> According to the petition, two people asked [Meta AI] to pick a number between 1 and 25. They gave no instructions and made no reference to the election. In one attempt, the AI answered 13. In the other, it answered 22. Those are the party ballot numbers of Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro, respectively. The groups question the coincidence.
My confidence in the validity of their claims tanked right about here.
I'm all for regulating transparency into social media algorithms. Meta most certainly is compromised by foreign actors. But can we choose less stupid hills to die on than numerology and GIFs? Headline is not remotely supported by the evidence.
They are beholden to the current US admin - as always - only good thing is that the current admin is so blatant that maybe one day even the Germans will realize that you need to have your own social media just you have your own national tv, newspapers etc.
> realize that you need to have your own social media
How could that be made to happen? Should EU somehow move to federated (let’s say per country) instances of Mastodon or something? Or one big platform? How would regular folks get used to it? And how could those initiatives be prevented from falling into irrelevance when network effects are at play?
I agree with the idea, it’s just that there’s the usual hurdles there aren’t necessarily good answers for that I know of.
> They are beholden to the current US admin - as always
They have, as the joke goes, more money than God and influence all over the world. They are beholden to no one. They have the resources to fight in court against decisions they don’t believe in, and all the lobbying they need to shape established laws.
They choose their actions, and their actions are their own. Every single dollar they donate to the current president but not the previous one is an admission of their allegiance and (lack of) morals.
Having principles and standing for them costs money, and these societal parasites subsist on money and influence. Make no mistake, they will sell their own mother to further their goals, but they don’t have to while they can keep selling everyone else’s.
At this point sociala media has become a television, on twitter I just unfollowed everyone who have't followed back and I keep seeing the same antisemitic, antimuslim, anti-EU, anti-woman, anti-immigrant shit. My SO happens to see very similar posts to the point that I can't show her a funny post because she would have already seen it. There are some different posts of course but the money shot is mostly the same.
They probably show posts based on location and background, so essentially just like Fox, CNN, MSNBC but everyone sees theirs from the same screen with the same agenda pushed from all of them.
I have almost no reason to look at my facebook feed, check it perhaps once every 1-2 weeks in case something important was only posted there (not that this helps as they don't show me actual friends actual updates). Recent visit was 50% ads, 25% recommended or weirdly boosted content, including a post from Mark Zuckerberg promoting his AI, and a post whose content I forget from the White House (I live in Germany, the last time I even visited the USA was 2018).
I think the most charitable explanation for this is that it's because polarizing content (aka ragebait) gets views/plays, which the ranking algorithms directly optimize for.
Also, this isn't a new phenomenon. If you're interested, I'd recommend reading Shoshana Zuboff's 2018 book: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
Indeed. US tech has been actively conspiring in lying to the American populace about everything in Canada from politics, election results, public opinion in Canada, resources needed by the US from Canada, etc. They're interfering in the affairs of any country that won't bend to their will.
A lot of bots of US origin are propagating false narratives posing as citizens of these countries.
Or maybe AfD hasn’t targeted you for other reasons, so you’re not fighting against a marketing team to avoid the videos, only against the “pure” form of the algorithm.
I find a lot of social media algorithms are "dumb" in that they will see someone share something saying "x sucks" and interpret that as one being interested in "x".
Either that or it's deliberately showing people stuff it knows they will hate to harvest hate scrolling.
You can say many bad things about Google, but I think they are still "California liberals" on social issues.
I get AfD content recommendations (lurid, trashy stuff of uhm uncertain truth value) a propos of nothing in the village I grew up in - they are popular there with about 25% in the 2025 election. The region is not even in the east or particularly suffering economically. I don't get these recommendations in Berlin. It seems regional.
The owners of these companies are very much conservative though, not out of any ideology mind you, but because they correctly identify that this is the party that best suits their class interests of fucking over everyone and everything else in order to get richer.
I was careful to say socially and I generally agree with you, but Trump is currently just turning everything into shit that he touches. If you don't directly participate in his grift, you probably lose economically because of him. So I'm not sure how useful it is to back him for economic reasons.
