Meta (Instagram) certainly pushes one side in India. I am sure of it.
I didn't quite believe its involvement with things in Myanmar where media, people vowed left and right of Meta's involvement.
But seeing it now firsthand, I certainly believe it.
- Accounts, posts from one cabal being pushed to your feed even if you don't follow any of them.
- If you open a fresh account, the accounts from those cabal are recommended at top.
- Relentlessly showing posts from one side and promoting them like hell.
Suspected bot activities. There were posts that are sans merit clearly, but Insta pushed it and had the unvelievable amount of likes, like Messi would have, had he posted his wedding reels.
I don't have publishable evidence, but I ask you to trust me. Human to human.
I read newspapers, I don't trust megaliked reels. But most don't nowaday, and I saw real people fall to blatant lies and propaganda. It's real. You can say anything, but I am convinced fully.
Yes I mean anecdotally, not India, but an acquaintance of mine (North American) got JD Vance in her feed and she doesn't like him
Myanmar - Facebook took responsibility from the moment they decided to "service" the country using shady tactics such as https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/facebook-misleading-indians-i... where they had what, one translator, two? Some of this is in Careless People
It shouldn't matter what specific political side - Facebook are bad actors (or Meta or whatever) across the aisle
I think it's their lack of oversight that allows bad actors to flourish. The BJP pay people to spread stupidity online (both with paid posts and liking swarms) and have done so for years (they were early to this game), and despite it being fraudulent activity, Meta does little to stop it or let people know it is not authentic activity
Even though I've shilled the book before, it's an opportune thread to repeat the recommendation: if you haven't, read Careless People. For much of her career at Facebook, the author worked for Joel Kaplan, who was VP of Global Public Policy and is now Chief Global Affairs Officer. She's not particularly complimentary.
Americans don't like any entity to interfere in their elections but the reality is that their corporations are knee deep in interference in other countries never mind what they themselves call the deep state!
Does anyone remember Cambridge Analytica activity on Facebook during US elections in 2016.. Look it up if you don't remember. The same entity was also active in South America aka Colombia, Brazil, Argentina.. Cambridge Analytica was never charged and Facebook was never charged because it was all made legal. After the revelations, some laws changed but has it really changed. Is it stopping American interference in other countries? it doesn't look like it. What about at home? You know better than I do if you have an account; I don't.
That is definitely part of the history, but there is no reality where the USA wouldn't have taken Hawai'i, one way or another, because of it's strategic location and the 19th century attitude toward conquest. Hawai'i couldn't defeat Western powers militarily, especially after disease wiped out so much of the population, and none of the Asian countries had developed enough to compete at that point.
But that inevitability doesn't excuse the specific deceit and treachery around the annexation of Hawai'i.
Exactly. Even the american gov involved in other nations elections, toppling elected govs and whatnot. When the same thing happens to then they cry like ...
Interference with an election is so in line with the current president's character that nobody has any reason to think otherwise.
The political atmosphere in the USA, and worldwide let's be honest, has become so cynical that people aligned with the American president don't really see any issue with doing morally wrong things or downright illegal acts if that means a political victory for them.
What's the incentives to not do it this way? Are there punishments for companies to lobby or influence things? How is the everyday voter affected by this?
Well, for each individual, there’s some level of disincentivization to act according to social and moral code. That’s kind of where shame and laws are supposed to come in to regulate. We are in a post-shame world it seems
I don't think shame has gone anywhere as a feeling, but I'd say that we are post-moral-shame due to neoliberalism.
In "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism", Zhuboff poses that shame in a neoliberal society becomes tied to individual failure, such as failure to succeed. You feel shame for your shortcomings and not working hard enough, rather than for some mortal virtue you failed to uphold. Psychopolitics by Han-Byul also goes into this, kind of how the market managed to convince the individual to enslave themselves and set their own requirements for themselves without a king or master to order this.
In such a society, shame cannot be ascribed to doing something monetarily rational. It's not immoral to better yourself in any way. If you need to cheat to steal the election, so be it, you're just hustling and are clearly smarter than your opponent, so you deserve it.
I think a bit of the tragedy in this is that this stacks the incentives against morally right things in the long run. It was often better for resource accumulation to do the morally bad thing, and your counterweight would be shame from society, but now it's gone and the people who choose the (now much more accessible) morally corrupt path with run away with capital, power and social status. It's IMO a really good time in history to be a piece of shit as an average person
Let's see how we are affected.
Corruption means that taxes are stolen
Incompetence means the country declines on the global stage
Democracy becomes impossible.
Honestly - what's immoral about someone showing their breasts? That's not going to hurt anyone, so why would it be immoral? Obsessing over how woman cover or reveal their bodies is regressive behavior, as if men can't be held responsible for controlling themselves, or children will be injured by seeing a body part that exists to feed babies.
>“My trans masculine friends were showing off their top surgery scars and living in joy, and I wanted to join them,” she said. “And because it is perfectly within the law in Washington, D.C., I decided to join them and cover my nipples just to play it safe. Because I wanted to be fully free and myself. I had zero intention of trying to be vulgar, or be profane in any way. I was simply living in joy, living my truth and existing in my body. Happy Pride. Free the nipple.”
The president enriching his family to the tune of billions and billions of dollars while flouting every norm and law possible and committing war crimes and murder is equivalent to...someone baring their chest?
> The melodrama about "moral bankruptcy" is performative.
Equating actions that offend your sensitivity with the moral bankruptcy of shamelessly cheating and stealing prosperity from a whole society is quite... Bold.
> We long for the simpler, morally un-bankrupt times when people were flashing their bolt-ons on the White House lawn:
Perhaps one day you'll grow to understand that complaints about "flashing their bolt-ons" is dog whistle for moralist hypocrisy, whereas openly taking bribes, threatening close allies with invasion while launching economic war in the form of tarifs, and eliminating foreign aid programs causing hundreds of thousands of deaths digs a far deeper moral, ethical, and geopolitical hole to claw from.
I thought this was terrible when this happened. But I would welcome them doing this every day instead of having Trump corruptly accept bribes to the tune of billions of dollars for his kids crypto company and rug pull American citizens twice with fraud crypto schemes, and go on a pardon spree for every fraudster and white collar criminal he can find.
