questions and just want to do whatever moves margins. Your real problem is a lot less easy to propagandize about - the fact that a majority of your fellow citizens (in the USA at least) don't actually care about their (and by extension - your) privacy or human rights in the Middle East. They want cheap oil and cheap products.
Not sure how many election cycles American liberals need to live through to get this through their heads.
I hear you, there are countless problems to solve. My "..in a just world.." was doing a lot of heavy lifting.
> I mean at least they are giving you a free service and you essentially take part in a transaction.
Yes, it is akin to a transaction, but we cannot ignore the power imbalance between the user and the corporation. They actively engineer their platforms to keep you glued to the screen. It is far from free. You pay with time, money spent on whatever is advertised to you and a lot of other things.
My proposal was analogous to say tobacco tax or carbon tax and the like. We somehow made it essential to be on social media, it is proven to be harmful, policy action to shift priorities.
Fair enough, I appreciate the response. Just note in this case I think the precedent should not be private company can ignore public demand. If they can unilaterally ignore the demands of the Saudi government then why not any liberal government? If you operate in a country you should have to follow their rules. If the rules themselves are bad that is a different question.
The remedy in that case then would not be a tax but to ban them from operating in that country. We already have these sorts of export controls with other countries. It is just the case that despite their egregious human rights record (bone saw, anyone?) the United States has propped up the Saudi regime since basically it first came to exist roughly a century ago.
The reason is obvious - Saudi brutality is a feature not a bug. It secures access to cheap oil.
The export control angle is interesting. I was treating addiction, radicalization, capitulation to authoritarian govts, abetting human rights violations, productivity loss, etc., as the symptom of a common cause: the hyper-optimized engagement model and curbing it with a policy. You're right that some of these harms might warrant categorical exclusions rather than pricing the whole business model out.
I may have had an overly optimistic ideal of people running small federated mastodon servers for friends and family for free/donations being the only type of "social media".
I appreciate your optimism actually. Someone (it's me) can also share your ideal for social media while also having slightly different takes on what makes the prevailing model wrong exactly.
> Wouldn't it normatively be more in keeping with a proper distinction between public and private to say lobby your congressman to stop the ceaseless funding and weapon deployments to countries in the ME that don't share our values?
If an individual lobbying the government wouldn't be overpowered by monied corporate interest in the government, maybe. Sadly that's not the case, at least in the US.
> The NSA has all your data anyway.
Yes, and this is incredibly unpopular and if we had a real representative democracy we'd be able to do something about it.
> In some jurisdictions you can even claim a right to be forgotten.
This too is popular and would be codified more broadly if, again, it wasn't for corporate lobbyists.
> Do you really think such public entities are more trustworthy than their private bedfellows merely because they fall on opposite lines of the public/private divide?
To beat a dead horse...
> the fact that a majority of your fellow citizens (in the USA at least) don't actually care about their (and by extension - your) privacy or human rights in the Middle East
Factually untrue.
The Iran war is incredibly unpopular, beating Iraq and Vietnam in unpopularity this quickly into the operation [1]
Most Americans want us to stop funding Israel [2]
Most Americans are against spying on fellow Americans (esp democrats/the left; tho republicans love a good ole police state)[3].
I'd argue strongly the reason these numbers aren't more in favor of anti-intervention and privacy is decades and decades of propaganda and fear mongering (about socialism/communism during the Cold War and before, about the Middle East/muslims since the oil crisis and before) because of, you guessed it, corporations lobbying for military engagement, oil contracts etc.
There is a thoroughly documented history of American corporations lobbying the government to, here is a brief list:
- Hawaiian overthrow (1893): sugar (dole, spreckles)
- Spanish-American war (Cuba, Philippines, Puerto Rico) (1898): sugar, tobacco, shipping
- Columbia/Panama (1903): canal rights
- Nicaragua (1909-1933): United Fruit, banking
- Honduras (1903, 1907, 1911, 1924): United Fruit and others
- Dominican Republic (1916–1924, 1965): sugar again
- Iran (1953): oil
- Guatemala (1954): United Fruit!
- Congo (1960-61): copper/cobalt
- Brazil (1964): mining
- Indonesia (1965–66): mining, oil
- Chile (1970-73): copper
- Iraq (2003): oil, war contractors
- Iran (2025-26): oil, war contractors
There are many more - some more contested than others - but the above list have clear historical documentation linking them to corporate interests.
Socialism, communism, "terrorism", the war on drugs, "democracy", and Iran getting nukes have all been helpful tools for US corporations to curry influence with bought politicians to have the US colonize or dismantle other countries for their benefit.
Your analysis puts all the blame directly on citizens vs looking at root causes and the obvious successes of corporate and government propaganda on the opinions of Americans.
Let's instead look at who benefits most from these wars and try and dismantle their ability to influence opinion and government and work towards a more representational and fair government we have a say in.
The Iran war is unpopular because of prices at the pump. Prior interventions in Iran (and elsewhere) that also violated rights did not garner the same reaction because to the average American they incurred no cost. If for some reason the war had caused prices to go lower the war would be popular. The fact you think otherwise would lead me to simply conclude you are in denial re the psyche of the American electorate.
You aren't telling me anything I don't already know. You cannot be pro democracy and at the same time treat the electorate like children. Propaganda is part of electioneering. Parties advocating for their own interests should be a feature in a healthy democracy. Are you suggesting the electorate is incapable of dealing with their basic obligations as citizens of a free society? And your scapegoat for this is the corporations?
What is your theory of democracy if the population is so susceptible to "corporate lobbyists"? Why trust such a body to make decisions if it can't even cope with basic propaganda?
Have you been to red counties? I think you are severely over-indexing on your own biases. Corporate lobbying has nothing on tribalism, racism, and general parochialism. You seem to be well read enough when it comes to history. I am surprised your assessment of human nature has not caught up.
The fact is most Americans don't care. If they did they would elect different leaders. If your theory is that the electorate is simply brainwashed well that seems to me as much an indictment on the notion of democracy itself as a criticism of any allegedly brainwashing entity.
Of course I put blame on citizens. Your attempt to shift all the blame to "corporate lobbyists" is about as convincing as the "they were about to get a nuclear weapon" responsibility shift.
Citizens are responsible because in a democracy they are the ultimate arbiters. You don't get to shift the responsibility, it's not optional. The notion of democracy itself rests on it. If you feel a need to control what information citizens consume so that you can personally legitimize their decisions I would suggest to you perhaps you don't really believe in democracy. As George Carlin said, garbage in garbage out.
Like who? Notable candidacies are predicated on million dollar budgets, and pretty much everyone who runs on justice and gets into an office in the US then neuters themselves.
It's not a democratic state, and US society has very little tolerance for or understanding of democracy.
If your point is to suggest no alternatives have ever been contemplated then that is simply factually untrue and I think you know that. In some cases, such people succeed locally/statewide even if failing nationally.
My point is simply you don't get to rob the electorate of its agency because you don't like the choice its made. That's about as silly as the grandparent to your comment citing random polls to establish some authoritative notion of what Americans believe.
I would like someone to come up with a way to block tracking and complicate their data collection processes, with consumers able to remove those features selectively in return for cash payments from Meta et al. The problem is that consumers don't have control of their data and are grossly under-compensated for it (primarily with access to broken, predatory services that are mostly designed to extract even more money from their pockets). There needs to be a rebalancing; tech ads should be stupidly low-margin because data sales are actually compensated correctly.
Is this not a Straw Man, as I'm hearing you say "they do the bare minimum in terms of content moderation and bots" whereas if as the title of the article claims, meta is instead "blocks human rights accounts from reaching audiences" then the problem is that the content moderation itself is the problem, not "not doing enough" in content moderation.
It's their content moderation and perhaps bot policies causing damage.
I have first hand experience with how harmful their policies were during the SARS-COV-2 era, where I and peers who shared about health practices we were following with decades of experience to help improve our health were moderated and censored due to Facebook policies.
Buddy... Are you a doctor? Are you a scientist? Why do you think that you have an inalienable right to proselytize your "health practices" on a public forum?
My experience was that there wasn't nearly enough moderation on social media about Covid. The absurd amount of misinformation was the final straw that finally got me to leave Facebook and Instagram.
Yup. My experience was this. Many professionals I knew were censored, one of the biggest was an old family friends' mentor who ultimately lost his job in Virginia. He became a big name and ultimately, sued the FDA and won money though the court sealed it I believe or there was some outcome where things couldn't be disclosed. I think those are common with big govt cases.
Which part of my post judged the practices? I just want to understand the other user's motivation for complaining because my experience was the polar opposite. I am related to several health professionals, and none of them ever complained about feeling censored in any way.
Because giving every maniac an equal voice and hearing them out is asymmetric. They have the burden of proof to have said “my perfectly validated facts I’ve learned in two decades as a scientist” or whatever if they wanted to provide that context.
Then again, here I am arguing in good faith with you, so more the fool I.
This isn’t how the algorithm works. It costs less than $10k to get some conspiratorial nonsense circulating nowadays, and less than $1mm to flood the zone.
Sorry, I think this got confused because you can only reply so deep. I meant conspiracy theory folks should have the burden of proof. If you're saying that's completely naive in the current climate, I agree. I am only arguing that's how we should treat commenters who seem more than 7 bubbles off plumb: ignore entirely unless they provide reason not to.
> ignore entirely unless they provide reason not to
The reason not to is they start trending and then infecting the political system. By the time anyone brings evidence to the table, the status quo has been shifted.
I see. So you employ the Ad Hominem style fallacies to attack my credibility. No thank you.
Unlike you, I listen with an open mind and curiosity. It's led me to an obsession in my health practices as a nearly full-time job for about 10 years, I don't just blindly follow what I'm spoon fed by a doctor or some authority figure. And neither do I blindly call forth the label of "science" to win approval and credibility.
Science is literally the path towards understanding of the world around us through hypothesis, experimentation and study. That's definitionally being open minded and curious.
Your statements imply that we can't trust scientists because of their "authority" and that they just use that position as scientists to nefariously control you?
Why should anyone trust you? "Curiosity", having an "open mind" and "a nearly full-time job for about 10 years" aren't credentials anyone with critical thinking would recognize as reliable.
Whether you like it or not, scientists and doctors have to go through many years of rigorous study and full-time practice for their specific fields and are constantly challenged by their peers in their work place and in academia. That's a more reliable (tho not perfect) set of credentials.
Scientists are intellectually adversarial to each other by nature because all ideas must be challenged (eg peer review) in order for those ideas to become consensus. Science is constantly in a state of change and evolution as incorrect conclusions ideas are abandoned in favor of more correct conclusions, based on new learning.
That's the whole point. Science will get things wrong, it's impossible not to some times, but the global scientific community is constantly seeking to get closer and closer to base "truth" about the world.
Unless you have some other suggestion, I don't see any other way humans can get a clear understanding of the world other than the scientific process and I see no less reliable source than the current global scientific consensus.
You were talking about your personal experience, were you not? How can I avoid Ad Hominem when we are literally talking about you? I definitely could have phrased my question better, but I genuinely don't understand why you think that a public forum run by a private company should be required to publish unverified "health practices" in the midst of a global pandemic.
I'm not going to pretend that the CDC did a good job during Covid, but it's very clear to me that a lot fewer people would have died if we had all followed their guidance more strictly. I generally err on the side of sparse moderation, but life and death scenarios are one of my main exceptions.
I'm sorry if I offended you. It seems like we disagree on the fundamental nature of science, and I don't think that it's likely that we will overcome that disagreement. So, it looks like this conversation is over. Have a good day!
Sadly I dare not say anything rude against Facebook and its policies, as it gets immediately devoted for presumably harsh language or incitement of hatred. Well I really hate everything there is about FB in 2026 and have avoided it by all means possible ever since 2017. My actual FB is now called HN, but... I guess 1) HN has its own limits; 2) everything is fine, look the other way and it will go.
The third option is to ignore them and let them block you. In a democracy this causes lots of public outrage and might be reversed. Not sure how it goes in authoritarian monarchies.
This is the answer. Stop operating in authoritarian states and ignore their laws. If those states want to censor what their population can see, it's on them to establish a firewall.
While we're fantasizing about evil people doing the noble thing: the fourth option is for Meta to takes its vast wealth and help build resilient uncensorable communications instead of doubling down on centralized and surveilled social networks.
