Controversial creators are benefiting from monetization programs run by Meta
abc.net.au
abc.net.au
It sounds to me like the creators are creating and uploading the content, and then that is getting monetised on the platform?
The title makes it sound like meta is commissioning the content? I don't think that is the case here? Or is it?
Directly commissioning someone to create it is pretty wild.
Ironically, the article is itself ragebait! But that’s the media as a whole (including Meta).
The difference between “We ask white nationalists to join our invite only pay-for-views program” and “we commission white nationalists to make content” kinda seems like splitting hairs.
I give it a couple years before the PSA about ‘your brain on social media’ or whatever.
And you certainly shouldn’t bother monitoring what it’s doing.
In reality META has simply not banned or restricted these accounts from monetization. That's it! But that doesn't make for an exciting headline.
But also, maybe more importantly, as soon as money changing hands is involved, that's a business transaction and if you aren't watching like a hawk who your business transacts with, then yes that is often assumed intentional (and classically a sign of a bad business) because it shows up in your accounts and impacts your bottom line.
It’s a very flimsy defense. “It’s not my fault that the cartels pay the most for heavy weaponry.”
Facebook isn't paying to produce. It's paying for driving views and clicks on ads, regardless of how.
It's like if I hire a taxi driver to come to my house and drive me to the airport, and the taxi driver happens to run over a person in the process. It would be ridiculous to write 'he hired a driver to run over a person with a car'.
However, this also doesn't fully capture the reality of what is happening.
Let's say I routinely get a taxi, and taxi drivers routinely hit people because I happen to have a policy where I only pay them a large sum if they get to the airport impossibly fast, and the fastest way is to drive dangerously. Suppose I notice that every time I get a taxi, someone is run over because of my payment incentives. Suppose I then write a statement that says I will not pay the taxi if they hit a person. Suppose it keeps happening anyway, and I keep paying anyway. And suppose I benefit directly from this financially, because getting to the airport faster saves me money in missed flights.
Suppose I then do this on a worldwide scale involving many millions of people and create a market around this of tens of billions of dollars, suppose it's having a significant effect on public health and safety worldwide?
I think it's fair to then use more explicit language to hold me to account. I am financing death and destruction after all, even if technically I'm 'just getting a cab'.
No one cares if you clean up after your dog makes a nr 2. The anti dog poop people want to hear you don't give a fk and let Herman poop wherever he likes.
Similarly the dog owners don't want to hear you understand. They want you to talk about little poopers getting stuck in your barbed wire with razorblades.
I think government should work more on helping people find alternatives to social media. The “town square effect” that makes people feel forced to use these apps is real and pernicious. That feels like a better target for regulation and taxation than content. If your business moat is based on network effects, perhaps there should be the equivalent of a land value tax on your network.
If you effectively control what is monetised, you effectively control what is said en masse. It's a distinction without a difference.
Sadly we are finding out that our way of life is under threat 24/7 by nefarious barbarians.
I wonder how it would look like as a new antitrust vertical slice to enforce against.
Plus you can always self host content and set up your own monetizing partners.
Reddit and Blue Sky are almost entirely left-wing rage-bait and conspiracy theory content these days, and they amplify such content right to the top of the default feed, yet you rarely see the right calling for these platforms to censor their users.
If the right can learn to tolerate different opinions that they find offensive, then it’s reasonable to expect the left to do so as well, without resorting to these contrived cancel culture talking points.
The vast majority of political violence and riots in the US these days is orchestrated by left-wing movements and individuals. The assassinations of Brian Thompson, Charlie Kirk the attempts on Trump, all the riots surrounding BLM and George Floyd etc
Obviously directly inciting violence is not acceptable, but cherry picking obscure instances of it, while simultaneously overlooking the far larger problems that exist on the left, is bad faith. The threads celebrating the murders of Brian Thompson and Charlie Kirk are some of the most shared Reddit posts of all time, with zero self-reflection from the left about this double standard.
