Meta executives ‘inadvertently’ identified in OnlyFans bribery suit
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23131224-76-main#doc...
Page 10, lines 26 and 27 say the names are Nick Clegg, Nicola Mendelsohn, and Cristian Perrella.
To be clear, this is a motion from OnlyFans lawyers, and they're trying to communicate that the anonymous tip should not be considered reliable information. Not even the plaintiffs are claiming to have evidence of a demand to go with the bribe. But I expect it should be enough to subpoena the financial records that could prove that the information is true.
If this is true, I'd guess the situation might not only include issues of bribery, a quasi-public platform silencing speech, interfering with commerce, etc.
It sounds like it might include abusing/compromising/eroding mechanisms intended for protecting people against violent attacks, as well as other aspects of national security.
who would have thought that could happen..
We should be thinking about how to stop such injustices.
To put it another way, if you don't have reason to believe someone would collaborate in a prisoner's dilemma I would not say you are morally obligated to collaborate. You should and you are a better person for doing so, but it is not unethical to make the selfish choice in my opinion.
Doesn't that mean you would only help people if you got something in return?
Killing anyone who slightly inconveniences me is selfish, and so is keeping my last dollar instead of giving it to the poor, but those two have vastly different moral implications under and system of morality that's any good.
Sure, $10 billion seems like a lot to stand up two postgres containers, but can you really put a price tag on something like this?
Uh, so at what point do you become a person who has access to a database? When you install postgres? When you have payments set up?
This is the exact purpose of the state, to punish bad actors that can't be effectively effectively punished or disincentivised with collective action.
Does knowingly participating in a corrupt platform or business make one complicit? This is why I opted out. If more people would make decisions with conscience, it would starve the beast.
As for what they could have done instead, they could have gone the more traditional route and hired him as a consultant who attends a few offsite gatherings and maybe writes a policy memo for them if he’s feeling ambitious.
Interestingly, small government seems to correlate with more corruption too.
I am very much not an expert in this area.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23311886.2021.1...
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/inequality-and-corr...
Meta has scrutinized the email, too, noting supposed inconsistencies in the plaintiffs’ claims, including that Clegg started at Meta after the OnlyFans bribery conspiracy allegedly started. In the court filing, Fenix also pointed out that plaintiffs have accused Perrella, but in their complaint, plaintiffs say that wire transfers allegedly sent to Perrella were sent to someone with a similar name at “Cristian Peralta Trust.”
Hopefully he had the foresight to kick some down to the guys upstairs.
He was inside the cabinet after all.
It's a well trodden path. Credit Suisse paid almost a million for ex-PM John Major to work 'part time' for them after he left government.
What it means is that whenever an organization is corrupt, it should be considered to be the responsibility of the top management.
Corruption itself is a symptom.
edit: correct->corrupt
Unhealthy organizations do not become unhealthy because of a few rotten apples, but because of mismanagement.
Not really.
1) Meta is publicly traded, and has a duty to shareholders.
2) Antitrust laws limit what can Meta can do.
3) Paying individual executives to take action against Meta's interest is a crime.
4) A deal that involves Meta breaching contractual obligations with other parties or otherwise committing torts (e.g. libel) is also actionable.
There are more exceptions, but that should be enough.
Corruption in the system is just a symptom of the root problem of Meta/Instagram getting to decide what you are not allowed to see.
OnlyFans star says she REPEATEDLY tracked down Meta employees and had sex with them to get her Instagram account reactivated when it was locked for explicit content - and reveals Insta's shadowy 'review' process
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10833813/OnlyFans-s...
Nick Clegg to decide on Trump's 2023 return to Instagram and Facebook
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/23/nick-clegg-t...
I guess Trump now knows what he needs to do.
Some things never change.
Facebook (and in this case, its employees) certainly aren’t hurrying to fix a power structure that gives them arbitrary influence.
It’s not in Facebook’s shareholders’ interest. That’s all we can say.