Not true, there’s a third option: Stop operating in those countries. Which used to be a common choice for tech companies, until it somehow became unthinkable for some reason.
I don't know if everything in the book "Careless People" is accurate, but there's a lot of quoted emails saying that this is all part of Meta's playbook.
The Netherlands supports precisely those human rights that aren’t inconvenient for them. Just like every other country. There is no fundamental distinction here.
Meta is not a political or moral entity, it's a for profit tech company. I don't see why it would be expected to make judgement calls on government requirements. Are we expecting Meta to take a political stance for or against specific policies in every country in which it operates? How would its politics be determined? I think the sensible thing for the corporation to do is to operate as widely as possible and follow the rules where it operates.
Governments suppress information all the time. We know of a huge list of thousands of documents and terabytes of video implicating people in child abuse and as important as that is, we aren't getting all of the information. That's the government position. Redact and suppress. It's up to the people to demand transparency from their government and if they don't demand it and fight for it, they won't get it. Corporations like Meta aren't there to help fight the power.
Being a for-profit company does not automatically give you a free pass to do anything in the name of profit and claim immunity if your actions harm certain people. Individuals can (and will) expose and condemn for-profits for policies they believe cause them harm in order to attach some semblance of accountability to a corporation that would otherwise completely ignore their interests. This is effectively a way of exerting some form of voting power over the decision-making algorithm of the profit-driven body. And something that might make an entity solely focused on profit reconsider running over the concerns of those affected, precisely because they made taking that route less profitable for it. This is not only perfectly legitimate, it is also one of the most powerful ways for consumers to challenge plutocratic forces.
> Being a for-profit company does not automatically give you a free pass to do anything in the name of profit and claim immunity
Okay but that's not what were talking about. We're talking about Meta following the rules specified by the government of a country in which they operate. They don't need immunity to follow the rules.
Meta lost the ability to claim they're not political when they donated to Trump, one of those child abusers you're talking about. They seem to have no problem taking a political stance when it benefits them.
That is not about taking a political or moral stance though. Although Trump is a political figure, it could be seen as a simple transaction to the new administration to gain favor. It's not Meta deciding it dislikes a certain viewpoint and playing activist, making moral judgments about population control mechanisms employed by foreign countries. I think there's a difference there. And Meta is expected to have a stance on things like content regulation and platform liability that are core to its operation. It's not completely apolitical. Almost any decision can be framed as being political.
Is it better for human rights for a channel of communication to exist only if every single person can use it? Or is it a net positive for these communication channels to exist, albeit in an imperfect form?
Communication channels like Meta are a strict negative for human rights everywhere (including in the West), because they funnel all communication into a single channel that is easy to surveil and censor.
It's called shareholders. When you need a single person with a single share to be able to sue the company for not doing its fiduciary duty that is the result.
I don't think someone accessing content on US servers run by a US company counts as "operating in" any country other than the US.
But Meta is an international company, so maybe they have servers/staff in Saudi Arabia, in which case their only options are to leave the country or comply.
I'd argue doing business with a foreigner doesn't constitute "operating in" that person's country if you never set foot there. They came to you, not the other way around.
Meta / Facebook would happily sell advertising for baby eat restaurants and cook books. It is about profit not morality nor even being a good human being.
Need to maximum profits for the share holders. Modern day large scale companies follow the Friedman doctrine, not human decency. [0]. They need that fix of infinite growth, which by doing so become cancerous to society.
> Meta should exit the US too because the US does {x} that I don't agree with.
This can be a real argument and conversation but we would need to know what {x} is and the causal chain that leads the world to be better after Meta leaves the US.
One of the points of consumer articulation is to prevent incentives to being "unable to file without facebook". And, where I live, taxis still exist, although as expensive as before.
This is sort of what Scuttlebutt did. You receive and distribute posts by anyone you follow, creating a decentralized network, not just a federated one. I enjoyed checking it out briefly a few years ago, but there really wasn’t that much to see, and it would randomly cause your computer to run hot and eat up gigs of storage. I also worry about inadvertently storing copies of illegal images on this kind of network.
That’s the beauty of this design, you only seed what you share. If something is not worth seeding, you don’t share it. You are only responsible for the seed you selected to reseed. That also acts as a verifier in case someone edits the comment later on. You put an id based on the timestamp and every user uses a signature that allows others to verify original source. The client could theoretically auto trust certain signatures if it is proven to be from a trusted user.
A pro-democracy group in a non-democratic country got banned? whaaaaa? ... I mean their ideal outcome would be the toppling of the current government, so ya
And yet both countries, unlike Iran, are US and European buddies. Because it's not about democracy, it's about playing ball and letting Israel occupy Palestine in peace.
Can just re-title this to: "[Company] forced to follow local laws where it operates as always has been the case"
Meta also had to block legitimate coverage in the US during the Covid pandemic because it conflicted with whatever the mainstream narrative was at the time, due to government forcing their hand.
If you're mad at any company that's following laws you don't like, you should direct your ire at the government that created the laws or policies, not at the companies that have no power to overrule said governments.
On one hand HN gets mad when big tech is perceived to have too much power, then on the other hand HN gets mad when big tech doesn't have enough power. It doesn't seem very coherent, just a mob getting angry at random emotional triggers.
Big platforms optimize for engagement because it works financially, but society ends up paying the externalities. That incentive mismatch is the real problem.
Maybe I'm fatigued by a decade straight of people co-opting the language of human rights and progressivism in order to push the most insane agendas possible, or maybe I'm just the particular brand of contrarian that is common to HN, but I find it hard to take either the title or the article at face value.
Who writes a carefully worded statement like this, in multiple languages, but then "accidentally" forgets to include details about who was blocked and why?
They did say who was blocked, they list 2 NGOs and 2 individuals by name, while also saying "100 others" in the second paragraph. They link to Meta's transparency report for the "100 others".
Do folks have a suggestion for a Facebook alternative? I'm about fed up with the state of things, but still want to feel connected to social circles (even if they're online only) and politics (ideally without the hate spam bots).
The software is never the issue with this, it's where people are that's the problem. Though I did witness my age-peer friend groups finally switching to Signal in the late 2010s (away from Facebook Messenger), I don't actually know what convinced them. The security-conscious minority element had been pushing it since it started but were generally mocked. I think it finally showed up in a New York Times article, which is what helped them.
No, I don't see any indication it has anything to do with the "anonymity". Very few people, even technical people care about anonymity to the extent that they try to achieve it in everyday life.
iMessage is the dominant messenger because most people have iPhones combined with the fact that SMS has long been free and unlimited, so people don't see the problem of using it with the occasional Android user.
Really, it's all about the defaults. Even though everyone uses iPhones, they still use the calling feature from their cellular provider, because Apple doesn't push FaceTime as the default calling mechanism.
Signal is gaining popularity because there are people that care about using it over iMessage.
Signal is 100x better than WhatsApp, but it feels so unstable using any centralized messenger that has complete control over the software and the users. No centralized service can truly be relied on, non-profit or for-profit. But clearly that's what has to happen in order for the service to become mainstream, so it's an acceptable compromise for me. It's not like I can't say Signal does great things for privsec and metadata reduction.
If you have the option of moving people off of facebook, how about a slack or discord group?
If they won't move off of facebook, I'm not sure there's anything you can do to retain the same level of interaction. Maybe you could allow yourself a reduced level of interaction while still feeling connected. For example, an SMS every couple of days should be plenty enough contact to keep up with any significant events. If you really want to take the reins, you could organise events yourself, ensuring you won't miss them.
I jumped ship, and the friends and family who are important to me are still on the ship, by and large.
Yet I've never felt as though I'm missing out. We communicate via alternative forms (texts, calls, hanging out in person) and I have never felt disconnected.
The whole trope about people being worried about missing out is misplaced - that feeling is exactly what these products are designed to imbue in their users. Ultimately, if you value others, you'll make the effort to connect somehow, and if they value you, they'll return that energy. If that two-way street doesn't exist, if they're not willing to give back a similar effort, then why do we need to know what they're doing or thinking every day?
I largely agree, but this discounts the personal value of keeping contact with weaker connections that we don't talk with often but still have some concern for.
What do you use it for? There's never a single alternative to a social media platform the way there is for say online shopping - the experience isn't fungible. But you may be able to find another platform to fulfil the same purposes.
Genuine human connection. Seriously. I've never had a social media account on any platform and I have plenty of friends and an active social life. I also make the effort to do so. Why do you need facebook? Is it so important to share a photo with strangers? You could text it to a friend if you want to share it. Stop feeding the beast.
Not really. No infinite scroll. No personalized algorithm. No insane levels of tracking. To compare this to facebook or tiktok is incredibly dishonest.
You didn't mention any of those. You mentioned "real human connection," yet the connections here are no more or less "real" than on facebook and tiktok.
"I've never had a social media account on any platform and I have plenty of friends and an active social life." Yeah, most people who use social media also have plenty of friends and an active social life.
You seem to not comprehend that there is actual utility to social media for many people, or that most people using social media aren't touch-starved incels or lonely basement dwellers or whatever.
But to answer OP's question since no one else will - maybe try Fediverse alternatives like Mastodon or Friendica.
Are you serious? He didn't answer my question, he jumped all over me judging my choices and insinuated that I don't get enough real life human interaction.. so yes that's my response.
Yes, OP did - the alternative to social media is not more social media, which is a view shared by many. OP didn't judge you, they stated their opinion and asked you to soul search.
If you truly feel that judged and offended, and I say this with kindness, perhaps you would do well to ask yourself why.
Haha, they didn't say they were offended, they just rejected the (clearly judgmental and off-topic) advice. They specifically asked for a Facebook alternative, including for online-only social groups they find important, so the advice to "just do real human connection without social media" is pretty useless. And shit like "Is it so important to share a photo with strangers?" is clearly judgmental and dismissive.
Loved your little passive aggressive encouragement to look inward though. So kind.
I asked for social media options and dude went on a self entitled rant saying I shouldn't want social media. I feel like my response was rather level headed considering what I wanted to tell him to go do, but maybe that's just me.
Social is where the people are. If you’re using Facebook to keep in touch with friends and family, the only viable alternative is wherever your friends and family are. Chances are it’s going to be impossible to switch everyone (or even most people) over, so you’re stuck if you care about those connections.
Or you can do what I did and simply say “fuck it”. Get rid of your account anyway and deal with the consequences. I don’t even have WhatsApp (because, you know, Facebook) but don’t feel like that’s been a detriment to my social life. The people I care about understand and I see most of them on the regular. SMS and phone calls still work. I do know some people who live abroad that fortunately I can communicate via iMessage, but if that weren’t an option then email would have to do. I've been doing this for over a decade and while there was some friction at first, it’s been long since it has been an issue. It probably helps that these days most people understand that avoiding Meta is a good thing.
If you don’t care about people you personally know in your social media, then pick whatever you want depending on features. I recommend Mastodon. It has quirks (what doesn’t) but it’s fine. Chronological (not algorithmic) time-line, open-source, you can even subscribe to people with RSS feeds. If there’s someone you’d like to follow from e.g. Bluesky, there’s often a Mastodon bot for their posts. Or you can subscribe via RSS there as well.
Thanks for the reply.. yeah I might just be at the "fuck it" point. I've done that before and it always makes me feel healthier (calmer, sleep better, etc).
I don’t understand the point of the pedantry. Obviously I was talking about people you know personally that you know are not bots, and obviously I prefer and advocate for connecting with those you interact with offline. I don’t see how you can read my comment in good faith and take anything else from it.
They can’t publish a gag order they receive from a United States authority either
I would take most of these comments seriously if the respondents acted like they knew that
But in the demand from the article, I agree that it would be helpful to know the rules behind the censorship requests, but if they are remotely similar to the rules in democracies and republics that people are inspired by, then it comes with a gag order
Social media and Google tends to agree with the government of the place wherever they're in. That isn't democracy and we should probably realise it has done that in the west as well.
It is useful, because instead of being surprised and reading this article, you can nod your head and go about your day because you already knew they were a company that was rotten to its core.
I look forward to the day that society finally decides to hold Meta (Facebook), Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Apple etc accountable for their transgressions against humanity.
Some say it will never happen, but they said that about the now-dying tobacco industry, too.