Idk, maybe having a lewd President is better than having a corrupt, fraud-supporting, law-discarding President who is now trying to kick people off voter rolls so he doesn't lose a midterm after his failed running of the economy despite having every single branch of govt in his control
Interference in other countries' elections has been a cornerstone of American foreign policy since at least 1948, and overthrowing democratically elected governments and replacing them with comprador dictators has always been on the table when the elections still went the wrong way.
> I don't think you understand how small stakes Watergate was in comparison to the daily collapse we are experiencing. And Nixon resigned because of it!
I agree. This is what baffles me the most about USians. They know Watergate was one of the lowest points in the US history in terms of corruption and anti democratic maneuvers by a high level political group in the country.
Yet, the Trump administration outcorrupts any Watergate scandal very much each week. Yet, the US population is so docile and controlled that they barely react.
Gore was literally trying to steal that election by doing selective recounts and having partial hand recount results included in the final tallies with machine counted results. You should actually read the crazy shit they were doing: https://download.ssrn.com/07/12/03/ssrn_id1049741_code410506...
The Florida Supreme Court held that Gore’s first recount was unconstitutional and the U.S. Supreme Court held 7-2 that the second recount was unconstitutional. It hasn’t entered the public consciousness that Gore was blatantly cheating because the trick involves understanding a bit of math: if you do a recount in a precinct where the overall margin was say 2:1 Gore, then statistically the hand recounts (which find ballots the machine couldn’t count) will identify 2 Gore votes for every Bush vote. Over all precincts the effects will cancel out. But if you selectively recount only in certain precincts, or push to certify results including partial hand recounts, then you’ll “find more Gore votes.”
It was the most overt election fraud anyone in the U.S. has attempted in modern times but nobody knows because Americans are bad at math and you can’t explain how Gore was cheating with a football analogy.
You’re smart enough to understand the math, and so was the Florida Supreme Court and U.S. Supreme Court, so what’s your response? How is it not election fraud to have a partial recount that’s statistically guaranteed to find net additional votes for you relative to your opponent? The fact that reporters didn’t cover it that way doesn’t justify your snarky response. Journalists are mostly innumerate; you meanwhile can’t play dumb about the math.
You’re basically taking an error that is randomly distributed, but then partially correcting that error only from pools that you know skewed your way to begin with.
Imagine if Trump had initiated hand recounted undervotes (votes the machine couldn’t count) only for election day votes but not mail in votes. That would be election fraud, because it would be calculated to find additional votes from a pool that skews GOP while not finding additional votes in a pool that skews Democrat. What Gore did was exactly the same thing.
People scream “election interference” at these highly attenuated and indirect actions like Meta taking down a post. But Gore was statistically minting additional Gore votes before two Supreme Courts stopped him.
Have you researched Gore’s stochastic cheating that led to Bush stopping the vote count?The Supreme Court found by 7-2 that the Gore recount strategy violated voters’ constitutional rights. Why does nobody mention that part?
(Imagine if Trump requested a hand recount in 2020, but only in the rural parts of Pennsylvania, where every ballot that had been rejected by the machine but could be counted by hand was twice as likely to be a Trump vote than a Biden vote. Say 10,000 ballots were rejected by the machine, and 1,000 of them could be hand counted. If the county went 65-35 Trump overall, then you’d find 650 new Trump votes but only 350 more Biden votes. If you had done a statewide recount this effect would be cancelled out by the opposite outcome in Philadelphia, finding newly countable Biden votes. But in this hypo Trump deliberately engineered a selective recount to benefit from this skew.)
The last people in history who had as much wealth as Elon Musk were emperors.
Perhaps something can change to help prevent poverty and hunger if the economic value produced by society results in such enormous gains by such few people.
Exactly! It's a common expression to shoo someone off.
Literally it translates to "Don't put yourself" where "put" is the closest I can think of to the verb "meter", which is sort of what you do when you insert something haphazardly instead of carefully.
Truly literally the words are "No + self + put" and the conjugation of "meter" into "meta" makes it clear the subject is "you"
Brazil’s law requires Meta to take down certain posts by politicians. How does such a law not inevitably lead to the loser of the election complaining about “interference.”
Everyone really need to go back and read the work of America’s founding generation. The founders understood the importance of structural and procedural rules versus substantive rules. A structural rule is some thing like: no politician can use Facebook, or alternatively, Facebook isn’t allowed to censor any candidate for political office. Such rules can be implemented with little room for debate.
A substantive rule by contrast requires some person to make a substantive judgment about particular content. Such rules turn that decision maker into a gatekeeper. And as a practical matter, nobody trusts such decision makers to render impartial decisions. This is why, in the U.S., judges largely police procedure and legal instructions, while substantive decisions about guilt or liability are made by randomly selected juries. In the U.S., a highly educated federal judge isn’t even trusted to decide guilt for a misdemeanor that could put a single individual in prison for more than six months. Meanwhile other countries trust random people at companies to make decisions that could swing entire elections and affect millions of people. It’s lunacy.
> A structural rule is some thing like: no politician can use Facebook, or alternatively, Facebook isn’t allowed to censor any candidate for political office. Such rules can be implemented with little room for debate.
Except there's debate all the time in the USA stemming from this originalist tradition from the founders' intent.
Like: the First Ammendment, there was debate about the role of money, is it speech? Culminating with Citizens United which is absolute lunacy.
The American system isn't objectively better by any means, it's just the one you're used to.
Ultimately it ended up being about money in politics, that the original complaint was about a movie is entirely moot given the consequences of the decision.
Why should everyone care about founders of a different country that's not even working particularly well at this time.
> while substantive decisions about guilt or liability are made by randomly selected juries
A system gamed as easily as any other one.
> Meanwhile other countries trust random people at companies
They don't trust them to do the right thing, which is why there is a law telling them what to do. The alternative is to ban privately-owned social networks (either all of them or at least those that don't follow the laws).
> Why should everyone care about founders of a different country
Because the U.S. was the first country in the world created, with great study and deliberation, by high-IQ political philosophers. Because the country was already a successful democracy for 189 years before all the EU17 countries became democracies even on paper. Because the U.S. was having orderly transitions of power since it was as poor as Bangladesh is today.
