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Comment by hadrien01 | Hacker News Reader

From Facebook's announcement:

We look at several factors that may indicate editorial control by a government, including:

- Mission statement, mandate, and/or public reporting on how the organization defines and accomplishes its journalistic mission

- Ownership structure such as information on owners, stakeholders, board members, management, government appointees in leadership positions, and disclosure of direct or indirect ownership by entities or individuals holding elected office

- Editorial guidelines such as transparency around sources of content and independence and diversity of sources

- Information about newsroom leadership and staff

- Sources of funding and revenue

- Governance and accountability mechanisms such as correctional policies, procedure for complaints, external assessments and oversight boards

View on HN

So… if:

- it says its goals are honest journalism,

- it's privately owned (and hence not required to disclose its owners),

- it has public guidelines and policies promoting transparency, neutrality, independence and accountability,

- its newsroom leadership and staff are careful about what they put on their official Facebook accounts,

- it has an abuse@ address and an internal oversight board, and Facebook has assessed it

then that's okay? I think I'd be able to get an organisation past stronger checks, and I'm not even particularly good at that sort of thing.

That last check is the hardest one to game, but it's also likely to have a high false positive rate, so I wouldn't be too worried about my hypothetical shady organisation getting past that.

Elections are only allowed to be rigged by private corporations!

Essentially (de facto): yes.

Generally I like to remind people of an infamous quote, from a truly nasty period at the beginning of the last century. Because I believe it illustrates the true nature of this fact you pointed out:

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power” ― Benito Mussolini

It is possible that what (eventually) will go down in the history books regarding the USA, might be how astonishingly effective the decades upon decades of positive propaganda have blinded/confused/divided it's own citizens from noticing the true nature of the machinery that runs the country (and has done so, maybe even ever since WW2).

With a few people and some decent preparation you could probably fake most of this without too much effort.

In fact, I wonder what the smallest amount of people and effort you'd need to get past this: if you can get away without having face-to-face you might be able to pull and do it with 1 person, a bunch of emails and some AI generated faces (inspiration courtesy of https://youtu.be/bqPARIKHbN8 )

Funny you should say that, this kind of shallow formal rules are typically what a government would propose...

And most of the times that proposal comes from corporations and or 'friends'...yes, we have a circle.

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