You're parsing the meaning from his sentence wrong.
Clearly, when he said "I vow to loosen restrictions on online speech", what he actually meant was "I vow to loosen [the circle of people who get to set] restrictions on online speech".
At this point Meta doesn't even worry about these news and specially right now that it is trying to please the current adminstration. Over the years I see it got a lot of bad press but they continue to grow their revenue. Investors are happy, nothing else matters probably for the company .
Cambridge Analytica resulted in them largely closing off their API which depending on your view on platform monetization vs moat of less easily accessible social graph was a bullish thing for the company. It was quite a manufactured scandal in my opinion.
It was an API for making apps with Facebook integration, and after they closed it down, Facebook became even more of a walled garden. Perhaps no criticism of Facebook has ever been more trumped up, and it shut down a lot of people making useful, fun, interesting Facebook apps who were afterwards locked out of the platform. Facebook was probably all too happy to remove the functionality and use this as the excuse to do it.
Anyone that remembers the Graffiti Wall knows the real thing that was lost here. It had it's issues (Farmville was the worst / most annoying version of Harvest Moon ever made) but it was worth saving.
It was also worth building the infrastructure required to make it function, because it ultimately damaged Facebook in ways I don't think they really still understand. Their abortive attempt to build a metaverse or a Twitter that feels more like a prison, vs successful, beautiful, creative, wild interpretations of a metaverse that lead to things like Minecraft and Bluesky. They simply won't succeed a these endeavors without meaningful third party access. Improving upon that problem might be a more productive use of their time than kissing political butts if they want to actually succeed in this space.
They just learned, like every single company, that nobody has willpower, ability or memory to keep up with the news. Wait a week or two, say nothing, people will forget. The product is intrenched enough in the society that nobody will move unless something happens to the product itself.
Frankly, can’t really judge them. That is probably the optimal thing to do in the current business environment.
I don't think "keeping up with the news" is really the problem. The problem is that "the news" is primarily about entertainment, not information, and so it isn't actionable. If you care about being informed about actionable information, then your good sources of information are RSS, long-form articles, books, etc.
Yeah totally fair. But honestly, I would blame the people. Eventually they are the ones that vote for politicians that result in uneven game field, so businesses end up playing ball. And I know, leadership needs to have some sort of shame, empathy, morality and etc., but US isn't Japan where some sort of participation of leadership in sexual misconduct between third parties can bring down a TV company to their knees. And i'm not saying whether one is better than the other, it's just what it is.
Lots of blame to go around. I can have it my heart to blame the voters, the systems set up to make sure the voters never get a good choice, the slavers that made that system, the apathetic, the opportunistic, the greedy, the domineering.
Overall though, I feel like if I'm going to single anyone out, its those with the most power and those benefiting the most.
Fair enough, and I agree with you! It is sad how over the years, I’ve lost my belief that one day we’ll all live in a fairly peaceful world where this is never a problem. I understand that it’s practically impossible, but I used to be a naive 12 year old decades ago.
> People keeping up with the news doesn't do much either when our lawmakers are bought and paid for.
This is not true and you'll never understand politics if you think this.
(What actually happens is that being in Congress is such a horrible job that only insane people would want to do it, so the people with money find congresspeople who /already agree with them/ and are trying to keep them from leaving for a less stressful normal career.)
I think it might be OpenSecrets' fault. They're great and all, but they report donations from employees of companies as if they're from the companies themselves, which produces nonsense like "health insurance companies donated to Bernie Sanders". No they didn't!
Your example has no merits on both key factors - means and motive.
Means - your neighbor has no way to murder you without very high risk of getting punished afterwards. Where is Biden could do to FB whatever he wanted without any risk to himself.
Motive - does your neighbor pressures you into doing something worth killing for?
I mean he also said in the same interview that after he pushed back against Biden, Biden opened an anti-trust lawsuit against Meta.