> A system gamed as easily as any other one.
Decisions of randomly selected jurors are much harder to “game” than decisions of corporate censors or election board bureaucrats.
> They don't trust them to do the right thing, which is why there is a law telling them what to do.
Every dysfunctional third world has beautiful “laws telling people what to do.” We have those in Bangladesh. As often as not, such laws just become vehicles for manipulating elections because what the law says to do or who is following the laws or not is highly debatable. Such laws effectively turn the prosecutors and the court system into the locus of corruption, because they have the power to decide “who is following the law.” (It’s like Iran’s system with more steps. Iran actually has fair, functioning elections. It’s just that the Guardian Council, an expert body of highly educated scholars, gets to screen who is allowed to run for office.)
Please try to understand the difference between procedural/power allocation laws and laws that incorporate substantive standards. Instead of having laws that say “what to do”—which is always open to interpretation—you should have laws that focus on “who decides” and “how do they decide.” You need to either make the decision mechanical so everyone can see whether the rule is being followed or not, or you need to put the decision in the hands of a body that can’t credibly be accused of having their own agenda.
> Decisions of randomly selected jurors are much harder to “game” than decisions of corporate censors or election board bureaucrats.
Sure, which is why the laws in the US are not approved by randomly selected lawmakers. In that way it's irrelevant what some random jury decides, when the executive branch, the lawmakers and top judges are owned by the ruling class.
> We have those in Bangladesh. As often as not, such laws just become vehicles for manipulating elections
Sorry about that, but that's not a rule that applies everywhere, far from that. And of course the elections in the US are already heavily manipulated even without that.
Of course big and influential media companies favour one side over the other. That's been happening long before the internet. It's called propaganda and has been the practice of traditional newspapers, radio stations and television networks since the beginning of their existence. And that will continue being the practice. Now the questions are: how much does it matter? can/should we try to control it? what are the proposals for that? how to enforce it fairly for every political group? --- note the current government (the one complaining about Meta favouring the opposition) also has its own propaganda network favouring itself against the opposition.
Just because people did shitty things in the past, doesn't mean people shouldn't care about the shitty things people are doing now. Particularly if the 'people' are corporations.
The difference is that Meta says it's just a "platform" and not a "media company" (since it doesn't want to be regulated or held liable as a media company). So Fox News can host talk shows openly favoring one candidate, and NYT can write editorials in support of another candidate, but Meta cannot.
A note on Meta AI was making the rounds the past few days: it will happily generate images featuring the right-wing candidate, logo or party number, while consistently refusing to generate anything related to the opposition Lula/PT/13.
They claimed it was a 'technical error'.
In September, as the elections geared up, they also suspened Lula's campaign account due to another 'technical error'. There are also thousands of complaints from users having their posts blocked.
"Technical error" sounds frustratingly vague and contentless, but it's odd to think about the lack of cultural consensus about whether the ability for others to depict someone with generative AI is more a benefit to him or her, or more a risk. I could imagine someone hearing this and sincerely thinking that Meta was protecting Lula from deepfake attacks (making it slightly harder for people to falsely depict him doing saying embarrassing or offensive things). Uses of AI to mock or attack people often get more attention than uses of AI to praise them.
In the U.S., if someone had programmed a generative AI to be unwilling to depict Obama, I imagine many people would assume that decision was meant to help Obama, not harm him.
There's probably some Meta employees reading this. You probably are decent people, with a nice family, good to your friends, ethical citizens and aren't directly involved in this psyops conspiracy. But you will be responsible for a lot of suffering. The Amazon will be devastated. A lot of people will get poorer. Violence will spread. Autocracy will win. Few people will get richer.
I remember NYTimes/WaPost pieces being concerned about Hindu nationalist influence on the Republican party. Anyone who has spend 2 seconds online know it's more likely the Republican party nukes India than forming alliances with the BJP.
Quick-cut to Musk funding right-wing political parties in Europe, JD Vance using the NATO bully-pulpit to talk down European center-right politicians, and Trump creating a slush-fund worth billions to Argentina to prop-up its failing experiment in right-wing libertarian governance, and America evangelicals funding regressive politics across Africa and Europe, reducing America's refugee program to resettle right-wing South Africans.
Someone needs to tell President Trump that he is backing one of the country's most prominent militia figures — a real thief, corrupt, and involved in dozens, maybe even hundreds of crimes (including murder of Marielle Franco) ever since he entered politics. Or even before that. This isn't a fight between left vs right, or conservatives vs progressives. It's a fight between honest Brazilians vs Brazil's real organized crime.
I am quite sure meta does support the german AfD. Rage causes engagement. AfD (and Trump and Orban and le Pen) communicate in such emotional ways that algorithms prefer them. Facebook does not care about truth, it cares about active users
Both extremes on the political spectrum use and heavily rely on emotions over nuance/truth. Probably why both have been steadily growing and that the clashes tend to be explosive.
Relying on emotions is human. I appeal to love, empathy, kindness, caring, and sadness when I discuss politics all the time. To experience the world is to have emotional connection with it and with others.
Pretending only rational discourse is valid ways to plan or engage in politics omits a lot of what's important.
All political parties and politicians rely heavily on emotional appeals both because they are effective and because people across the political spectrum are becoming more polarized, dumber and less informed (more saturated with their respective tribal propaganda) every day, making them even more susceptible to this sort of nonsense.
Political manipulation by Russia, China, etc, have been using wedge issues to push people into extreme sides on issues, but they throw support behind the far-right political parties, because conservative voters unite their votes and because they're more willing to accept mistruths.
Liberal voters don't unite well, and they also tend to have lower trust when it comes to misinformation.
I've heard this theory sincerely expressed from the right about the left and from the left about the right, and I understand that it looks this way to many people, but I suspect it's mainly the out-group homogeneity bias.
This isn't the case. People assume this is the case because only one side is reported for various reasons.
Just to be clear though: the Communist Party of China is not a massive fan of far-right parties, there are certain ideological barriers there.