Many are saying Meta has to comply with local law, and, fair enough. But does anyone know - when someone in that region tries to view a blocked post or account - do they see the post, but the content is censored over with a black bar with "Censored by order of the UAE"? Do such censored posts show up in recommendation feeds, promoted at equal rates as non-censored content, so that it is obvious something is there that you are forbidden from seeing?
Or is the content simply absent, and unless you directly visit the banned accounts, you don't even know anything was censored?
The AMC TV series The Audacity has a scene where one of the tech sociopaths says that if one of the other tech sociopaths goes through with a plan to utterly destroy privacy (as a service) that it will cause the government to finally pass real privacy laws and then all the other sociopaths will gang up on him.
Zuckerberg proves otherwise IMO. There doesn't seem to be a bottom to how low they can go.
Disappointing but not surprising. This is what happens when you're a billion dollar company and your ethical bone is tied to "we fully comply with the law". You get compliance by default, even if doing so would exacerbate human rights abuses.
I don't know the list of everything they've complied with but contrary to Google who once(?) refused to remove pirate bay results, Facebook blocked it even in private messages
Zuck doensn't care. His motto is 'dumb fucks'. And that wasn't a joke. It's how he sees people
The title should read "Saudi Arabia". Cutting a country name in half (unless its an accepted way of abbreviating it) is not a good say of modifying a headline. What is next? Zealand ?
We can't solve the general problem of English syntax ambiguity in a HN headline, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to be precise about the literal names of things
And yet the title kept the equivalent of "United". Except that there isn't a region of the world called "United", but there is one called "Arabia", and it isn't the country.
I don't find it too objectionable, Saudi Arabia refers to the country and part of Arabia (the peninsula) that is under control of the House of Saud. It may be an expat affectation though. My... American family lived there when I was a child and we called it "Saudi." Flying back to Saudi, where we'd see and interact with the native Saudis.
To your point about New Zealand, of course NZ would be used.
The title says Arabia because this practice of evil trillion dollar megacorps capitulating to repressive regimes happens across multiple countries recently (UAE & KSA) - just as they did w.r.t Russian accounts in the Epsteinist-occupied EU/UK.
Something happened during the pandemic where too many normies got hired into tech and then started larping around here.
The quality of comments here is now just emotional mainstream nonsense, compared to the annoyingly autistic (but often intelligent) analysis that used to be commonplace.
It was probably the Reddit exodus. A lot of people from Reddit realized that HN has the same topics as Reddit and has the same upvote/downvote interface around the same time Reddit was having its API changes. The folks who did it were the kind who felt strongly enough about Reddit's leadership that they brought their strong opinions here.
Nothing you can do about open forums really. They all regress to the mean user who has enough time to spend hitting the up and downvote arrows on the website all day.
It's gotten almost unbearable in the last couple years. The amount of hate, cynicism, bitterness, etc. towards almost everything (currently AI, capitalism, anyone successful, etc) is just ridiculous. It's sad, I've been a heavy user for almost twenty years now, and I find it borderline intolerable most days.
What's funny is the Meta, Twitter, Google, etc are doing everything China gets accused of doing. Trillion dollar companies move in lockstep with US domestic and foreign policy.
My position is that these companies are already violating Section 230 so that's the first thing you could attack them on. Section 230 shields "interactive computer services" from strict liability for third-party content. It's enabled the likes of Wordpress and Geocities and the original version of Youtube so they caqnq't be sued for defamation for what users post. This is distinct from, say, CNN, NYT, WaPo, Fox and other media companies that do have strict liability because they're first-party publishers.
My position is that an algorithmic feed and selective distribution turns such companies, which includes social media companies, from platforms into publishers (Section 230 doesn't use that language specifically; it's paraphrased).
Twitter pushes Elon Musk onto everyone's feeds. That's not a "platform". Twitter should be legally liable for doing that. Meta's Jordana Cutler essentially boasted about suppressing pro-Palestinian content [1], in effect consciously pushing pro-Israeli content. How is that different to just publishing the exact same content? I don't think it is.
The other way to handle this is as a product liability issue. Just like tobacco companies, social media companies should be sued for the foreseeable and known harm they produce, such as targeting minors, allowing advertisers to target minors, addictive behavior, pushing dangerous ideas (eg eating disorder content) and so on.
Remember when they told us that social media would "spread democracy" ?
No, I don’t. I remember when the internet would (it did!) and Usenet would (it did!) and irc and open source and the web (they did!) but social media was always about entertainment and (one way or another) monetization of those technologies. It’s the cancer of our collective mind and achievements.
Here you go.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2010/06/08/the-twitter-devolution/
See also...
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/06/evalu...
And these lies, of course, were spread by the social media platforms themselves and their PR departments.
Why did you trust what The Atlantic and Foreign Policy had to say at the time? Anyone can tell you anything ; that's no reason to take them so seriously you're disappointed if events years later show their claims to be wrong.
And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media's_role_in_the_Ara...
Yes, this is known as manufacturing consent.
Isn't that precisely why this is happening? Because it's doing exactly that, and the people in power in these countries don't like it?
At some point societies are going to have to reckon with the fact that democracy, free speech, and unrestricted capitalism simply aren't a sustainable mix. A system that allows people to amass incredible fortunes and use those fortunes to influence other people's beliefs and votes is simply a system that will eventually fall under the control of those ultrawealthy people.
What’s your more effective, less flawed alternative with a proven track record?
The "proven track record" part of your question is shortsighted. We shouldn't restrict future political thought by past political thoughts. We'd never see any progress that way.
If you're asking which one of the three I think we should focus our attention for change, I think the obvious answer from both a moral and logical standpoint is capitalism. The combination of democracy and free speech means money is political power. Allowing individuals to amass this much political power is both unjust and destabilizing. That goes for companies as well. If companies are going to be amorally motivated purely by money, we need to do a better job of pricing in externalities to put reins on that amorality.
There were times when NASA went to space, not incredibly wealthy individuals…
NASA just sent four people around the Moon.
It's not an either/or situation... we can improve on the capitalist system we have today (in the US) through government policy (taxes, whatever). I fear we're actually too late, and ceded too ,much influence to the billionaire class, but that's not totally proven out yet.
Marginal tax rates on income and wealth that make being a billionaire impossible? The US was prosperous with much higher marginal tax rates for instance.
We should treat existing fortunes as bugs and correct them.
The Islamic system does not permit uncontrolled capitalism, requires fair financial transactions, is pro rights for both rulers and the population, enforces Zakat (alms tax / a form of wealth tax).
Unrestricted capitalism doesn't exist anywhere in the world.
Neither does democracy nor free speech. It's interesting that you felt the need to quibble over only one of those three definitions.
I used those words in the context of the rise of companies like Meta and people like Zuckerberg. I trusted the people reading what I wrote to know that. A response telling me the US is a republic adds nothing to the conversation but allowing an individual to bask in their own pedantry.
Depending on your definition, it may actually exist in many places around the world. As long as criminal CEOs/executives/engineers are not prosecuted under the laws they break everyday, one could argue "unrestricted" is the norm here in France, or in the USA. Two small examples out of a widespread issue:
- tobacco company execs lied under oath in the USA and killed millions for profit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Berkshire
- fascist-owned CNews keeps spreading illegal (under french law) fake news yet noone is jailed, the fines barely make a dent in the profits, and their nationwide TV channel continues to receive license despite breaking all regulations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNews#Warnings_and_sanctions
That's just scratching the surface.
Who told you that, the entire point was to talk to girls you lacked the courage to strike up a conversation with.
Saying ‘hi, I also like that band you have a shirt of’ was just too hard so we had to create trillion dollar monstrosities.
I thought that was true only for Zuck …
I’ve never heard a single time social media companies say that social media would spread democracy. Sounds like a straw man to me
It was a fairly common narrative during the Arab Spring, when the technology was still relatively novel.
Arab Spring and the Obama campaign. I know, it seems a lifetime ago...
It’s quite the contrast when you look at Twitter then and X now.
It was a good pitch to get funding.
“Spread democracy” means “manipulate public opinion to submit to USA”.
That includes censoring content that threatens puppet governments.
It can and does. The power of social media to spread ideas and accelerate political action is why fascists took it over and co-opted it. That's why we're fed the narrative that social media is evil and needs to be regulated or banned at all costs.
> That's why we're fed the narrative that social media is evil and needs to be regulated or banned at all costs.
Social media prioritizing algorithms that feed off division and anger is evil.
If Facebook & Twitter were still ways to simply keep in touch with friends, family, and interest groups, I don't think anyone would care (other than the ads).
Do you remember cases in which it "accelerated political action" ?
famously the Arab spring
also BLM, israel palestine
and the genocide in myanmar, that was definitely accelerated political action
There have been plenty. Surely you aren't arguing that social media has never done so. Arguably social media has been one of the most catalyzing political forces in human history. And bearing in mind that "political action" can be in any direction, I found some examples. I didn't work very hard because this could have literally been a Google search on your part.
Arab Spring
Nepalese Discord Protests
Euromaidan revolution in Ukraine
2009 Iranian presidential election protests
2011 Egyptian revolution
#BlackLivesMatter
#MeToo
Hong Kong protests
#NoKings protests
Yellow Vest protests (France)
Anti-Israel/Pro-Palestine protests
Anti-vaccine protests during COVID
Rohingya genocide
GamerGate
The case of Iran in 2009 is notoriously false. See for example what ForeignPolicy has to say about it.
More in general, Malcolm Gladwell is not convinced about the power of social media...
https://archive.is/GryvI#selection-323.0-355.16
That's a lazy response. Do better.
It's clear time and again that having short-term growth at all costs means you can't have principles.
It means having short-term growth at all costs will be your only principle
I think you can have principles. They just need to be chiseled unambiguously into your articles of incorporation.
Meta is the worst of the worst. I don't use it other than a tombstone account with some family connections and a separate burner account we use for Facebook marketplace.
This is how everyone talks about their use of Meta products: "I don't use them except for those times I use them...". We all need to actually boycott and actively help create alternatives or these little bits of fabricated need will keep them in business forever.
I doubt my semi-monthly marketplace usage is contributing more than it costs. If everyone used just the bare minimum free feature set, the company would not be viable.
Do you boycott Apple and Google too? Because they have to comply with debatable laws just as Meta. See drama about Apple maps for Taiwan/China for example.
So you do use them. Twice.
Do they have a choice? It’s either that or they are shown the door, in which case they will probably be replaced by worse local alternatives in terms of freedom of speech and gov influence
"Somebody's gonna profit from these authoritarian regimes, so it might as well be us!" -Zuck, probably
“If I don’t sell drugs, guns etc at the street corner, someone else will. Might as well be me, I’d like to make a few hundred Billion while I am at it”
Is this a good justification though? I get what you’re saying, but the same argument you’re making for social media can also be applied to everything else, isn’t it?
If I don’t do human cloning, someone else will. If I don’t make bio weapons, someone else will. And so on
>Do they have a choice?
Yes, they absolutely have a choice. People can choose to not assist with transgressions against human rights in the year 2026 :)
Meta is not people, it's a publicly traded company that's practically legally required to make money and grow infinitely.
You however, as people, can choose not to patronize a Meta that assists with transgressions against human rights.
>Meta is not people, it's a publicly traded company that's practically legally required to make money and grow infinitely.
Has a company ever faced any sort of legal repercussions for sacrificing profit for moral reasons? That isn't rhetorical. I'm not aware of this ever happening, so I'm dubious of your claim.
Meta is a legal person in almost all jurisdictions it operates within
It is also operated by human individuals as employees and c-suite
And companies are legal fiction. Meta doesn't remove a post, a person does. Or maybe some software built by a person.
A person from a government told a person at Meta to block it, and that person did (probably by telling yet more people to do it).
> Do they have a choice?
Neither the UAE nor Saudi Arabia have extradition treaties with the United States. (On a practical level, they wouldn't be able to enforce one if they had it.)
But they do control the routers that peer with external networks.
Russia and China can do that, but I am not sure Saudi and UAE reasonably could. Too small and too enmeshed with the US empire
Saudi could - I think people accept Saudi is a religious oligarchy - but the UAE is a playground of international people avoiding tax and ostensibly a first world country, Facebook being banned would highlight how ridiculous the government that did that is.