However, the anti-trust lawsuit was filed in the 1st Trump administration. So, I don't really think you can take anything Zuck says outside of a shareholder meeting at face value (where he has an actual penalty for lieing).
yes because the opinion of voters who care about DEI doesn't seem to matter, while voters who demonize it does. why you pretend this won't ressonate well with the electorate of our new president?
you may believe it is a puff piece, and that's subjective, it's fine to think so. but saying it's paid for is a serious accusation and very different from "puff". big time news outlets like the NYT don't do paid content like that - if they have any sponsored content it will be prominently labeled or placed in the Opinion/Editorial section.
We’re talking about posts promoting prescription medications. There were always strict rules about this on Facebook (banned by default) and the fact that most of these posts ever stayed up was more likely a result of oversight and possibly politics in the first place. You certainly don’t see almost anything about other prescription meds.
> "The company restored some of the accounts and posts on Thursday, after The New York Times asked about the actions."
It would appear the posts were OK after all.
> You certainly don’t see almost anything about other prescription meds.
I get pretty much non-stop Ozempic ads on Facebook.
> "Aid Access, one of the largest abortion pill providers in the United States, said some posts were removed on its Facebook account and blurred out on its Instagram account since November, with more posts blurred in recent days. The abortion pill service said it has been blocked from accessing its Facebook account since November, and its Instagram account was suspended last week, though it has since been restored."
You don't think the November timing is the slightest bit suspicious?
- Has this happened before?
- are they actually compliant with the rules? Or are they being banned and then unbanned because we’re sympathetic to them?
- was anyone mass reporting them? Was this human or automatic?
- how often are these things banned?
It’s really a miracle most of these outfits are operating at all. In most cases we’re talking about filling out an anonymous form to get prescription medication. It’s not legal. Some of them try to provide a form of legality as a cover (“we definitely have a doctor review your anonymous form”) but not anything that would hold up to scrutiny. It’s not surprising that very few of them are likely following Facebooks rules on top of that.
Of course maybe they should be legal and the situation should be totally different, but Facebook banning grey market prescription drug sellers that almost certainly violate their rules is not surprising. It’s also not surprising they ease up when the NYT asks about it even if there are rule violations because I doubt Meta wants any part of this debate.
People buy highly illegal drugs on the Internet all the time. Yes, most people regard an address as sufficiently anonymous, and either way, it's obviously not meaningfully doctor-supervised if a possibly-imaginary doctor never sees anything but an internet form you filled out.
Again, I am not saying things should be this way, but we're talking about black/grey market prescription drug suppliers mailing prescription drugs to people pseudonymously/anonymously, usually/sometimes in violation of US law and almost certainly nearly always in violation of the FB rules I posted above.
If this was literally any other prescription drug, nobody would find this result surprising.
NB: In contradiction to one of your downthread posts, very few of these places are taking insurance information. (Maybe even "none", but I am willing to believe someone does.) Usually one of their selling points is that it is "private". The article for example cites Aid Access, which does not. Neither do any of the sites in the downstream commenter I clicked on. I encourage you to actually look at these sites and see how easy it is. I am not saying that it is a bad thing, but clearly it is not aboveboard.
I would encourage you to check out the actual affected accounts from the article, which are listed.
> The Instagram account of Hey Jane, another abortion pill provider, was recently invisible in Instagram search, said Rebecca Davis, who leads marketing at Hey Jane.
I did, as I said, I went through Aid Access. I checked some of the others as well.
> Telehealth, looking to take Medicaid.
"Looking to take Medicaid" is a strange way of saying they currently do not accept any form of insurance.
Hey Jane is the only one I have seen thus far. And of course, there's a reason why they also accept eg. Cashapp rather than just taking CC/debit cards - they expect most of their customers will not want them to have any actual information on them.
And again, any prescription med promotion, including 100 legit prescription meds, require some byzantine bureaucratic process with FB themselves - not just being legal or de facto legal.
Listed there I checked some of their recommended stores. The first that I clicked accept Bitcoin payment and require no insurance details (medside24). It does look like it's possible to do this fully anonymous without much hassle. I have no problem with that by the way.
Oh good, an unalterable ledger stating the wallet associated with you paid for an abortion medication. Good thing the US is in a social headspace where none of us believe that that will be made retroactively illegal.
