Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content

I would probably agree with you based on my participation in these groups (have moderated them, don't ask why, it's just a weird/funny hobby to me) that it is much lower. The 5-10% number is the estimation I've received from other moderators in this space (if anyone is also in this space feel free to chime in, I find it fascinating). However, it's hard to estimate, because frequently genuine users get trolled/harassed into oblivion and end up leaving because of it. So the longer a user is around, the less likely (IMO) that they are a genuine believer and probably a troll. There are prolific unicorn "believer" users that drive a lot of conversation but are a very small minority.

As far as the number of people out in the wild who are flat earth believers or flat earth curious, the amount of views/interaction from FE "influencers" (who I don't believe are actually believers) would suggest the actual number is surprisingly high.

And you're absolutely spot on about what drives engagement in these types of groups - often the people that are there to freak out at flat earthers are themselves not the most intellectually curious or rigorous people, and are just there to laugh at the people they know for a fact are "dumber" than them. Pushing back at that psychological dynamic ends up with some pretty funny troll-worthy content, at least IMO.

I'm convinced that almost all flat earthers, even the few "true believers" got their belief through reaction to the mainstream. Its not really a belief about the shape of the earth, its more a belief about how you can't trust the status quo. If everyone just stopped complaining about flat earthers, they'd all be gone within 20 years.

That's quite a claim.

"Stricter private messaging settings for teens To help protect teens from unwanted contact on Instagram, we restrict adults over the age of 19 from messaging teens who don't follow them, and we limit the type and number of direct messages (DMs) people can send to someone who "

With things like this, and now several states requiring that you must be 18 to use any social media, (because parents can't parent apparently?)

I wonder how much of a problem this really is?

I get it that smart teens will find ways to access naughty things no matter how many barriers are put in front of them..

But at some point we must look at parents and ask why 'children' would find it fine to spend lots of time staring at thirst traps.. I know kids that if someone was to put stuff like that in front of them they would push it away and tell multiple adults about it..

Of course I have also known parents that let their kids play grand theft auto at 6 years old.

So while I have tried to tell parents for years about what exists on game consoles and the internet and how they need to not only pay attention, but have open dialogue about sharing what they see and such.. it seems to me that most parents actually do not care what their kids see on the internets..

You could of argue that parents did not know what could be found online 20 years ago, but today's children had their parents grow up with unfettered access (most of them I believe) - and so they know and they don't care (again most I believe).

There are some vocal small groups screaming that there is a need to save the children, but I would assume most of them have kids with cell phones without any blocking systems installed.

That's not to say all. I do know a family that does not let any of their children watch TV, use the internet or cell phone - all their kids, 6yrs - 16 ..no TV even not at all and they would not even think about sneaking to use a cell phone behind their parents back.

Sadly as far as the world having a culture that onboards into sex work I believe has more to do with the rent is too damn high, food costs too much and people want designer / name brand things. If most women (and men) could easily earn a living wage within a few blocks of where they live, there would be much less onboarding period.

Sadly I have given up hoping that rent will be cut in half and wages will double anytime soon, if anything, I'd bet that if the wages double I think we'll see the same with the rent and food.

[0] https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr (this URL seems to work on a desktop browser only; use the menu items in other situations)

I post a lot less than I used to as well. At least in part this is because my feed is drowning in unwanted noise. Facebook's desparate attempts to wave stuff in my face 'for engagement' drive me away from posting more, so it becomes a vicious circle, driving down engagement, making people post less, round and round we go.

Maybe I'm weird, but if my friends aren't posting much, that's OK, that's what I came here to check. Instead I'm assaulted by noise, quite a lot of it either scammy or offensive.

eg Facebook replacing people's email addresses, one wonders if it was partly a way to fight Google+ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433

It was called "New Wave Cinema".

> separate entities such as US, Global, and JP. Like laptop keyboards. That shouldn't be a wrong or unjust option

This is the maddest I have ever seen anyone be about Japan that didn't involve WW2. We don't even do this for China or Russia, who arguably cut themselves off in the other direction.

> None of even CJKV guys except J show this behavior

C is heavily censored. Japan is, officially, more censored than the US. Korean gatcha waifu games became a serious political issue that I think ultimately got a minister fired.

