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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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?
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:
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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 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 ?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 wish I could get my friends to stop using WhatsApp
I communicate with direct family and many friends through Signal. Don't tell them to replace WhatsApp by Signal. Ask them to install Signal besides WhatsApp.
Both can exist at the same time and this is a route with much less friction and slowly builds the network effect.
> now not only are people made redundant, but in a small market like here in Ireland they're outed as a poor performers.
I don't know - I've said before, but the bigger red flag to me would be either that they worked for Meta at all, or that they didn't leave of their own accord. Any big tech company pretending someone was let go, as part of a mass lay-off, for performance reasons is generally going to rate as about as truthful as saying it's "because of AI", if I'm looking at hiring.
Not to erase that Meta is an absolutely shitty company run by a literal ghoul enabled by tens of thousands of "people" who are happy to make giving teenage girls depression in return for ad clicks their entire life's work.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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
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We could start by stomping out the Linux kernel mailing lists; that cancer is at the root of so many other social networks' software.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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
Meta took less than $100m from VC money over a decade ago. It makes billions in profit a quarter.
Maybe he's choosing to connect the 99.998% of Facebook users in Saudi Arabia who have not been ordered blocked by their government.
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.
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 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
> 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.
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?
They can't operate there. AFAIK, that's the only difference.
A company can not operate in a country and not follow its rules.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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 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 ?
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 know what it means and I'm in the US.
No one here would know what it meant.
Unless they collect stamps.
Especially when arabia by itself kind of means the arabian peninsula, not saudi arabia.
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?
Even better!
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?
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
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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
Remember when they told us that social media would "spread democracy" ?
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?
I’ve never heard a single time social media companies say that social media would spread democracy. Sounds like a straw man to me
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can read the article, look up the names online and see for yourself.
Yep, as I described.
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
If Meta operates in Saudi Arabia and UAE, shouldn't they follow their laws?
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.
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.
Nah fuck that.
“Meta blocks Western propaganda from reaching the Middle East” would be a good title
The way to fix social media is to get off of social media.
This shouldn't be downvoted, it's absolutely correct.
Let's not forget about the slave markets mobile apps:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50228549
At least we can't blame meta for inconsistency ...
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?
The UAE is in Arabia. It's not in Saudi Arabia.
Big platforms optimize for engagement because it works financially, but society ends up paying the externalities. That incentive mismatch is the real problem.
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
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).
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 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.
The trick is to get your friends and family to jump ship with you.
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.
Group text? Individual texts/calls? Setting up a monthly codenames game or book club, etc.?
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.
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).
Bluesky
Bluesky both isn't an alternative to Facebook and is generally terrible too.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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I wish I could get my friends to stop using WhatsApp
I communicate with direct family and many friends through Signal. Don't tell them to replace WhatsApp by Signal. Ask them to install Signal besides WhatsApp.
Both can exist at the same time and this is a route with much less friction and slowly builds the network effect.
Meta (trillion dollar company) also targets 15 year old OSS maintainers with legal threats.
> now not only are people made redundant, but in a small market like here in Ireland they're outed as a poor performers.
I don't know - I've said before, but the bigger red flag to me would be either that they worked for Meta at all, or that they didn't leave of their own accord. Any big tech company pretending someone was let go, as part of a mass lay-off, for performance reasons is generally going to rate as about as truthful as saying it's "because of AI", if I'm looking at hiring.
Not to erase that Meta is an absolutely shitty company run by a literal ghoul enabled by tens of thousands of "people" who are happy to make giving teenage girls depression in return for ad clicks their entire life's work.
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