Bitcoin is absolutely not anonymous. To believe otherwise is a grave error.
Having trouble getting past the paywall. Can you confirm that these were posts directly promoting the prescription drugs, or were other posts by this organization also hidden?
>At this point Meta doesn't even worry about these news and specially right now that it is trying to please the current adminstration
You may not agree with the current administration, but they won the popular vote. What would you rather them do, defy the current administration? Sounds pretty anti-democratic to me. Am I missing a deeper principle here or is it just a matter of "companies should do what I think is right"?
I would rather companies do whatever they thought was best with no regards to the current administration, unless forced by law to take some action. Large companies feeling like they need to take actions to please the current President is not great.
Any scenario in which a billionaire, with all their power and resources, is deeply scared of pissing off the President - to the point of doing a public 180 on everything - is one in which us much less powerful regular people should be very scared.
>defying an administration that you disagree with, within the rule of law, is just about the most American and democratic thing I can imagine.
Purdue Pharma caused the opioid crisis which killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. State and federal governments thinks it's liable for billions in damages. Perdue disagrees and is fighting it tooth and nail in the courts, which is within their rights. Would you characterize this as "the most American and democratic thing I can imagine"?
Having the right to attempt to defend yourself in court - even if you're a shitty person/organization - is very American, yes. Electing governments in part to try and prosecute said shitty people/organizations is similarly quite democratic.
>Having the right to attempt to defend yourself in court - even if you're a shitty person/organization - is very American, yes.
I'm not arguing they shouldn't have the right to defend themselves in court, only that most people wouldn't think that as being "patriotic". It's also not hard to find people characterizing Citizens United v. FEC as "undemocratic", even though it theoretically emobies the democratic principles of free speech and the supreme court acting as a check.
There's a pretty wide gulf between "abortion should be legal in at least most or all cases" and "ads for abortion pills on facebook". The company's spokesperson specifically mentioned it was taken down due to regulations relating to advertising drugs.
If the reason for the takedown was "we don't allow ads for drugs of any variety on the platform" or "regulations prevent us from allowing ads for medicines on our platform" then sure, I have no problem with that. I can complain about the quality or consistency of that enforcement, but sure, if that's the reason, that's fine.
If the reason for the takedown is that the popular will of the people, as manifest in the preferences of the current President, deems this thing bad, and therefore we're taking it down, then that's a) inaccurate and b) deeply out of step with American tradition, principle, and governing philosophy.
>If the reason for the takedown is that the popular will of the people, as manifest in the preferences of the current President, deems this thing bad, and therefore we're taking it down, then that's a) inaccurate and b) deeply out of step with American tradition, principle, and governing philosophy.
Is the implication here that any sort of proactive action by companies to dodge enforcement actions a bad thing? For instance, if after Biden appointed Lina Khan to the FTC, and M&A firms suddenly stopped doing deals out of anti-trust concerns, is that bad? Or is it somehow only limited to advertising?
So I'd started writing a response to this, but it got a bit long and abstract and it was a work day, so I kind of left it, but an article dropped into my lap today which was almost too perfect as a demonstration of what I was trying to get to:
> Now Mr. Trump is back in the White House, and many executives at CBS’s parent company, Paramount, believe that settling the lawsuit would increase the odds that the Trump administration does not block or delay their planned multibillion-dollar merger with another company, according to several people with knowledge of the matter.
In general, if an incoming administration signals a change in regulatory priorities or interpretation, and that causes businesses broadly to adjust their business plans, I think that's a reasonable reflection, after a relatively long chain and with all the caveats of the US electoral system, of the "people's will" as expressed in governance after an election. Lina Khan indicated that the FTC was going to take a much closer look at mergers with a renewed eye towards competition, not just consumer wellbeing, and that broadly changed the math on whether companies expected their mergers to go through. That's what I would expect - that's the point of government and regulation here, and the change in those priorities following an election fits broadly into "the government as the people's tool for constraining powerful actors."
