Meta does a U-turn, will share its technology with Five Eyes members
news.slashdot.org
news.slashdot.org
This to an audience that is about 1/3 foreign employees, who are all sitting there going "even when it's my country the US is invading?"
The first immediately replies to any request and offers additional information the requestor may not have even known to ask for, the second fights everything in court and drags feet as much as possible.
On paper they may seem very similar, on the ground they're entirely different.
For a more recent example, Prince Andrew and Prince Harry have real military experience. They were not fighting in trenches with bayonets, but they were not in a 100% safe possition.
“Strange women lying in ponds, distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.”
- Pink Floyd, Us and Them
Funny how the only thing that's changed is that now there's a lucrative industry reaching into every sector whereas there once were only a handful of profiteers.
He gave some controversial statements, that's true, but "diehard worshiper" is simply false.
> "The invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation was illegal. I condemn it in the strongest possible terms," he said via video link.
> "Also, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was not unprovoked, so I also condemn the provocateurs in the strongest possible terms."
> He continued: "So what do the voiceless millions have to say? They say thank you for hearing us today. We are many who do not share in the profits of the war industry.
> "We do not willingly raise our sons and daughters to provide fodder for your cannons.
> "In our opinion, the only sensible course of action today is to call for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine. Not one more Ukrainian or Russian life is to be spent, not one, they are all precious in our eyes."
source: https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-64580688
But he's definitely quite naive, and is inadvertently serving Putin's interests.
But I'd argue that anyone from pretty much anywhere in the Middle East, Asia, or Latin America has reasonable historical grounds to question if US intervention is in their future (whether clandestine or a full-blown invasion).
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/netanyahu-calls...
Then they should be much more concerned about their country invading Taiwan than the US invading them.
> I can assure you a lot of them are less than thrilled by the rhetoric around China as the #1 enemy of the US. I worked there when Trump's first round of trade tariffs were being implemented, and we were busy relocating the our hardware manufacturing outside of China - it was a tense environment.
Well tough shit. I'm less than thrilled about the actions China takes against the US, yet I still work with Chinese coworkers.
> But I'd argue that anyone from pretty much anywhere in the Middle East, Asia, or Latin America has reasonable historical grounds to question if US intervention is in their future (whether clandestine or a full-blown invasion).
If we're moving the goalposts to include clandestine intervention, then no major power has clean hands.
The rest have made a choice to work in the west mostly because it is considerably better than China.
Meta is an American company. This shouldn't be a surprise, and in fact is the default expectation. The same logic applies to companies in other countries and any belief to the contrary is badly mistaken.
Like when Apple pretended to not work with the agencies when Apple hardware needed to be unlocked ...
Or that was the story they all agreed to tell.
Is it the same Palantir that provided tech for Israel's massacres in Gaza?
The original title leaves open the idea that this decision doesn't have a precedent which it is overturning, which is unnecessary and misleading. And the original title strongly implies that the recent revelation from Meta only relates to the U.S., which similarly is not true and is misleading.
For a U.S. audience that might seem to make sense, but HN has international readers.
I miss that tagline though. "News for nerds. Stuff that matters" <3
I stopped using it back in the day because it was so American-centric. Hacker news is a better tracker for me.
More discussion on the source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42048009
I think maybe the Bloomberg article [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-11-04/meta-open...] might be the actual original. But that is less significant a difference.
You see this in Meta's entirely hypocritical (and dangerous) suppression of speech [1]. All of these companies are increasingly moving in lockstep with the US State Department. Core to that is the insitutional belief that China is The Enemy [tm]. Banning Tiktok reflects this new reality and has the added benefit of banning a competitor who is eating Meta alive, for example.
People who were attracted to tech were often idealistic. I wonder what this will do to staff retention and hiring as people increasingly realize their Big Tech employer is increasingly indistinguishable from a defense contractor like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon or Northron Grumman.
AI and technology are weapons [2]. We've come a long from building tools to find and build community to beging a weapon in the American arsenal.
[1]: https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-assisted_targeting_in_the_G...
The true American Exceptionalism.
