> According to the petition, two people asked [Meta AI] to pick a number between 1 and 25. They gave no instructions and made no reference to the election. In one attempt, the AI answered 13. In the other, it answered 22. Those are the party ballot numbers of Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro, respectively. The groups question the coincidence.
My confidence in the validity of their claims tanked right about here.
I'm all for regulating transparency into social media algorithms. Meta most certainly is compromised by foreign actors. But can we choose less stupid hills to die on than numerology and GIFs? Headline is not remotely supported by the evidence.
The example showcased is particularly weak, but the actual scandal with Meta AI is that when they are asked to produce campaign material, they spontaneously produce it with Bolsonaro's number (22), even when not asked. But then they refuse to produce it with other numbers like Lula's 13, saying they can't perform this for a specific candidate. When asked, they admit they were inconsistent in producing Bolsonaro-linked material, but in new chats they reliably continue to do so. See for example what was posted in this thread
- Meta has suspended Lula's facebook account a week from the election day, and many advertising instagram and facebook accounts associated with his campaign have been consistently suspended and then reactivated with days of delay (this is a huge loss in the context of a political campaign)
- The reach of his opponents is being inflated to unexplainable proportions while people are having trouble finding Lula's profile by searching for... lula. And then you got people like Nikolas Ferreira, whose videos consistently reach several times his follower numbers and reach several times more views, likes, shares, etc than people like Kim Kardashian, Beyoncé, Messi, etc. He's a Brazilian politician who speaks Portuguese and talks about strictly Brazilian subjects. He recently posted a MUTED video that reached 60 million views in hours.
- Lula's big WhatsApp channel for coordinating online campaign actions with voters kept getting suspended over and over
- There are reports from Brazilian META EMPLOYEES talking about the unresponsiveness of the internal American team to solve reports they made regarding Lula's platform issues
There are so many problems I can't even list them all here without making it a wall of text. It's just too obvious.
Now look through this thread and be amazed at how most posters are apparently satisfied by this level of evidence and some are even calling for China-style Internet censorship in response. A good reminder that even enlightened progressives are helpless against cognitive bias when they want to believe the worst about their enemies.
Yup, it seems unfathomable to some commentators that the likes of AfD or Le Pen or Bolsonaro would get popular support were it not for US big tech (interference). Which truly boggles the mind, it seems to be the same narrative that couldn't believe Hillary lost the election and it was the russians fault. Even if that were true, you should still review your policies and how you ran the campaign and learn something from it. Here it's like we're in a world with no reinforcement learning feedback loop.
It seems similarly unfathomable to other commenters that US big tech is ideologically aligned with the rightwing parties in EU and SA.
Further that the current US administration is openly rooting for leaders to get elected that serve its interests and not the electorate’s interests (which makes sense) and that US big tech is entirely controlled and thrall to the US administration.
Truly mindboggling
It's not that it's unfathomable. Most just agree with that because that's how you 'make it' in the VC world of today. They also pretend that the right wing is somehow for free speech, of course ignoring everything the right likes to censor, such as criticism of Israel/support for Palestine.
It also doesn't help that it's easy to lump 'the left' with 'everything I don't like re social issues' because the institutional left is basically neoliberals who prefer to talk social politics to avoid talking about economics.
Censorship is when you don't leave an information manipulation and mind control tool in the hands of a hostile foreign power. Sure.
As for the evidence, it has been well documented beyond the parent comment's silly examples and it includes shadowbanning popular profiles with certain opinions.
Shadowbans have a high base rate. You notice when it happens to your side and take it as a sign of bias. You don't notice when it happens to the other side, because that is not your circle and you don't track them as closely.
I guarantee your political opponents also think Meta is trying to shadow ban then.
The perfidy of Putin (and many other authoritarian regimes) is that they can clothe their anti-democratic and anti-human policies in the language of their opponents.
So Putin can justify anything with words - what they say doesnt really matter or reflect reality. The actions and outcomes matter.