Russia employed the former left-wing German Chancellor as part of their strategy making an invasion of Ukraine economically viable for them (it is worth pointing out that when right-wing politicians pointed this out, it was received as a crazy conspiracy theory..."liberal voters" distinguish themselves as people who believe themselves particularly unlikely to believe in "misinformation" whilst simultaneously believing in things that make no sense, most people who have a knowledge of politics are required to believe things that aren't true...if they were in touch with reality, they wouldn't vote).
My casual read is that the CCP can tolerate both the far left and right in the US, but only the far right is near the levers of power, and the far right is apt to leave them alone entirely(America first).
To call Scholz left-wing is quite a stretch. But what can one expect of someone that believes that not voting is the natural consequence of "being in touch with reality".
When has the US not interfere in other countries' elections, especially those taking place in its "backyard"? Nothing is off limits. Everything comes from the CIA playbook: bribes, threats, assassinations, social media trolling, censorship, etc. Of course, these days, interference is no longer limited to international affairs but has fully entered the domestic arena. Trump's top donors have already contributed billions to the midterm elections, but it may not be enough to sway voters. This coming midterm election, brace for the unexpected.
People should look up the North American Technate, because we're living in it. Its been a mission of techno-fascist for a couple decades, they're finally succeeding. They will get rid of democracy altogether
(they may have already, they can basically do mind control with recommendations algorithms and get swaths of people to do whatever they want).
You're currently in a thread discussing a news article that would be one piece of evidence. There's plenty of obvious evidence of technocratic influence in global poltics on all news platforms.
A large minority of people cannot cope with losing elections. Shadowy forces are behind every loss. Ironically, it's this attitude that undermines democracy. More than Facebook at any rate...
At least in certain parts of the world, there has been consistent efforts to manipulate the government and political movements for close to a century. It's not as if the US hasn't supported coup d'etats in Brazil, Chile, and other governments in South and Central America.
> Shadowy forces are behind every loss. Ironically, it's this attitude that undermines democracy.
I mean, this is South America we're talking about. It's not attitudes that undermine their democracy, it's very notoriously US-based three letter agencies.[1][2][3][4][5]
I don't believe this was the case, at least not openly, until Trump made it part of his platform. His personal ego injury has accelerated this massively, and fed into the right-wing cookersphere all over the place.
America has recently done a huge amount to undermine faith in its own democracy, and that has been gleefully spread around the world. Absent any evidence. It's gross.
I mean, if they have secret mind control powers that they've hid from the rest of the world for years, it seems kinda pointless to try and oppose them?
At that point, they've already won, neh?
(this is mostly to object that hyperbolic phrases like "basically mind control" don't do your argument any favor)
Clearly their argument is that social media algorithms has an outsize influence on people's opinions, and that a handful of people have the power to alter those algorithms and content feeds to influence people in a way they find favorable. It's not mind control, but in a country like the USA, shifting the middle 10% of voters to either side is enough to determine elections. They don't need to "mind control" everyone as a result.
I would call it mind control, I think normal people that know nothing about tech and have their gaurd down are quite hypnotized by doom scrolling social media.
I would say they can also successfully do "remote viewing" through a network of worldwide IOT devices.. While not metaphysical, modern surveillance techniques are certainly is inspired by those earlier more mystical ambitions.
Early intelligence programs had an outsized influence on Cybernetics and thus the internet.
Imagine telling a MK Ultra researcher in the CIA that in 50 years you'll be able to listen into, and steer the behavior of an individual through a glass screen they hold in their hands all day.. That you could target people individually, important people even, while they sit alone in a room customizing and tweaking the propaganda they see every 10 seconds as they touch the screen to swipe.
This all sounds pretty normal, and run of the mill to us now but if you take a step back its all very trippy. Its interesting to follow the evolution of early cybernetics research to the modern day and if you follow the lineage of researchers back in time you'll find some very suspect connections/influences.
That only makes any sense if you consider that influencing people is 100% effective. If you look at advertising, it clearly influences some people to buy certain products, but more cynical people might well see through the new product and realise that it's just the same as other un-advertised brands.
Meta has interfered with elections before, we know the Trump admin wants Bolsonaro Jr in power, and the US establishment has supported anti-socialism in Brazil in the past. (The CIA agitated against Lula under Reagan, for example)
Is it overly conspiratorial to think the Meta is doing what they're accused of on behalf of the US?
As much as I wish I could say you're right -I think that's unlikely. Please feel free to say "I told you so" in fifteen days, however. I'd love to be wrong!
If you’re someone who treasures the scientific method and the scientific approach to understanding the world, you have to become comfortable with uncertainty. Particularly in the Senate are several possible outcomes with wildly different consequences, all of which are plausible.
Don’t let either loss aversion or irrational exuberance rule you. Weigh every possibility and prepare yourself for it psychologically. The result could be crushing defeat, but it could also be stunning triumph.
My worry/expectation is that Democrats may win both the House and the Senate, then spend two years finding excuses to keep letting Trump have everything he wants.
The majority of the Republican primary electorate demands Trump and won’t stand for elected Republicans who challenge him. There have been a fair number of Republicans who have stood up to him, but most of them are already out or on their way out.
It’s basically impossible for elected Republicans to hold Trump to account without losing office, and even if Republicans get wiped out in the coming election (I’m skeptical), I doubt that dynamic will change. If the price of gas weren’t so high, Republicans would be fairly happy with Trump — he’s basically kept his promise to be a hard-ass on immigration and other culture war issues.
I don’t expect a Republican reckoning that would please Democrats. Future Republican standard bearers will probably be very similar to Trump but more competent — akin to Erdogan, Bolsonaro, Orban, Modi, and others.
Exactly. Even if Trump disappeared today, the voters/mentality who elected him is not going anywhere. All they need is someone else to say "I am exactly like Trump and will keep doing everything he did," and that politician will be their top candidate. (R) is no longer the party of guys like Mitt Romney and John McCain.
While that much is true, I'm not sure how nationally successful that movement would be without Trump at the center of the cult of personality. The ideological movement will keep control of the party, and ideologically-motivated people will turn out to vote for it, but I think they will lose a lot of the low-information, incoherent-ideology people that Trump was able to bring into the tent once he's gone.
I don’t know about that. I remember when California Hispanics turned on Republicans after Prop 187 in the 1990s, and the realignment was permanent[1]. This could be the timeline where national Republicans lose Hispanics for good, destabilizing the knife-edge balance between the parties.