Democracies often worry about who they should supply weapons too, but rarely doubt themselves and close allies should have them.
But you do what you want to do. America is going to go guns guns guns.
> Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
> This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chance_for_Peace_speech#The_sp...
The PRC is the biggest threat to the United States and does not speak in favorable terms about the US. Do you have any reason to think they aren't the biggest enemy?
Is China really an "enemy" and if so, to what degree compared to other nations?
> People who were attracted to tech were often idealistic.
It's worth noting that the founders you felt most worthy of calling out are specifically ones whose "idealism" was always about commercial domination, deal-making, and personal financial largess. These weren't aesthetes like Jobs or impassioned programmers like Gates, who found themselves caught up in a ethically challenging world of finance and business. The ones you're calling out were all opportunists prowling for whatever opportunity might ratchet them to greater personal success. And they're doing exactly that again now.
There are no surprises here. Or at least there shouldn't be.
Just want to point out that Steve Jobs merely happened to be really good at aesthetics (which is more downstream from how he was really good at manipulating people). Reading up on his life's story is pretty revealing in the sense that if he hadn't run into someone like Wozniak, he probably would've ended up like Zuckerberg or Thiel and had more in common with them than people would realize. (Not necessarily much in common with Musk though, who is his own particular brand of awful.)
He had very little morals outside of "whatever gets me ahead in the world", and it's just that Wozniak's actual skill with computers meant that translated to Apple instead of skeezier things. Apple was itself founded on money that Jobs stole from Wozniak after all (money that Wozniak later pointed out he would just have given to Jobs anyway if he told him what the plan was.)
The fact he made Apple isn't anything to scoff at, but one wrong turn in life and he probably would've ended up in the same position as most other awful tech billionaires (and unlike most of them, he wouldn't have been a charisma void.)
"China is The Enemy" is also old as dirt. The US need something to scare it citizens with. Russia, China, Muslims, communists, homosexuals...
This is part of the core beliefs of every US adminitration. It will not change unless something wild happens. 3rd party in power? US being overtaken by most of the world? Invasion from Mars that forces it through....
[0] https://www.internetsociety.org/internet/history-internet/br...
Suppression of speech was the number one topic for Democrats from 2020. They ordered COVID censorship (admitted by Zuckerberg), suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story (admitted by Zuckerberg and Twitter/X), suggested a "disinformation tsar" (Jankowicz). They encouraged flagging and de-platforming of opposing opinions and people.
Democrats did not oppose the use of Lavender (pre-crime software) and "Where is Daddy" (cynical name for assassination technology) in Gaza, despite their constant claims to care for people of color.
I'm not saying that any of this will get better under Trump, but let's be realistic here. Though I do believe that Republicans will allow more free speech in total.
Apologies for not being clear. I'll clarify.
My view is that US foreign policy is uniparty. No matter who is in the White House or controls Congress, there is always money for weapons.
So in that sense, suppressing speech that doesn't align with US foreign policy isn't pandering to one party or the other. It's moving in lockstep with the US State Department.
Meta is increasingly comfortable becoming a government tool for mass surveillance and, essentially, a weapons manufacturer. So while that part is uniparty, you have to then consider what those weapons will be used for.
Trump openly campaigned on mass deportations and has said since the election has confirmed that the mass deporation program will begin the first day of his administration [1]. It would be naive to think that social media platforms won't be used to identify targets for mass deportation. No one, particularly Zuckerberg, can argue this is a surprise.
So Zuckerberg has either endorsed the mass deportation plan or at least not considered it a deal breaker. I wonder how the staff that actually created his fortune feel about this. Not good overall I suspect.
Compare this to the Harris agenda. Were there any similar uses for social media likely? Not that I can recall. So one side wants to build concentration camps and the other doesn't.
So yes, Zuckerberg has quite clearly cozied up to the Trump administration.
[1]: https://www.indiatoday.in/world/story/donald-trumps-day-one-...
BTW, he didn't congratulate Biden on Twitter four years ago, so it's not just something he always does. You can argue papers shouldn't do endorsements, but changing this policy a week before the election against a guy famous for going after his enemies... you can't deny the motivations here.