The economic problems hit people, then they (if they are white and / or male) are called bad people with an unfair advantage on top. Seems like not such a great way to get their support tbh.
Things like these happen if a state fails to secure its information space. Giving control over it to foreign entities means providing population wide manipulative power to foreign entities with adversarial intentions.
Every state should have foreign agent laws (NGOs must register and must be transparent over their financials). Every state should have control over their information space (especially educational, social and news media). Russia and China understood, Brazil and Europe did not.
It is not so black white. It is a dilemma. There is great value in freedom of expression. But fake expression with the explicit intention to mislead is not so good. It would be best if the population would be better at distinguishing truth from falsehood. Unfortunately much of the population seems to be at a level close to cattle.
> Unfortunately much of the population seems to be at a level close to cattle.
Not you though. You're a wolf among sheep. A true seer among the blind.
Everyone else is too dumb to know what's right, just manipulated by the media they consume on the Internet.
Not you though. You get all your information from trustworthy sources. Sure, they happen to agree with you 90% of the time but,hey, nobody's perfect, right? Well, except you. You've got all the answers.
If only everyone else would just let you make all the rules. You could get to all the bad people and make sure they stopped saying the wrong thing. Maybe provide them the resources they need to learn the truth and, if they don't want to learn the truth, we'll just keep them away from everyone else until they figure it out.
Which is evidence of how extraordinary his actions were in January 2021, and how extraordinarily well the billionaire owners of American media (including Zuck) have managed to retcon it as something else.
The surprise is not that he was kicked off the main social media companies, the surprises are that the wheels of US justice turned so slowly that Trump got a chance to be re-elected rather than life in prison, and likewise that the US electorate went for him.
It's interesting times where American Billionaires are deciding the politics in USA, South America and Europe.
I am sure that everyone involved must be feeling invincible but this is how you build resentment that will last and in most cases result in conflicts or regulations. Probably Musk, Zuckerberg and Thiel will be fine but they will destroy the prospects of the upcoming libertarians and cement the Chinese dominance as they don't have a problem of unruly billionaires and the problem of someone getting rich by doing one thing getting the right to do decide on everything and screw it up for everyone. Sad, I really don't want to live in a China-style political system.
You can resent them all you like; they don’t care as long as nothing is done to them, and nothing is being done. Resentment is worthless without action.
Resentment isn't worthless, the current political climate is a result of overshoot of a resentment towards some liberal policies. The next cycle will overshoot too.
The Supreme Federal Court in Brazil has been notorious for censorship. The New York Times has found that it has ordered 223 account-blocking orders since 2020.
This is exactly the kind of stupidity that helps people like Trump reelected. I know nothing about Brazilian politics, but this looks like a desperate attempt to undermine the opposition or pull Meta into needless controversy, and I have no idea how complicit the courts are in all this.
So what if searching for “brasil” returns a Bolsonaro GIF? I tried it myself, and the obvious explanation is that he’s wearing a Brazilian flag tshirt and dancing rather comically. How does a GIF appearing in search results imply political bias?
Let's face it: Tech CEOs have aligned with fascists (techno-fascism) because - and that's a general rule throughout history (see pre-WWII industrial titans aligned with Nazi-leaders): Industry leaders of large corporations and authoritarians share the same goal : ultimate control and power over others.
At a point on time, there should be more structured and unbiased content in social media before elections in democratic countries to help people make their decisions.
This should be regulated to avoid interference from anyone.
The biggest problem now is that the billionaires behind social media nowadays will push for a liberal / right wing agenda in the west for their own interests.
These billionaire ghouls need to answer for their many attempts on our Republics. Democracy can't survive when its most powerful members are working against it. We have to take them done ASAP, unless we want an encore of the 1940s.
Capital naturally compounds, and financial resources naturally seek political influence, so to combat the root of all evil is simply to cap individual's wealth versus society so they can't rig the game in their favor.