It's an authoritarian autocracy. I'm not using that as a slur against them as it seems like quite a nice place to stay for a while, but it's simply what it is. An American spent the better part of a year in a max security prison there for the high crime of making a video mocking youth culture. [1] I'm rather surprised to find out that Facebook isn't already banned! In looking it up turns out you can get into legal trouble there for things as small as using suggestive emojis, and they are watching. Kind of funny in a way.
Anyhow, yeah - Facebook being banned in UAE would surprise exactly nobody that's familiar with their government. People are willing to tolerate a whole lot of nonsense for 0% taxes!
[1] - https://apnews.com/general-news-4c1f57ed465940659eeb79b41447...
Even disregarding the ability to criticize the government, Western expats seeking 0% tax want to be able to talk with their family, friends, and business partners elsewhere in the world. UAE banning Meta platforms reduces the country's appeal for foreigners
Yes they do. twitter followed way less requests than X does
Yes, they have a choice. Profits are more important than values.
Right, but it should be acknowledged that this is likely an amoral decision on Facebook's part (or more charitably, a pragmatic decision) not an immoral one.
The governments that forced these changes in the first place are of course acting immorally, that's not in dispute.
I don’t think that’s what amoral means. It’s not malicious but doing something that hurts others just because you gain money from it isn’t amoral just because you’re not doing it just to inflict pain.
Hyperbolic example: If your boss tells you to kill the next customer or you won’t get paid, doing the killing isn’t amoral.
Good point. Even if Facebook is being threatened they're still ultimately responsible for their actions. Maybe amoral isn't the right word to describe this.
I guess it just feels like a lot to me to expect a company to break the law on purpose, even in the service of a greater moral duty. But maybe it shouldn't. Obviously if they did pull out of the UAE and Saudi Arabia over this rather than comply that would be a laudable stand.
Facebook acquiscing to dictatorships that block human rights organizations is immoral.
It is.
It’s not as bas as the time they helped organise a genocide though, so there is that.
People here all complain about social American social media companies defying the law when they refuse to cooperate with EU censorship, then they complain about them not defying the law with Saudi censorship, it's a double standard.
Yes of course, clearly the EU and Saudia Arabia both have equal censorship initiatives and human rights track records.
Apologies for the sarcasm. But I think it’d be helpful for you to expand a little on what you mean by EU “censorship” in this case.
Could be goomba fallacy, but listening to people irl, maybe not.
I'm in the UAE right now.
The site www.alqst.org is blocked here. I had to turn on a VPN to read the article.
Here, it's not even allowed to read about what's not allowed!
Social media companies post record earnings year after year from their ads business while increasingly proving to be harmful to society. They do the bare minimum in terms of content moderation and bots while priming the algorithms to maximize revenue. The good ol' privatized profits, socialized harm model.
In a just world, would social media platforms be taxed higher on corporate revenue and how would that pan out? Maybe we'll be left with small federated platforms without algorithms and ads.
> In a just world
In a just world what Zuckerberg and his cronies are doing - the sheer unrelenting tidal wave of destabilising societal damage (nationally, internationally, globally), not to mention the negative consequences of bullying and the exacerbation of mental health issues at individual and group levels over the course of, now, decades - would be considered crimes, and they would all be put on trial, held to account, and appropriately sanctioned for them.
What he's done to individuals, to marginalised and oppressed groups, to societies, and to global stability is far worse than any damage that, for example, Sam Bankman-Fried managed to do and yet somehow SBF is in prison for 25 years and Zuck walks free.
Not OK.
(Not to say SBF doesn't deserve his criminal penalty but to highlight the disconnect where we're not seeing similar treatment of these social media moguls who, at very best, are completely indifferent to the harm they cause but whom, one starts to suspect, are actually gunning for that harm in order to cement their own power and positions.)
SBF took money from rich people and nearly lost it.
Zuck made money for rich people.
Criminal culpability must always filter through this lens.
I think what social media companies are doing is both immoral and criminal. In a just world this behavior would count as a crime against humanity and the people responsible would be tried in a court of law accordingly. In a just world we would have strong consumer protection laws which would protect users against the behavior your parent described. And consumer protection agencies would shut these companies down before they were able to cause this much harm, The worst offenders like Zuckerberg would be criminally charged and go to prison.
I’m taking it as a given that any sufficiently large social network is a gigantic propaganda machine of interest to domestic and foreign nation-state actors.
Entertaining the thought experiment where all the normies join the fediverse: now you’ve got a big juicy target maintained by hobbyists.
When it’s Lazarus Group vs Randall, the over-worked sys admin who stood up a node in his spare time, who do you think wins?
Social networks are cancer. Just ban the lot of them and move on.
You are worrying about domestic nation state actors, and you are calling social media to be banned by whom? Some mysterious administrative entity that is surely not a part of the domestic nation state doing the very propaganda you are railing against?
Surely the people with the power to ban the lot of social media don't have their own propaganda to shove down your throat. Surely they will only ban the bad ones where foreign agents spread dangerous ideas and keep the good ones where only upright citizens of their own country can talk about how great everything is.
Shhh if you say too much you’re gonna rattle their “the government will save us if we vote hard enough” worldview
They should be rattled. The US didn’t vote its way to independence from the England. Freedom never comes without a cost paid in blood, but people don’t want to admit that anymore.
>Just ban the lot of them and move on.
How do you define social network, though? Is Facebook a social network, even though it includes a marketplace? Is HN a social network? Is Newgrounds a social network....? Seems difficult to stomp out effectively
We can come up with a definition and refine it. Maybe something like: algorithmic content suggestions trying to maximize engagement and time on app (leave out chronological + explicit follow).
Banning is not the way to go about things. India is always ban happy -> a competitive exam in a state? Take down internet in the whole state to curb cheating. Outright banning hard to deal with stuff sets a bad precedent.
You don't ban the users or the internet, you make it illegal to do shitty psyops on the public. They were making plenty of money on chronological friend feeds.
How do you ban psyops? Require every user register with a gov ID so there’s someone to go after? What’s a psyop vs a grassroots contrarian movement like LGBT used to be?
Anonymity online seems the ultimate double edge sword. I prefer privacy over government prescribed safety.
I know I'm in the crazy minority but I'm over anonymity at this point. I want to know who's a real person and sincerely who they claim to be. The harms of trolling, scamming and societal mis/disinformation, for me, outweigh whatever benefit exists in anonymity. I've never assumed I was anonymous from the government anyway so really, we're just anonymous from one-another. Seems like a classic method of divide and conquer now that I think about it. All that said, I have no idea how to safely enforce ID'ing without some kind of authority (goverment or ideally something else).
You investigate and punish groups found to be running psyops, simple as. No need to automate the whole process with ID checks, these organizations make and spend money so the tracks are there to find. If suspected drag them into discovery and gather evidence like you would for financial fraud or criminal conspiracy.
They are often in other countries, and there are much worse crimes to focus attention on with a limited budget. This does happen and should more often, but it’s far from a full solution.
Sure, let's just give the state a pretext to jail anyone espousing opinions they don't like for running a psyop. Surely no government will abuse this power and brand anyone in their opposition as a psyop bot army that needs to be removed from the internet.
If they want to they'll do that under any pretense they can get away with. See the current administration declaring intent to treat pro-LGBT speech or anti-fascist speech as indicative of participation in terrorist groups.
You just can't let a government get this bad, and the set of rules and procedures you need to reign in a tyrant are pretty different from the ones you need to keep a system stable and functioning under normal operation.
Right now you can in fact express pro LGBT or anti fascist opinions despite the administration's efforts to stop you precisely because there are no such regulations.
Had a previous US administration thought that the US is a stable and functional democracy that can be entrusted with such a law, you will be in trouble.
It's not for a lack of laws granting the necessary powers; anti-terror laws passed in the wake of 9/11 allow for basically arbitrary use of warrantless surveillance and specifying any enemy as a terrorist. The reason this admin hasn't been successful in vindictively prosecuting its enemies is because they've only captured the Supreme Court, not the majority of the legislature. It's up to judges to interpret the law and decide if it's being applied appropriately. If you write an anti-psyop law it's far from impossible to make clear in the text what sort of organization it is meant to apply to. That's the case for all laws. Where it breaks down is when the legislature changes its interpretation standards. And at that point any law can be interpreted to mean anything and rule of law breaks down, so it doesn't really matter what laws you have or don't have on the books.
a 4 month old account making a bad faith argument, well I never!
Privacy? Do you think have that now?
Seems difficult to stomp out effectively
So just give up because something is hard? Sounds like the tech industry and its never-ending quest for low-hanging fruit.
"We've tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas."
I'm sorry if my comment came off dismissive, I was just remarking the idea of banning social media seems like we're going down the wrong alley. I like other commenter's ideas of outlawing the underlying tech. I'm more-so just asking how to make a distinction between a post on Reddit (commonly called social media) and a post on Stack-Overflow (not commonly referred to as social media). Discord vs Teams...etc.
I think user 0x5FC3 correctly identifies the root of the issue, and any (if implemented) regulation should be based on the algorithmic serving, but I hold a firm belief that you cannot and should not try to outlaw math. From my first glance at this issue, it seems tricky
It still reads like a bunch of deflection, which is the usual response from industries from big oil to fast food to tobacco to pharmaceuticals.
Delay delay delay and continue reap the profits in the meantime by making people talk in circles instead of addressing the problem. Let Q4 figure it out, just keep the Q2 gravy train rolling.
Also, nobody is trying to outlaw math. That's just a silly hyperbolic talking point.
Mate understand I am not the industry trying to deflect, I am a human asking how to clearly define 'social media' to encapsulate all of the sites we consider 'social media' without damaging perfectly fine applications, or if we can come up with a better solution than 'ban it all'.
HN is usually pretty good about brainstorming as a group on topics like these, and I value the insights of others.
I'm a SysAdmin. I'm not about to write the law, just trying to partake in the discussion
Also, the comment I referred to was quite literally talking about banning the use of algorithms to serve content. I'll ask you what that is, if it's not banning math?
Saying “ban social media” is a lot like saying to solve lung cancer we must “ban cigarette lighters” when lighters are actually quite useful outside of smoking cigarettes and banning lighters doesn’t really fix the problem.
> So just give up because something is hard?
No, but a good first step would be to widely acknowledge that the problem is hard. And thus is not solvable by a quick fix of a type "let's ban <something>". Otherwise we will keep trying quick fixes and local optimizations that will be just as quickly subverted by the deep pocketed incumbents.
We could start by stomping out the Linux kernel mailing lists; that cancer is at the root of so many other social networks' software.
> now you’ve got a big juicy target maintained by hobbyists.
You'd have a much larger number of targets which makes things somewhat more difficult for those looking to exploit them since they'd have to track down the various platforms and navigate a variety of systems each with their own rules and culture. Fewer of them would allow ads at all and none of them would match facebook in terms of being as easy to weaponize. "Pay us to attack this platform's userbase" is a core part of facebook's business model.
You'd also be much better off when the people maintaining the system are hobbyists because they actually care about the platform and moderation. That's a massive improvement over facebook which does as little as they possibly can, only enough to be able to claim that they do "something" at the next congressional hearing, while still making sure that they can actively censor what they want. Moderation on major social media platforms seem to frustrate the efforts of legitimate users more than spammers and scammers.
I'd put my money on "Randall, the over-worked sys admin" over the half-assed AI moderator bots employed by Musk and Zuckerberg
Randall’s eagle eye friend and fellow US-based sysadmin notices attacks on his own server, reports it to his congressperson, and the fed stands up protection for the whole fediverse in short order.
The government in the US will prevent others from immediately physically infringing on your rights, say to brew beer. So they’d help us online too even at the expense of corporate platforms right?
What exactly would you like banned and how would you define what should be banned and what shouldn’t?
I assume you want FB and Insta banned. What about Reddit? YouTube? Hacker news? Discord? X? Dating apps? Snapchat? WhatsApp? iMessage? Gmail? Just curious where exactly you draw the line, and how you’d implement the ban.
> Social networks are cancer. Just ban the lot of them and move on
I've been pushing for the under-14 ban, which is popular in almost every country with polling, and holy shit is it a pigpen to wade through.
Just find a good technical solution that doesn't require handing over your id, yeah?