And all foreign agents should be allowed to freely operate everywhere simply because Putin has falsely accused at least one person of being a foreign agent? Espionage sure is easy these days.
A: social media is a mind control tool that can be used for targeted political manipulation, as shown by the cambridge analytica scandal and plenty of other research.
B: the US is a hostile foreign power in relation to South America, as proven by its continuous threats, embargoes, tariff wars, coups and more recently the unashamed declaration of a "Donroe doctrine"
I deny that social media is a mind control tool that can be used for targeted political manipulation. The examples I see people provide for such a phenomenon almost always boil down to “social media let lots of people see bad messages I don’t agree with instead of good messages I do agree with”. Unless you take a very expansive view and consider e.g. catchy chants at a protest to be political manipulation, the effect just isn’t strong enough.
>social media let lots of people see bad messages I don’t agree with instead of good messages I do agree with
If the provider can tamper with the algorithm to filter out information that goes against its political preferences, how is that ineffective or not targeted political manipulation? The idea of democracy presumes that the public can be well informed in order to take decisions.
Because information passes through all kinds of formal and informal filters in the status quo, so adding another one doesn’t move the needle very much. In the US, the antivaxx movement has recently become so influential that it took over the national health authorities, despite most media platforms openly filtering out their information to suppress them.
A lot of the examples in the article seem to quite plainly be that. “Lula ladrão” is a big meme, but many people think it shouldn’t be, and therefore it’s unfair that ‘Lula’ is so associated with ‘ladrão’ in the Instagram search index.
The statement you are replying to is not specific at all to this article. There is so much evidence - and so much research - that social media bubbles are polarizing influences that you'd have to be an equity holder not to see it.
I definitely agree they’re polarizing influences, turning polite disagreements between people saying many of the same things into angry disagreements between people living in different worlds. I don’t think that constitutes “mind control”.
I really think it’s the same beliefs plus anger. 20 years ago, I had at least as many disagreements on substantial questions of policy with my political opponents, but I wasn’t as polarized against them, because their slogans and messaging strategies weren’t optimized on social media platforms for maximum ability to go viral by pissing me off.
You misunderstand me. What you are describing is not polarization. Maybe you have not actually experienced it. Polarization is defined as: "the divergence of political attitudes away from the center, towards ideological extremes."
This is something that has been measured and its growth has correlated with deployment of algorithmic social media in country after country (where it not all deploy at the same time).
I see the opposite: the OP cherry picked the weakest of a long list of examples. The other reactions you’re seeing in the thread are based on all the discoveries, not just that one.
It’s disappointing to see it upvoted to the top of the thread. Seems many people are looking to dismiss the issue rather than fully consider it.
Look at this thread and you could think that the quoted example was the first, or main one, in the article.
When in fact, it comes after
> The petition describes a GIF search on WhatsApp for the word “brasil.” The first result was an image of Flávio Bolsonaro. It showed his ticket number and identified his running mate.
> According to the records sent to the court, the same result appeared on three separate accounts. The groups use this to ask whether its top position comes from systematic ranking criteria.
> A similar check on Instagram also showed images of the senator among the first results. Users who searched for “brasil” found three images of Flávio Bolsonaro in the top positions
> On WhatsApp, a GIF search for the word “ladrão” (thief) returned a caricature of the president in a striped uniform, a reference to prison dress. Another result carried the message “Supporting the Workers’ Party is a mental illness.”
> On Instagram, a search for the same word showed a GIF reading “Vote 13.” That is the Workers’ Party election number, tied to Lula’s candidacy.
And you could also think that the authors would be for censorship and completely crazy, when in fact:
> They are not claiming that they have proven bias in Meta, choosing instead to posit the question to the Superior Electoral Court.
That's all ignoring the fact that Trump and the US openly support Bolsonora, who is in jail for attempting a coup after losing the election.
