That’s exactly it. I view it almost like Newtonian physics. Sure, it’s inaccurate at some level, but until we find a superior model, it’s safer to make your investment decisions based on it.
Same here, with the caveat that Google has managed to successfully bully me into paying for Premium some time ago. Not sure if any Premium users are affected.
Are you disagreeing with the “chilling effect” section of the article, or are you implying the effect could not have been real due to the current length of the article?
Did Zuckerberg himself support conspiracy theories? Or does he regret succumbing to government requests for censoring that type of content? Sounds to me like he wants to allow certain kinds of speech on his platform, regardless of whether or not he personally agrees with them.
He probably hates how expensive it was/is to now support government requests, and how many governments are big enough to bully "his" platform into giving the same support other governments have gotten.
Literally Zuckerberg is quoted as saying he didn't remove posts: "[USG] “expressed a lot of frustration” when the social media platform resisted.".
It would be much better if the article actually posted the contents of the government email. Everything we saw from say the Twitter files in this regard is some gov employee asking if X post complied with Y Twitter policy and if-not if the post should be removed. That gov employee didn't write Y policy, it was Twitter's own policy. I suspected a similar thing happened here where Facebook has a fake news policy [1] and a gov employee was asking them if given posts were in violation of it.
I assume he’s familiar with the transparency standards of his own site. And he still calls whatever happened pressure. So it’s entirely possible it wasn’t as innocuous as you suggest.
If a major government agency repeatedly requests you follow certain guidelines and gets frustrated when you don’t, it might be reasonable to feel pressured or threatened, even if they’re your own guidelines. I know I’d be, even by what was revealed in the Twitter files.
Their system is designed to push engagement. My guess is that COVID conspiracies generated this engagement, and their system automatically pushed it to the top. We already know that a lot of dishonest but emotionally charged speech gets pushed up by the algorithm.
IF COVID conspiracy theories got pushed up by this algorithm, as opposed to what would be produced by a 'dump pipe', then yes, with the power that Zuck has over facebook, he supported conspiracy theories, in the interest of making money.
Can’t find the claim about the statement not being political anywhere in the linked article. But there’s this:
> Meta’s CEO aired his grievances in a letter Monday to the House Judiciary Committee in response to its investigation into content moderation on online platforms
Sounds like he wasn’t the initiator of the discussion, but I may be misreading the paragraph.
And it’s in the news because it’s being made newsworthy, not because it’s new.
“A U.S. federal judge,” in 2023 “restricted some agencies and officials of the administration of President Joe Biden from meeting and communicating with social media companies to moderate their content” [1].
"On Wednesday, the Supreme Court tossed out claims that the Biden administration coerced social media platforms into censoring users by removing COVID-19 and election-related content."
> “For months, high-ranking Government officials placed unrelenting pressure on Facebook to suppress Americans’ free speech," Alito wrote. "Because the Court unjustifiably refuses to address this serious threat to the First Amendment, I respectfully dissent."
It seems like the court had agreement that government coercion did happen. They threw the case out because they couldn’t draw a direct correlation to harm to the specific people that brought the allegations up.
Unfortunately, Alito has objectively proven himself to be a liar at best. His statements are the farthest of any justice from representing an agreement of the court.
The only "pressure" that was put on FB, was the same put on Twitter, which was that reports and requests from Administration employees has some higher gravity than other reports. The "investigation" here, and Zuckerberg's responce are not evidence of wrongdoing, only political maneuvering.
It's genuinely weird that they keep talking about pressure as if there was an actual means of exerting pressure rather than literally providing feedback - this administration doesn't go after it's enemies in the private sector unlike the last one (JEDI contract comes to mind)
Very funny that the initial case got lots of press on HN and got people like patio11 in a tizzy but when it was tossed out by SCOTUS there was nary a peep.
> Plaintiffs may have succeeded if they were instead seeking damages for past harms. But in her opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote that partly because the Biden administration seemingly stopped influencing platforms' content policies in 2022, none of the plaintiffs could show evidence of a "substantial risk that, in the near future, they will suffer an injury that is traceable" to any government official. Thus, they did not seem to face "a real and immediate threat of repeated injury," Barrett wrote.
Are you saying Zuck is lying and the government did not do what he's saying they did? In Twitter's case, there are emails from Adam Schiff - do you think that evidence is fraudulent?
The existence of the government communications with the social media companies requesting suppression of content are referenced in the courts opinions. The Biden admin also admits to these communications. https://rollcall.com/2024/06/26/supreme-court-rejects-lawsui...
> funny to see MAGA people all of a sudden embracing Chad Zuckerberg, as though this represents some sort of organic character development on his part
Honestly, it's refreshingly pragmatic to see American politics ditching the ideological purity tests that defined our recent history. I disagree completely with MAGA politics. But allies don't have to be friends--if someone's on your side, that's really what counts.
Zuckerberg is pretending to be on MAGA's side so that he can assist whatever next phase of the agenda is intended for Trump's next term in office. Of course, if MAGA could pick out people who are only pretending to be on their side they wouldn't be supporting Trump in the first place.
He must have a fantastic PR team. Across the political spectrum, I'm seeing a ton of support for him. Decades of harvesting and selling personal data (including shadow profiles of non-users), "I don't know why people trust me", Cambridge Analytica, the metaverse/attempt at owning the future of the internet- all swept under the rug in exchange for open Llama weights and a couple statements about censorship. Musk could cure mortality without changing as many minds about him.
> He must have a fantastic PR team. Across the political spectrum, I'm seeing a ton of support for him
He's speaking to both sides and has seemingly--almost uniquely in Silicon Valley--mastered the art of shutting the fuck up. Note, for example, his disciplined reticence around endorsing a candidate.
I wonder if companies are now more likely to keep those postings open despite not actually hiring. I’m personally (and of course anecdotally) aware of a number of such cases.
Open job postings have no downside to the company, but a lot of upside:
- You can tell overworked employees that reinforcements are due soon.
- You can tell the government to ease visa requirements to increase your worker supply (so you can pay lower salaries)
- You signal (to the market, your employees and applicants) that you're a successful company in need of talent at literally no cost.
Its not just a "now" thing, been going on for at least 20 years and probably longer. I worked all my career at small companies and generally there was little to no interviewing for any of our so-called "open positions". The last company I worked at was in a defacto hiring freeze most of the time I was there; for about 2 years I was the last IC hire they had made, and some people left too. The whole time we had multiple open positions advertised. We did cycle through a few contractors which seemed all that management was interested in.
So I don't know what bigtech does, but smalltech just seems to use open positions to signal "we're healthy" or just forget they even have them out there.
And population is growing all the time so that will make new openings positions too, but it doesn't necessarily translate into higher percent employment.
The article is from 2019, so its claims about Ethereum are outdated. But even so:
> We start by collecting data on emission rates… for four pollutants commonly created by burning fossil fuels to produce energy
Wait, why focus on fossil fuels alone?
And why focus on cryptocurrency specifically? Did they produce a similar study for e.g. entertainment?
Also, did I miss the part where the impact of traditional mining is estimated and compared? I can’t find anything about the headline’s claim in the body of the article.