> find a good technical solution that doesn't require handing over your id, yeah?
In a perfect world, sure. In the real world, the political demand for a solution to this problem means we'll get a lot of crummy solutions.
Why don't you be a better parent or just repress your own child instead of oppressing everyone else's children whether they want to or not?
The idea that they would ban their propaganda networks, but not their alternatives, is really baffling...
This is the exact opposite of what you think. The problem is the governments in those places, and not the private company. The private company would gladly connect everyone.
Not opposite, a different problem.
If you remove one viewpoint because of government mandate, while still carrying the other, your platform is creating a biased viewpoint to influence people, that’s on the platform.
The platform deciding to obey local laws is not "on the platform". It's on the local laws.
The choices between not operating in that jurisdiction, accepting the legal consequences that jurisdiction can enforce or obeying the laws in that jurisdiction is certainly on a choice of the platform. And the resulting product is their responsibility and a reflection on them for better or worse.
There have been numerous cases of companies ignoring local law for both good and bad.
Strong disagree on this one! The problem is the company will do anything to stay operational in these repressive countries, including helping them hide human rights abuses (among other things).
The logic that if the local government was more open about their repressive policies then Meta would happily help spread that information is probably true but I don't think anyone has ever disagreed with that.
Yep. The worst of both worlds..
1. Whatever the govt wants
2. Their own mods to max profit.
Corporations were conceived specifically to remove responsibility. They should not be this widely available.
Not sure what anyone expects Meta to do differently here. Meta has basically two choices: they can obey the local law in places where they operate, or they can choose to not operate there.
So why not make the positive choice?
Zuckerberg claimed time and time again he wanted to connect the world, and it was part of the earliest mission statements:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/02/mark-zuck...
It was on the hoodie!
https://www.cnet.com/culture/zuckerberg-hoodie-makes-mountai...
Mark said, "But there’s this mission belief that connecting the world is really important, and that is something that we want to do. That is why Facebook is here on this planet."
https://www.thedrum.com/news/ads-not-short-term-solution-int...
He also said he wanted to make an impact, but I always felt like this was misguided, because what matters is whether the impact is positive or negative.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/05/mark-zuckerbe...
If we give him the benefit of the doubt that he actually wanted to achieve something positive, maybe he sadly became subdued by having to make an outsized return from VC money. I don't know that we should give him the benefit of the doubt, but imagine if he had sold to Yahoo for a paltry billion dollars and then created a site to truly connect people with a foundation or some other entity that gave him more freedom to ignore profit.
Meta has more luxury of choice than most companies. They can choose to make positive impacts if they so choose. "He chose poorly" and "You have chosen wisely" comes to mind from the the ancient knight in the 3rd Indiana Jones film:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-_BH7x7Dl8
Maybe he's choosing to connect the 99.998% of Facebook users in Saudi Arabia and UAE who have not been ordered blocked by their governments.
But, honestly, I think all he ever really wanted to do was make money, and control the narrative. The connecting the world stuff makes a nice sound bite, and it was the motivation for some of the others at the company though. Read Careless People.
Meta took less than $100m from VC money over a decade ago. It makes billions in profit a quarter.
And, additionally, it should be noted the corporate structure gives Zuckerberg near absolute power. So you can't really blame the decisions on anyone but him.
The United States and its businesses are continually faced with a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation when it comes to operating in countries which have poor human rights records claims, whether that's China or Saudi Arabia or others.
If the company doesn't operate in the country, a competitor will, and the United States in particular will be criticized for failure to compete, losing ground to China (or some other actor), and of losing soft power. If the American company does decide to comply with the laws of the host nation, they're evil and bad, and they're an example of fascism or being complicit in human rights violations. These charges are never levered at other countries or their companies, strictly American ones. For example, France sells weapons to Saudi Arabia.
Certain loud groups also like to complain when the United States takes forceful action to prevent those same human rights violations. They want the US to withdraw from the world, but they also want the US to be at fault for withdrawing and leaving others to suffer. We should ignore what they say and do what we think is right and in our best interest.
We're not going to change these countries by refusing to operate in them and we're just going to cede ground to a competitor for on change and no advantage. We're unwilling to fight or go to war over these things either, so we might as well learn to live with some countries doing some bad things or having some human rights violation and hope we can change them over time. In other words, it's fine that Meta operates in the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia even with the human rights violations.
EU member states are happy to sell weapons to these countries. Who cares if we let them on Facebook too?
My preference would be that they choose not to operate in areas where local law and policies make them complicit in hurting people.
Force Zuck to take FB to a sole proprietorship
Only if we want a utopia
Agreed, the company chasing infinite growth convinces itself that it must work with these repressive regimes. How could we not acquire these users! We need to keep growing, and growing! It shows that under capitalism there are no morals, no humanity, only profit and growth. When push comes to shove human rights abuses are forgivable, failure to maximize profit is not.
The transnational private sector is neither morally consistent nor geopolitically neutral.
The transnational private sector is neither morally consistent nor geopolitically neutral.
The transnational private sector is neither morally consistent nor geopolitically neutral.
Maybe only a handful of people morally consistent or geopolitically neutral. It's unlikely that Saudi Arabia actually cares if Meta gets themselves kicked out of the nation, but it's easy to blame Meta because money in their pocket is money that isn't in mine. Meanwhile, oil money is ultimately what enables Saudi Arabia to get away with human rights abuses, but don't you dare do anything that makes me pay more at the pump.
But is it not consistent to be consistently inconsistent?
But is it not consistent to be consistently inconsistent?
But is it not consistent to be consistently inconsistent?
That would mean regulation of social media companies seems appropriate.
That would mean regulation of social media companies seems appropriate.
That would mean regulation of social media companies seems appropriate.
So what? Very few organizations are morally consistent or geopolitically neutral. Especially in 2026 where political polarization is the norm.
Despite Meta's self serving actions here their morals are significantly better than those of Saudi Arabia or the UAE.
I'm not complaining about it I'm just pointing out that widely held assumptions are false
Very few? Try none.
Unless the moral position is something akin to realist self interest, in which case the apparent "inconsistency" is actually internally quite consistent. Perhaps the lack of consistent moral positions in competing paradigms is less an interesting phenomena to point out and more a tell that someone is laboring under an extremely naive conception of human morality.
> The private company would gladly connect everyone.
They'll gladly connect everyone except those people/places they personally don't like, or anyone their friends/business partners don't like, or anyone they are paid/bribed to leave disconnected, or anyone who it isn't profitable to connect, or anyone who is profitable to connect but not profitable enough to be worth the bother, etc.
One could (naively) hope that goliath corporations used their massive lobbying power for good. There was a time, long, long, ago, Google refused to operate in China because it refused to censor itself.
Since no matter how much power they have they won't behave good let's go ahead and regulate the shit out of them and tear them into tiny mangable pieces.
If we had a thousand different smaller federated platforms it would be harder for governments to impose rules on them anyways.
Connecting more than none is an admirable goal, but if a company is not objecting this policy in covert and overt ways, they're being just complicit for monies.
Being complicit is something, but being complicit while trying to sugarcoat or hide it is something else.
>The private company would gladly connect everyone.
they do plenty of completely arbitrary censorship voluntarily. no government had mandated the frenzied erasure of certain viewpoints during certain events of 2020-2023, for example.
Which viewpoints?
the ones that corporate eunuchs had implicitly decreed to be banned.
The ones that got a million Americans killed
> The problem is the governments in those places, and not the private company.
Do you think Meta will comply if North Korea or Iran requests same censorship?
If your answer is "No, they will not comply", then problem is the company
It's more complicated than that. The US government is currently at war with Iran, alongside UAE and the Saudis as allies. Meta is a US company.
I'd say the US government is more important to Meta than either the UAE or Saudi government. What do you think US government people are saying to Meta about this?
> Do you think Meta will comply if North Korea or Iran requests same censorship?
Those countries don’t allow Meta to operate at all.
> If your answer is "No, they will not comply", then problem is the company
I don’t understand what point you’re trying to make. Large companies comply with the laws of countries they operate in. It’s not optional. If you have a presence there you either comply with their laws or they shut you down.
In some of these countries they might even arrest any employees of the company they can get their hands on to send a message, even if they didn’t have decision making authority. That’s not something you subject your employees to.
They can't operate there. AFAIK, that's the only difference.
A company can not operate in a country and not follow its rules.
i dont think meta does business in those two countries?
thats not a very relevant comparison.
Does Meta do business in either of those jurisdictions?
If the answer is “No”, then it makes sense they would not follow laws they do not have to.
Public companies want only one thing, and it’s disgusting.
But seriously, they would gladly connect three people and leave everyone else out if it were most profitable. The fact freedom, such as it still is, is unevenly distributed is no excuse and we are not obligated to shrug and go, “Eh, what do you want this super valuable corporation to do?” We make it valuable as human beings. It should have a responsibility toward us. The fact it does not is a flaw in the system, not a fact of life.
Broadly, I think an ad tax that hits both ad platforms and ad purchases would do a lot to focus businesses.
In a just world all companies would be taxed on their overall impact and not just revenue. Coca Cola would be taxed for their contribution to obesity and plastic waste. Exxon would be taxed for their emissions. Meta would be taxed for its harmful impacts on society and childhood development.
> taxed for their contribution to obesity
It's always amazing how fatties can shift responsibility onto others. The calorie count for Cola is listed right on the bottle. Just don't drink it if you're to fat. And spend a few hours teaching your fat kids to read.
> The calorie count for Cola is listed right on the bottle. Just don't drink it if you're to fat. And spend a few hours teaching your fat kids to read.
it is legal to drink Cola, yes? so I will drink it as I have no control over it... eventually I am going to have serious health issues... and Ray20 will pay for this from his taxes... or alternatively, we can add some tax to companies that are net negative to society and are causing Ray20's money to be spent on my fat asses healthcare, yes?
> or alternatively, we can add some tax to companies that are net negative to society
Or alternatively, we can leave Ray20 alone and not force him to pay for the treatment of a 200 kg fatties with the illegal motorcycle racing and wingsuit jumping hobbies.
> companies that are net negative to society
It is fatties who are net negative to society, not companies.
What is this “just world” of which you speak?
In a just world, would social media platforms be taxed higher on corporate revenue and how would that pan out? Maybe we'll be left with small federated platforms without algorithms and ads.
Make them put big block ads across ⅓ of the screen with rotating warnings of the harms of the web site people are using, like with cigarette packs.
People hate friction online.
The problem with this summation is the government is complicit in their actions. Thus it undermines this simple private gain, public pain argument.
A lot of the times when Meta does something like this the fact the governments in question essentially demand that action seems to be ignored. Would you have a better view of corporate power if corporations could unilaterally ignore the laws of sovereign countries in which they operate?
Wouldn't it normatively be more in keeping with a proper distinction between public and private to say lobby your congressman to stop the ceaseless funding and weapon deployments to countries in the ME that don't share our values? I have the same feeling when people complain about Meta and privacy. I mean at least they are giving you a "free" service and you essentially take part in a transaction. The NSA has all your data anyway. Does anyone remember their congressional rep trying to convince them this is a good idea? You can log off from Facebook at any time. In some jurisdictions you can even claim a right to be forgotten. Try sending such a request to the NSA or your local police department. Do you really think such public entities are more trustworthy than their private bedfellows merely because they fall on opposite lines of the public/private divide?
If you want a new public culture you should probably identify the real target is not private companies which really don't care about these questions and just want to do whatever moves margins. Your real problem is a lot less easy to propagandize about - the fact that a majority of your fellow citizens (in the USA at least) don't actually care about their (and by extension - your) privacy or human rights in the Middle East. They want cheap oil and cheap products.
Not sure how many election cycles American liberals need to live through to get this through their heads.
I hear you, there are countless problems to solve. My "..in a just world.." was doing a lot of heavy lifting.
> I mean at least they are giving you a free service and you essentially take part in a transaction.
Yes, it is akin to a transaction, but we cannot ignore the power imbalance between the user and the corporation. They actively engineer their platforms to keep you glued to the screen. It is far from free. You pay with time, money spent on whatever is advertised to you and a lot of other things.
My proposal was analogous to say tobacco tax or carbon tax and the like. We somehow made it essential to be on social media, it is proven to be harmful, policy action to shift priorities.