And Brazil, AFAIK, was a military dictatorship until, what, 40 years ago? To my knowledge, without a "hard cut" that would have investigated this part of the country's history.
I am not Brazilian, who knows, I can't tell whether Lula is corrupt, or anything, what I have not seen is proof of the election fraud claims put forward by Bolsonaro sr.?
Not irrelevant since his son of course rehabilitates him and wants to "correct the public record".
And also, imprisoning him of course was a strong move that also needs justification.
But it would be cool to limit political content on platforms with non-audited, non-public and intransparent engagement algorithms.
Just as it would be good to stop intransparent flow of big money into politics.
The latter is a sentiment that Trump catered to when he became president for the first time. Of course, only in a twisted, cynical way: "the system is broken, so I alone can fix it".
Regardless of anyone's political affiliation: Meta has a long history of not giving a shit whether their engagement algorithms at best... "damage" democratic processes, so I don't see any reason to be smug about it.
Trump openly supports the Bolsonaros who are his political allies. The European Union openly supported Lula when the roles were reversed in the last election.
As for WhatsApp GIF searches. Searches for "brasil" shows one candidate as the first person after GIFs of the flag. Search results before you have started typing anything shows the other candidate.
You can search for any negative term that one side commonly uses against the other, and WhatsApp will suggest GIFs of the person. Do you understand that millions of normal people send these GIFs to each other in WhatsApp groups and private messages? Of course they're going to turn up in top suggested.
Do an image search on Google for a common derogatory term of any (in)famous politician you know of and look at the results.
> Do you understand that millions of normal people send these GIFs to each other in WhatsApp groups and private messages?
Of course, it could be organic. I shortened my text a bit so it's not explicitly mentioned anymore, but I still wrote about "engagement algorithms".
It doesn't need to be a political influence dial at Meta's HQ.
Regardless of whether there is intentional influence by the platform, or the platform intransparently favors other actors who in turn use the platform, it's a problem. Even when the platforms just do it for simple financial reasons or political opportunism.
On HN, people are usually quick to lament to damaging effects of engagement optimization on public discourse.
I thought mentioning that I cannot judge whether Lula is a corrupt president (I assume that's what's meant by "criminal") is enough to make clear that I am not arguing for silencing opinions.
What I would like to see is addressing Social Media's role in weaponizing outrage advertisement using slander, and also, platforms getting away with not making transparent how they weight political advertisement in elections.
In my opinion, electoral advertisement should be regulated, and it is regulated, in many countries. This does not prevent you from sending memes on WhatsApp, it might prevent a platform from suggesting political memes to you when you did not explicitly seek out partisan content.
Regarding the rest:
Lula has been imprisoned because of corruption, Bolsonaro has been imprisoned because of his coup attempt.
Seems hard to argue about that in one-sided way, and I'm not gonna make any explicit stance here, I am not from Brazil.
It seems impossible to assess whether one of the two is in fact not guilty of the crimes they were charged for. What I did notice though were the election fraud claims, and consensus seemed to be that they are false.
The coup attempt also seems to be undisputed.
The EU has sought out trade deals with Brazil, which was more easily possible with Lula, AFAIK.
I'm not gonna defend everything (sry, not "anything") the EU does here either.
My point was how the public deals with election fraud claims and coups.
And it does seem strange to normalize those openly, even 5 years after the capitol storm.
---
But, to be clear: I am not interested in advocating for Lula in Brazil, that's a Brazil problem and I don't know enough to have an opinion on this. Maybe a gut feeling, but it's easy to get rid of that by reading from the other side (e.g. about corruption, crime rates etc).
That was hopefully not something I said in my initial comment either, because viewing politics as a football match is not healthy, and Germany has its own problems which are more relevant to me - and yet, German politics would still not be something I want to comment about extensively here.
I only wanted to comment on the role of Social Media in political elections. The fact that coup attempts are now so openly normalized in many countries considered democratic (US, Turkey, Brazil)... might seem odd to me, but that's more of an "illusion of stability" thing I guess.
