Facebook whistleblower to claim company contributed to Capitol attack | Hacker News Reader

Facebook whistleblower to claim company contributed to Capitol attack

theguardian.com

94 pointserdo18 comments

>The violence and chaos of the attack sent shockwaves throughout the US, and the rest of the world, and saw scores of people injured and five die.

Stopped reading right there. I'm not even American and I know this has been debunked long time ago. There was only one person shot by capitol police who died as direct consequence of the storming. Some other people died because of self-inflicted body harm (overdosing for example) or entirely unrelated health issues.

This is propaganda.

Does it matter? There will people raiding through the Capitol with slip knots and plastic binders, ready to have a kangaroo court. I don't know how much of the footage you've watched, but it was anything but a peaceful protest. It was a violent uprising. It's just that the mob was mostly comprised of a bunch of fuckups, so they were fortunately unsuccessful in their attempt at insurrection.

>Does it matter?

Yes it does, it makes the difference between journalism and propaganda. If you dont care about the truth I cant help you.

Yes the truth matters. Why is this even a question?

And how would you define the months, literally months of BLM and etc protests in which many, many people participated in the burning of buildings, mass looting and other random destruction across a number of American cities before the Capitol uprising as you call it?

I would define them as whataboutism.

Possibly there is a bit of that, but on your part as well (and from the numerous people who view this all the same as you). Because your answer also implicitly says "I'd rather ignore these much larger, very serious and fundamentally serious things completely because they don't fit with my need to hysterically focus on Trump and any example of similar violence from any supporters of the right. Much of the rhetoric from the left-led violence that stemmed from the BLM protests prior to the one single Capitol riot was also rife with calls for radical overthrows of established power. Personally, I sympathize with much of that anger, much more than I do with the people who supported Trump during the much smaller Jan 6th riot, but it's a good idea to at least keep the ideological blinders off when analyzing either..

>This is propaganda.

For those interested in a counter point, since I was curious based on this comment.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/11/us/who-died-in-capitol-bu...

Says Published Jan. 11, 2021. Its part of the initial reporting on the event and full of wrong information even with the updated section that still says 5 people died because of it while it fact it was only one.

Brian Sicknick died of a stroke the day after the event. 2 men were charged for assaulting him no one was charged for causing his death.

The NYT post says he died of his injuries.

Ashli Babbitt was fatally shot by capitol police Michael Leroy Byrd.

Kevin Greeson suffered a heat attack at the rally before the capitol was even stormed. There is no sign he participated or was involved any illegal activities nor that his death was related to it. He was apparently very passionate about political events, he attended and celebrated Obama inauguration in 2009.

Rosanne Boyland died of an amphetamine overdose was apparently involved in a stampede like situation which the NYT post still says is the reason for her death.

Benjamin Philips died from coronary heart disease no sign that he was involved with rioting or any illegal activities.

The NYT post falsely reports that he died of a stroke.

The NYT post is outdated and should be marked as such but it represents information available from that time. However the parent article from The Guardian is from yesterday, no excuse there to spread long known false information. Its defensively intentional and therefore by definitely propaganda and not journalism.

Makes sense; you can't take credit for the Arab Spring and then hold yourself harmless for the Capital insurrection.

Did Facebook take credit for the Arab Spring? I remember at the time Twitter (and its SMS accessibility) both taking and being given credit (and blame, from different quarters), but other social media (Facebook, Google something or other, etc.) I remember getting mostly “also vaguely involved” mentions more than credit/blame.

Facebook actually did the wrong thing during the arab spring : 1- login was not encrypted, so we got our accounts compromised 2- they blocked activist accounts, disabled pages and groups and censored content based on pro regime reports 3- when they got their shit together, they realized that most of us did not use our real identities on facebook so blocking every Tunisian user based on regime report was not going to cut it. So they had this smart identity verification idea where they would show you a picture where one of your friends was identified and ask you where he was. Genius. Too bad we actually identified people on stupid photos just to get their attention. So when you tried to login you were showed say a picture with two dogs and they asked you to identify one of your friends. Half the Tunisians were blocked out of facebook till they rolled back this feature.

Read memo PDF without Javascript: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21075249/facebook-mem... ^1

"Indeed, polarizing content and misinformation are also present on platforms that have no algorithmic ranking whatsoever, including private messaging apps like iMessage and WhatsApp."

If these services were truly private how would Facebook know what type of content peoples' messages contain.

1. NB There is an internal Sharepoint link in the PDF that apparently reveals the name of the Facebook employee who published this memo.

Every time we hear about how Facebook didn’t do enough to shut down this or that kind of speech on their platform, where that speech was legal, it should be recognized as smuggling in the basic assumption that it is perfectly ok we have a centralized company (and in Facebook’s case, an individual) with the power to influence global discourse to the degree Facebook does.

Did Bic contribute to the Unabomber's reign of terror because he used one of their pens to write his manifesto?

What are the names of the five people listed as having been killed? One is well know, unsure about these other four.

There's only one. All reputable news sources agree that all others died after the event due to other causes. Why is this controversial?

> after the event

Or before.

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