Trump is a lame duck now and in 15 days there's nothing more he can do for senators or representatives since they will all be sucking up to whoever is their next nominee for president.
Even among people I know who voted for him, Trump fatigue is setting in and growing. Iran, renaming lakes and oceans, high cost of food and gas, none of that is what they voted for.
It doesn't matter whether Republicans lose the election or not. Trump will just ignore/dismiss the election results, or ignore/dismiss Congress, as he did has done for the last two years.
Republicans will not get any sense regardless of what happens.
The only important question is whether Democrats will get any sense if they win.
The worst outcome is actually Democrats winning and then keeping the status quo and continuing to serve corporations and special interest groups over the needs of their own constituents.
They won't have any real power to force through legislation even if they win, but if they win and don't use this time to shake up their own party and instead keep Schumer/Jeffries/et al in charge and keep towing the center-right Third Way-esque line then in a few years time we will find out that actually, yes, there are worse people that could be president than Trump (all of the malevolence, but perhaps with competence too next time).
Every election for over a decade has been a change election and the Democratic party refusing to understand this (because the consultant class and their high value donors don't want to understand it) is one of the primary factors in creating and enabling Trump. And it isn't yet clear they intend to address this. I mean, people are still taking a Gavin Newsom run in 2028 seriously ffs.
"A conspiracy, also known as a plot, ploy, or scheme, is a plan or agreement between people (called conspirers or conspirators) for an unlawful OR HARMFUL purpose, such as murder, treason, or corruption, especially with a political motivation,[2] while KEEPING THEIR AGREEMENT SECRET from the public or from other people affected by it"
Coming at me, contradicting me, what ever you want to call it. "hallucinating" is a statement of fact. You just concocted false information out of nowhere, no different from an LLM. If being truthful is being a dick, so be it. If you had something else to say and the false statement was incidental, I could have been more lenient, but the entirety of your comment was just to contradict me, and wrongly at that.
By this logic, old Twitter interfered with US elections by banning Trump.
Edit: the point about Trump was facetious, but old Twitter actually DID actively interfere in the 2020 election by censoring all sharing (even in DMs!) the New York Post Biden laptop story.
I am not making that argument, I just dislike double standards, especially considering that right wing voices have been repeatedly and consistently scrubbed from social media for years.
> Twitter interfered with US elections by banning Trump.
You mean when Twitter "permanently" banned Trump in January of 2021, after the 2020 election (which he lost)? Which election do you suppose that interfered with?
Nothing will shut him up. My god.. I wish killing his twitter account could do that.
He lost because he is a POS and people where tired of his blabbering and complaining.
All the future ones. Don't you see? If you're a big enough public figure and announce any ambition for public office, every attempt at holding you accountable for crimes is interference!
Oct 14, 2020, Twitter blocks the NY Post laptop story. The New York Post published a story based on emails said to come from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden. Twitter flagged the tweets and froze the Post's account under a 2018 policy against sharing hacked materials.
Oct 2020: Facebook demotes the same story. Zuckerberg wrote in an August 26, 2024 letter that Facebook temporarily demoted the story after the FBI warned of a possible Russian disinformation campaign.
Early to late 2020: Twitter labels Trump's election claims. Twitter first added a contextual label to a Trump tweet calling mail-in voting fraudulent in early 2020.
Dec 8, 2022: The Twitter Files describe "visibility filtering." Bari Weiss reported that Twitter staff limited the reach of some accounts without telling users, including Dan Bongino and Charlie Kirk.
Those evil US imperialists and CIA agitators, not letting any new countries prosper like DPRK, Cuba and Venezuela, or be free of tyranny like PRC and Venezuela!
Sorry, are you suggesting that the CIA hasn’t done its best to prevent left-wing governments from succeeding in many cases? Because that would be very silly and ahistorical.
If by "succeeding" you mean destroying thousands or millions of people's lives by famine, labor camps and executions, then yes, it sure has.
Everyone remembers evil Pinochet who killed some 3k out of 11 million, nobody cares about kind Hoxha who killed at least 6k (likely closer to 100k) out of 2 million, or plushy Castro (10k killed + 70k dead trying to flee out of 10 million).
Meta chose to be a platform for political ad campaigns, and part of that money comes from the taxpayers. They have the responsibility to prove they are treating both sides fairly, and to ensure their automated systems don’t favor either candidate, intentionally or not.
Agreed! Protest is always about the assertion of power and identity, like all politics. But protest, like physical violence, attempts to assert power by sidestepping the mechanics of government. So it does not need evidence reason or logic, it is operating on an entirely different plane!
this is turning out to be a disaster for the tech communities and powering technology fearmongers because people do not understadn the case here.
From what I can see, the meta cutoff data was from a time where one candidate was confirmed and the other wasn't. The political interference here was actually the timely manner for them to fix this. It took weeks of public pressure / federal government pressure for Meta to act.
People being edgy on X seems unrelated. Comment seems completely off-topic. Or are you implying Meta suppressed Lula's account because he threatened to murder Protestants? I don't get it.
What a bunch of crying babies. Plus, my entire feed is full of pro-Lula garbage
Either most of my friends are pro-Lula (they are not) or Meta is helping them, not Bolsonaro.
This is an excuse for them to challenge the election if they (hopefully) lose.
For my other Brazilian friends over here: to me both sides are terrible but Lula is the convicted felon that spent 2 years in prison, and he ruled the country since 2003 and the place gets worse by the day.
I didn't quite believe its involvement with things in Myanmar where media, people vowed left and right of Meta's involvement.
But seeing it now firsthand, I certainly believe it.
- Accounts, posts from one cabal being pushed to your feed even if you don't follow any of them.
- If you open a fresh account, the accounts from those cabal are recommended at top.
- Relentlessly showing posts from one side and promoting them like hell.
Suspected bot activities. There were posts that are sans merit clearly, but Insta pushed it and had the unvelievable amount of likes, like Messi would have, had he posted his wedding reels.
I don't have publishable evidence, but I ask you to trust me. Human to human.
I read newspapers, I don't trust megaliked reels. But most don't nowaday, and I saw real people fall to blatant lies and propaganda. It's real. You can say anything, but I am convinced fully.