Ah look, it's the hallmark of well-reasoned thinking. I have seen this exact phrasing numerous times over the past week, did the bots learn a new talking point? "The right" sure is doing a lot of tolerating around abortion, trans identities and women's bathrooms and sports.
If I owned a social media network, I wouldn’t let Nazis, MLM peddlers, transphobes, pro-gun advocates, or anti-vaxxers, among others, on my network. That’s where my moral compass lies.
Now, you might say that’s unfair, that’s not an open forum. I’m not being open-minded to other ideas or freedom-oriented.
You don’t have to agree with me. Go use someone else’s product.
The thing is, Zuckerberg has uniquely overarching control over Meta in ways that most public companies don’t. He has controlling special founder’s votes, he is the guy in charge, equivalent to a dictatorship.
That means that anything Meta allows on their platform is a reflection of Zuckerberg himself. Whether or not that’s how the eyes of the law views it is very different than how it is from a moralistic “who is responsible?” angle.
Zuckerberg can stop all hate and anger on his platform in one business meeting. Plenty of other platforms (public and private companies) including HN don’t allow the kind of conduct that Facebook and Instagram allow wholeheartedly.
He chooses not to hold high standards for his platform because anger, fear, snake oil sales, and purposeful disinformation campaigns, among other shady business ventures, are profitable.
And here we are, debating whether he and his company are responsible. After all, they just provide a neutral platform, right? If I get hit by an Amazon truck, it’s not their fault, that was a subcontractor! Companies enthusiastically create these mechanisms to detach themselves from the harm they bring.
He is saying that the US has free speech norms (not laws) where it is acceptable for people to get together and rant about X, Y, or Z. There are limits (e.g. calls for violence), but they are few. Anyone who does not like the speech can leave the room, try to argue with the speaker, or make their own speech in another room. It is not the social norm to shut down the speaker, make the speaker unemployable, trash or bankrupt the venue, etc. Those actions are contrary to the norm.
In my personal experience having lived in the US and several other countries, I found officially people can say much more things (i.e. due to the strong freedom of expression laws), but in personal settings you are much more likely to be shut down, fired, threatened with violence, ostracized... for stating unpopular (in that social environment) opinions, in the US compared to the other countries.
Private organizations dictate their own social constructs. It’s not acceptable to proposition sex at a book club, but it’s acceptable to do that at a swingers club.
This idea that private companies follow the social norms in the US is only partially true at best.
It’s socially normal for me to talk about how my company sucks and I hate my boss with 100% of my friends and family, but doing so at my place of employment isn’t okay. That’s one major example where my company doesn’t follow social norms.
If what you say is true then YouTube should allow hardcore pornography since over 90% of men watch pornography. It’s socially and legally acceptable, with numerous legal brick and mortar businesses specializing in that market. But they don’t allow that because they are a business that doesn’t want to engage in that business activity.
I think it’s easy to mistake the current state of private social media as “open” in the way you describe just because it looks open. To your point, not a lot of speech is banned outright, which seems parallel to US social norms, but whether or not something is banned or removed from social media is almost meaningless because promotion and multiplicative reach is the domain of the algorithm.
The algorithm doesn’t promote and multiply the reach of content based on whether that content is most aligned with social norms. It’s promoted based on whether it makes money or causes users to stay watching the platform.
In real life, you don’t hang out with your friends and family most who make you the most mad or generate the most shocking content. But that’s how social media works because social media isn’t real life.
This idea that today’s social media platforms are a neutral vessel for speech is flawed right from the start because of that algorithm.
[1] publicly traded, private as in “private property”
Facebook wants to get that speech in as many rooms as they can, because they figured out a way to profit off of the emotional reaction of the people who were already there. They offer free hosting for community groups of all sorts in order to bring people to the rooms they can profit from.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2023/07/13/twi...
You don't get to be Meta's size and have Meta's experience with systems engineering and research on their own platform's incentives and outcomes, and not know exactly how this will go.
—
“I didn’t directly tell them to make white nationalist content, I just paid them for being an engaging content creator.”