> It seems impossible to assess whether one of the two is in fact not guilty of the crimes they were charged for.
It's actually not, a cursory understanding of Brazilian politics is all that's needed to understand this in context. Lula was essentially "acquitted" for his crimes, as it was proved after he served a few years in prison that the charges were brought under false pretenses by partisan operators. (https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/04/brazil-crimi...)
It was also quite convenient for liberals and the right wing at the time to jail Lula, as he was at the apex of his popularity and was making life hard for the Brazilian bourgeoisie. Bolsonarism can essentially be read as a revolt of the Brazilian elite against Lula's economic policies which stepped on the toes of a few powerful sectors of the Brazilian capitalist class.
Lula has a long history of successfully managing capitalism as a socialist. Brazilian politics is extremely corrupt and pay-to-play, and the Bolsonaros are essentially a crime family in their own right. Flavio, the son running for president, has been convicted of embezzlement when he was a state congressman and is literally under investigation right now for money laundering and bank fraud.
I mean, ideally I'd have Zuckerberg, Musk, Dorsey and friends in jail forcreating social networks where conflict is rewarded and pushed in front of everyone, leading to the collapse of the social fabric we're seeing throughout the world right now, but censorship is fine by me in the mean time.
your own country flipped its shit and said that Tiktok was CCP propaganda less than a year ago and tried to ban it, so it seems like foreign influence on your politics does seem to be a bad thing.
Whereas you are the paragon of rationality and can do no evil. Private company good, must not rein in, invisible hand of market daddy <3
When faced between the choice of "genocide" or "no genocide", do you also pick "a little genocide is fine", or has the market already priced it in so you can stop thinking about it ?
Appreciate you so aptly demonstrating my point again. I said nothing about not reining in private companies, the invisible hand of the market, genocide, etc. And my views don't align with whatever strawman you're desperately trying to construct here.
I'll spell my point out, just so it's clear to you: the idea that we should imprison someone for creating an online space where people offer vapid incendiary takes and then argue about them is itself a vapid incendiary take. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything about the corrosive influence of social media, that we shouldn't have a different regulatory or policy environment with respect to these things, but "throw them all in jail!" is exactly the kind of stupid take that you're railing against them for encouraging.
Yes, I would love to block American social media companies from meddling with the elections of my country. Like you did with TikTok, for example, when your government forced ByteDance to sell to an American company to continue operating. Fucking hypocrisy is palpable.
> ... but it's another to willfully disrupt legal elections in a soverign country.
Especially if they're the same exact people who whine at the top of their lungs that our elections are the subject of foreign interference (even when it isn't). If one does a thing to someone else, they have zero leg to stand on when they think it's being done to them (even when it's not). Some of our first childhood lessons are "Lying is bad" and "Two wrongs don't make a right". Beyond ridiculous that the (supposedly adult) people in charge of our nation and corporations aren't able to handle lessons that most of the rest of us learn and understand as tiny children.
One thing you learn in life is that hypocrisy is the way to get rich. Do whatever is good for you now and if a different thing is good for you later do that thing then, instead of continuing the thing you're doing now. It seems to work.
I think the Cambridge Analytica scandal was largely made up in similar ways. Data privacy is important, but much of the data they “stole” seems to me to be within then-contemporary expectations for third party access, and I’ve never seen a coherent explanation of how collecting this data disrupted elections.
Perhaps in Brazil it’s illegal for political messages go viral on social media at all? Then I could see how there’s an issue here. But that isn’t my understanding.
The average user didn’t and doesn’t understand what’s going on at all. When I used Facebook more heavily, I would routinely see memes passed around where people were alarmed to discover Facebook has a license to use+reproduce their photos, and posted legalese on their walls which they believed would revoke that license so Zuckerberg can’t steal them.
