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Comment by ocd | Hacker News Reader

He said the thing that Canada, Greenland, Cuba, and various other countries are worried about, but is either publicly ignored in the US or dismissed as "trolling" by the president.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/25/lula-says-trum...

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The same old cool-aid: the label on bottle reads "freedom". But if you look at the ingredients: greed, gluttony, looting, bullying, spread american culture, slavery, surveillance - the full nth-amendmend package. Dosages may vary.

And Meta (or the US government) seems determined to prove him right

Meta == US gov. It’s another tool in their toolbox. You shouldn’t trust US tech any more than Chinese tech. If anything, probably should trust it less than Chinese tech.

Interesting that people trust foreign tech/government over their own to represent their interests. Not saying you're wrong.

For Brazilians and about half of HN readers Meta and Chinese companies are both foreign tech

The CCP doesn't worship Jesus meanwhile we know what hell on earth 1000 years of Christianity was.

It's a two-edged sword. Compared to other governments your own government when good is the best to promote your good. But when bad, it is by far the worst abuser.

It's not so much a matter of thinking one is "better" (for whatever definition of "better") - it's that the Chinese tech and Chinese government are so obviously coupled at the hip while American tech continues to claim independence (all the while paying billions in bribes directly to Trump's family and vanity projects).

I don't trust the Chinese government but i do trust that they're disinterested in me and don't have much agency over me. My own government is more trust worthy, but have interest and agency in me, so it could be said I trust the Chinese government more.

The frenemy of my frenemy is my... frenemy?

I think this is something many people tend to miss. The Chinese might spy on you, or steal your data when you use their devices. But for the _majority_ of people living the west, the odds of that actually being used against them are small.

The US government is much more likely to act against their interest than the Chinese.

Nobody can "miss" this, it's brought up whenever the letters C, C or P are mentioned.

I just remember that Mariott employee got fired for liking a tweet thanking the chain for having Tibet in a dropdown menu.

https://onemileatatime.com/marriott-fired-employee-for-likin...

> “This job was all I had,” Jones also said. “I’m at the age now where I don’t have many opportunities.”

"they might spy on you and take your data but not use it against you", oh that's alright then. Of course, unless you show kindness to those they torture and disappear. Or don't even, but do something the CCP construes as such. So what you're really saying is that you can reasonably expect to never be tempted to show such kindness. That I hear such talk in Western circles by Western supposed peers I already consider a great harm the CCP has done to me.

Totalitarian revisionism, by definition, seeks control of the whole planet, because it must. It can allow other totalitarian spheres if influence, but no non-totalitarian ones, where people are free to experiment and investigate, collect evidence etc. It's like bacteria agree about hating direct sunlight, but being agnostic about the color of the material that blocks it.

Comparing the two like this is interesting but there are fundamental differences. The US today could not delete tech companies, or the people who run them, the way China can its industries—and, crucially, the people who run them. The US’s version is personalist and would not survive even changing to another person other than Trump, not even going as far a a political party shift, which is possible in America.

It currently can't, but the current administration wants that power so desperately.

I am sure the plan is to make J D Vance president with all these powers and perhaps more, so he can rule for the project 2025 crowd.

20 million people wearing facial recognition glasses in public, always-on, networked and geolocated, with a Muse agent monitoring the feed, would 1000x the domestic surveillance capacity of current Flock, Ring, Tesla and CCTV cams.

The Fermi probability that you'll be ingested and inferenced by this network on any given day is incredibly high, even if you never buy a Meta product and never create an Instagram account.

It's hideously dystopian and you cannot opt out.

Maybe that's why the Muse avatar is a cute and cuddly Teletubby.

I suspect they are working on the edge where limited data makes the subjects more interesting.

Correction: Meta == Israel + US gov.

If those countries worried for real they would have built open platforms themselves. In reality they are making running any social platform next to impossible operate legaly.

That would require that Meta is carrying water for Trump. I don't think I see that as very likely.

"Likely" or not has nothing to do with it, it's well documented. https://www.wsj.com/tech/mark-zuckerbergs-meta-donates-1-mil...

Meta restored Lula's FB account hours after it got flagged for content that as posted on their page. That is a pretty weak basis for a conspiracy theory.

Did they anticipate there would be large numbers of attempts to report the page and cause it to be automatically flagged and/or blocked?

I am sure the American president is target for such efforts as well and provides ample material for rules violations.

As the source article covers, they’ve been facing a number of complaints from human rights organizations that they are being insufficiently censorious regarding the Brazilian election, failing to swiftly take down some things which ethical standards and Brazilian law require. So that presumably influenced their policy. A lot of people seem to have an idea that Facebook’s election policy should quickly block all the bad ads with no risk of blocking any good ones, and that’s just not possible.

One paper that really hammers this point: Inherent Trade-Offs in Algorithmic Fairness [1]

The example they focus on is different but the general principles and takeaways are very powerful and applicable to all classification problems including content flagging.

[1]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3219617.3219634

Wake me up when the right wing guy in the corporations pockets is banned by mistake

Is there a betting market for that?

IIRC, profiles of public officials are (or should be) handled differently.

Only insofar as more careful review. Otherwise, no, they shouldn't. Exactly the same policies on content should be applied uniformly to everyone.

I agree with both of you.

They should be handled differently [than they are today]. They should not be handled differently [than any other persons]. Meta should be giving everyone careful review.

donating money to the president and their party is something nearly every national corporation does. Using their corporate power to do political favors is not. those are two very different things.

That's not a campaign donation, this is straight up a gift to show loyalty to the new guy, after he won the election. But that's not the only thing, for just one more example, look at Zuckerberg getting on Joe Rogan weeks after the election to praise "masculine energy", wearing a ridiculous haircut and necklace, just to pander to the Right.

If the title of this article is not sufficiently eloquent, the photo should finish the job

https://www.wired.com/story/tech-ceos-donald-trump-white-hou...

What universe have you been in for the past decade? Meta is hand in glove with authoritarian interests, including in the US.

Meta hired Dina Powell McCormick into a position directly under Zuckerberg after the election and appointed Dana White to their board of directors. Is that enough water?

Zuckerberg started pandering to the Trump admin mere months after he took office, publicizing "evidence" consisting of a few emails from Biden admin officials as proof of widespread government manipulation of tech platforms that Trump rightly put a stop to in the name of free speech.

At the time the story blew up on HN drawing lots of outrage from the self-styled free speech maximalists. Now, of course, there's comparative silence from that crowd after regular stories about the FCC routinely weaponizing licenses to enforce preferred speech, lawsuit threats against Wikipedia, coercion of universities to suppress specific political views, etc. But at the time it was a big thing and a political gift to the Trump admin's public image.

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