—
Hope that we get to a point as a society that we acknowledge that companies can and should be held liable for inevitable second-order effects of the decisions they make and strategies they adopt.
It certainly applies to personal liability, e.g. manslaughter.
they have a system where they accept all content, but pay double(or whatever extra the algorithm prioritization creates) for controversial content
I see that basically every day now with people watching TikTok or Instagram while walking, on the bus, or even driving, barely able to tear their attention away. It’s like a casino except that it’s available 24 hours a day with no limits.
and i get it! the zombified rapid button pressing over and over. when i went to japan we were stoked to go check out a pachinko hall and we walked in and it was overstimulation city lol. walking in through the front door directly out through the back door haha.
It's not just seniors.
I used to date a woman who worked as a cocktail waitress on the floor of a major casino on the strip. She referred to the people at the slots as "trained monkeys".
I think it's a frog boiling situation. Early users got gradually accustomed to the gradually increasing garbage, but anyone who enters the ecosystem now is immediately turned off.
That said, I see your point. I wouldn't use Instagram if I couldn't do these things. If Google cracks down on user choice to a degree that even adb can't work around, then I'm out. Motorola's Graphene OS phone can't come soon enough.
Meta should really have gone the way of MySpace a long, long time ago.
Though I hear it might make a comeback.-
PS. To your point, I am guessing: For one thing it takes the ability to thus conclude, to begin with. THAT, in turn takes intellect and time AND evidence such as has been accruing. AND third, probably, because addictions are by definition hard to quit. ALSO: I think few times in the history of addictive behaviours has the enabling agent had such a low low low entry threshold, such presumptive innocuousness, and such assumed and granted "utility". It began by hijacking human communication, "socialization". It is devious.-
It doesn't matter what your high level brain knows, there is a structure and organization of your brain that only changes on geologic timescales, and that structure has serious, easily attackable flaws.
PS. F'book commoditized social interaction to their ends while abusing these attackable surfaces. Kalshi and that ilk have now done away with the whole pretense of communication itself and are abusing the same addiction mechanisms to commoditize OPINION to their ends. Opinions: Everybody has one.-
PS. At some point somebody is going to commoditize mere bodily movement wrapped into such an addictive mechanism and we will get people with "weird" performative "palsies" walking about.-
In any case, the reason I haven’t bothered is that the Facebook feed is entirely harmless. I wish I could show you guys.
Is this entire phenomenon one of those things that people believe is happening to others and not them? Having scrolled that feed, I am confident that an unfiltered HN read would have more outrage porn than that.
Similar confusion on HN comments about SaaS UX arise when there is AB testing and some are victims and some are not.
the fundamental issue is that the user has no actual control over what ends up on the feed, and everyone's experience is based on what facebook decides you should see.
i manipulated mine to show only leatherwork, but it'll never ever show me stuff from my friends. instead of showing me what my friends are up to - deletig any likes and telling it to never show me suggested junk - it shows an error for "add more friends" rather than show content from my friends which they definitely do have.
i get the sense that facebook has marked my friends as not worth having their posts seen, so it cant add their stuff to my feed even when i dont have anything else on my feed.
Many people understand that it’s a waste of time, but people with low impulse control get sucked in. Same as with gambling and Candy Crush style games. And substances, for that matter. This isn’t their fault, some people are wired that way.
We really need a revival of Craigslist to eliminate the Marketplace hold on local P2P commerce.
However, companies could en masse decide to start filtering resumes containing Meta employment history. This already happens with some other questionable industries when reviewing applications. I know I'd be hard pressed to hire anyone with a Meta background.
Nice thought. Sure as heck will consider it now.-
Because it provides a form entertainment, low hanging entertainment. All designed to grip you in your weakest fronts.
Map out what triggers a person visually. Feed it in to a LLM model and on the evil scale, you can start exploiting those who get angry based on whatever content.
Anger is one of the easiest trigger points in form of media. Broadcast a opposite view of an individual or a group. Downvotes and Upvotes are the primitive form of this and if you lack the emotional intelligence (thick skin) to handle the flack, you end up turning on emotions.