Concentrated, opaque and arbitrary power centres are predictably corruptible. Creating and nurturing those at multiple levels of an organisation, one whose senior leadership has shown a pathological history of lying moreover, speaks to an unsaid intent, or at the very least, overt tolerance of the pattern of behaviour. It’s also self reinforcing, as the culture increasingly forgets how to build and protect other power structures.
Nice ideal statement
The problem is that there is no "company" that has a will or ability to think or act on it's interests - the "company" is literally a virtual creation.
What DOES exist are a collection of people in executive positions. Some of them may take a long view and see that what is good for the company and stakeholders is good for them, and act on those ideas. But, sadly, what usually seems to happen is that the system actively filters into executive positions sociopathic individuals who will happily game the system for whatever advantage they can gain, and they're usually smart enough to not do it in the easier-to-catch direct bribery/kickback schemes. But, if they think they won't get caught, many will do so.
>>I bet you Facebook doesn't want any of the latter.
Again, there is no "Facebook" who doesn't want the latter. There is Zuckerberg, with primary controlling interest, who wants what he wants, and the board and a bunch of executives. And he can exert some level of control, including the threat to summarily fire them upon his displeasure. That will not prevent any of them bending the organization to their own benefit if they think they can get away with it, and nothing says in advance that they won't try something corrupt if they think they can get away with it (& nothing says they're right or wrong about thinking they can get away with it either).
Of course not. I did not say or imply that they could. I was merely clarifying that there is no abstract "company" with a will of its own, and that the major players, WITHIN the constraints of the law and the other players, can and often do exploit power for their own purposes rather than an abstract ideal.
>>There definitely is a strong separation between Zuckerberg and the company. Even if he had 100% the company still would have to act fiscally responsibly for itself.
Yes, people can have multiple hats, and there are laws about fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. There are often lawsuits over failures to uphold such responsibilities.
>>Read the law.
Yes, I do read the law. I do not make the silly assumption, as you apparently do, that just because there is a law, it fully covers all possible wrongdoing and people always follow it.
There are nearly unlimited actions that can be legitimately dual-purpose, benefiting the corporation and the individual executive/board member, whoever. and that does not even begin to account for the actions that are only arguably beneficial to the corporation but really extract value for the wrongdoer. I've literally heard an executive state "There's 1000 ways to screw minority shareholders", and watched them do it. There's a practice that screws creditors that is so common there's a name for it - a "cram-down". I could go on endlessly.
If you really think that the fact that laws define responsibility of corporate players, and therefore there is no wrongdoing, I'd like to talk to you about an opportunity for some great oceanfront property in Kansas. Sheesh.
I suspect that corruption might actually help facebook avoid a bunch of negative attention from powerful individuals who’d otherwise struggle to get their account unbanned/verified/whatever.
Propping up the org props up all the unethical schemes. Personal preference to label self as merely looking passed one is gibberish.
The shifting of personal responsibility from the individual to the governments and corporations that exist to 'serve you' in some sort of hybridized federal/corporate merger.
When the majority learns from birth to completely trust the institutions (ran by the government) that have existed for decades/centuries before them, there's very little wiggle room to try and convince people that maybe they don't have your best interests in mind...
We'll see what happens when first-world governments can't reliably feed a majority of their citizens and when social media companies start putting "misinformation" tags on individual messages/status updates about people dying due to starvation.
It is more, however, believable than the official accounts.
For all that, I think he made a serious mistake going into coalition with the Tories when he could equally well (going on election results) have done so with Labour (plus possibly SNP I forget), whose policies I thought should have better aligned with Lib Dem.
But I'm assuming the best of intent here, and will continue to do so until proven otherwise, so this case is an interesting development.
Cameron was a disaster. Austerity was incredibly cruel on the poorest of the population, and the UK wasn't exactly a shining light in its recovery from the financial crisis. He led a weak remain campaign and then stepped aside as soon as Brexit became difficult, and the following governments have had to deal with his mess, the covid outbreak and the effects of the war in Ukraine.