However, a company changing its policies or plans specifically because it is concerned about the whims and wills of the president - in other words, companies specifically attempting to curry personal favor with the president to get better treatment - is not that. If Paramount was worried that recent changes to the law or changes to how the FCC or FTC interpreted regulations affected their chances of winning the lawsuit or getting the merger through in the same way that, say, NBC would be worried about it, that's normal. Paramount is worried that the president is angry at them and they are going to be specifically targeted, and so they're going to give the president a large cash settlement so he'll instruct the FTC to let them complete their merger. That's not normal - or at least, it's not good.
They didn’t. They won 49.8%. But I’ve got to be honest, any logic along those lines rings very hollow these days. We’ve been told over and over about the “tyranny of the majority” being why a number of sparsely populated states get a disproportionate vote on the country’s destiny. To pivot just because the popular vote flipped to the other side (which, again, it didn’t) feels very… convenient.
I don't have a horse in this race nor a particular interest in US elections but I don't think your definition of popular vote is the commonly used one (i.e. candidate doesn't have to have more than 50% to win it).
I definitely think it's better for companies to do what's right than what's wrong, and I'm not sure I follow your implication that this is a shallower principle than calibrating what I think companies should do against the winner of the most recent federal elections. It would be a harder question if there were a law which requires Instagram or Facebook to block and hide posts from abortion pill providers, but there isn't.
Ideally, each individual, with society deciding via laws and regulation when people disagree.
> Does this boil down to just "I don't agree with what meta is doing"?
No, this boils down to "it is bad for even billionaires to be terrified of opposing the new President". Who has, for the record, previously called for Zuck's imprisonment.
>No, this boils down to "it is bad for even billionaires to be terrified of opposing the new President". Who has, for the record, previously called for Zuck's imprisonment.
That's a total 180 from the OP and most of this comment thread, which was seemingly about excoriating meta/zuck's behavior.
Everyone who makes a decision has the responsibility to judge whether it's right.
It would be one thing if Meta content teams sat down, thought about it, and decided that abortion pills aren't something they're comfortable having on their platform. But then they wouldn't have restored accounts when the New York Times started asking. It looks a lot more like an unprincipled decision to make their lives a bit easier by putting their thumbs on the scale against views the government doesn't like. (It's not like they've never done that before!)
> You may not agree with the current administration, but they won the popular vote
A republican candidate narrowly won the popular vote for the first time in 20 years, a metric that has no value in our system of government. And somehow you think this factoid puts the current administration in a position where they dare not be defied? Give me a fucking break.
>A republican candidate narrowly won the popular vote for the first time in 20 years, a metric that has no value in our system of government.
I can't tell whether you're trying to make a nitpicky point about how the president is elected, or you're trying to claim the concept of political legitimacy doesn't exist.
I think they're claiming that the popular vote has no real relationship to political legitimacy in the US, which is true, because the electoral college/FPTP system is explicitly designed to render the popular vote essentially meaningless through layers of abstraction and gatekeeping. It's only really useful for propaganda, and not even that useful - Republicans claimed a sweeping mandate from the masses even in 2016 when millions more people voted for Hillary Clinton.
Political legitimacy isn't static, but it is primarily demarcated by hard numbers in our system. And going by the hard numbers - the ones actually referenced in binding documents - the Republican Party currently has one of the weakest grasps on power of any ruling party in our country's modern history. A rational administration would appreciate that fact and govern accordingly.
> You may not agree with the current administration, but they won the popular vote. What would you rather them do, defy the current administration? Sounds pretty anti-democratic to me.
Does this concept of yours apply to, say, the Heritage Foundation, Musk's Twitter, Fox News, etc. during the Biden presidency?
>Does this concept of yours apply to, say, the Heritage Foundation, Musk's Twitter, Fox News, etc. during the Biden presidency?
The Heritage Foundation and Fox News are basically advocacy organizations so their remit includes criticizing the government. For that reason they get a pass. I don't know what you're referring to with "Musk's Twitter [...] during the Biden presidency", so you're going to have to elaborate.
The roles are entirely reversed here. Rather than the company voluntarily complying with the administration, musk alleges that biden administration officials illegally try to pressure twitter. I agree that if trump tried to illegally pressure zuck into censoring abortion pills, that would be improper on the part of trump, but at the same time I wouldn't fault zuck for caving.