Tabs are superior to spaces and Python is basically JavaScript with indentation.It’s the hundreds of people on my Facey that I have no other way to contact, and whom I can’t convince to move to e.g. Mastodon, even by offering to do or automate it for them. I suppose I could get an agent to run through the list with a script that gives my phone number to anyone who expresses a wish to remain in touch.
Quora has become a scam and CP-ridden cesspit but there are still some old-timers who can really write, and whom I’ve become somewhat emotionally invested in. And a habit of 13 years is hard to break.
The other part is messaging. In parts of Europe nobody uses WhatsApp or SMS to communicate, everybody is on Facebook messenger.
And there's still the old school social media posts: cousin had a baby, friend got married. And also content made for the general public which is not malicious.
Hell, the most reliable communication channel for getting information from my kid's school is Instagram.
On Tiktok I don't think the platform is paying people to rage bait, at least not directly. But wannabe influencers will still try and rage bait their way into a viral video and hopefully a following. To me it's entirely transparent and I just move on but people fall for it. Lots of people. Gender wars is easy pickings. A good example was the $3 cheese surcharge on a burger. I knew immediately that was fake and it was later confirmed [1].
But why am I on Tiktok? Because there's actually some good stuff on there and just some plain entertaining stuff. But what really seals it is the comments. Therea re a ton of videos where the comments are the best part. There are some funny people out there. And Tiktok more than any other platform I've experienced seems to surface such comments.
But I could best describe Facebook as your racist uncle posting conspiracy theories and that's pretty much it.
[1]: https://www.bonappetit.com/story/tiktok-3-dollar-burger-chee...
- Keep in touch with family
- Comfort from having their ideas reinforced
- Organize small events
- Share pictures easily
- not feel lonely
- stay current on world events
All of those have other routes to accomplish the same thing, but I guess they have the "Dropbox effect" of simplifying it so even techno challenged can use it.
Depending on your interests, getting off meta platform may very well result in a net loss of real life activity you can participate.
From what I have heard, Facebook is also the place to rent cheap apartments. The mom and pop landlords are Facebook only. The local Craigslist is dying and scam ridden. Big name rental websites tend to only have listing for pricier, corporate owned rentals.
These mainstream journos would have to exist in a clean room environs.
Personally - I think that this was the moment when silicon valley billionaires without shadow of a doubt understood that they have power what used to be reserved only for state actors. Bonus - for using that power they get fined penny on the dollar at most or just slap on the wrist.
Update: now situation is even worse - states actively buy propaganda with social media companies, making those companies even more rich and influential.
The problem with Meta is the monetization and engagement model, not the lack of fact checking.
I'm not sure that I buy that when people's health are at stake. When things are objectively false, and spreading that information will actively harm people, you have a responsibility and duty of care to point out falsities. But that's just me.
That statement was censored as "objectively false", but our best information says it's probably true, and it was probably true then, too. Censorship is a dangerous walk. I totally agree with you that harmful misinformation is a problem, and that we have a duty of care. The problem is "who fact-checks the fact checkers?", and what happens when political leaders can request certain topics "fact checked".
> Having the government lean on private platforms to pressure them into censorship, especially in a coordinated fashion, violates that right.
Even as a non US, this isn't true. A private company can decide to ban you for whatever reason they like. If they align with government health experts or not. It has nothing to do with your first amendment. It WOULD violate your rights if they arrested you for it.
Absent government pressure, of course it’s not a free speech issue, but a violation of rights happened here.
The government can’t just evade the first amendment by cleverly outsourcing censorship, especially if they have people sitting in Slack channels and the like passing on names! And even more so if they are simultaneously applying pressure and vague threats through Congressional hearings.
It’s unfortunate that the government has not yet learned its lesson on this, because this kind of pressure is still ongoing with speech related to ICE and Israel/Palestine. Hopefully someone wins a big lawsuit soon.
In the US we are citizens with rights, not subjects.
