Facebook is the defense contractor that is building America's Great Firewall and social credit system, so it makes sense that there is a revolving door with the authoritarian regime.
When the day comes that we are forced to use a social media platform... heh, we'll all just roll over and start using it. Revolution takes too much effort.
As for the great firewall, Facebook has been in talks with lawmakers who want Facebook to do more to prevent "fake news" which is another way of saying that lawmakers want to use Facebook to control the news narrative.
So far, Facebook has been extremely complaint with both of these areas. This new hire is further evidence that Facebook plans to support user privacy only after offering the government plenty of reassurance that its interests and patriot act powers will not be adversely impacted.
I've been concerned/cynical about Facebook's stance on this stuff for a while, but this hire is really chilling. If anyone reading this hasn't read the Patriot Act, give it a read. It is shocking both in how stupid and technologically naive the wording is, as well as in its blatant disregard for the bill of rights. It's definitely the most shameful piece of legislation passed in my lifetime.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-made-m...
Zuck is losing on purpose here by admitting they screwed up, so that he can pivot into a negotiating stance to determine what level of control government will get. This is not all decided yet, it is still in play but this hire suggests that some progress was made in the negotiation.
Washington has been shouting fake news from both sides for a while. Is worth noting that Trump just copied something already being said by others and mashed the definition.
Why do we think the government, almost 10 years ago, wanted a robust social graph of every citizen in the United States?
1. Actually using it results in parting with it (rather than being able to merely present it over and over)
2. Money held by outsiders is just as valuable as money held by insiders (giving outsiders independent power)
#1 is mitigated by the inflationary treadmill policy, and #2 is mitigated by oxymoronic "money laundering" regulations. But the authoritarians in power are always seeking new ways of eroding distributed paradigms.
There is a material difference between FICO and what China and, potentially, Facebook are building.
FICO looks at financial factors. It's a model to estimate likelihood of repayment. Being brown or gay or female might correlate with factors that reduce the likelihood of repayment. But if those systemic problems were fixed, and FICO were left unchanged, it should yield an unbiased result.
Social credit scores, on the other hand, directly incorporate biases. Introduce a social credit score into an economically equal society and it will redistribute from the "undesirable" to the "desirable" based on zero economic facts. (Same with ad-driven social networks like Facebook and Instagram.)
It's subtle. But it makes a world of difference in terms of effect and the moral culpability of those who choose to support its development and deployment.
When people say "social credit score" they distinctly mean something different than "credit score" (you may get this hint by the extra word, "social").
A social credit system not only includes your finances, but as well as much about your behavior. Such as "do you buy cigarettes? How often?" FICO doesn't care about this, they just care about if you're likely to pay back debt (based on your track record of doing exactly that). FICO doesn't care if you're Muslim, black, white, Christian, etc. But a social credit system DOES.
Rather than putting a score on your likelihood of paying back debt, a social credit score scores you on how "good of a citizen" you are. Not just legally, but morally. And that's the danger. Morals shift and vary a lot (more so in the US than most countries). There's a general belief in most first world countries that your skin color, religion, gender, etc should not play a role in how the government of businesses treat you. Social credit systems (even if they don't explicitly add those factors: ie implicit) will use these factors to rate you.
FICO doesn't "care" if you're Muslim or black, but FICO scores can be absolutely used to discriminate against those groups.
It isn't hard to argue that FICO can be abused. But what's being argued here is that we don't need, nor want, a system that is more imposing than FICO. One that affects much more of your life, such as "can I use an airplane?"
If a score prevents you from using transportation (a needed car), living in decent housing, and getting a decent job, I'd say that score is pretty tightly tied to your social well-being.
I will agree that there's problems with a credit system. No argument there. But I'm (we're?) arguing that these problems are exacerbated when adding the social element.
2) Asserting the development of an American "social credit system"
3) Describing America's political atmosphere as an "authoritarian regime"
4) Describing Facebook as a "defense contractor"
Come on, you know what you're doing
We must ask how a social credit system would be useful to any government and wonder how any government would turn down the chance to obtain one. There is already hard evidence that the US Government wants to influence FB's news feed algorithm. Strictly speaking that is not a firewall, but the effect (censorship) is the same.
So feel free to belabor the difference between government meddling in the news feed algorithm to promote/demote various ideas and the technology known as China's great firewall. In my view that is a tangential and distracting discussion.
Yet it is important enough to public opinion that congress undertakes days of hearings with Zuck to try to control the news feed algo?
Often, the term gets thrown around too freely by those on the left when they want to disparage someone on the right whose ideas they dislike, so it gets overused.
But I think with the disdain for the rule of law, friendliness and admiration of rulers who are certainly authoritarian, and the push to "believe in me, rather than your lying eyes", the term has a place in the conversation.
The two above comments I made are sitting at moderately positive vote counts, so it makes me happy that at least > 50% of HN is bored of the way we've been discussing this topic for the last few years.
It would be useful if Hacker News would either make a magnitude number available or the actual up and down votes. A comment that gets 3 upvotes versus 2 downvotes will have the same total as a comment that has 412 upvotes versus 411 downvotes, but clearly one comment was ignored while the other struck a nerve.