After Musk took over, not only he removed the moderation team, he also introduced many policies that encourages extreme content (well actually, it encourages encouragements, but extreme content draws the most encouragements, which is a well-know phenomenon). For example the blue checkmark for sell and encouragement based revenue sharing.

Current problem that Twitter suffering is the result of those policies from Elon Musk himself. A YouTuber John Harris suspected that Musk is doing this to mock something (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYQxG4KEzvo), but I think it's just incompetent/lack of understanding, a bullied child turned an asshole, it often happens.

Upper middle class its where highest quality of life happens, if one is smart enough to understand how happiness and life fulfillment works, to not die full of hard regrets. You can have meaningful true friendships. Enough to afford whatever is you need or desire to do, not enough to become self-entitled spoiled lazy disconnected from reality piece of shit parent and partner type of folks. No you don't need private jet or mega yacht or 5 mil hypercar for that, that's poor man's idea of what sort of quality wealth brings you in life.

EDIT: I’ve misunderstood your comment, I don’t have any alternative accounts on hacker news!

And there lies the loophole. These loans are often structured as some kind of business expense that can be paid from pre-tax income.

So, ultra rich people get to double dip here. No taxes on selling stocks for money, as there's a loan, plus no taxes on the income for paying it off.

I'm not an expert on this, and I could be misunderstanding some subtlety here.

[1] https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-estate-tax-fili...

Also, just to add to the above discussion, it's even worse in practice than a tax on unrealized gains because I'll have to pay the same amount of tax every year if my house stays the same value. If it were a tax on the unrealized "gains" of my house, I'd pay $0 if it stayed the same value. And if the value of my house decreases, I'll still have to pay more than $0 in property tax, whereas a capital loss would mean I would pay at most $0.

So, I think I still stand by my sentiment that property taxes are more burdensome than a tax on unrealized capital gains.

So... is owning piece of a productive company "fake wealth"? Is it fake when you can leverage that valuation to have access to more credit and use that to buy real stuff (like property...)?

> the notion of "tax" being just supposed public good versus requiring transactional value ("no taxation without representation") was a founding issue for the U.S.

This was a representational issue, not non-transactional taxation. Property taxes existed in many colonies 100 years before the revolution.

Correction: without SEEMING exceptionally wealthy or even ramen profitable. By, say, kneecapping your own profit. So that you don't pay as much taxes. Which is the entire problem we're trying to solve.

In practice, these people ARE wealthy. Just perhaps not on paper (depending the paper you look at). Of course when you observe their life, they are obviously filthy rich.

So we have an accounting problem. The papers don't accurately reflect the reality.

Taxing entrepreneurs will lead to worse outcomes for entrepreneurs. That is obvious. Every tax has a cost. But we need to fund the government and it is not fair for workers to pay for everything while much wealthier investors and entrepreneurs do not.

The right are currently targeting facebook and tech firms because they want to be able to influence the ‘algorithm’ to support their policies.

They are current churning out concepts such as the ‘censorship industrial complex’, and finding ways to publicize blame on “liberal Californian tech firms”.

The right wing think tanks are posturing about this from the perspective of free speech - while avoiding getting down into the weeds of trust and safety decision making.

I am on board with better freedom of speech protections - but not someone pontificating on principles, but ignoring the massive amounts of failure when you run moderation on “principles”.

This is where they lose credibility for me, and the power grab becomes apparent.

This letter is almost certainly to appease the Republican Party so that Meta is not dragged into hearings near the election.

They will be incentivized to do this otherwise they will get nothing for their shares.

That's a bold claim. The tax-averse amongst us say that, but in my experience investment flows to the best ideas / best distribution / best businesses. If those people are in the US because they're citizens, the capital will flow to the US, and investors will take the hit.

It’s a closed system at the end of the day so the wealth isn’t vanishing into thin air.

In the context of home ownership, a loan using an asset as collateral translates to a home-equity loan or reverse mortgage. If you want to protect ordinary home-buyers, set an asset value floor of say $20M.

