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Comment by i_am_nomad | Hacker News Reader

I’m not familiar with either of those two projects. Perhaps the latter is the aggregation of numerous “good customer” scores, plus actual credit rating, plus the no-fly list. But I haven’t heard about an actual program that implements a social credit score that FB is implementing.

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Facebook's social graph and engagement data combined with data already obtained by governments makes an elaborate social credit score easy to generate.

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.

I’d say it’s the media and general public that want Facebook to curb “fake news”, more so than Washington.

See the tit for tat between Facebook and lawmakers:

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.

'The Media' includes The Daily Mail and Fox News. The general public on average don't want facebook to curb 'their' news, perhaps those other people's.

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.

"I was having a conversation with a senior government official I have know all these many years who work in the White House and I said you're changing American society. He said well we realize that we need a robust social graph of the United States. I said, you mean the United States Government is from now on going to keep a list of everybody every American knows, do you think by any chance that should require a law? And he just laughed." - talk in 2012 by Eben Moglen

Why do we think the government, almost 10 years ago, wanted a robust social graph of every citizen in the United States?

It's called sarcasm

Or "speculation"

It's actually just synthesis.

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