So I think you could equally say that the coalition is a root cause of many of the issues of today. That and the lack of any credible opposition for years.
Although austerity did indeed start under the coalition (so it has the Lib Dems' fingerprints on it), didn't much of what many dislike about Cameron's premiership stem from after the end of the coalition?
> He led a weak remain campaign and then stepped aside as soon as Brexit became difficult, and the following governments have had to deal with his mess
He was rumoured to have campaigned in the 2015 general election on the assumption he'd renew the coalition with the Lib Dems, who would block the EU referendum he'd promised his voters, and who he could continue using as a human shield. But the backlash against the Lib Dems after just one term of coalition with him was so severe that he had to lead a single-party majority government and uphold his negotiating position as if it were a plan for government.
In contrast, the Lib Dems did manage to pass same-sex marriage (frustratingly, many seem to credit the Tories or Cameron for this despite a majority of Tories voting against it at both readings[1]).
The Lib Dems also managed to block the Digital Economy Bill, AKA the "Snoopers Charter" (the Tories later passed it, once they got a majority in parliament).
The Lib Dem's top priority has always been voting reform, and Clegg seemed to gamble away far too much in an attempt to get it. All they managed was a referendum on a watered-down AV system (AFAIK the Lib Dems want STV, as used by Northern Ireland); which was heavily campaigned against by both Labour and Tories, and failed spectacularly :(
[0] https://general-election-2010.co.uk/2010-general-election-ma...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_(Same_Sex_Couples)_Ac...
Then someone pointed out to me the tuition fee thing wasn't just a manifesto policy. Every Lib Dem candidate in that election had (at the direction of the campaigns department) signed a personal pledge to vote against a rise in tuition fees during the next parliament. Most of them broke that pledge in pretty spectacular fashion (at the direction of party leadership).
I didn't really have an answer to that, and still don't.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_for_Students_pledge
Agreeing to a referendum on the voting system without securing agreement that the Tories would not campaign against it was also incredibly tactically stupid.
The coalition negotiations were far too quick and cheap. It should have been over a few weeks rather than a couple of days. Anyway, the public punished the Lib Dems by re-relegating them to minor party status.
This was key for me that turned it from being the unfortunate reality of politics into a serious breach of trust. I remember saying at the time that I'd have accepted keeping fees but tripling them was like slapping your voters in the face.
I understand they were stitched up by the Tories: the budget gutted university funding, meaning the choice was increase fees or watch higher education collapse. That being said, they needed to find another way.
From a strategic perspective, too, it was the biggest cause of their 2015 annihilation. Their entire message of "we'll moderate the Tories" had the ready response of "you mean like tuition fees?"
It wasnt any more a mistake than the decision to take a bribe was a mistake.
It's my pet peeve when people claim this.
The UK already had same sex marriage, it was just not called marriage. Labour brought that in. The bill you refer to just renamed it, plus it gave religious orgs a get out from equalities legislation and tidied up non-same-sex marriage rules.
And the only reason it passed was because of Labour. The majority of Tories voted against their own parties bill. And 10% of Lib dems did too.
Like so many of Clegg's achievements, it was a triumph of (false and misleading) advertising over substance...
In exchange for not supporting a bill that didn't really do what was claimed, the tories got total support for all of their economic and social policies.
Sure, but marriage isn't just about legals/financials. Socially/culturally, civil partnerships are a "runner up prize" compared to marriage; e.g. the recent extension of civil partnership to opposite-sex couples didn't get much fanfare.
In any case, I was specifically referring to the 2013 act, rather than the broader notion of marriage/partnerships/etc. It's the inconsistency which frustrates me, to see people thanking Cameron/Tories for delivering same-sex marriage (i.e. the 2013 act) in one breath, and blaming Clegg/LibDems for delivering tuition rises in the next.
> And the only reason it passed was because of Labour
Absolutely. The LibDems couldn't do much to swing votes themselves; hence the back-room negotiations, whips, etc.
> And 10% of Lib dems did too.