Myanmar - Facebook took responsibility from the moment they decided to "service" the country using shady tactics such as https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/facebook-misleading-indians-i... where they had what, one translator, two? Some of this is in Careless People
It shouldn't matter what specific political side - Facebook are bad actors (or Meta or whatever) across the aisle
[Meta apologises to India for restricting PM Modi's post](https://www.reuters.com/world/india/meta-apologises-india-re...)
Reading a good newspaper shows the megaliked reels push a false narrative. Even the paper that the oppositions like.
Watching all the techbros trying to crowd the stage to get in the shot with Modi when he went to SF was a precursor to them all crowding around Trump.
Does anyone remember Cambridge Analytica activity on Facebook during US elections in 2016.. Look it up if you don't remember. The same entity was also active in South America aka Colombia, Brazil, Argentina.. Cambridge Analytica was never charged and Facebook was never charged because it was all made legal. After the revelations, some laws changed but has it really changed. Is it stopping American interference in other countries? it doesn't look like it. What about at home? You know better than I do if you have an account; I don't.
But that inevitability doesn't excuse the specific deceit and treachery around the annexation of Hawai'i.
Pathetic
The political atmosphere in the USA, and worldwide let's be honest, has become so cynical that people aligned with the American president don't really see any issue with doing morally wrong things or downright illegal acts if that means a political victory for them.
In "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism", Zhuboff poses that shame in a neoliberal society becomes tied to individual failure, such as failure to succeed. You feel shame for your shortcomings and not working hard enough, rather than for some mortal virtue you failed to uphold. Psychopolitics by Han-Byul also goes into this, kind of how the market managed to convince the individual to enslave themselves and set their own requirements for themselves without a king or master to order this.
In such a society, shame cannot be ascribed to doing something monetarily rational. It's not immoral to better yourself in any way. If you need to cheat to steal the election, so be it, you're just hustling and are clearly smarter than your opponent, so you deserve it.
I think a bit of the tragedy in this is that this stacks the incentives against morally right things in the long run. It was often better for resource accumulation to do the morally bad thing, and your counterweight would be shame from society, but now it's gone and the people who choose the (now much more accessible) morally corrupt path with run away with capital, power and social status. It's IMO a really good time in history to be a piece of shit as an average person
https://www.newsweek.com/topless-trans-woman-white-house-pri...
>“My trans masculine friends were showing off their top surgery scars and living in joy, and I wanted to join them,” she said. “And because it is perfectly within the law in Washington, D.C., I decided to join them and cover my nipples just to play it safe. Because I wanted to be fully free and myself. I had zero intention of trying to be vulgar, or be profane in any way. I was simply living in joy, living my truth and existing in my body. Happy Pride. Free the nipple.”
Why are you people so obsessed with the genitals of others over the bald-faced corruption of the most powerful nation in the world?
The melodrama about "moral bankruptcy" is performative, especially when a few years ago there was live-streamed buttsex from the Senate chambers.
No one has a right to claim a moral high ground here.
> The melodrama about "moral bankruptcy" is performative.
Oh, on that point we could not agree more.
Perhaps one day you'll grow to understand that complaints about "flashing their bolt-ons" is dog whistle for moralist hypocrisy, whereas openly taking bribes, threatening close allies with invasion while launching economic war in the form of tarifs, and eliminating foreign aid programs causing hundreds of thousands of deaths digs a far deeper moral, ethical, and geopolitical hole to claw from.
Idk, maybe having a lewd President is better than having a corrupt, fraud-supporting, law-discarding President who is now trying to kick people off voter rolls so he doesn't lose a midterm after his failed running of the economy despite having every single branch of govt in his control
The country's biggest scandal - Watergate, was fundamentally an election sabotage/political espionage scandal
Bush in Florida stopping the vote count was definitely democracy being tagged.
I agree. This is what baffles me the most about USians. They know Watergate was one of the lowest points in the US history in terms of corruption and anti democratic maneuvers by a high level political group in the country.
Yet, the Trump administration outcorrupts any Watergate scandal very much each week. Yet, the US population is so docile and controlled that they barely react.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot
The Florida Supreme Court held that Gore’s first recount was unconstitutional and the U.S. Supreme Court held 7-2 that the second recount was unconstitutional. It hasn’t entered the public consciousness that Gore was blatantly cheating because the trick involves understanding a bit of math: if you do a recount in a precinct where the overall margin was say 2:1 Gore, then statistically the hand recounts (which find ballots the machine couldn’t count) will identify 2 Gore votes for every Bush vote. Over all precincts the effects will cancel out. But if you selectively recount only in certain precincts, or push to certify results including partial hand recounts, then you’ll “find more Gore votes.”
It was the most overt election fraud anyone in the U.S. has attempted in modern times but nobody knows because Americans are bad at math and you can’t explain how Gore was cheating with a football analogy.
That's just too funny Rayiner... really, you broke the record here.
You’re basically taking an error that is randomly distributed, but then partially correcting that error only from pools that you know skewed your way to begin with.
Imagine if Trump had initiated hand recounted undervotes (votes the machine couldn’t count) only for election day votes but not mail in votes. That would be election fraud, because it would be calculated to find additional votes from a pool that skews GOP while not finding additional votes in a pool that skews Democrat. What Gore did was exactly the same thing.
People scream “election interference” at these highly attenuated and indirect actions like Meta taking down a post. But Gore was statistically minting additional Gore votes before two Supreme Courts stopped him.
(Imagine if Trump requested a hand recount in 2020, but only in the rural parts of Pennsylvania, where every ballot that had been rejected by the machine but could be counted by hand was twice as likely to be a Trump vote than a Biden vote. Say 10,000 ballots were rejected by the machine, and 1,000 of them could be hand counted. If the county went 65-35 Trump overall, then you’d find 650 new Trump votes but only 350 more Biden votes. If you had done a statewide recount this effect would be cancelled out by the opposite outcome in Philadelphia, finding newly countable Biden votes. But in this hypo Trump deliberately engineered a selective recount to benefit from this skew.)
Perhaps something can change to help prevent poverty and hunger if the economic value produced by society results in such enormous gains by such few people.