Fair enough, I appreciate the response. Just note in this case I think the precedent should not be private company can ignore public demand. If they can unilaterally ignore the demands of the Saudi government then why not any liberal government? If you operate in a country you should have to follow their rules. If the rules themselves are bad that is a different question.
The remedy in that case then would not be a tax but to ban them from operating in that country. We already have these sorts of export controls with other countries. It is just the case that despite their egregious human rights record (bone saw, anyone?) the United States has propped up the Saudi regime since basically it first came to exist roughly a century ago.
The reason is obvious - Saudi brutality is a feature not a bug. It secures access to cheap oil.
The export control angle is interesting. I was treating addiction, radicalization, capitulation to authoritarian govts, abetting human rights violations, productivity loss, etc., as the symptom of a common cause: the hyper-optimized engagement model and curbing it with a policy. You're right that some of these harms might warrant categorical exclusions rather than pricing the whole business model out.
I may have had an overly optimistic ideal of people running small federated mastodon servers for friends and family for free/donations being the only type of "social media".
I appreciate your optimism actually. Someone (it's me) can also share your ideal for social media while also having slightly different takes on what makes the prevailing model wrong exactly.
Thanks for the back and forth.
> Wouldn't it normatively be more in keeping with a proper distinction between public and private to say lobby your congressman to stop the ceaseless funding and weapon deployments to countries in the ME that don't share our values?
If an individual lobbying the government wouldn't be overpowered by monied corporate interest in the government, maybe. Sadly that's not the case, at least in the US.
> The NSA has all your data anyway.
Yes, and this is incredibly unpopular and if we had a real representative democracy we'd be able to do something about it.
> In some jurisdictions you can even claim a right to be forgotten.
This too is popular and would be codified more broadly if, again, it wasn't for corporate lobbyists.
> Do you really think such public entities are more trustworthy than their private bedfellows merely because they fall on opposite lines of the public/private divide?
To beat a dead horse...
> the fact that a majority of your fellow citizens (in the USA at least) don't actually care about their (and by extension - your) privacy or human rights in the Middle East
Factually untrue.
The Iran war is incredibly unpopular, beating Iraq and Vietnam in unpopularity this quickly into the operation [1]
Most Americans want us to stop funding Israel [2]
Most Americans are against spying on fellow Americans (esp democrats/the left; tho republicans love a good ole police state)[3].
I'd argue strongly the reason these numbers aren't more in favor of anti-intervention and privacy is decades and decades of propaganda and fear mongering (about socialism/communism during the Cold War and before, about the Middle East/muslims since the oil crisis and before) because of, you guessed it, corporations lobbying for military engagement, oil contracts etc.
There is a thoroughly documented history of American corporations lobbying the government to, here is a brief list:
- Hawaiian overthrow (1893): sugar (dole, spreckles) - Spanish-American war (Cuba, Philippines, Puerto Rico) (1898): sugar, tobacco, shipping - Columbia/Panama (1903): canal rights - Nicaragua (1909-1933): United Fruit, banking - Honduras (1903, 1907, 1911, 1924): United Fruit and others - Dominican Republic (1916–1924, 1965): sugar again - Iran (1953): oil - Guatemala (1954): United Fruit! - Congo (1960-61): copper/cobalt - Brazil (1964): mining - Indonesia (1965–66): mining, oil - Chile (1970-73): copper - Iraq (2003): oil, war contractors - Iran (2025-26): oil, war contractors
There are many more - some more contested than others - but the above list have clear historical documentation linking them to corporate interests.
Socialism, communism, "terrorism", the war on drugs, "democracy", and Iran getting nukes have all been helpful tools for US corporations to curry influence with bought politicians to have the US colonize or dismantle other countries for their benefit.
Your analysis puts all the blame directly on citizens vs looking at root causes and the obvious successes of corporate and government propaganda on the opinions of Americans.
Let's instead look at who benefits most from these wars and try and dismantle their ability to influence opinion and government and work towards a more representational and fair government we have a say in.
[1]: https://www.natesilver.net/p/iran-war-polls-popularity-appro... [2]: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20260519-poll-shows-majori... [3]: https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/52425-what-americans-think...
The Iran war is unpopular because of prices at the pump. Prior interventions in Iran (and elsewhere) that also violated rights did not garner the same reaction because to the average American they incurred no cost. If for some reason the war had caused prices to go lower the war would be popular. The fact you think otherwise would lead me to simply conclude you are in denial re the psyche of the American electorate.
You aren't telling me anything I don't already know. You cannot be pro democracy and at the same time treat the electorate like children. Propaganda is part of electioneering. Parties advocating for their own interests should be a feature in a healthy democracy. Are you suggesting the electorate is incapable of dealing with their basic obligations as citizens of a free society? And your scapegoat for this is the corporations?
What is your theory of democracy if the population is so susceptible to "corporate lobbyists"? Why trust such a body to make decisions if it can't even cope with basic propaganda?
Have you been to red counties? I think you are severely over-indexing on your own biases. Corporate lobbying has nothing on tribalism, racism, and general parochialism. You seem to be well read enough when it comes to history. I am surprised your assessment of human nature has not caught up.
The fact is most Americans don't care. If they did they would elect different leaders. If your theory is that the electorate is simply brainwashed well that seems to me as much an indictment on the notion of democracy itself as a criticism of any allegedly brainwashing entity.
Of course I put blame on citizens. Your attempt to shift all the blame to "corporate lobbyists" is about as convincing as the "they were about to get a nuclear weapon" responsibility shift.
Citizens are responsible because in a democracy they are the ultimate arbiters. You don't get to shift the responsibility, it's not optional. The notion of democracy itself rests on it. If you feel a need to control what information citizens consume so that you can personally legitimize their decisions I would suggest to you perhaps you don't really believe in democracy. As George Carlin said, garbage in garbage out.
"If they did they would elect different leaders."
Like who? Notable candidacies are predicated on million dollar budgets, and pretty much everyone who runs on justice and gets into an office in the US then neuters themselves.
It's not a democratic state, and US society has very little tolerance for or understanding of democracy.
If your point is to suggest no alternatives have ever been contemplated then that is simply factually untrue and I think you know that. In some cases, such people succeed locally/statewide even if failing nationally.
My point is simply you don't get to rob the electorate of its agency because you don't like the choice its made. That's about as silly as the grandparent to your comment citing random polls to establish some authoritative notion of what Americans believe.
>> The NSA has all your data anyway.
> Yes, and this is incredibly unpopular and if we had a real representative democracy we'd be able to do something about it.
no, this is something people dont care about, and is a low invasive way for the government to solve a problem people do care about - terror attacks
I would like someone to come up with a way to block tracking and complicate their data collection processes, with consumers able to remove those features selectively in return for cash payments from Meta et al. The problem is that consumers don't have control of their data and are grossly under-compensated for it (primarily with access to broken, predatory services that are mostly designed to extract even more money from their pockets). There needs to be a rebalancing; tech ads should be stupidly low-margin because data sales are actually compensated correctly.
Is this not a Straw Man, as I'm hearing you say "they do the bare minimum in terms of content moderation and bots" whereas if as the title of the article claims, meta is instead "blocks human rights accounts from reaching audiences" then the problem is that the content moderation itself is the problem, not "not doing enough" in content moderation.
It's their content moderation and perhaps bot policies causing damage.
I have first hand experience with how harmful their policies were during the SARS-COV-2 era, where I and peers who shared about health practices we were following with decades of experience to help improve our health were moderated and censored due to Facebook policies.
Buddy... Are you a doctor? Are you a scientist? Why do you think that you have an inalienable right to proselytize your "health practices" on a public forum?
My experience was that there wasn't nearly enough moderation on social media about Covid. The absurd amount of misinformation was the final straw that finally got me to leave Facebook and Instagram.
The problem during the pandemic was, even health professionals' personal accounts got censored. It was hectic.
This was not the experience of the health professionals that I know, but I will take your word for it.
Yup. My experience was this. Many professionals I knew were censored, one of the biggest was an old family friends' mentor who ultimately lost his job in Virginia. He became a big name and ultimately, sued the FDA and won money though the court sealed it I believe or there was some outcome where things couldn't be disclosed. I think those are common with big govt cases.
Source?
How about we first ask what the practices are before we judge the practices?
Which part of my post judged the practices? I just want to understand the other user's motivation for complaining because my experience was the polar opposite. I am related to several health professionals, and none of them ever complained about feeling censored in any way.
Your first paragraph set a tone that I would interpret as a "who do you think you are?". But that might just be written text and cultural differences.
It came off to me as Ad Hominem, making it very difficult for me to engage you.
Because giving every maniac an equal voice and hearing them out is asymmetric. They have the burden of proof to have said “my perfectly validated facts I’ve learned in two decades as a scientist” or whatever if they wanted to provide that context.
Then again, here I am arguing in good faith with you, so more the fool I.
> They have the burden of proof
This isn’t how the algorithm works. It costs less than $10k to get some conspiratorial nonsense circulating nowadays, and less than $1mm to flood the zone.
Sorry, I think this got confused because you can only reply so deep. I meant conspiracy theory folks should have the burden of proof. If you're saying that's completely naive in the current climate, I agree. I am only arguing that's how we should treat commenters who seem more than 7 bubbles off plumb: ignore entirely unless they provide reason not to.
> ignore entirely unless they provide reason not to
The reason not to is they start trending and then infecting the political system. By the time anyone brings evidence to the table, the status quo has been shifted.
I see. So you employ the Ad Hominem style fallacies to attack my credibility. No thank you.
Unlike you, I listen with an open mind and curiosity. It's led me to an obsession in my health practices as a nearly full-time job for about 10 years, I don't just blindly follow what I'm spoon fed by a doctor or some authority figure. And neither do I blindly call forth the label of "science" to win approval and credibility.
Science is literally the path towards understanding of the world around us through hypothesis, experimentation and study. That's definitionally being open minded and curious.
Your statements imply that we can't trust scientists because of their "authority" and that they just use that position as scientists to nefariously control you?
Why should anyone trust you? "Curiosity", having an "open mind" and "a nearly full-time job for about 10 years" aren't credentials anyone with critical thinking would recognize as reliable.
Whether you like it or not, scientists and doctors have to go through many years of rigorous study and full-time practice for their specific fields and are constantly challenged by their peers in their work place and in academia. That's a more reliable (tho not perfect) set of credentials.
Scientists are intellectually adversarial to each other by nature because all ideas must be challenged (eg peer review) in order for those ideas to become consensus. Science is constantly in a state of change and evolution as incorrect conclusions ideas are abandoned in favor of more correct conclusions, based on new learning.
That's the whole point. Science will get things wrong, it's impossible not to some times, but the global scientific community is constantly seeking to get closer and closer to base "truth" about the world.
Unless you have some other suggestion, I don't see any other way humans can get a clear understanding of the world other than the scientific process and I see no less reliable source than the current global scientific consensus.
You were talking about your personal experience, were you not? How can I avoid Ad Hominem when we are literally talking about you? I definitely could have phrased my question better, but I genuinely don't understand why you think that a public forum run by a private company should be required to publish unverified "health practices" in the midst of a global pandemic.
I'm not going to pretend that the CDC did a good job during Covid, but it's very clear to me that a lot fewer people would have died if we had all followed their guidance more strictly. I generally err on the side of sparse moderation, but life and death scenarios are one of my main exceptions.
I'm sorry if I offended you. It seems like we disagree on the fundamental nature of science, and I don't think that it's likely that we will overcome that disagreement. So, it looks like this conversation is over. Have a good day!
You're describing a crank. Avoiding cranks is a good strategy even if technically biased.
Sadly I dare not say anything rude against Facebook and its policies, as it gets immediately devoted for presumably harsh language or incitement of hatred. Well I really hate everything there is about FB in 2026 and have avoided it by all means possible ever since 2017. My actual FB is now called HN, but... I guess 1) HN has its own limits; 2) everything is fine, look the other way and it will go.
I would like to congratulate Meta on this day as they layoff more people for AI. I hope all your platforms burn to ash.
Well, it's that or the accounts get removed completely. Sometimes you have to pick your fight, and this doesn't look like one that's worth it.
The third option is to ignore them and let them block you. In a democracy this causes lots of public outrage and might be reversed. Not sure how it goes in authoritarian monarchies.