"The most accomplished masterpiece of contemporary capitalism is neither the iPhone, nor the unicorn startup, nor even the visionary billionaire.
No.
Its flagship product, its anthropological jewel, its greatest achievement, is the right-wing poor person. A genuine feat of social engineering: materially deprived, yet rich in convictions that run counter to their own interests.
They have been carefully molded. They have been taught that their problems always come from below or from next door — the immigrant, the welfare recipient, the civil servant, the unemployed — never from above.
They have been taught to hate taxes while surviving thanks to public services. To defend heirs to fortunes while having nothing to pass on themselves. To applaud those who crush them, as long as they speak loudly and promise law and order.
The right-wing poor person is a fascinating creature. They vote against their own interests with fervor, convinced that one day, perhaps, they too will find themselves on the right side of the fence.
They mistake brutality for courage, authoritarianism for protection, injustice for merit. They are sold fear in a ready-made package, identity at bargain prices, and anger in bulk on a monthly subscription.
At the dawn of this new world, the monsters do not emerge from the margins: they rise from the ballot boxes, television studios, and simplistic slogans.
They thrive on manufactured misery and sabotaged political awareness.
Capitalism has not merely produced poverty; it has achieved something far worse: it has made the poor docile, obedient, spiteful, and grateful.
> According to the petition, two people asked [Meta AI] to pick a number between 1 and 25. They gave no instructions and made no reference to the election. In one attempt, the AI answered 13. In the other, it answered 22. Those are the party ballot numbers of Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro, respectively. The groups question the coincidence.
My confidence in the validity of their claims tanked right about here.
I'm all for regulating transparency into social media algorithms. Meta most certainly is compromised by foreign actors. But can we choose less stupid hills to die on than numerology and GIFs? Headline is not remotely supported by the evidence.
It's the same here. AfD content gets pushed on YT. No matter how often I ignore channels.
Big tech is so rigged (intensional or not), the question if it is socially net negative has become rhetorical.
They are beholden to the current US admin - as always - only good thing is that the current admin is so blatant that maybe one day even the Germans will realize that you need to have your own social media just you have your own national tv, newspapers etc.
> realize that you need to have your own social media
How could that be made to happen? Should EU somehow move to federated (let’s say per country) instances of Mastodon or something? Or one big platform? How would regular folks get used to it? And how could those initiatives be prevented from falling into irrelevance when network effects are at play?
I agree with the idea, it’s just that there’s the usual hurdles there aren’t necessarily good answers for that I know of.
> They are beholden to the current US admin - as always
They have, as the joke goes, more money than God and influence all over the world. They are beholden to no one. They have the resources to fight in court against decisions they don’t believe in, and all the lobbying they need to shape established laws.
They choose their actions, and their actions are their own. Every single dollar they donate to the current president but not the previous one is an admission of their allegiance and (lack of) morals.
Having principles and standing for them costs money, and these societal parasites subsist on money and influence. Make no mistake, they will sell their own mother to further their goals, but they don’t have to while they can keep selling everyone else’s.
At this point sociala media has become a television, on twitter I just unfollowed everyone who have't followed back and I keep seeing the same antisemitic, antimuslim, anti-EU, anti-woman, anti-immigrant shit. My SO happens to see very similar posts to the point that I can't show her a funny post because she would have already seen it. There are some different posts of course but the money shot is mostly the same.
They probably show posts based on location and background, so essentially just like Fox, CNN, MSNBC but everyone sees theirs from the same screen with the same agenda pushed from all of them.
Similar, but more slop and less evil.
I have almost no reason to look at my facebook feed, check it perhaps once every 1-2 weeks in case something important was only posted there (not that this helps as they don't show me actual friends actual updates). Recent visit was 50% ads, 25% recommended or weirdly boosted content, including a post from Mark Zuckerberg promoting his AI, and a post whose content I forget from the White House (I live in Germany, the last time I even visited the USA was 2018).
I think the most charitable explanation for this is that it's because polarizing content (aka ragebait) gets views/plays, which the ranking algorithms directly optimize for.