>Yes, that was and is explicitly legal.
>(Morally shitty. But that's freedom!)
The question is whether it's "democratic", not whether it's illegal. The fact that you think it's "morally shitty", suggests think that you agree it's antidemocratic.
> I agree that if trump tried to illegally pressure zuck into censoring abortion pills, that would be improper on the part of trump, but at the same time I wouldn't fault zuck for caving.
He is clearly caving to pressure, either present or expected.
> The fact that you think it's "morally shitty", suggests think that you agree it's antidemocratic.
No. Democracy and shittiness are not mutually exclusive.
Obviously they are trying to curry favour at the moment and don't care what reasonable people might think. My instinct is that it will all prove to have been futile and they will be hung out to dry.
At some point the people at the top turnover. Zuck might just hang in there long enough to step into that role. The resources at his disposal certainly don’t hurt his chances.
I hate how Zuckerberg tiptoes around Section 230; that's what his hyper-masculine phase is about. Pretending medical information shows up on your front door, pretending Cambridge Analytica doesn't show up, pretending you're acting in good faith. It's all pretend. Sure, this child's HIPAA package was posted on Facebook, we don't know what that is. Instead of exporting a child's medical information to a local church, we're exporting it out of the country. That's what good faith means because I'm a philanthropist and I'm a philanthropist for doing so; we developed Zstandard.
There is almost always a non-malicious explanation when it comes to complex technology systems acting in ways that appear politically malicious. You’d think the hackernews crowd would bias towards curiosity over impulsivity.
Now every time you get the urge to log back in, switch to a neglected activity/interest to focus in on. In 30-60 days (I can’t remember the grace period) you’ll have a deeper understanding of this interest and be Facebook free.
jk, of course it isn't fair to judge anyone for not leaving social media - it's actually quite valuable at times and going without it feels like missing out.
Serious question: If you never log back in, what does it matter if you have an account or not? An account I never use doesn't appear to have any affect on me.
Serious question: If you never log back in, what does it matter if you have an account or not? An account I never use doesn't appear to have any affect on me.
By way of example, the Catholic Church holds enormous political power in the US by virtue of its claim to over 50 million members. When the Church speaks up, politicians sit up and take notes. Less than 25% of those members actually attend church weekly, but the others are still counted as "Catholics" because you have to go well out of your way to have yourself formally removed from the church membership rolls. [1] As of 2010 there is apparently no way to do that voluntarily at all.
Facebook works the same way. Once you're in, your account is never truly closed or deleted AFAIK. (I've tried.)
We may debate MAU versus other metrics for assessing user activity, but all the politicians see is "We have 3 billion accounts worldwide, over 250 million of them in the US." Like the church, Facebook is able to wield political power in your name even if you signed up many years ago and now disagree vehemently with everything they stand for.
It seems that the only guaranteed way to avoid this sorry situation, short of changing your name or faking your death, is to refrain from signing up in the first place.
>Less than 25% of those members actually attend church weekly, but the others are still counted as "Catholics" because you have to go well out of your way to have yourself formally removed from the church membership rolls.
This only matters if people use the numbers that the Catholic Church tells them.
The real reason people get counted as Catholic (or any religion or group) is because those people identify as Catholic on surveys and such. People in my social circle identify as Catholic while also not having been to a Mass in years outside of an invited event (e.g. wedding). So they would still get counted.
There are some social ramifications. I haven't used my Facebook account in years. Around the holidays I happened to run into an old college buddy and we caught up a bit. It was great, but there was a bit of awkwardness around how he had been in town a couple times and hit me up on facebook to get together, but I had never responded... It's all good between us now that that has been cleared up, however I sure do wish that he didn't think I was blowing him off and he had known to try another contact method. We missed some good times together.
It's not huge in the grand scheme of things, but it's something to consider.
