Open letter to Mark Zuckerberg – Congratulations on your remarks | Hacker News Reader

Open letter to Mark Zuckerberg – Congratulations on your remarks

berliner-zeitung.de

Anyone who believes Zuckerburg values "free speech" or somehow opposes bureaucrats and politicians is naive or just pushing a political agenda. Meta has policy chief positions for India and Israel, both of whom have used their positions to try to suppress criticism of their governments [1]. The India policy chief quit in late 2022 and now has a similar position at Samsung. The Israeli ex-senior Israeli government official is still in place.

[1] https://theintercept.com/2024/10/21/instagram-israel-palesti...

Honestly I think this is so much bait it's depressing: the guy writing the op-ed clearly means it to be bait, B-Z see it and correctly call it as good bait and gives it a ragebait title so everyone knows the score, and now it lands here on HN to really chum up the water.

After listening to his interview on JRE, it sounds like the Biden administration came down on him hard during Covid and then when he didn’t _fully_ fall in line they threw the machine at him with a large number of government investigations. This is a much bigger machine than exists in Brazil and India. I think Zuck realized they were not on his team anymore and walked over to the other side.

The same thing seems to happen to musk.

A simpler theory might go like this: Musk and Zuck both want to be richer, and both want a government that regulates, investigates, and fines them less.

The Republicans are the team you want to play on. There doesn't need to be any retribution or payback or realizations or switching sides.

It's a money play, simple.

If the Democrats could come up with a plausible pro-business strategy (and they could), it might not be such as easy choice.

> A simpler theory might go like this: Musk and Zuck both want to be richer, and both want a government that regulates, investigates, and fines them less.

I agree with your conclusion, but not your premise. If they solely wanted to be richer, the obvious move would be to divest their holdings and start their own broadly diversified wealth funds - similar to Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway, Norway's Sovereign Wealth Fund or Saudi PIF. Then retire to their yachts and private islands. Rather, it seems to me that they both have specific goals they want to accomplish and are making the (ethics aside) rational moves to limit government interference.

I think you may be onto something.

Certainly Musk doesn't just want to be rich. He also craves power and adoration. Zuckerberg is less public than Musk but could easily have retired if he didn't actually enjoy having the power of being a mega-tech CEO. So power is at least as important to them as money.

We know social media was supposed to be a glorious freedom for everyone to publish their story. It was presumed that around every corner lay a French Salon, or an Algonquin round table, or Einstein and Dirac just walking home on a summers day. And we could all listen in.

How wonderful it would be.

And yeah, sometimes it worked. New voices have been found and shared. But new voices require those listening to learn, to chnage. That’s hard and takes effort - social media’s fundamental promise was not publishing, it was an infinity of effort on behalf of the demos.

That’s quite an ask. Entertainment is easier - but traditional media does that well, and social media is only slowly catching on that a teenager in their bedroom can be entertaining but Sitcoms are more consistently entertaining

So social media kind of gives us a curation over millions of teenagers and selects the 100 best shorts- but that can only work without ever learning anything new - social media will find and supply cheap low rent entertainment shorts to people who have not learnt or changed.

But it is here. It owns all the ad revenue and is the portal on the rest of the world

Newspapers used to be that portal, then TV and now the algorithm. But how often did newspapers challenge their readers as opposed to pandering ? The only way to defeat it is to provide a better portal. Is it am LLM ? Is it just talking to our neighbours?

In the end we need to make effort, to learn, to discover to become informed and to build a mental model of the world that is accurate and refined.

And that’s hard work.

So perhaps regulation should be focused on teaching us, not regulating entertainment

Edit: I think there are two camps on a spectrum here - both are in favour of freedom of speech, but one end believes that any speech, lies, untruth or nonsense is fine and that caveat emptor applies, and the other end believes that there is a pool of common speech and lies and untruths sully the water. Which is right is the current argument, not which lies should be banned

As an aside, I find Zuck's newish Ceasarian look quite amusing.

Is he serious? Or being deliberately ironic? Or making some kind of statement on Trump?

Amusing either way, though like many here, I secretly prefer to laugh at him than with him.

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