Just to fund, transmit, amplify, protect, and profit from it.
- Facebook and Genocide: How Facebook contributed to genocide in Myanmar and why it will not be held accountable - https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho...
- UN: Facebook had a ‘role’ in Rohingya genocide - https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/3/13/un-facebook-had-a-r...
- Rohingya refugees sue Facebook over genocide - https://www.dw.com/en/rohingya-refugees-file-lawsuit-against...
[1] https://transparency.meta.com/policies/community-standards/
We actively work to prevent anyone with a suspended license from using the road, so does it follow that failing to do the same for convicted rapists is a bad thing?
I don't think "Facebook should allow all content that is within the bounds of the law of the local jurisdiction" is stupid at all. Ideally that's how infrastructure-esque operations should conduct themselves.
That revised standard isn't obviously stupid, just vacuous, in two ways.
One, Facebook is nothing like neutral content infrastructure.
Two, laws come from somewhere. They are rooted in morality, and are always a snapshot of the historic violations bad enough to drive laws. Anybody who bases their behavior purely on the law has no morals, just fear of consequences. And when it's something new in the world, that stance guarantees ongoing harm until the law catches up.
Logically we might expect Meta to get into selling narcotics next.
"It is not Meta's role to police drug use"
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
“Meta internally projected late last year that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running advertising for scams and banned goods, internal company documents show.”
What's the latest social media platform position on being labeled a publisher? Aren't they against that?
Note incidentally that "free speech" doesn't mean you can say what you like. Yes, you can go out in public and swear and engage in hate speech - all legal - but for example you can't incite others to commit crimes, cross over into disorderly conduct, shout "fire" in a theater, etc.
Yes, bookstores should stock it, and libraries should shelve it. Its something everybody should read at least once, for some perspective at least.
“Inside a meme factory: meet one of thousands of Indonesians trading political outrage clicks for Facebook cash“
All social media is drifting towards being a mirror that reflects your worst tendencies back at you. No content restrictions will fix this - the whole personalized approach to media is fundamentally rotten.
Even the main feed isn't that bad for me. I guess it depends who your friends are and what you click on.
I think it has done more damage to this country than tobacco.
I've seen some local groups taken over by ragebait slop, though. Ironically, not even right wing rage bait slop. As far as I can tell, it finally boiled over for the admin of the page, who was a fairly liberal guy in an extremely rural place, when a local museum found out he was anti-Trump and stopped collaborating with him on local history (maybe for fear of other's reactions). Since then he's strictly reposted rage material from other places/people on Facebook, much of it clearly low effort/AI generated.
I can't judge him, he lives there after all, and from this side of the ocean my political sympathies are definitively closer to him than to his enemies. Still :/
They didn't just run a linear regression or whatever on some data and magically get the most rage inducing system. They made conscious decisions at nearly every step to make changes to optimize for "Engagement", which at this point is a code word that means "Controversial" the same way that a video of someone eating a toddler would be "Controversial"
It's digital crack pointed at a subsection of our brain that evolved to do group signalling.
UK “D-notices” are another great example
And the Sedition Act, as well as the Comstock Act
There are things they are allowed to talk about, and things they are not.
It’s been refined over many decades to maintain public ignorance
That Epstein or Enron type scandal you see in the media is tip of iceberg of what is not published.
Torture or murder on a live Facebook stream? You hold Facebook accountable.
It's the exact "Industries have an incentive to self regulate" talking point that conservatives have long used to say industries should be less regulated
And you are pointing to it as an example that we shouldn't use the government to regulate media.
Meanwhile, I think the FCC does a pretty good job, where their regulatory bar is "You cannot blast boobs or these swears over the public wireless spectrum, everything else is fair game", including an entire TV channel called "Fox News" which has had to argue in court on at least one occasion that nobody would assume any program on "Fox News" was news, rather than entertainment.
I have alternatives like eBay and Gumtree but they have their own shortcomings.
