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Comment by numair | Hacker News Reader

Aside from my personal experiences in this area, you can ask the Winkelvoss twins what happened when the judge in their case found out that Zuckerberg/Facebook’s lawyers lied and withheld evidence that would have gotten them a bigger payout. As the person who represented them told me: “Those guys can lie to the government and get away with it. I’ve seen them do it.”

So, no, this is not the “mother of all lawsuits.” Nothing will happen to Mark Zuckerberg or Facebook. And, yes, there seems to be something rotten in the American political system — on both sides of the aisle — that’s keeping these scumbags protected.

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there seems to be something rotten in the American political system — on both sides of the aisle

There only being two sides on the aisle is one of the main problems. It's an oligarchy, not a representative democracy.

Actually, I think that the system with "first-past-the-post" voting, tied with small voting districts is much better for representative democracy.

Yes, the one visible result is that you get only two political parties (because being third, with no prospects of winning makes smaller parties to give up). However, the two parties tend to be internally much more diverse than you get in other systems.

The system where there's a proportional representation means that the elections now become nationwide - first you count votes for each party, to determine how many seats they get, and only then you assign seats to individual candidates.

The way it is implemented in Europe gives two terrible results:

1. The leader of the party now have much more power over individual candidates, since none of them can get into the parliament on their own, they need support of the nationally-recognized party. In American system individual congressperson is free to say "fuck you" to their party leader and will still be able to win their seat in the next elections.

2. After some small party gets into the parliament they are basically powerless, they have no way of delivering on their promises to their voters, so instead they focus on "just being there" and receiving Member of Parliament salaries. Basically, small parties are just there for comic relief.

Re point 1: Depends on the country, but you can just found your own party in at least some EU countries.

Re point 2: Usually small parties in Europe do have a say in government, if they form a coalition with one of the big parties without an absolute majority (>50%). Yes, the big party will push through more of their own ideas, but the smaller party will get to make their own laws too - the big partner needs them to vote on their own laws too, so they can’t just ignore the smaller partner.

In some cases the parties even have received a roughly equal number of votes, so they get an almost equal say.

> The way it is implemented in Europe gives two terrible results:

You mean EU parliament or european countries in general? Because there are some(e.g. germany) where you have two votes, one for a direct candidate im your district which can get elected independently, and one for a party, to also give smaller parties a chance, which is a neat compromise. On the other hand, if you have e.g. 2 big parties and several small ones, the small ones can still make a difference when creating a coalition with one of the larger ones. Of course, there will be small parties only "receiving salaries", but tbh there will be people like that in the bigger parties, too.

> representative democracy

And given the degree to which lies have gotten better at mutating and spreading, while critical thinking is barely taught in schools, even if this "democracy" was representative it might not work too well.

At this point, I think the only way to save the user base of this dying old system is a slow migration towards competing co-op social services... but once again -- without critical thinking -- most people would likely choose by lowest price and end up with much of the same.

I am skeptical of the notion that teaching critical thinking will do people any good in fighting lies.

People believe in the narrative they want, and they'll employ tools to do that.

Very likely not a one-stop solve-all. But also very likely part of the tool set.

two ^official^ sides

They play ball with intelligence and law enforcement agencies providing something to them the government could never practically or legally procure otherwise.

Between NSLs and Patriot Act, pretty sure the government gets anything it wants at any time with zero consequence.

But fundamentally, it needs to be out there in order to be obtained by a TLA. Facebook and Friends help by giving us a reason AND a platform for us to put information out there that can then be tapped.

Maybe. But there's something to be said for getting a hard drive full of juicy info from 'just some guy' who has zero oversight now and forever.

And even if the only thing you're accomplishing is giving the secret judge a break from rubber stamping all of your requests, I can see that having some inter-department social currency benefits.

The rottenness is that our government wants to wield social media as a propaganda tool.

They never discuss breaking these companies up, they only do things like bring Zuckerberg in and try to prod him into regulating his platform in their direction.

That and lobbyist padding their wallets.

Paypal got similar inexplicable treatment from the government. Other places trying to do online banking got regulated out of existence, often involving legal trouble for the individuals involved. Paypal, tho, apparently those regulations and laws behind them just don't apply.

Remember E-gold?

As I remember it, PayPal worked to enforce many of the same laws the government requires of banks, as well as helps track transfers for taxation reasons.

I don’t think it’s a conspiracy, PayPal just made sure they were on the side of the law that allowed them to operate without government interference.

The "right wing" doesn't really care about free speech, they are only talking about it because they "feel" that they are being "suppressed".

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