However, I think most share "pledging" [1] by the uber-wealthy is done using company stock as collateral, so you could restrict the tax further by having it apply only to loans taken against stock holdings over some similarly high value floor.

1. https://aaahq.org/portals/0/documents/meetings/2024/ATA/Pape...

So just have it kick in above $5M/year or something like that, and have it only apply to securities as assets. Not a lot of ordinary people are taking $5M+/year in loans against their stocks.

This is effectively similar to nationalization, along with the pros and cons that come with it.

If your bank determines that assets you post for collateral are worth 100mn or more, that's a pretty good indication.

    > When calculating wealth tax, you must include any assets that you own at the end of the year. These assets must generally be valued at what the asset is worth on the open market. However, an exception is made in the case of housing, and a lower value, known as the tax value, must be used when calculating wealth tax.  

Two things stand-out to me:

(1) "assets must generally be valued at what the asset is worth on the open market". I guess there will be GAAP accounting rules about how to value less liquid assets. Tradable securities are easy to value; other things, like artwork are less easy to value. In the case of a car, an accountant could reasonably use an online used car marketplace to find a value. (The US has something called the Kelley Blue Book.)

(2) "an exception is made in the case of housing". It sounds like there is a totally different set of rules for taxing housing (land+building).

... What people are suggesting is to take money from some productive enterprises and put it towards other productive enterprises such as education, medicine, public infrastructure, etc. Enterprises which have more benefits beyond simply increasing the bank account of entrepreneurs and fund managers.

This is a rather large assumption. One's assets might be invested inefficiently, as those who financed Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter have learned to their cost.

Do we make them give 20% of their unrealized paint to members of the public so they can make their own paintings, hoping they too will fetch $1m each?

If the IRS took control of 20% of the paint, borrowed against it to fund the state, but then the artist decided to quit does the government somehow force them to paint?

If the artist said this ahead of time and this was priced into the future value of their paintings (now worth $0 because there will be 0 paintings) does the IRS revalue their unrealized gains down to $0bn?

Wealth and income inequality has well-studied negative effects on society.

The ability for a single person to own over $100m in assets is not a human right. It's not a protected class or status. It's an abhorrent misappropriation of human resources. It is a societal mistake.

And let's not forget, people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg have multiple THOUSANDS of $100 million dollars in net worth. This completely insane $100 million figure is so small to those men that you would have to earn $100 million every single year for over 30 lifetimes to get to their level of wealth.

It's not about demanding some of the money from the wealthy. That's a shallow way to think about it. It's about the inherent power imbalance and exploitation that comes along with being excessively wealthy like this.

Think for a second what would happen to you if Jeff Bezos banned you from using all Amazon products. Would the Internet even work anymore for you? You know, every company has the right to refuse service to anyone. This one man can basically cut you off from television, e-commerce, Internet, employment (if you do engineering work on AWS), even Thursday Night Football.

And again, this is for publicly traded stock portfolios. Private farms won’t be broken up… yet :-)

No, it's because using stock (and other securities) this way allows them to "convert" the stock into money without actually realizing the gains. Thus they derive benefit from the gains without actually paying capital gains tax.

Obviously I am over-simplifying a little, but this is a real thing. Here's a more comprehensive explanation: https://smartasset.com/investing/buy-borrow-die-how-the-rich...

One of the reasons I'd like this policy even more if the shares were sold to the government and the government is forbidden from voting outside of exceptional (e.g valuation crash over x years) circumstances.

But the reality is that companies play games with voting rights on shares all the time, so your scenario is easily worked around by founders themselves.

Only for the little man

You’re still going to end up making a higher valuation on the stock market than you would trying other means to avoid this tax.

- Taxes - debt financing - seignorage

The latter two aren't taxes, but people end up paying for the expenses anyway.

Governments can also plunder other country's money. While this sounds very Roman empire, it's still a thing. Case in point freezing another country's foreign exchange reserves, refusing to return their gold, confiscating the interest on the reserves, etc

We should be demanding ruthless efficiency from the government, not dreaming up new ways for them to take our stuff.

> hypothetical tax on people

It is literally part of Biden's tax proposal and is endorsed by Kamala's campaign. None of us are making this up.