OK, so let's say I used a Facebook account 10 years ago (I didn't). And they know: Roughly (by IP geolocation) where I lived three homes ago, that I liked Fallout 3, and who three of my high school buddies were, none of whom do anything with me or live within 1000 miles of me. Now I no longer use Facebook or any of Meta's web sites. What can they do with this old-ass information (or even any accurate new information that they could magically derive from it), that would affect my life today?
One of our EU devs tried to exercise his GDPR rights to be exempt from automated decision making (there was a clear app review bug; thousands of apps impacted at the time). It was quite impossible to do so.
An anomalous uptick in censoring information that is politically biased toward the new authoritarian regime is suspicious. Especially when Zuck has explicitly stated his desire to get "in" with the leader, his ~~bribe~~ donation to the leader's inauguration, and so on.
It's also possible that it was as innocuous as aggressive automod.
Yes, I'm saying it's plausible that Meta is acting in line with the Trump administration. The GOP is very anti abortion, to the point state AGs are trying to prosecute put of state doctors for prescribing abortive pills.
I hear you , and that's a stretch. Trump is a party of his own. Until recently, most of the GOP were Trump antagonists. He was so soft on the abortion issue during the campaign that most pro-lifer's wrote him off until he won.
It's deeply hypocritical of these oligarchs to pretend fighting for absolute free speech while exerting unprecedented censorship on their platforms. And if you're OK with that maybe it's because you never actually cared about free speech.
FacebookInstagram is blocking and hiding many posts and vowing many things since forever. You are free to get an account there to enjoy advertising while getting likes for posting agreeable posts. And on top of that you can subscribe to the nytimes which is hiding and blocking news fit to print since forever to learn about your values and the way you see things.
There is a clear trajectory for Tik-Tok to be force sold to a Musk type who can bend it to conservative American disinformation, supposedly better than CCP disinformation?
I despise Facebook, but given a choice of US youth being indoctrinated by Facebook, by TikTok/CCP, or both… the choice is pretty clear. Sure, I’d like a “none of the above” option but that is not on the table. Wake me when it is.
Why is it clear that your life won't suffer more under domestic control than foreign control, other than reflexive jingoism? Domestic control has more direct levers and the gloves are off right now.
You see it as “jingoistic” to prefer more local corruption that sucks, but largely zero sum among the country you live in, to foreign corruption that is zero sum with adversaries?
I’ll be charitable and assume your point is “any corruption is so unbelievably awful that we might as well have the worst possible form of it if we have any at all.”
> Why is it clear that your life won't suffer more under domestic control than foreign control, other than reflexive jingoism? Domestic control has more direct levers and the gloves are off right now.
Because foreigners are even less accountable to Americans and even less interested in their well being than any domestic group? It just stands to reason, there's not even the weak ties of being members of the same group.
I mean, to be a little outlandish: if there was a conflict, and some foreign adversary could transmit a mind virus to Americans that would cause them to go on murderous rampages and kill everyone, they'd probably do it. It'd be an instant win, and there'd be some sweet, sweet land to colonize afterwards.
The rich who are currently raiding the country are effectively unaccountable and care as little for the bottom 99% of the US as the Chinese government does.
If we ignore murder mind viruses and look at what's actually going on.
> Because foreigners are even less accountable to Americans and even less interested in their well being than any domestic group?
That is not necessarily true. The Hitlers and Putins of the world will happily sacrifice their own citizenry and their country's future for more power in the moment. It's entirely possible for some foreigners to hold more goodwill towards a country than its own leadership.
> I mean, to be a little outlandish: if there was a conflict, and some foreign adversary could transmit a mind virus to Americans that would cause them to go on murderous rampages and kill everyone, they'd probably do it. It'd be an instant win, and there'd be some sweet, sweet land to colonize afterwards.
Several countries are entirely capable of doing this with nukes.
> That is not necessarily true. The Hitlers and Putins of the world will happily sacrifice their own citizenry and their country's future for more power in the moment.
Don't you think they'd be even more willing to sacrifice Americans or other foreigners?
> Several countries are entirely capable of doing this with nukes.
No, and you're kind of missing the point, which was the adversarial leader cares less about foreigners. Also: nukes are somewhat controlled with MAD, and they'd spoil that sweet, sweet land with fallout.