Examples from Facebook:
- Antique lumber planks 50p a plank
- 4 sticks of DDR4 16GB SODIMMs, £60
- Garden tools, £10
This stuff would be slower and more expensive on eBay, and Gumtree is more of a waiting game as its userbase has definitely shrunk.
If you're in a position where you're actually making the decision between letting these harmful practices continue, or putting a stop to them, that's different. But in this society, such people are more likely to be journalists and justices than vigilantes, so violence is still inappropriate. I think the scenario you described, of those incited to violence turning on the inciters with violence, is rather unlikely in reality, and it wouldn't necessarily be a good thing.
Voting seems to work, either with actual votes, or wallet, or attention.
The best solution for now seams to be what twitter is doing with community notes.
However, I'll lay odds that if I had posted that Hitler was just a misunderstood genius, my posts would have gone viral throughout the system.
want to make it worse?
When you literally have a billion dollars what difference does 1 million more make?
"Mega-billionaire can't relate to his millionaire friends" - Wizards with Guns
I remember during COVID I saw a number of YouTubers swing from producing normal content into conspiracy shit. Their views ballooned. I saw a nasty feedback loop where the more controversial content received more engagement, hence more ad revenue, leading to more of it being produced.
These platforms are actively degenerating society; there’s a reason the CCP is keeping tight control and reportedly rebalancing things to promote educational creators on China’s.
I don't know what you believe Google changed about YouTube, but I believe it has just made itself worse.
Such a shame that people take up against AI, rather than the people selecting and serving them slop.
"Last month 60 popular celebrity gossip sites were closed overnight for corrupting "core socialist values," and a new regulation released in May requires all online news portals to be managed by Communist Party-sanctioned editorial staff."
I mean, yes, you also can't get away with organizing an opposition, but they really do care about social cohesion and good family values above and beyond that.
(Also, one should always note that the BBC is state owned when they write articles full of invective like this).
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/dec/15/jimmy-lai...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/22/hong-kong-auth...
The Chinese media landscape doesn't support anti-Chinese narratives and the US/UK media landscape, while totally free, somehow never produces anti-Anglo narratives[1]. It's not a conspiracy, it's a culture.
[1]: There are safe anti-anglo narratives where various defeated/killed people have a valid grievance and we should all cry about it, as long as they're all dead and a non-threat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_chomsky
The Myth of American Idealism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_American_Idealism
The Withdrawal
The party doesn't actually need "core socialist values" to stay in charge. They could easily have adopted a Putin (or Napoleon, or Caesar) attitude of "I don't give a damn about the framework legitimizing my rule, as long as you acknowledge me as the boss".
They did oversee an unprecedented rise in living standards and global influence after all...
Maybe those core socialist values were what enabled it?
If you provide both:
a) a service to earn money from content
b) an algo promoting those videos
then yes, IMHO they pay them directly for the content produced.
- Meta is commissioning or sponsoring rage-bait
- Controversial creators are earning money through Facebook's content monetization program
The title is ambiguous (at first, I thought it was the first case), and that's where the clickbait lies.
No doubt that also the second case is a serious problem, but that's orthogonal to the ambiguity of the title.
Contrast it with something like Elsagate. Google actioned the offending creators and attempted to deprioritize the kind of content that caused the controversy. Facebook would do the same if they didn't condone rage-bait.
They don't because they don't select for it. They disporotionally push engagement but as far as I know don't have some indians or AI working tirelessly analysing countless videos to categorise them and rank them according to how ragebaity or controversial they are. Those things just rise to the top out of their effort to drive engagement and screentime.
Any alternative that does the same will end up with similar result.
And regardless, even if they don't select for rage-bait, they still refuse to take action against accounts that repeatedly post it, making your interjection largely pointless.
>They serve you content that they think you will find engaging, and there has to be some automatic categorization as a result.
And this can be completely smart or dumb depending on how you look at it. From my perspective it's a smart algorithm still. If you like or comment on far right or far left ragebait or just ragebait in general then it can serve you ouput from accounts who attract engagement from others who also engage witht hat video. Aka similarly minded people get similarly minded content semi organically as a result of optimising for engagement.