Also, this isn't a new phenomenon. If you're interested, I'd recommend reading Shoshana Zuboff's 2018 book: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
Indeed. US tech has been actively conspiring in lying to the American populace about everything in Canada from politics, election results, public opinion in Canada, resources needed by the US from Canada, etc. They're interfering in the affairs of any country that won't bend to their will.
A lot of bots of US origin are propagating false narratives posing as citizens of these countries.
I've literally only been recommended their crap once and "don't recommend channel" has been working fine.
You might simply have been engaging with related content unknowingly, even if it's only one critical of them.
Or maybe AfD hasn’t targeted you for other reasons, so you’re not fighting against a marketing team to avoid the videos, only against the “pure” form of the algorithm.
I find a lot of social media algorithms are "dumb" in that they will see someone share something saying "x sucks" and interpret that as one being interested in "x".
Either that or it's deliberately showing people stuff it knows they will hate to harvest hate scrolling.
You can say many bad things about Google, but I think they are still "California liberals" on social issues.
I get AfD content recommendations (lurid, trashy stuff of uhm uncertain truth value) a propos of nothing in the village I grew up in - they are popular there with about 25% in the 2025 election. The region is not even in the east or particularly suffering economically. I don't get these recommendations in Berlin. It seems regional.
The owners of these companies are very much conservative though, not out of any ideology mind you, but because they correctly identify that this is the party that best suits their class interests of fucking over everyone and everything else in order to get richer.
I was careful to say socially and I generally agree with you, but Trump is currently just turning everything into shit that he touches. If you don't directly participate in his grift, you probably lose economically because of him. So I'm not sure how useful it is to back him for economic reasons.
Californian liberalism is one of the principle causes of the far-right backlash you're addressing.
That implies the far-right would have otherwise just sat peacefully at home doing crossword puzzles, until triggered into acting.
I don't think that's ever been true.
The inherent contradictions of capitalism coming to a rear are.
California liberalism is just a convenient bogeyman.
The economic problems hit people, then they (if they are white and / or male) are called bad people with an unfair advantage on top. Seems like not such a great way to get their support tbh.
Things like these happen if a state fails to secure its information space. Giving control over it to foreign entities means providing population wide manipulative power to foreign entities with adversarial intentions.
Every state should have foreign agent laws (NGOs must register and must be transparent over their financials). Every state should have control over their information space (especially educational, social and news media). Russia and China understood, Brazil and Europe did not.
It is not so black white. It is a dilemma. There is great value in freedom of expression. But fake expression with the explicit intention to mislead is not so good. It would be best if the population would be better at distinguishing truth from falsehood. Unfortunately much of the population seems to be at a level close to cattle.
> Unfortunately much of the population seems to be at a level close to cattle.
Not you though. You're a wolf among sheep. A true seer among the blind.
Everyone else is too dumb to know what's right, just manipulated by the media they consume on the Internet.
Not you though. You get all your information from trustworthy sources. Sure, they happen to agree with you 90% of the time but,hey, nobody's perfect, right? Well, except you. You've got all the answers.
If only everyone else would just let you make all the rules. You could get to all the bad people and make sure they stopped saying the wrong thing. Maybe provide them the resources they need to learn the truth and, if they don't want to learn the truth, we'll just keep them away from everyone else until they figure it out.
Meta, along with every other large platform, had previously banned the sitting president of the United States.
You mean the senile reality tv star who kept breaking their TOS? Yeah totally the same thing…
Which is evidence of how extraordinary his actions were in January 2021, and how extraordinarily well the billionaire owners of American media (including Zuck) have managed to retcon it as something else.
After this happened, causing him to get double impeached: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Capitol_riot-_Videos_show...
The surprise is not that he was kicked off the main social media companies, the surprises are that the wheels of US justice turned so slowly that Trump got a chance to be re-elected rather than life in prison, and likewise that the US electorate went for him.
What US companies do to US politicians is an internal matter for the US.