True, but that's still just 4 MPs; so I'm not sure it's too statistically insightful. Still disappointing considering the whole point of liberal philosophy is personal freedom (unfortunately some like to interpret "personal" as "the corporation I own/represent", and "freedom" to include freedom to pollute, freedom to choose my own health & safety levels, etc.)
> In exchange for not supporting a bill that didn't really do what was claimed, the tories got total support for all of their economic and social policies.
To be clear, the bill which did that would be the AV referendum (which LibDems most cared about). Also, some Tory policies were blocked by the LibDems, e.g. the Digital Economy Bill.
Lib Dems target students and young people who are generally more liberal, their main selling point to them was tuition fees. Young people got them to government and they immediately turned on their voters.
He was Cambridge.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/inside-nick-cleggs-7mi...
He has fallen a long way since then. It's a remarkable descent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_United_Kingdom_Alternativ...
He did sacrifice everything because of that too! (Ref lost, low if not the lowest ever turnout, party lost huge support generally and he exited politics failed)
[1] https://eu-browse.startpage.com/av/anon-image?piurl=https%3A...
Christ that's in bad taste.
EDIT: wanted to add this quote from [1]: "On 5 May, David Blunkett, one of the Labour Party former-government ministers who had supported the 'No' campaign, admitted that the £250 million figure used by the 'No' campaign had been fabricated, and that the 'No' campaign had knowingly lied about the figure and other claims during the campaign."
So it does seem like it was a testing ground for the brexit busses. Just make a bunch of stuff up.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/feb/25/no-to-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_United_Kingdom_Alternativ...
There were a couple of others where the proportional representation would hurt a soldier or an old lady instead.
I remember feeling like I had learned a little bit about how the world worked, seeing that campaign succeed.
It doesn't really add up to me, but I don't know how these high level bribes work in practice. I would have thought big business would have a smoother routine worked out than transferring money to accounts in people names.
But I find it odd that the perfectly reasonable claim by Meta, "why are you suing us if it was OnlyFans who bribed our employees to do something that benefits OnlyFans but not us" gets spun as being further proof that Meta was up to something.
I'm happy to believe Meta are up to something scummy but this all feels a bit random.
Meta has Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and others.
When Meta tells law enforcement that user xxxBobTerrorist69xxx is a terrorist based on information they have from their apps, law enforcement listens. They can also ban that person from all of their platforms. These platforms are used by content creators for findability, just like any business.
If the only place you can advertise is your own platform, how are you going to draw people to your platform.
The plaintiffs are arguing that OnlyFans used connections to Meta executives to then have them use their position to lock creators on competing platforms out of important advertising platforms.
So far, it seems like Meta itself isn't the issue here, it's people who work for Meta. Which is a little hair-splitty considering some of the people involved. But if Rob Walton is caught snorting coke off of a hooker's ass, we don't say "WalMart" is doing it.
They were fancied to do very well in that election - Clegg was young, spoke really well and outclassed everyone in pre-election debates[0]. However they didn't do quite as well as hoped - while they added about a million votes over the previous election, they ended up losing a few seats in total. However they ended up in a fairly powerful position, since neither of the two bigger parties - Labour and the Conservatives - had enough MPs to form a majority government. So whoever could form a coalition with Lib Dems could basically win.
They chose to enter a coalition with the Conservatives who then proceeded to lifted the cap on tuition fees and basically every university in England and Wales promptly hiked their fees to the maximum allowed. In response they didn't do much other than wring their hands and offer meek apologies. The party was quite understandably crucified at the next election, losing 49 of their 57 seats and they've been the fourth party - behind the Conservatives, Labour, and the Scottish National Party[1] - ever since.
[0] - This was a pretty low bar, though. For example one of the memorable parts of the first debate was that during his closing statement he namechecked the audience members (name, location and issue) who asked the candidates questions. The media liked this. Needless to say, all the candidates did the same in the second debate :D
[1] - They do pull more votes overall than the SNP, but due to how the UK system works they don't get as many parliamentary seats. Understandably they pushed for a proportional representation voting system which would help ... but that failed.
