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.