The average person who did understand these things, before the mid 2010s, was very passionate about open standards. The zeitgeist at the time was that you should be able to do anything through the API that you can do through the official app; it wasn’t until 2015 (https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/28/facebook-api-shut-down/) that Facebook turned off their official API for letting third parties dig through your friends’ entire profiles. If Facebook had announced in 2017 that they’re turning off API access to the timeline, which they ended up doing as part of the Cambridge Analytica response, people would have been very frustrated and would not have believed that it was a privacy-first measure.
Yes, and to add to this, people in the tech space were generally quite upset at the death of third-party Twitter clients and more recently Reddit clients. But, well, the level of API access required to create a third-party client is fairly obviously "all the data".
If the company putting at risk underlying social contract is not completely dismantled and its head is not sent in jail, the message they get is clear: go on as long as you can sustain the loss and profit. Or at least it's apparently the only way they can interpret it.
Or the public could grow up, learn that algorithms are stochastic, and not let their vote be influenced by the number that pops up when they type in "vote" in the search bar.
If this is influencing your votes your democracy is already lost.
I'm not sure looking down on the general public helps anything. People are obviously influenced by spamming them with information. It works in marketing, it works on election billboards, it works in lots of contexts.
Of course not, it's much worse. Candidates whose names are closer to the top of the ballot get more votes. People vote based on name association, name preference, candidate order, whether their favorite color is party color, unsubstantiated Facebook rumors, gifs, memes, advertisements, peer pressure, and you know - everything besides facts and data.
Need to see details, but it's perfectly plausible that geolocated requests from Brazil get a special treatment during this specific period of elections.
My wife is Brazilian. I think HN might be missing some cultural context here. IIUC in Brazil when you vote for a presidential candidate you literally enter the 2 number digit assigned to the candidate's party. When casting your vote for Bolsonaro you enter 22, or 13 for Lula. The machine then displays the candidate's info and you press a confirm button to finalize your vote. I personally agree that "give me a random number between 0 and 25" and getting 13 or 25 is not a strong argument by itself, but I also think that HN may not appreciate the significance of these numbers to the literal mechanics of voting in Brasil.
The headline is that Meta is ignoring a court order, which seems to be the case.
The numerology is weak evidence on its own, but it is decidedly odd in connection with the other examples. If a pattern persists in seemingly irrelevant areas and favours one candidate in a political race then the call for clarification is valid.
Or at least a serious enough issue for a court to order Meta to desist while the legal trial is ongoing.
To assume that Evil Corp Inc. does evil things? They should just turn the platform off because it seems is only thing that works as a bargaining chip with such powerful entities.
One big company says things should be secret, another says that things should be transparent, and your conclusion is that both are equivalent and therefore any attempt for transparency is meaningless. I don't buy that logic. A party being biased doesn't mean that its stance on every issue is automatically wrong; at the very least, it's possible as an individual to have a mutual interest with a company.
You phrase this as a "gotcha" but I don't think you understand that NGOs and nonprofits are the exact kind of entity that would naturally be involved here.
Algorithmic transparency is a deeply unprofitable and difficult task, with people from all sides screeching at you thinking you're biased against them. Governments obviously shouldn't be involved (unless you're a fan of state-controlled media), and so the only people that will take this on are people that care enough about the impact of social media on society to give up careers in the private sector.
If you care so much, you can always join one of these NGOs! You won't. I guarantee you they are not as biased as you think they are, and they certainly don't hold a "shadow ban this guy" hammer.
I believe though it is an old phenomenom that if (given the default context) you ask a random number, it will more often than not give numbers from a very small set.
I just used a "Temporary chat" with ChatGPT twice to "Give a random number" and it gave 42 both times (this shuold be rather understandable why it ended up with this). Then I asked "Give a random number in 1-10" twice and it responded with 7 for both (and this too is an old "magic number").
btw today's models run random.randint() by default unless you prohibit python by choosing one of the dumb models, disable thinking, disable tool calls, etc.
Because the AI is trained on real world data and in the real world real people are making a gigantic amount of images and posts in support for the two biggest candidates.