It always shocked me that this was what the media jumped on, and seemed to matter most to people. Really shows how appallingly low the standard of political debate and reporting has become.
(Personally, I'd be much happier with someone who didn't spend time on such obvious PR guff, and was a good and incorruptible administrator of a country.)
It’s amazing how many people when presented with a list of policies will vote one way, but when presented with a list of names and parties will vote the other.
British universities were pushing hard for the raised tuition fees at the time, a legacy of Labour's drive to drastically increase the numbers of people going. They claimed that they were going broke and needed the possibility of charging more to decrease class sizes and scale up their operations. They also claimed that very few universities would actually raise prices to the new cap, that in most cases the new prices would be hardly different.
The coalition, both Tories and Lib Dems, were completely suckered by this claim. They came to see raising the price cap as an unpleasant compromise, needed in order to ensure education remained high quality at the very highest end (russell group etc). What actually happened next showed that the claims of universities were a lie: every university immediately raised their prices to the max and faced with a tidal wave of new money, the academics that had been claiming they needed it to benefit students immediately went on "strike", except it was the sort of strike where they continued to turn up and do research (the fun bits), but refused to mark students exams. In other words they held students hostage at the start of their careers. I remember because I was there at the time.
Because the university sector has pathetically weak management this tactic worked very well, and within months the "strike" was ended by the simple expedient of allocating nearly all the new money to wage increases for lecturers and other academic staff. The new money was swallowed whole by the existing system, the big promised expansion never happened.
The ironic thing is that universities are heavily biased towards Labour/Lib Dem voting, with university towns being much more orange than typical, even though it was the Tories who gave them all massive pay rises and Clegg who notionally opposed it.
Yeah I remember this too - the commonly-held belief was that only the top Universities (Oxbridge, Durham, LSE and UCL, plus Edinburgh/St Andrews for English students) who would max it out, and that the rest might just allow themselves a little bit more to balance the books. Looking back it seems pretty obvious that it wouldn't go down like this - who wouldn't want to give themselves more money?
I didn't recall all the details of the aftermath though (the strike + the capitulation) though, that was a pretty interesting turn. I guess it was after 2011 when I moved abroad.
> the "strike" was ended by the simple expedient of allocating nearly all the new money to wage increases for lecturers
This makes it sound like the money from tuition fee rises went to the academics as pay. It didn't: they've now had real terms pay cuts for over a decade (here's one estimate [1]), as well as their pensions becoming worse.
The tripling of the price cap occurred in 2010; there was a strike in 2013 because university staff had had a real-terms pay cut of 13% in the 4 years from 2008-2013 [2].
It would also be more accurate to say that universities and vice-chancellors (rather than "academics") pushed for a raise in fees.
[1]: https://twitter.com/PWGTennant/status/1579061761013329921
[2]: https://www.ucu.org.uk/article/6846/Strikes-remain-on-at-uni...
You're right, I'm mis-remembering the ordering of events. The strike I'm talking about was in 2006 and pre-dated the tripling of the fee cap. They got a ~15% increase for everyone in the entire sector, including non-academic staff. Then they started to plead poverty and demanding a rise in the price cap, even as the great recession was ravaging the economy.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/jun/06/lecturerspay.high...
I do seem to have recalled correctly that they claimed at the time very few universities would actually raise prices.
Your university source picks the time period for their "pay cut in real terms" starting immediately after they got a big pay rise phased in over two years. I learned at the time that the way unions calculate things like cost of living and "real terms" isn't always what you'd expect, though this was coming up on 20 years ago so I forgot the exact details of what they were doing. At least back then it wasn't just inflation. I do remember being pretty disgusted at their strike tactics and especially at the fact that universities continued to pay them, even as they refused to do their jobs.
It would be fair to say that academics demanded increases to their salaries (to limit how far they fell below inflation), but not that they demanded tuition fees be increased to achieve this.