This was a concern in 2009, but now, 15 years later, people using platforms have only themselves to blame. Stop being part of the problem !

> self moderated by kicks/bans

Also smaller communities tend to be easier to keep from becoming a cesspool

Now the moment a vulnerability is known, be it social or system, it is exploited by many actors.

The moment a new business idea appears to work, it is an overnight saturated market

The internet is now driven by hustlers and monetization all the way down

RIP AOL COMOUSERVE PRODIGY GOLDEN ERA

Now that the entire population uses it, the average IQ involved has plummeted, and the political and social payoff for manipulating it with inauthentic content is huge.

boys did. the girls left those spaces (and the internet more generally, until social media became mainstream) because all the public spaces were disgusting, and all the boys sat around posting vulgarity, laughing, and wondering why there were no girls in our online spaces.

Those spaces were/are absolutely appalling sausage fests and while I don't think they should be shut down, saying "we all mostly got by" is some kind of selection or survivorship bias. YOU didn't mind. YOU got by. Polite company DID mind, and there wasn't a space online for them. You just didn't notice.

Kicking people off was and still is censorship and moderation. Services really try hard to not kick people off now and just police the content instead.

Gentrification of the Internet by smartphone-wielding normies who were neither prepared nor equipped to deal with the established cyberspace social norms that differed from their meatspace counterparts, as massive corporations rushed to get as many people Online as possible, as fast as possible, so as to target them with advertisements and accumulate and sell their data. Once said gentrifying normies outnumbered the "Internet natives", the "New Internet Culture" subsumed nearly all of the "Old Internet Culture", leaving us where we are today.

This statement is hysterically ahistorical. Each thing you listed had active moderation. Sysops didn't just allow anything on a board, if you posted stuff off topic or offensive (to the Sysop) it was removed with prejudice. IRC networks all had long lists of k-lines of people kicked off the network. Individual channels had their own mods with ban lists. Forums either moderated or were deluged with spam. AOL and ICQ were both highly moderated.

Just like today small networks might be uncensored free-for-alls. Even then they are/were rarely actually uncensored, it's just you might have not been censored because you aligned with the views of the owners/operators.

The only really uncensored free-for-all was Usenet and that state only existed for its first decade or so when it was limited to professionals and academics. The Eternal September turned Usenet into an unusable mess. It's corpse limps along today as a vehicle for piracy and not much else.

I think back when the internet was new, people just weren't used to anonymity and still behaved like they were in a room with other people. Also the types of people who engaged in those early internet forums may have just been less likely to be showy edgelord trolls - these types took longer to get into the internet.

That’s nostalgia - the BBS world, Usenet, IRC, etc. absolutely had norms and people who violated them were routinely blocked. Where I grew up there were some BBSes run by e.g. evangelical Christians who aggressively restricted the FidoNet channels they carried and the files allowed to be uploaded, and later some of the business-focused ISPs sharply limited things like Usenet (which had its own moderation system). When I ran a FidoNet node, I had to agree to community standards with the boards I peered with because the operators didn’t want to deal with certain types of hassle.

What was different is federation: back in the early online era, someone who was booted off of one system would go somewhere else. The problem with services like Twitter is that they’re centralized and so when people break their terms of service don’t want to go somewhere else, so they complain about censorship when they really mean “free hosting and promotion”.

Plus - nothing was at the scale of Facebook or social media during those halcyon days.

Do you think platforms WANTED to invest in manpower dependent labor?

Platforms started moderating because things got bad.

Also, community norms massively included censorship. BBSes booted people who annoyed the sysops, Usenet had moderation even if it wasn’t very secure and some servers aggressively filtered the feeds they carried for reasons in addition to space consumption.

If you're saying "we must censor abhorrent viewpoints for the good of society", I'll just counter that your viewpoints are horrible and must be suppressed, while mine are good and must be amplified. For the good of society.

What the consumer wants from those services is "free speech", but with restrictions. They want "uncensored" content with the objectionable bits removed. For some people "objectionable" means spam and pornography, for others it includes certain types of political discourse or content from certain classes of person. If people really wanted uncensored content, the dark web would be far more popular.