It can do so without genuenly knowing that the video is of category xyz and promoting that specific category but automatically it detects that people who engage with video y are also more likely to engage with video z. The ideological and engagement type bubbles create themselves as a result.
>even if they don't select for rage-bait, they still refuse to take action against accounts that repeatedly post it, making your interjection largely pointless.
The definition of ragebait is vague. Your supressing ragebait is another person's ragebait or supressing of desimination of societal issues. It can be a video of violent crime or of political corruption. Of war or religious extremism. It can be sharing statistics, supporting misogynistic or xyzfobic talkingpoints or exposing them, etc
In a society facing economic decline, corruption or cultural upheaval or what have you you will be stepping on toes whichever way you go. I'd say it's better to either outright ban this kind of social media which will be deeply unpopular or to focus wholely on tackling the divisive issues that lead people to be attracted to some of the dominant topics.
As always, the only solution is twofold: (1) end the targeted advertising business model (for everyone, not just Meta) and (2) acknowledge and address the underlying social and economic problems affecting average people. But of course the establishment has no interest in pursuing either one of these. And so popular anger will continue to build.
I’m sure that shutting down the few release valves for that anger is a great solution.
Some of these actors also put a lot of money into campuses in the west, so when you're done watching some terrible propaganda, you can join a local club and find your way to more people getting angry at misinformation. This is how we get stuff like "globalize intifada" and students "occupying" buildings.
I wish this was just hyperbole, but really, go check for yourself what kind of money state actors put into schools and universities in the west, and why.
Meta are the greatest force against freedom in the world today, apart from Putin's post-fascist power vertical and the Chinese Communist Party.
What I think of Mark Zuckerberg unfortunately cannot be printed, because unlike Meta platforms, HN has standards.
not all israeli settlers are terrorists of course, but unlike me, who's living on the land by treaty, theyre living on land obtained through terrorism and war crimes.
not all settlers are equivalent
Maybe they have some romantic ideals about the 1930s, where Schacht fixed the economy for Hitler with a form of quantitative easing. But that scheme became unsustainable around 1938.
The difference is that back then the powerful needed people. The current Silicon Valley "elites" want to get rid of everyone, make them dumb and replace them with AI.
The sooner the right wing audience realizes this, the better.
Those greedy billionaires also keep on having ties to right wing nuts. Let's not forget Melon Usk with his suspicious right-arm-raising gestures (having done so twice, which is quite strange when you do the same gesture twice in a row - I mean there can be no doubt about this if you do it twice; twice is an accident?).
In return, many companies that rely on these problems, turn around and advertise on these networks.
Social media is just following the same strategy.
Otherwise, we can dislike both things and it adds nothing to say "but why aren't your talking about the other thing instead". And for what it's worth, there is a pretty clear difference between the journalistic standards of FB bait and of the legacy media.
If they start producing their own content they might get considered like a news organisation with a whole different set of rules being applied to them and Safe Harbour being inapplicable.
If an online platform can't figure out how to do that, it's really their problem to solve, not one they should just get to shove on society with some lectures about "parenting" or other nonesense.
Scale, lower entry bar, lack of regulation.
ruzzian troll farm employee cannot call into fox news and say “create 100 John Does impersonating MAGA texans (or whatever), present them as real and I will pay you 5$ for that”. Such troll can automate all this and present media somewhat realistically on FB.
Facebook is global. Traditional media is much more heavily regulated in some countries and while it may not be perfect, it's not comparable to the shit show that is social media.
Social media networks display different things to different people so it’s borderline impossible to know exactly what they’re even showing. That makes regulation extremely difficult.
More broadly, this perspective depresses me. I’m old enough to remember the promise of the internet when we first all got it: that it would democratise information and we’d be able to break free of the issues with traditional media. Fast forward to today and we’re asking “why shouldn’t the tech giants monetise hate speech?”. How far we’ve fallen.
https://www.facebook.com/jewishvoiceforpeace/posts/meta-does...