They are beholden to the current US admin - as always - only good thing is that the current admin is so blatant that maybe one day even the Germans will realize that you need to have your own social media just you have your own national tv, newspapers etc.
Germany is even more corrupt than the current US but is more subtle about it. I'd almost rather have German media censored by the US than by Germany, because the US can't arrest German people in Germany for their posts, but the German government does.
> Germans will realize that you need to have your own social media just you have your own national tv
There is a national broadcast apparatus in Germany, directly funded by the people in form of mandatory household monthly contributions. It definitely needs improvements and is far from ideal but it doesn’t work at behest of government (budget pressures, etc.). It was designed to resist the top down pressure from the admins (lessons learned from what Nazis did). AfD along with some private news networks backed by the likes of Telekom are really pushing to abolish it.
> realize that you need to have your own social media
How could that be made to happen? Should EU somehow move to federated (let’s say per country) instances of Mastodon or something? Or one big platform? How would regular folks get used to it? And how could those initiatives be prevented from falling into irrelevance when network effects are at play?
I agree with the idea, it’s just that there’s the usual hurdles there aren’t necessarily good answers for that I know of.
The Chinese did it. We broke Boeings monopoly with Airbus.
I realize these are heavy handed approaches - but shows what can get done.
Perhaps smaller scale things can work as well: Ie supporting alternatives when they occur - ie tiktok back when it was kinda Chinese - use the China threat to enforce objective standards - rather than just following the us stance.
Use existing monopoly legislation.
All creating an open market place for social media that allows for newcomers and local alternatives rather than the single monopoly that is the situation now.
Notably Germany used to have its own social media. SchülerVZ/StudiVZ/MeinVZ was like Facebook, but German (and with three networks targeted at school kids, university students and everyone, respectively). They did well initially. But by 2011 Facebook had the lead, and from there network effects did the rest to cement Facebook as the winner
No, we had way more. I enjoyed being member of a local social media webiste (a elaborate forum) in my teens.
And StudiVZ, which I never liked, made that slowly die out. Facebook came later.
I would very much prefer to still be part of local social media (where you could resolve issues with the admin directly), but federated to other networks.
The way it should've happened is that over the last 20 years EU governments should have tried to keep tech companies doing well in Europe.
We had video streaming sites like youtube. We had cellphone manufacturers. We had chat applications.
But the conditions for these companies were better outside of Europe. Now we're stuck with everything not made in Europe. (South Korea is more relevant in consumer tech than the EU.)
European governments still haven't swapped off MS.
I’m not following. Youtube has always been an American company. YouTube was founded in San Mateo, California, USA, and it was an American company the whole time before Google bought it.
Perhaps I wasn't very clear - we had video streaming sites before youtube. The local sites could not keep up with youtube.
Could a European competitor have even existed when even youtube struggled with the GEMA lawsuit for over half a decade? And that by the end of it they still had to pay?
You can still have Facebook, its just if you're german your home server is a german one, with algorithms running on german servers, staffed by Germans and subject to German oversight. It would still even be one big global network.
Right until the Germans decide that something should be blocked globally, not just in Germany. And now you have a problem, because there are going to be 150 other countries demanding the same kind of treatment.
It might work, but it also might bloat the whole operation so much that the social network becomes non-functional.
All which would be owned by a US entity after all, and still at the whims of Meta executives. CLOUD Act makes stuff like that impossible to trust, anything going through US infrastructure or administration needs to be considered compromised at this point.
Amazon/AWS tried this route with their "sovereign cloud" which still ends up being beholden exactly the same way as "real AWS", so what's even the point? Who is even falling for these "tricks"?
Well the solution is pretty simple: geo block US owned social media and wait a two days for people to move to the best EU alternative. One you remove the foreign subsidized option with complete market share capture, there will be options that can finally compete.
Both the US and the EU are already doing this exact thing with cars, basically.