The only way these companies can give people both uncensored "free speech" and content moderation is to build these bubbles where freedom of speech is only freedom of one type of speech.

They're stuck in a catch-22, and I can't help but feel like they actually ARE providing the service that we demand from them to the best of their abilities.

The public at large however is not informed enough to have a legitimate opinion.

Flat earthers are not “legitimately questioning the science”

This is called JAQing off. “Just Asking Questions”. They’re not. They’re muddying waters, often knowingly.

Well yes, because one is trying to get to a positive outcome while the other is trying to confuse and mislead you for ideological reasons.

https://rumble.com/v21dicq-dr.-peter-mccullough-and-dr.-asee...

https://rumble.com/v2nxfvq-international-covid-summit-iii-pa...

There were plenty of things besides a myopic fixation on one single problem to the exclusion of literally everything else.

It takes an extreme amount of privilege to look back and say we should have done any of that.

… it was unethical, immoral, authoritarian and plain evil. I don’t care if any of it “worked” because even if it did the costs vastly outweigh any of the “working” bit. The fact it requires a lot of contortion to show any effect at all should give a reasonable person a concerned pause. Any idiot off the street should be able to clearly see the effects of masks and lockdowns without reading a bunch of statistics first. This is clearly not the case at all….

And again, doesn’t matter if “it worked” because “it worked” only holds true in the most myopic, sheltered, privileged world view possible. For any view that sees the world through a lens besides Covid, what we did was clearly insane.

Two justices are blatantly corrupt and should be removed from the court. Two more are there through GOP malfeasance, but there's nothing we can do about them at this point.

No other democracy has lifetime appointments for high court justices.

As far as packing the court, I am personally interested in any kind of reform that depoliticizes it somewhat, whether it be that the SCOTUS acts like the Appeals courts and is a rotation, or the appointed Justices choose a second tier of judges unanimously.

But process only does so much to prevent partisan political interference. At the end of the day, our amendment system and our Congress are broken. It will take something like a mild revolution or major systemic breakdowns to fix it.

As a side-note: I think limiting the term of justices would overall strengthen the supreme court's integrity and I think the right would agree. Or, at least, the right would regularly agree but they won't now - because they stuffed the court with cronies. Once the situation is in your advantage, surprise! The narrative changes.

Similarly I don't blame FB for failing to block links to the Steele dossier, even though I think it was bogus.

But it wasn’t.

And everyone who looked the videos of Hunter smoking crack, and his text messages discussing Joe Biden involved in business dealings, and his relationship with his 24yo niece knew it wasn’t “Russian Disinformation”.

It was obviously real, and hidden from everyone in order to influence the election.

It was censorship at request of the government and election interference.

We don’t need the WHAT-IF it wasn’t.

this is not me saying there's zero benefit to moderated dialogues, but what's better for overall intellectual pursuits? a dialogue that's inviting, or one that always coldly and dismissively rejects all opposing beliefs or understandings?

i have recently learned, that dialogues seem to benefit from communication and spaces that are supportive and empathetic in their approach to first understanding differences in reality and experiences, before entering discussions on truth and objective realities, and therefore confronting and challenging, and at times overcoming what are limiting beliefs -- from the irrational to the rational.

there's empiricism around this as well (SET: a framework for communicating with people who have vastly different experiences than you, including those labeled "delusional") -- it frames Support and Empathy as the necessary foundations in any dialogue, before one can discuss the difference in each party's Truth.

i'm not so sure the whole categorically "you have less right to sit at this table because i've judged your experience as non-real, and therefore less relevant) is compassionate communication, nor productive when systematically, algorithmically applied.

Even political content?

When I visit Reddit's Popular page it's pretty obvious which party and candidates they are pushing.

?

> “For months, high-ranking Government officials placed unrelenting pressure on Facebook to suppress Americans’ free speech," Alito wrote. "Because the Court unjustifiably refuses to address this serious threat to the First Amendment, I respectfully dissent."

It seems like the court had agreement that government coercion did happen. They threw the case out because they couldn’t draw a direct correlation to harm to the specific people that brought the allegations up.