Comment by brennanbrown | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brennanbrown | Hacker News Reader

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I'll quote a previous article I wrote, as it seems relevant here.

A lot has changed over the past decade, and corporate social media now blatantly allows awful, harmful takes in a way that you could only get away with on truth.social or Gab or whatever the fuck years ago. You do not need a tiny, independent platform to say whatever you want, now. A vaccine skeptic is the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services. You are no longer anti-authority when the authority agrees with you. You are no longer the little guy fighting in counterculture against the big man in power. You're all on the same team, now.

On January 7th, 2025, Mark Zuckerberg posted a five-minute video called "More Speech and Fewer Mistakes." In it, Meta ended its third-party fact-checking program in the US, replacing it with X-style Community Notes, and framed the whole shift as a return to free expression after what Zuckerberg called a "cultural tipping point" brought on by the 2024 election. In the same breath, Meta rewrote its Hateful Conduct policy to expressly permit describing LGBTQ+ people as "mentally ill" or "abnormal" and calling for their exclusion from professions and public life, loosened its rules around immigration status, and swapped proactive enforcement for waiting on user reports. Days later, the company donated a million dollars to the incoming president's inauguration, added a Trump ally to its board, and handed its global policy shop to a Republican former Bush staffer.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate spent six months on either side of the change combing through eight million Facebook comments aimed at elected officials, and found abusive comments tripled, from 24,000 to 78,000, with violent threats and hate quadrupling and harassment doubling. The ADL tracked the Facebook pages of Jewish members of Congress and found toxic comments jumped more than thirteenfold after February 4, 2025. GLAAD, UltraViolet, and All Out surveyed over 7,000 people across 86 countries and found 92 percent worried about the rise in harmful content, and 77 percent now feeling less safe simply existing openly on Meta's platforms. Even Meta's own first integrity report after the change admitted that violent and graphic content, plus bullying and harassment, both ticked upward.

https://brennan.day/free-speech-and-the-indieweb/

This all sounds acceptable to me in the interests of free speech.

I guess if you want to live in a hateful society, you'd accept it in the interests of hateful free speech. Kind of a race to the bottom, though.

However, if you look, for example, at the history of constitutional amendments over the centuries, turns out they've consistently been to provide more inclusivity/less hate. And that's arguably what made america great.

Seems the maga crowd wants to make America great at being stupid, mean and weak, instead of that inspirational light on the hill.

Yeah when you just pretend everything you don't like is "hate" then your own position is bound to end up sounding pretty reasonable.

So, just to illustrate.

A "vaccine skeptic" is generally considered to mean someone who is skeptical that vaccinations work at all.

This is very different from having specific concerns about specific products, like the COVID "vaccines", which turned out to:

- not protect against infection

- not prevent transmission

- have numerous side-effects worse than the disease it's supposed to prevent

...all in direct contradiction to the pharma propaganda that was the norm during 2021-2022, for which large amounts were paid to influencers and media.

Indeed, someone who is a proponent of the practice of vaccination ought to be dismayed that such a shoddy product was pushed as belonging in the same category as time-tested vaccines which went through a rigorous and long development process before hitting the market, rather than being foisted on a population under duress. Competing remedies were also ridiculed so as to secure that desirable Emergency Market Authorization, combined with government contracts that removed any liability for the producers, with additional censorship of those contracts before release to the public.

Hence, "You're all on the same team now" is an example of missing the point entirely and turning the issue of vaccination into political team sports and "our guy" vs "their guy", rather than actually debating any of the issues that matter in public health. Do you see what I mean about not being able to state what opponents actually believe?

With loaded terms such as "hate", "toxic" and "harmful" being thrown around like candy, it's exactly the same thing. Hate and harm are supposed to be decided according to objective norms of discourse and behavior, not sentiment. Because what happens is sentiment is decided according to whom the source and target is. The lefties obsessed with these topics decide first who can be a victim and perpetrator based on the tenets of intersectionality, and then interpret the events and actions to fit that preconceived hypothesis. This is largely a result of peer pressure within their own circles. The Jason Arday case is the best recent illustration.

Notice too that the surveys you cite center on "worry about the rise in harmful content" and "feeling less safe". Not about any actual harm that may have been done, nor about whether safety has actually gone up or down.

I'll even add that the distinction between looking at objective behavior and outcomes, vs looking at subjective sentiment, tracks very well with masculine vs feminine norms in social interaction. Feminization of online spaces has been an absolute disaster and the quality of discourse has gone down immensely, because women by and large prefer social cohesion over facing uncomfortable truths. But when the ship is sinking, complaining that someone is rocking the boat is willful blindness.

Complaining about blowback when for the past 15+ years the mainstream cultural narrative has been #killallmen, "COVID-19 vaccines came too early, not enough men died", "religious people should be sent to labour camps" and so on is for sure something.

“mainstream cultural narrative” … I’m not sure where in the world this would be true but do please cite sources to back this claim up if you want to sound in any way credible.

Not sure if honest mistake, but this is what was going on in Twitter and Tumblr for a long while. Obviously in recent years people are trying to walk back on it because of the backlash.

I would suggest not interpreting (your) algorithmic driven social media feeds as the “mainstream cultural mainstream”. As an older white male, at no point in the last 10 years have I felt exposed or subjected to the extreme views you’ve enumerated.

Social media is upstream from beliefs and actions that happen in real life. Not even by mid-2000's, early days of 4chan, could people claim that Internet and real life are separate. The same people who write those kind of things on Twitter and Tumblr and now Bluesky, are the same ones who work at schools and universities, run NGOs, advise local municipality and government policy, and so on. So "you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you", but with social media roots of politics.

Also, what's up with misquoting me? I never used the phrase "mainstream cultural mainstream".

Simple typo. Internet and real life are very different once you remove algorithmic driven social media feeds.

Not sure where this was ever a mainstream narrative.

I guess if by mainstream culture you mean some sort of thin-skinned incel echo chamber. Which, yes, those "men" are pretty weak and pitiful, but I've never seen and calls to kill any of them.

Sure. And there were never any restrictions during COVID either, right?

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