But the reason is not sovereignty - it's to make sure people can't receive communications not approved by the (fascist*) French government.
* Please do not mince words or make excuses. We know they are fascist because they're shooting the population in the streets and turning off the internet, just like bad countries do. So far this is isomorphic to the Arab Spring.
As a EU citizen I believe in the citizen's freedom to pick their social media platform, but when it comes to official accounts (e.g. government, the president or prime ministers, etc) I've always believed we should favour open protocols and federation. Public funding of course. Probably an unpopular opinion.
How is Russia currently moving everyone from Telegram onto some "Max" app? How has China managed to keep the likes of Meta out?
B-but the EU can't do that!
It absolutely can. Just like it can push Chat Control down everyone's throats even though if you held a referendum on it it would be voted down (no, most Jacques the plumbers on the street don't want mass surveillance even if it's "against crime").
one day they will realize - everobody realized long time ago, its info war friend.
Germans for example own 90% of polish media and are growing our younglings to be ashamed to be polish
> They are beholden to the current US admin - as always
They have, as the joke goes, more money than God and influence all over the world. They are beholden to no one. They have the resources to fight in court against decisions they don’t believe in, and all the lobbying they need to shape established laws.
They choose their actions, and their actions are their own. Every single dollar they donate to the current president but not the previous one is an admission of their allegiance and (lack of) morals.
Having principles and standing for them costs money, and these societal parasites subsist on money and influence. Make no mistake, they will sell their own mother to further their goals, but they don’t have to while they can keep selling everyone else’s.
Or maybe the reason more bribes are paid to the current administration is that the current administration is more receptive to bribes? The ROI on gifts to Trump is probably higher than on gifts to Biden so it makes sense to give more.
> They have, as the joke goes, more money than God and influence all over the world. They are beholden to no one.
The administration can take over them with the snap of a finger if they so desire. They have absolutely no power.
The best example of that is the BBC suit, where the only reason it's happening is because the US doesn't have any control over the entity because it's British.
> The administration can take over them with the snap of a finger if they so desire.
No, no they cannot. They sure want you to believe that, though, and the longer that fantasy is left unchecked, the more power it gets. The current administration is not omnipotent, and that is exemplified by the times it was pushed back (not by the bootlicker CEOs at major US tech companies, obviously).
Like John Oliver said, use the four key words that make weak bullies go away: “fuck you, make me”.
That’s not the argument. Unfortunately, reading comprehension and engaging in good faith continues to decline rapidly on HN.
Not being beholden to someone does not mean you have power over them. For example: you are not beholden to me and thus don’t have to do anything I say; but that doesn’t mean I have to do anything you say either, I’m not beholden to you.
I look for stuff I need on a search engine, watch the video I need only (mostly tutorials) and then leave. I never follow YouTube recommendations anymore - that’s how it keeps you hooked and feeds you what they want you to watch. (It’s also nonsensical and blatantly obvious these days - I went in to watch a video on how to tie a bow tie, why is there a recommendation on “Bolsonaro has Lula shaking in his pants, find out why??”
We banned YouTube for casual entertainment at home years ago - one of the best decisions we ever made, other than the toxic content pushing, it’s also so ad-infested it’s totally worthless anyway.
I remember when YouTube was “better than tv! Content on demand, no ads!”. Those days are long gone
The answer implies a misunderstandng the dynamics of this system.
There is very little chance that Meta is doing algorithmic political adjustments at the behest of Zuck.
It's conspiracy theory without a shred of evidence.
As much as Zuck is a maligned actor, that's not how these things work thee.
X - yes, that could happen there, Meta and Google are different kinds of organizations.
Meta is feeding you click bait without bother.
YouTube is feeding you clickbait wit some concern, especially for advertisers.
X is almost entirely feeding you clickbait, and very aggressively amplifying clickbait voices, and heavily promoting those voices Elon wants promoted.
None of them are making up and promoting magical weird memes.