See this policy briefing from the UCU on "Tuition fees in higher education" from May 2010 [1]: whilst bodies representing the universities supported increases in fees, the position of the UCU union (representing the academics, rather than the universities) was that tuition fees should be abolished and replaced by a Business Education Tax:
> University and College Union has consistently opposed the payment of tuition fees. Rather than charge students for their education, UCU would charge large employers who benefit from the plentiful supply of graduates through a new Business Education Tax (BET).
It's really not the case that lecturers wanted to stuff their pockets by price-gouging their students.
[1]: https://www.ucu.org.uk/article/4626/Tuition-fees-in-higher-e...
.. although that's to a great extent international students, because their fees aren't capped at all. Higher education is one of the UK's successful export industries.
The strike seems to have been, as always, changes to pensions and preventing pay cuts: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2011/oct/07/university...
They might well do, but it was their parents that didn't stop them and say 'perhaps you ought to get a job, do an apprenticeship, or basically anything other than a BA in Madonna Studies and 70k in debt by the time you're 21'.
This is another political legacy of Blair trying to get every kid through university and has resulted in pointless degrees and an increasing percentage of the population in debt. And can't afford to get on the house ladder.
I'd also add that in the UK student loan debt is orthogonal to the problem of young people being unable to get onto the housing ladder. Remember that Scottish students do not incur the same level of student debt (on account of the government paying tuition) and they have similar troubles buying property. Salaries and house prices control this, student loans barely figure into it.
> I'd also add that in the UK student loan debt is orthogonal to the problem of young people being unable to get onto the housing ladder.
Perhaps you'd like to tell that to one of my kids that has to factor all their outgoings (including university debt) into their calculations which tells them exactly whether they can afford to take on mortgage?
I'm really puzzled by your second part, so you have kids who have sufficient deposit saved up, and a high-enough salary to qualify for a suitably-sized mortgage ... but the difference between their current rent and the would-be mortgage repayments is high enough that specifically their student debt repayments are stopping them?
That's an incredibly unique problem. I mean, as someone who is probably within a few years of your kids' age, the overwhelming problems in our age groups are the deposit and the price itself beyond beyond what a bank would lend based on salary. Everyone I know who is struggling to get onto the ladder is facing these two problems. I was lucky with where I bought and more importantly when I bought (on the eve of a 3x price boom) otherwise I might have hit the same issues.
Out of curiosity though, does anybody here have a positive take on Nick Clegg?
I'm interested in your take, not interested in arguing.
I appreciate he'll have made an absolute boatload of money, but going to Facebook seemed a very odd choice. Or maybe he judged that his public profile couldn't be saved, and cashing in in the US was his best option?
So Clegg rolled the dice on getting proportional representation rather than first past the post to solve this and lost. He also had a go at being less of an opposition party (where you oppose) and more of a coalition party like in Europe to get things done (post the financial crisis). This failed.
Everyone hates him for tuition fees, but apparently George Osborne told him to vote against the huge raise. Had this happened I doubt people would remember him with the malice they do.
Finally, he always seemed an ethical person (Lib Dems usually are excepting local election shenanigans), so the charges seem odd and out of character, but so did the move to facebook.
> apparently George Osborne told him to vote against
Ha, the Conservative coaching the Lib Dem how to be a Lib Dem. That's a good friend.
As others have commented, opposition parties have to oppose.
Further, #1 job of party leader is to build the party. Especially for an upstart. That playbook includes symbolic defeats. To show everyone what you stand for.
> So Clegg rolled the dice on getting proportional representation rather than first past the post to solve this and lost.
Clegg compromised on a referendum on the "Alternative Vote" (i.e. what Americans call "Instant Run-off Voting" and Australians call "Majority Preferential Voting"). Alternative Vote isn't proportional or even semi-proportional. I think he considered it a worthwhile compromise:
1) on the grounds that it's a form of Single Transferable Vote (which also has proportional forms), and
2) on the assumption it would increase votes for smaller parties and hinder the major parties from forming governments in the face of opposition by a majority of voters (the received wisdom being that there was a block of like-minded centrist and left-of-centre voters that was inefficiently divided between Labour, the Lib Dems and others, to the advantage of the Conservatives - but Clegg's deal took place after more than a decade of Labour's votes having unusually been the most efficient, and Clegg was considered part of the Lib Dems' "Orange Book" faction which was less friendly to Labour and the left than Lib Dems typically are).