Yes- they can talk to each other and swap notes. It sounds like you're arguing for a great firewall type thing to make sure there's only approved non-propaganda content
Honestly, the choice is clear: the CCP is clearly not doing as much damage to our youth as our own companies are. Which is more important for U.S. youth to know about, Tienanmen Square or abortion, Winnie the Pooh or jury nullification? And that's just the censorship aspect of this; surveillance remains a bigger factor IMO. Which organization is more likely to be used by an American cop to track the ex-girlfriend they domestically abused: TikTok or Facebook?
It seems like your entire argument here is just vague sinophobic hand-waving. Do you have even a single example of TickTock/CCP harming American youth that hasn't been done worse by US social media and government?
To be clear, I'm not arguing that China is better than the US in any general way, I'm specifically making the claim that American government and social media harms Americans more than any other government or social media harms Americans.
I trust them about as much as the domestic adversary controlling the content. And the Chinese have a harder time sending in the cops if they don't like what they see
I'm beginning to think that putting likely sociopaths in charge of companies specializing in tools to enable human connections might not be a good thing for society.
> Nobody put him in charge, he started the company.
People get removed from the heads of companies they start all the time. That's how Elon became the "founder" of Tesla in the minds of most people: he got rid of the original guys.
He hasn't been removed from the leadership position (despite a lot of things that should have gotten him removed, if not imprisoned - psychological experiments on users without informed consent is a good example [0]) because in the 60s and 70s some other sociopath said that the main social responsibility of companies is to create value for shareholders, and he's done that, so he gets to stay.
Which leads me to...
> Start a competitor if you think you can do a better job.
You have a significant fraction of a trillion dollars lying around for me to fund that with? At least some of that will need to go towards brib... er... lobbying; the guy was literally hosting the President of the United States at his inauguration [1]
It's almost as if the form of economics practiced in the United States rewards bad personal behavior while conducting a company's business with enough money to avoid pretty much any form of consequence.
Cheerleading for the COVID/Biden era of social media moderation seems to have been predicated on the belief that the Democrats would always be in power. It was always just a matter of time before these systems were turned against those on the left.
I've always said that to leftists, particularly with "hatespeech" laws: Remember that the government will change at some point, and this could be used against you. Used to be you weren't allowed to criticize the Church, or say things that displease religious people. The laws you're supporting now could well lead to that being the case again in the future. But they just couldn't fathom a world where they wouldn't shape the narrative. It's the curse of progressives that they think society is always moving toward a utopian endpoint that they already envision.
With this story it appears to be primarily about restrictions on advertising pharmaceuticals, but if it was simply Meta considering abortions immoral, then yeah... Meta has been banning a lot of legal speech simply because it was considered immoral in certain circles. So to all the people outraged over this: You reap what you sow, and hopefully you learn to be careful about what you wish for in the future because it can always go both ways.
This is a hilarious claim given that none of the current action is going through the legislative path, and the tech billionaires freely bend the knee to Trump even before the inauguration.
What's even the material point here? That "the left" pierced the taboo on speech censorship? Trump's currently wiping his ass with the separation of powers enshrined in the constitution. He does not care about taboo.
Unless you consider Biden leftist, they always have been. Even when he was around, you'd get muted for talking about Palestine.
Also, if we're playing a game of 'who started it', look at the response to the artists and activists against the Global War on Terror. The OG cancel culture
Hardly the OG. We've kicked people out of our social groups since before we had language; all the other primates do it naturally in the wild just like we do.
McCarthy's blacklists, Focus on the Family trying to knock shows off the air, tarring and feathering during the revolution, the Alien and Sedition Acts... this country has always practiced cancel culture.
Hate the idea that the right never would have done all the things they promised they want to do, if Biden hadn't "started it". As if the problem of Biden is that he was too radical, went too far, and did too much lol
I have weird feeling their experiment block/unblock account
tactics is somewhat profitable. While some users are closing their accounts, new ones engadges. while bad publicity is always somewhat reasonable.
It is funny how loosening restrictions somehow seems to result in more moderation of specific topics, tags, etc.
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