This is the answer. Stop operating in authoritarian states and ignore their laws. If those states want to censor what their population can see, it's on them to establish a firewall.
While we're fantasizing about evil people doing the noble thing: the fourth option is for Meta to takes its vast wealth and help build resilient uncensorable communications instead of doubling down on centralized and surveilled social networks.
This is a false dichotomy, especially in light of the article mentioning that Twitter hasn't blocked accounts that KSA asked them to block.
Not true, there’s a third option: Stop operating in those countries. Which used to be a common choice for tech companies, until it somehow became unthinkable for some reason.
Meta has also been regularly nuking/blocking rights-related accounts in countries that do support human rights.
E.g. in The Netherlands. First they did a mass block last December, then again in April:
https://www.at5.nl/artikelen/237924/meta-verwijdert-instagra...
Some were reinstated again, but not all and not after they have been offline for to long.
I don't know if everything in the book "Careless People" is accurate, but there's a lot of quoted emails saying that this is all part of Meta's playbook.
The Netherlands supports precisely those human rights that aren’t inconvenient for them. Just like every other country. There is no fundamental distinction here.
Which is relevant to my comment how?
(The Dutch government certainly rejects LGBTQ censorship.)
Meta is not a political or moral entity, it's a for profit tech company. I don't see why it would be expected to make judgement calls on government requirements. Are we expecting Meta to take a political stance for or against specific policies in every country in which it operates? How would its politics be determined? I think the sensible thing for the corporation to do is to operate as widely as possible and follow the rules where it operates.
Governments suppress information all the time. We know of a huge list of thousands of documents and terabytes of video implicating people in child abuse and as important as that is, we aren't getting all of the information. That's the government position. Redact and suppress. It's up to the people to demand transparency from their government and if they don't demand it and fight for it, they won't get it. Corporations like Meta aren't there to help fight the power.
Being a for-profit company does not automatically give you a free pass to do anything in the name of profit and claim immunity if your actions harm certain people. Individuals can (and will) expose and condemn for-profits for policies they believe cause them harm in order to attach some semblance of accountability to a corporation that would otherwise completely ignore their interests. This is effectively a way of exerting some form of voting power over the decision-making algorithm of the profit-driven body. And something that might make an entity solely focused on profit reconsider running over the concerns of those affected, precisely because they made taking that route less profitable for it. This is not only perfectly legitimate, it is also one of the most powerful ways for consumers to challenge plutocratic forces.
> Being a for-profit company does not automatically give you a free pass to do anything in the name of profit and claim immunity
Okay but that's not what were talking about. We're talking about Meta following the rules specified by the government of a country in which they operate. They don't need immunity to follow the rules.
Meta lost the ability to claim they're not political when they donated to Trump, one of those child abusers you're talking about. They seem to have no problem taking a political stance when it benefits them.
That is not about taking a political or moral stance though. Although Trump is a political figure, it could be seen as a simple transaction to the new administration to gain favor. It's not Meta deciding it dislikes a certain viewpoint and playing activist, making moral judgments about population control mechanisms employed by foreign countries. I think there's a difference there. And Meta is expected to have a stance on things like content regulation and platform liability that are core to its operation. It's not completely apolitical. Almost any decision can be framed as being political.
Is it better for human rights for a channel of communication to exist only if every single person can use it? Or is it a net positive for these communication channels to exist, albeit in an imperfect form?
Communication channels like Meta are a strict negative for human rights everywhere (including in the West), because they funnel all communication into a single channel that is easy to surveil and censor.
What would the alternative be? Radio?
Operating in these countries helps gather information in them.
It's called shareholders. When you need a single person with a single share to be able to sue the company for not doing its fiduciary duty that is the result.
If Meta operates in Saudi Arabia and UAE, shouldn't they follow their laws?
I don't think someone accessing content on US servers run by a US company counts as "operating in" any country other than the US.
But Meta is an international company, so maybe they have servers/staff in Saudi Arabia, in which case their only options are to leave the country or comply.
operating here is the buying and selling of ads
I'd argue doing business with a foreigner doesn't constitute "operating in" that person's country if you never set foot there. They came to you, not the other way around.
If it’s legal to eat babies in a country, does it make it morally ok to do it too while visiting?
Then Meta should exit that country.
Meta / Facebook would happily sell advertising for baby eat restaurants and cook books. It is about profit not morality nor even being a good human being.
Need to maximum profits for the share holders. Modern day large scale companies follow the Friedman doctrine, not human decency. [0]. They need that fix of infinite growth, which by doing so become cancerous to society.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine
If they had a moral compass. They’ve proven time and again they don’t.
Meta should exit the US too because the US does {x} that I don't agree with. But Meta doesn't have a moral compass.
> Meta should exit the US too because the US does {x} that I don't agree with.
This can be a real argument and conversation but we would need to know what {x} is and the causal chain that leads the world to be better after Meta leaves the US.
I agree it can be a real argument.
The question is, who determines whether Meta should exit the US? Is it @ornornor? Hacker News? The Guardian? Europeans? Saudis?
If it's any of the above, I think Meta would have needed to exit the US market a while ago. ;)
> But Meta doesn't have a moral compass.
Exactly.
Nah fuck that.
The way to fix social media is to get off of social media.
This shouldn't be downvoted, it's absolutely correct.
It’s off-topic.
It's not off-topic to suggest using something other than social media to communicate in a thread about social media silencing speech.
Consumer activism is trash. Wait until you can't file your taxes without facebook. Not using Uber won't bring taxis back, you'll just end up walking.
I say this as someone who closed my facebook account 15 years ago, and who never opened an Uber account.
One of the points of consumer articulation is to prevent incentives to being "unable to file without facebook". And, where I live, taxis still exist, although as expensive as before.
Put social media onto torrent. Make reshares a seed, have it where users can use their device or a remote device to hold the seed.
This is sort of what Scuttlebutt did. You receive and distribute posts by anyone you follow, creating a decentralized network, not just a federated one. I enjoyed checking it out briefly a few years ago, but there really wasn’t that much to see, and it would randomly cause your computer to run hot and eat up gigs of storage. I also worry about inadvertently storing copies of illegal images on this kind of network.
That’s the beauty of this design, you only seed what you share. If something is not worth seeding, you don’t share it. You are only responsible for the seed you selected to reseed. That also acts as a verifier in case someone edits the comment later on. You put an id based on the timestamp and every user uses a signature that allows others to verify original source. The client could theoretically auto trust certain signatures if it is proven to be from a trusted user.
Anyone who has read Careless People will not be surprised at this.
Meta is a scourge.
The UAE is in Arabia. It's not in Saudi Arabia.
A pro-democracy group in a non-democratic country got banned? whaaaaa? ... I mean their ideal outcome would be the toppling of the current government, so ya
> Meta blocks human rights accounts from reaching audiences in Arabia and the UAE
That's just social media. Wait until CBDCs are rolled out globally and we'll what else can get blocked.
Facebook ip list at Github for those who aren't already blocking it:
https://gist.github.com/Whitexp/9591384
Of course they do I will never use their site knowing play nor will I ever pay for anything that they make…
Let's not forget about the slave markets mobile apps:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50228549
They're like vampires we invited in to our houses. And now we cant get rid of them.
And yet both countries, unlike Iran, are US and European buddies. Because it's not about democracy, it's about playing ball and letting Israel occupy Palestine in peace.
“Meta blocks Western propaganda from reaching the Middle East” would be a good title
Lol at the idea of "Western propaganda" being opposed to these regimes. They are friends with Our Greatest Ally, so they are friends with us
Does propaganda just mean opinion now?
Can just re-title this to: "[Company] forced to follow local laws where it operates as always has been the case"
Meta also had to block legitimate coverage in the US during the Covid pandemic because it conflicted with whatever the mainstream narrative was at the time, due to government forcing their hand.
If you're mad at any company that's following laws you don't like, you should direct your ire at the government that created the laws or policies, not at the companies that have no power to overrule said governments.
On one hand HN gets mad when big tech is perceived to have too much power, then on the other hand HN gets mad when big tech doesn't have enough power. It doesn't seem very coherent, just a mob getting angry at random emotional triggers.
Big platforms optimize for engagement because it works financially, but society ends up paying the externalities. That incentive mismatch is the real problem.
At least we can't blame meta for inconsistency ...
Apple's iCloud Private Relay is also disabled in Dubai/UAE.
All that masquerading as a paragon of privacy but it never works where it's actually needed.
Maybe I'm fatigued by a decade straight of people co-opting the language of human rights and progressivism in order to push the most insane agendas possible, or maybe I'm just the particular brand of contrarian that is common to HN, but I find it hard to take either the title or the article at face value.
Who writes a carefully worded statement like this, in multiple languages, but then "accidentally" forgets to include details about who was blocked and why?
They did say who was blocked, they list 2 NGOs and 2 individuals by name, while also saying "100 others" in the second paragraph. They link to Meta's transparency report for the "100 others".
There you go. I skipped over that. Both of the activists mentioned by name seem to be genuinely brave people standing up for real human rights.
Do folks have a suggestion for a Facebook alternative? I'm about fed up with the state of things, but still want to feel connected to social circles (even if they're online only) and politics (ideally without the hate spam bots).
The software is never the issue with this, it's where people are that's the problem. Though I did witness my age-peer friend groups finally switching to Signal in the late 2010s (away from Facebook Messenger), I don't actually know what convinced them. The security-conscious minority element had been pushing it since it started but were generally mocked. I think it finally showed up in a New York Times article, which is what helped them.
I'm curious why WhatsApp isn't much more popular in the USA. Is it the lack of anonymity?
No, I don't see any indication it has anything to do with the "anonymity". Very few people, even technical people care about anonymity to the extent that they try to achieve it in everyday life.
It is frequently confused with privacy, however. (https://www.privacyguides.org/en/basics/why-privacy-matters/)
iMessage is the dominant messenger because most people have iPhones combined with the fact that SMS has long been free and unlimited, so people don't see the problem of using it with the occasional Android user.
Really, it's all about the defaults. Even though everyone uses iPhones, they still use the calling feature from their cellular provider, because Apple doesn't push FaceTime as the default calling mechanism.
Signal is gaining popularity because there are people that care about using it over iMessage.
Signal is 100x better than WhatsApp, but it feels so unstable using any centralized messenger that has complete control over the software and the users. No centralized service can truly be relied on, non-profit or for-profit. But clearly that's what has to happen in order for the service to become mainstream, so it's an acceptable compromise for me. It's not like I can't say Signal does great things for privsec and metadata reduction.
If you have the option of moving people off of facebook, how about a slack or discord group?
If they won't move off of facebook, I'm not sure there's anything you can do to retain the same level of interaction. Maybe you could allow yourself a reduced level of interaction while still feeling connected. For example, an SMS every couple of days should be plenty enough contact to keep up with any significant events. If you really want to take the reins, you could organise events yourself, ensuring you won't miss them.
The trick is to get your friends and family to jump ship with you.
I jumped ship, and the friends and family who are important to me are still on the ship, by and large.
Yet I've never felt as though I'm missing out. We communicate via alternative forms (texts, calls, hanging out in person) and I have never felt disconnected.
The whole trope about people being worried about missing out is misplaced - that feeling is exactly what these products are designed to imbue in their users. Ultimately, if you value others, you'll make the effort to connect somehow, and if they value you, they'll return that energy. If that two-way street doesn't exist, if they're not willing to give back a similar effort, then why do we need to know what they're doing or thinking every day?
I largely agree, but this discounts the personal value of keeping contact with weaker connections that we don't talk with often but still have some concern for.
What do you use it for? There's never a single alternative to a social media platform the way there is for say online shopping - the experience isn't fungible. But you may be able to find another platform to fulfil the same purposes.
Mastodon has been great for me to follow niches I'm interested in.
For the politics part: join and volunteer for a local political party, even a small one, that aligns with your views.
Genuine human connection. Seriously. I've never had a social media account on any platform and I have plenty of friends and an active social life. I also make the effort to do so. Why do you need facebook? Is it so important to share a photo with strangers? You could text it to a friend if you want to share it. Stop feeding the beast.
I mean, you're commenting in text format on a web forum to strangers using pseudonyms right now. Why is that valid but the use of social media isn't?