But as said, maybe he judged that his image was already beyond repair, so at least he could get rich instead.
Perhaps it's just rose-tinted lenses, but as every year advances, the current crop of politicians in all parties just seem to be worse, and more childish than the previous lot. And that's a hard act to follow. Yet here we are.
Or you're just getting wiser.
edit: He also sold out his professed ideals for personal financial success, so he makes other people feel better for also doing that.
Clegg is as close you’ll find to a neutral politician. He doesn’t seek to do good, nor does he seek to do evil. He is simply out to increase his own power, and apparently wealth too.
Yes he plunged an entire generation of students into debt, but he didn’t do so maliciously. They were simply in the way.
Cameron and Osbonre skillfully used their junior partners to take the blame for everything unpopular while claiming credit for every good idea. The unintended consequence was to wipe out the lib dems which in turn killed off any centerism in UK politics.
I think it speaks volumes about the average lib dem voter that because the purity test of 100% was not achieved despite coming 3rd in a 3 horse race it was deemed to be a disaster. Without a doubt I expect every single one of them would prefer the government they voted out to the successive governments that have come and gone since.
a bunch of surveillance state simps in a comments section called me naïve and said it's against the law to use a product in a manner other than directed, so this could never possibly happen
nobody ever could have predicted this [specific series of events and actors]
i guess this is what they mean by a black swan event
v strange. such tragic.
statue of liberty weeping again
Can you clarify? From the article it sounds like this is some kind of “blacklist” database (sort of like a “known spammers” list) that is somehow is used in the industry to deny traffic to certain domains. Is it a government database?
Edit: It sounds like these databases are owned/maintained by Meta:
> If anything, plaintiffs allege that these John Does went rogue by manipulating and corrupting automated processes and databases that Meta had established for purposes of combating terrorism, deploying those methods to attack competitors of an adult-entertainment company, and then ‘attempt[ing] to cover their tracks’ to ensure Meta could not learn of their aberrant behavior,” Meta’s motion says.
Meta further argued that, even if true, any decisions to penalize OnlyFans’ competitors would have been protected by the company’s First Amendment rights, and the limited liability protections offered by Section 320 of the Communications Decency Act
(Also misspelled "JFCT" in some of the court transcripts from this case).
[0] https://gifct.org/explainers/ ("Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism")
Has zuckerberg ever been subversive? I thought he started facebook out of horniness and desire for power, and that pretty seamlessly morphed into greed and lust for more power.
What 'fuck the man' things has zuck done?
Yeah, nothing says ‘fuck the man’ like enrolling at Harvard.
In his defense, he was absolutely right. People shouldn't hand over their data to random websites.
he literally originally wanted to build a directory of pictures of attractive women so people could rank them
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/47709/did-mark-...
It is nevertheless surprising that every 4 years everyone gets riled up in favor of one of them.
The message "the only winning move is not to play" gets drowned out by their megaphones I guess.
* In his manifesto he said he'd scrap tuition fees.
* He signed a _personal_ pledge against voting to raise them.[0]
* People voted for him with this information.
* He was able to gain power through a coalition government.
* He voted to _raise_ tuition fees.
You can see how people could feel betrayed by him[1]. I wouldn't say he was hard done by, and I think condemnation of that behaviour is a rational response.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_for_Students_pledge
[1] ...the percentage of students supporting the Liberal Democrats had fallen from 42% at the last general election to 11% just after the vote on fees. 83% of students said they felt let down by the Lib Dem leadership's decision
I think it's fair to condemn him for that.
His party, and that manifesto came 3rd in the election.
The people who voted for him expected him to do the things he promised he would do, rather than the exact opposite.