Literally it translates to "Don't put yourself" where "put" is the closest I can think of to the verb "meter", which is sort of what you do when you insert something haphazardly instead of carefully.
Truly literally the words are "No + self + put" and the conjugation of "meter" into "meta" makes it clear the subject is "you"
Everyone really need to go back and read the work of America’s founding generation. The founders understood the importance of structural and procedural rules versus substantive rules. A structural rule is some thing like: no politician can use Facebook, or alternatively, Facebook isn’t allowed to censor any candidate for political office. Such rules can be implemented with little room for debate.
A substantive rule by contrast requires some person to make a substantive judgment about particular content. Such rules turn that decision maker into a gatekeeper. And as a practical matter, nobody trusts such decision makers to render impartial decisions. This is why, in the U.S., judges largely police procedure and legal instructions, while substantive decisions about guilt or liability are made by randomly selected juries. In the U.S., a highly educated federal judge isn’t even trusted to decide guilt for a misdemeanor that could put a single individual in prison for more than six months. Meanwhile other countries trust random people at companies to make decisions that could swing entire elections and affect millions of people. It’s lunacy.
Except there's debate all the time in the USA stemming from this originalist tradition from the founders' intent.
Like: the First Ammendment, there was debate about the role of money, is it speech? Culminating with Citizens United which is absolute lunacy.
The American system isn't objectively better by any means, it's just the one you're used to.
Why should everyone care about founders of a different country that's not even working particularly well at this time.
> while substantive decisions about guilt or liability are made by randomly selected juries
A system gamed as easily as any other one.
> Meanwhile other countries trust random people at companies
They don't trust them to do the right thing, which is why there is a law telling them what to do. The alternative is to ban privately-owned social networks (either all of them or at least those that don't follow the laws).
Because the U.S. was the first country in the world created, with great study and deliberation, by high-IQ political philosophers. Because the country was already a successful democracy for 189 years before all the EU17 countries became democracies even on paper. Because the U.S. was having orderly transitions of power since it was as poor as Bangladesh is today.
> A system gamed as easily as any other one.
Decisions of randomly selected jurors are much harder to “game” than decisions of corporate censors or election board bureaucrats.
> They don't trust them to do the right thing, which is why there is a law telling them what to do.
Every dysfunctional third world has beautiful “laws telling people what to do.” We have those in Bangladesh. As often as not, such laws just become vehicles for manipulating elections because what the law says to do or who is following the laws or not is highly debatable. Such laws effectively turn the prosecutors and the court system into the locus of corruption, because they have the power to decide “who is following the law.” (It’s like Iran’s system with more steps. Iran actually has fair, functioning elections. It’s just that the Guardian Council, an expert body of highly educated scholars, gets to screen who is allowed to run for office.)
Please try to understand the difference between procedural/power allocation laws and laws that incorporate substantive standards. Instead of having laws that say “what to do”—which is always open to interpretation—you should have laws that focus on “who decides” and “how do they decide.” You need to either make the decision mechanical so everyone can see whether the rule is being followed or not, or you need to put the decision in the hands of a body that can’t credibly be accused of having their own agenda.
Sure, which is why the laws in the US are not approved by randomly selected lawmakers. In that way it's irrelevant what some random jury decides, when the executive branch, the lawmakers and top judges are owned by the ruling class.
> We have those in Bangladesh. As often as not, such laws just become vehicles for manipulating elections
Sorry about that, but that's not a rule that applies everywhere, far from that. And of course the elections in the US are already heavily manipulated even without that.
Nazis have this thing where they depict any political target as being both too weak and too strong, and too dumb and too smart.
They claimed it was a 'technical error'.
In September, as the elections geared up, they also suspened Lula's campaign account due to another 'technical error'. There are also thousands of complaints from users having their posts blocked.
In the U.S., if someone had programmed a generative AI to be unwilling to depict Obama, I imagine many people would assume that decision was meant to help Obama, not harm him.
I don't know how you can sleep at night.
It gives the appearance that Meta is not an impartial platform like they try to claim for regulatory purposes.
I remember NYTimes/WaPost pieces being concerned about Hindu nationalist influence on the Republican party. Anyone who has spend 2 seconds online know it's more likely the Republican party nukes India than forming alliances with the BJP.
Quick-cut to Musk funding right-wing political parties in Europe, JD Vance using the NATO bully-pulpit to talk down European center-right politicians, and Trump creating a slush-fund worth billions to Argentina to prop-up its failing experiment in right-wing libertarian governance, and America evangelicals funding regressive politics across Africa and Europe, reducing America's refugee program to resettle right-wing South Africans.
The alliance is so strong that people are coming even to HN to spread disinformation.
Pretending only rational discourse is valid ways to plan or engage in politics omits a lot of what's important.
Liberal voters don't unite well, and they also tend to have lower trust when it comes to misinformation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity
Just to be clear though: the Communist Party of China is not a massive fan of far-right parties, there are certain ideological barriers there.
Russia employed the former left-wing German Chancellor as part of their strategy making an invasion of Ukraine economically viable for them (it is worth pointing out that when right-wing politicians pointed this out, it was received as a crazy conspiracy theory..."liberal voters" distinguish themselves as people who believe themselves particularly unlikely to believe in "misinformation" whilst simultaneously believing in things that make no sense, most people who have a knowledge of politics are required to believe things that aren't true...if they were in touch with reality, they wouldn't vote).
(they may have already, they can basically do mind control with recommendations algorithms and get swaths of people to do whatever they want).
i don't see the correlation with current events. do you have a source that establishes this based on evidence?
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/51954
Trump has also been posting maps that are identical to the North American Technate maps (that include Greenland).
https://bostonraremaps.com/inventory/technocracy-inc-technat...
Im not going to litigate reality with someone whos purposely denying it.
Fun read: https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/features/joshua-haldeman...
I mean, this is South America we're talking about. It's not attitudes that undermine their democracy, it's very notoriously US-based three letter agencies.[1][2][3][4][5]
[1] https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/legacy-posting/chile-united-states...
[2] https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/southern-cone/2025-1...
[3] https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB133/index.htm
[4] https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB465/
[5] https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/events/operation-condor-1975-1980
America has recently done a huge amount to undermine faith in its own democracy, and that has been gleefully spread around the world. Absent any evidence. It's gross.