Not really. No infinite scroll. No personalized algorithm. No insane levels of tracking. To compare this to facebook or tiktok is incredibly dishonest.
You didn't mention any of those. You mentioned "real human connection," yet the connections here are no more or less "real" than on facebook and tiktok.
"I've never had a social media account on any platform and I have plenty of friends and an active social life." Yeah, most people who use social media also have plenty of friends and an active social life.
You seem to not comprehend that there is actual utility to social media for many people, or that most people using social media aren't touch-starved incels or lonely basement dwellers or whatever.
But to answer OP's question since no one else will - maybe try Fediverse alternatives like Mastodon or Friendica.
I will do as I please, thanks.
You asked for a suggestion, they gave you one. And this is your response?
Are you serious? He didn't answer my question, he jumped all over me judging my choices and insinuated that I don't get enough real life human interaction.. so yes that's my response.
Yes, OP did - the alternative to social media is not more social media, which is a view shared by many. OP didn't judge you, they stated their opinion and asked you to soul search.
If you truly feel that judged and offended, and I say this with kindness, perhaps you would do well to ask yourself why.
Wow okay, whatever you say man..
/shrug
Hope you have a good day!
And I hope you get a clue Mr "I've got everything so figured out that I can psychoanalyze people from a two sentence internet comment". Gimme a break.
Haha, they didn't say they were offended, they just rejected the (clearly judgmental and off-topic) advice. They specifically asked for a Facebook alternative, including for online-only social groups they find important, so the advice to "just do real human connection without social media" is pretty useless. And shit like "Is it so important to share a photo with strangers?" is clearly judgmental and dismissive.
Loved your little passive aggressive encouragement to look inward though. So kind.
I hope you have a pleasant day. :)
I hope you find some peace ♡
This is an insane response.
I asked for social media options and dude went on a self entitled rant saying I shouldn't want social media. I feel like my response was rather level headed considering what I wanted to tell him to go do, but maybe that's just me.
Group text? Individual texts/calls? Setting up a monthly codenames game or book club, etc.?
Social is where the people are. If you’re using Facebook to keep in touch with friends and family, the only viable alternative is wherever your friends and family are. Chances are it’s going to be impossible to switch everyone (or even most people) over, so you’re stuck if you care about those connections.
Or you can do what I did and simply say “fuck it”. Get rid of your account anyway and deal with the consequences. I don’t even have WhatsApp (because, you know, Facebook) but don’t feel like that’s been a detriment to my social life. The people I care about understand and I see most of them on the regular. SMS and phone calls still work. I do know some people who live abroad that fortunately I can communicate via iMessage, but if that weren’t an option then email would have to do. I've been doing this for over a decade and while there was some friction at first, it’s been long since it has been an issue. It probably helps that these days most people understand that avoiding Meta is a good thing.
If you don’t care about people you personally know in your social media, then pick whatever you want depending on features. I recommend Mastodon. It has quirks (what doesn’t) but it’s fine. Chronological (not algorithmic) time-line, open-source, you can even subscribe to people with RSS feeds. If there’s someone you’d like to follow from e.g. Bluesky, there’s often a Mastodon bot for their posts. Or you can subscribe via RSS there as well.
Thanks for the reply.. yeah I might just be at the "fuck it" point. I've done that before and it always makes me feel healthier (calmer, sleep better, etc).
The offline world is where the people are.
Social is where the accounts are, many of which have a nonhuman substrate with the goal of coercing alignment out of you.
I don’t understand the point of the pedantry. Obviously I was talking about people you know personally that you know are not bots, and obviously I prefer and advocate for connecting with those you interact with offline. I don’t see how you can read my comment in good faith and take anything else from it.
Bluesky
Bluesky both isn't an alternative to Facebook and is generally terrible too.
At the same time they are enacting another round of massive layoffs.
Why does this company deserve tax-breaks on their AI data-centers again?
Arabia isn't a place.
What is a “human rights account”? Another reading of this headline is “Meta blocks western propaganda…l
Nah, if the Saudi and the UAE governments don't like it, it's certainly about human rights.
If it was western propaganda, it would be pro-Saudi and pro-UAE
Care to characterize these ideals for us then?
You can read the article, look up the names online and see for yourself.
Yep, as I described.
I thought they stopped moderating for “community notes”.
They can’t publish a gag order they receive from a United States authority either
I would take most of these comments seriously if the respondents acted like they knew that
But in the demand from the article, I agree that it would be helpful to know the rules behind the censorship requests, but if they are remotely similar to the rules in democracies and republics that people are inspired by, then it comes with a gag order
Trashy behavior from a trashy company.
Social media and Google tends to agree with the government of the place wherever they're in. That isn't democracy and we should probably realise it has done that in the west as well.
Every developer, and particularly every developer at Meta or who is thinking about working at or with Meta, should read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People
It is useful, because instead of being surprised and reading this article, you can nod your head and go about your day because you already knew they were a company that was rotten to its core.
I look forward to the day that society finally decides to hold Meta (Facebook), Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Apple etc accountable for their transgressions against humanity.
Some say it will never happen, but they said that about the now-dying tobacco industry, too.
Didn't they just lose a huge lawsuit about addictive engineering?
M.A.M.A knows what's best.
we need a tax on ad revenue specifically; that would go a long way in benefiting society
If Meta (a US company) blocks a NGO at home, is this a US problem or a UAE problem?
Why make it sound like it's a UAE problem?
Since y'all are pro at censorship, you may have the answer to my question?
https://i.imgur.com/dauVR5A.png
Many are saying Meta has to comply with local law, and, fair enough. But does anyone know - when someone in that region tries to view a blocked post or account - do they see the post, but the content is censored over with a black bar with "Censored by order of the UAE"? Do such censored posts show up in recommendation feeds, promoted at equal rates as non-censored content, so that it is obvious something is there that you are forbidden from seeing?
Or is the content simply absent, and unless you directly visit the banned accounts, you don't even know anything was censored?
That or they will be blocked completely.
Who's naive enough to think that big corporations like Meta would care about human rights?
"principles", "Big Tech", "morals", "money", "ethics" and "I work at a big tech company" are all oxymorons.
The AMC TV series The Audacity has a scene where one of the tech sociopaths says that if one of the other tech sociopaths goes through with a plan to utterly destroy privacy (as a service) that it will cause the government to finally pass real privacy laws and then all the other sociopaths will gang up on him.
Zuckerberg proves otherwise IMO. There doesn't seem to be a bottom to how low they can go.
Disappointing but not surprising. This is what happens when you're a billion dollar company and your ethical bone is tied to "we fully comply with the law". You get compliance by default, even if doing so would exacerbate human rights abuses.
I don't know the list of everything they've complied with but contrary to Google who once(?) refused to remove pirate bay results, Facebook blocked it even in private messages
Zuck doensn't care. His motto is 'dumb fucks'. And that wasn't a joke. It's how he sees people
I still remember when Messenger would block certain links, including links to news outlets to curry favour with organisations and governments.
The title should read "Saudi Arabia". Cutting a country name in half (unless its an accepted way of abbreviating it) is not a good say of modifying a headline. What is next? Zealand ?
The submitter was just trying to fit HN's 80 char limit for titles. We've adjusted it now.
Some people I know from Saudi Arabia refer to it as Saudi, so maybe thats the better word? I've never heard anyone call it Arabia.
"Arabia" is the name of the entire peninsula. There's half a dozen countries there.
KSA works too and matches UAE pattern.
KSA is never used in US media. No one here would know what it meant.
I'm sure almost no one watching US media knows what "human rights" or "asm.js" is, yet we allowed them in HN titles still.
I know what it means and I'm in the US.
No one here would know what it meant.
Unless they collect stamps.
I have heard lots of people who refer to it as Saudi and that would be a reasonable way to do it IMO.
Yes. Say Saudi.
The title as it is right now is 79 characters long, the limit is 80.
What about "Meta blocks human rights accounts for audiences in Saudi Arabia and UAE"? I don't think "reaching" adds much to the headline
> "Meta blocks human rights accounts from reaching audiences in Saudi Arabia, UAE"
79 chars.
Saudi Arabia is a city in UAE?
We can't solve the general problem of English syntax ambiguity in a HN headline, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to be precise about the literal names of things
Might as well go for the limit and replace the comma with " &" (space ampersand)
Even better!
Especially when arabia by itself kind of means the arabian peninsula, not saudi arabia.
People say "States" or even US all the time, usually forgetting the other country that has "United States" in their name.
> usually forgetting the other country that has "United States" in their name
Mexico?
the term "Americans" always bothered me, though it's commonly used to refer to US
And yet the title kept the equivalent of "United". Except that there isn't a region of the world called "United", but there is one called "Arabia", and it isn't the country.
Looks like the original title is too long for Hackernews
It could have used "Saudi" for more clarity while saving one character
Or KSA
Its the Saud's Arabia. That is a family name. Signifying its the Suad part of Arabia.
Arabia existed before the Saudis. It will exist after.
Yes, but it means something different to the name of the country. It means a region.
Geographically Arabia is more than just Saudi Arabia, so the title is inaccurate.
While true, they mentioned another country on the Arabian peninsula so you could assume it is the country.
I don't find it too objectionable, Saudi Arabia refers to the country and part of Arabia (the peninsula) that is under control of the House of Saud. It may be an expat affectation though. My... American family lived there when I was a child and we called it "Saudi." Flying back to Saudi, where we'd see and interact with the native Saudis. To your point about New Zealand, of course NZ would be used.
The title says Arabia because this practice of evil trillion dollar megacorps capitulating to repressive regimes happens across multiple countries recently (UAE & KSA) - just as they did w.r.t Russian accounts in the Epsteinist-occupied EU/UK.
Is HN just reddit now? The comments on this are beyond stupid and add nothing of value or thought.
No, it's not. There are a lot more thoughtful comments and some questioning the headline for its clickbait.
I agree there are a lot more low quality comments, though. It depends on the article.
There has been a bit of a trend. I do appreciate dissenting comments on HN even when I've gotten a bit defensive over them
Agreed. The quality of comments has really declined.
Increasingly so :(.
I've been saying this for the past year or so.
Something happened during the pandemic where too many normies got hired into tech and then started larping around here.
The quality of comments here is now just emotional mainstream nonsense, compared to the annoyingly autistic (but often intelligent) analysis that used to be commonplace.
It was probably the Reddit exodus. A lot of people from Reddit realized that HN has the same topics as Reddit and has the same upvote/downvote interface around the same time Reddit was having its API changes. The folks who did it were the kind who felt strongly enough about Reddit's leadership that they brought their strong opinions here.
Nothing you can do about open forums really. They all regress to the mean user who has enough time to spend hitting the up and downvote arrows on the website all day.
It's gotten almost unbearable in the last couple years. The amount of hate, cynicism, bitterness, etc. towards almost everything (currently AI, capitalism, anyone successful, etc) is just ridiculous. It's sad, I've been a heavy user for almost twenty years now, and I find it borderline intolerable most days.
What's funny is the Meta, Twitter, Google, etc are doing everything China gets accused of doing. Trillion dollar companies move in lockstep with US domestic and foreign policy.
My position is that these companies are already violating Section 230 so that's the first thing you could attack them on. Section 230 shields "interactive computer services" from strict liability for third-party content. It's enabled the likes of Wordpress and Geocities and the original version of Youtube so they caqnq't be sued for defamation for what users post. This is distinct from, say, CNN, NYT, WaPo, Fox and other media companies that do have strict liability because they're first-party publishers.
My position is that an algorithmic feed and selective distribution turns such companies, which includes social media companies, from platforms into publishers (Section 230 doesn't use that language specifically; it's paraphrased).
Twitter pushes Elon Musk onto everyone's feeds. That's not a "platform". Twitter should be legally liable for doing that. Meta's Jordana Cutler essentially boasted about suppressing pro-Palestinian content [1], in effect consciously pushing pro-Israeli content. How is that different to just publishing the exact same content? I don't think it is.
The other way to handle this is as a product liability issue. Just like tobacco companies, social media companies should be sued for the foreseeable and known harm they produce, such as targeting minors, allowing advertisers to target minors, addictive behavior, pushing dangerous ideas (eg eating disorder content) and so on.
[1]: https://theintercept.com/2024/10/21/instagram-israel-palesti...