As soon as they start interfering with democratic processes in other countries, it's imperialism.
The daily fine is so meaninglessly small ($99,000 per day) that there is very little incentive to do anything.
It's interesting times where American Billionaires are deciding the politics in USA, South America and Europe.
I am sure that everyone involved must be feeling invincible but this is how you build resentment that will last and in most cases result in conflicts or regulations. Probably Musk, Zuckerberg and Thiel will be fine but they will destroy the prospects of the upcoming libertarians and cement the Chinese dominance as they don't have a problem of unruly billionaires and the problem of someone getting rich by doing one thing getting the right to do decide on everything and screw it up for everyone. Sad, I really don't want to live in a China-style political system.
Its one of the most Orwellian situations I can think of.
You can resent them all you like; they don’t care as long as nothing is done to them, and nothing is being done. Resentment is worthless without action.
Resentment isn't worthless, the current political climate is a result of overshoot of a resentment towards some liberal policies. The next cycle will overshoot too.
The Supreme Federal Court in Brazil has been notorious for censorship. The New York Times has found that it has ordered 223 account-blocking orders since 2020.
As is its sovereign right. It is not Meta's right to interfere with Brazil's sovereignty.
This is exactly the kind of stupidity that helps people like Trump reelected. I know nothing about Brazilian politics, but this looks like a desperate attempt to undermine the opposition or pull Meta into needless controversy, and I have no idea how complicit the courts are in all this.
So what if searching for “brasil” returns a Bolsonaro GIF? I tried it myself, and the obvious explanation is that he’s wearing a Brazilian flag tshirt and dancing rather comically. How does a GIF appearing in search results imply political bias?
I’m immune to a trillion dollar brainwashing industry. It’s everyone else that is manipulated which makes it so valuable.
And once again meta is interfering with election. The scum of the earth…
Let's face it: Tech CEOs have aligned with fascists (techno-fascism) because - and that's a general rule throughout history (see pre-WWII industrial titans aligned with Nazi-leaders): Industry leaders of large corporations and authoritarians share the same goal : ultimate control and power over others.
At a point on time, there should be more structured and unbiased content in social media before elections in democratic countries to help people make their decisions.
This should be regulated to avoid interference from anyone.
The biggest problem now is that the billionaires behind social media nowadays will push for a liberal / right wing agenda in the west for their own interests.
These billionaire ghouls need to answer for their many attempts on our Republics. Democracy can't survive when its most powerful members are working against it. We have to take them done ASAP, unless we want an encore of the 1940s.
Capital naturally compounds, and financial resources naturally seek political influence, so to combat the root of all evil is simply to cap individual's wealth versus society so they can't rig the game in their favor.
"The most accomplished masterpiece of contemporary capitalism is neither the iPhone, nor the unicorn startup, nor even the visionary billionaire.
No.
Its flagship product, its anthropological jewel, its greatest achievement, is the right-wing poor person. A genuine feat of social engineering: materially deprived, yet rich in convictions that run counter to their own interests.
They have been carefully molded. They have been taught that their problems always come from below or from next door — the immigrant, the welfare recipient, the civil servant, the unemployed — never from above.
They have been taught to hate taxes while surviving thanks to public services. To defend heirs to fortunes while having nothing to pass on themselves. To applaud those who crush them, as long as they speak loudly and promise law and order.
The right-wing poor person is a fascinating creature. They vote against their own interests with fervor, convinced that one day, perhaps, they too will find themselves on the right side of the fence.
They mistake brutality for courage, authoritarianism for protection, injustice for merit. They are sold fear in a ready-made package, identity at bargain prices, and anger in bulk on a monthly subscription.
At the dawn of this new world, the monsters do not emerge from the margins: they rise from the ballot boxes, television studios, and simplistic slogans.
They thrive on manufactured misery and sabotaged political awareness.
Capitalism has not merely produced poverty; it has achieved something far worse: it has made the poor docile, obedient, spiteful, and grateful.
A masterpiece, I'm telling you!"
Maximino Fernández