At that point, they've already won, neh?
(this is mostly to object that hyperbolic phrases like "basically mind control" don't do your argument any favor)
Secret? Its called "X" and Facebook.
Or if you're not immune, why do they allow you to keep making these posts calling them out?
I would say they can also successfully do "remote viewing" through a network of worldwide IOT devices.. While not metaphysical, modern surveillance techniques are certainly is inspired by those earlier more mystical ambitions.
Early intelligence programs had an outsized influence on Cybernetics and thus the internet.
Imagine telling a MK Ultra researcher in the CIA that in 50 years you'll be able to listen into, and steer the behavior of an individual through a glass screen they hold in their hands all day.. That you could target people individually, important people even, while they sit alone in a room customizing and tweaking the propaganda they see every 10 seconds as they touch the screen to swipe.
This all sounds pretty normal, and run of the mill to us now but if you take a step back its all very trippy. Its interesting to follow the evolution of early cybernetics research to the modern day and if you follow the lineage of researchers back in time you'll find some very suspect connections/influences.
Is it overly conspiratorial to think the Meta is doing what they're accused of on behalf of the US?
Don’t let either loss aversion or irrational exuberance rule you. Weigh every possibility and prepare yourself for it psychologically. The result could be crushing defeat, but it could also be stunning triumph.
It’s basically impossible for elected Republicans to hold Trump to account without losing office, and even if Republicans get wiped out in the coming election (I’m skeptical), I doubt that dynamic will change. If the price of gas weren’t so high, Republicans would be fairly happy with Trump — he’s basically kept his promise to be a hard-ass on immigration and other culture war issues.
I don’t expect a Republican reckoning that would please Democrats. Future Republican standard bearers will probably be very similar to Trump but more competent — akin to Erdogan, Bolsonaro, Orban, Modi, and others.
This is the sad truth. Imagine if he hadn't invaded Iran. He probably would manage to finagle a third term.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/11/08/777466912/californias-prop-18...
Even among people I know who voted for him, Trump fatigue is setting in and growing. Iran, renaming lakes and oceans, high cost of food and gas, none of that is what they voted for.
The only important question is whether Democrats will get any sense if they win.
The worst outcome is actually Democrats winning and then keeping the status quo and continuing to serve corporations and special interest groups over the needs of their own constituents.
They won't have any real power to force through legislation even if they win, but if they win and don't use this time to shake up their own party and instead keep Schumer/Jeffries/et al in charge and keep towing the center-right Third Way-esque line then in a few years time we will find out that actually, yes, there are worse people that could be president than Trump (all of the malevolence, but perhaps with competence too next time).
Every election for over a decade has been a change election and the Democratic party refusing to understand this (because the consultant class and their high value donors don't want to understand it) is one of the primary factors in creating and enabling Trump. And it isn't yet clear they intend to address this. I mean, people are still taking a Gavin Newsom run in 2028 seriously ffs.
Not at all. We all know it. There's just literally nothing we can do. The whole world is an US dictatorship
And it doesn't have to be criminal. You are hallucinating more than a 2024 LLM.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy
"A conspiracy, also known as a plot, ploy, or scheme, is a plan or agreement between people (called conspirers or conspirators) for an unlawful OR HARMFUL purpose, such as murder, treason, or corruption, especially with a political motivation,[2] while KEEPING THEIR AGREEMENT SECRET from the public or from other people affected by it"
Edit: the point about Trump was facetious, but old Twitter actually DID actively interfere in the 2020 election by censoring all sharing (even in DMs!) the New York Post Biden laptop story.
You mean when Twitter "permanently" banned Trump in January of 2021, after the 2020 election (which he lost)? Which election do you suppose that interfered with?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
Oct 2020: Facebook demotes the same story. Zuckerberg wrote in an August 26, 2024 letter that Facebook temporarily demoted the story after the FBI warned of a possible Russian disinformation campaign.
Early to late 2020: Twitter labels Trump's election claims. Twitter first added a contextual label to a Trump tweet calling mail-in voting fraudulent in early 2020.
Dec 8, 2022: The Twitter Files describe "visibility filtering." Bari Weiss reported that Twitter staff limited the reach of some accounts without telling users, including Dan Bongino and Charlie Kirk.
E: oh it’s a 1 day old account. Sad troll.
I didn't laugh at the joke.
I laughed because their username was "We Need More Luigis" with a Palestine flag.
Everyone remembers evil Pinochet who killed some 3k out of 11 million, nobody cares about kind Hoxha who killed at least 6k (likely closer to 100k) out of 2 million, or plushy Castro (10k killed + 70k dead trying to flee out of 10 million).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/meta-employees-said-l...
It’s their platform, they can boost who they want.
That and the fact that US is actively putting money into favouring the candidate that's offering them access to Brazilian rare earth reserves (https://valorinternational.globo.com/politics/news/2026/09/3..., https://amadomundo.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/memorando-... and https://youtu.be/xPlKzqiYH5c?si=Cw4YGXU8B2Xb2EHY) we are looking at a direct attack against Brazil's right to self determination by the US and its corporations.
USA big tech is just as bad as Russias or China's
It's much, much worse
From what I can see, the meta cutoff data was from a time where one candidate was confirmed and the other wasn't. The political interference here was actually the timely manner for them to fix this. It took weeks of public pressure / federal government pressure for Meta to act.
One problem the Brazilian left is facing is that the non-Musk platforms are not too fond of death threats against Protestants, landlords, farmers etc.
Either most of my friends are pro-Lula (they are not) or Meta is helping them, not Bolsonaro.
This is an excuse for them to challenge the election if they (hopefully) lose.
For my other Brazilian friends over here: to me both sides are terrible but Lula is the convicted felon that spent 2 years in prison, and he ruled the country since 2003 and the place gets worse by the day.
Hacked messages uncovered procedural fraud in Lula’s trial, leading to the annulment of his convictions.
Even if the trial was annulled due to procedural fraud (which it wasn’t), it doesn’t take away his corruption and what his group did to the country.
One can argue that there have been numerous procedural frauds in Bolsonaro's trial - but of course if it’s the other side you don’t care ;)
The fact is that Lula was not convicted.