Edit: I should add, the political interference will directly happen but in a censorial way. If they can do something under the cover of 'upsets advertisers' - they will do that
YouTube wouldn't take ads for the film attacking Elon. I this is one of those Type B kinds of influences, not amplifying or making clickbait but a form of narrative censorship. But - they will do it within the limits and constraints of their own system. They are not sneaking into the lab and magically adjusting the algo. They are finding corporate/legal justification and doing it within that framework. If investors push hard enough and there's any thread of concern, lawyers can make a case. Elon might have threatened to sue, or do all sorts of things, and YT comes up with an excuse for whatever.
Finally - there is state intervention. State actors will ask them to do stuff. Sometimes through process aka FBI requests, sometimes through influence 'for state interests'. Again more on the Type B side.
You may see this kind of activity in trying to stop AfD etc later. German State might make the case that ABC actors are known to promote Nazi propaganda, this is illegal in Germany, you will be fined and banned unless you remove x y and z accounts etc etc.. That could happen for sure, even with dubious legal considerations all the way around.
At this point sociala media has become a television, on twitter I just unfollowed everyone who have't followed back and I keep seeing the same antisemitic, antimuslim, anti-EU, anti-woman, anti-immigrant shit. My SO happens to see very similar posts to the point that I can't show her a funny post because she would have already seen it. There are some different posts of course but the money shot is mostly the same.
They probably show posts based on location and background, so essentially just like Fox, CNN, MSNBC but everyone sees theirs from the same screen with the same agenda pushed from all of them.
I have almost no reason to look at my facebook feed, check it perhaps once every 1-2 weeks in case something important was only posted there (not that this helps as they don't show me all actual friends actual updates). Recent visit was 50% ads, 25% recommended or weirdly boosted content, including a post from Mark Zuckerberg promoting his AI, and a post whose content I forget from the White House (I live in Germany, the last time I even visited the USA was 2018).
Or maybe AfD hasn’t targeted you for other reasons, so you’re not fighting against a marketing team to avoid the videos, only against the “pure” form of the algorithm.
From my experience Youtube simply recommends more of the type of videos that you actually watched. Watch history overpowers basically anything else you do, your subscriptions have little to no influence. A single click on a 'wrong' video, and you'll get tons of similar ones in your recommendations feed for weeks to come, especially when you end up clicking some of the newly recommend videos. It requires purging unwanted topics from the watch history to actually get rid of them, which so far worked very reliable for me.
I find a lot of social media algorithms are "dumb" in that they will see someone share something saying "x sucks" and interpret that as one being interested in "x".
Either that or it's deliberately showing people stuff it knows they will hate to harvest hate scrolling.
Indeed. US tech has been actively conspiring in lying to the American populace about everything in Canada from politics, election results, public opinion in Canada, resources needed by the US from Canada, etc. They're interfering in the affairs of any country that won't bend to their will.
A lot of bots of US origin are propagating false narratives posing as citizens of these countries.
I love how everyone from every political background thinks big tech has it out for them specifically. No, it couldn't be that algorithms are stochastic and random and sometimes ban random people. The tech companies are trying to manipulate everyone, every single side, into some goal only they understand.
Somehow none of the hundreds of thousands of software engineers that have worked there have managed to uncover exactly what this purpose is despite having access to the monorepos and visibility into the recommendation engine pipelines.
On the modern internet, people confuse conspiratorial thinking for well-reasoned thinking. But an idea is not correct just because it is interesting or exciting.
The manipulation is not in the algorithm but in the controls the algo offers, either to the company or to financial friends of the company. It's pretty blatant the way Meta is pushing far right politics everywhere in Europe, pushing pro Israeli propaganda while silencing opposing opinions.
It's not a secret that Meta is selling political preferences on its platform, as they have been for decades. Several Meta employee have blown the whistle about it already.
This is the conspiracy theory thinking GP was referring to. There’s no evidence for any of it, it’s all vibes.
I favorite reels that are pro-Palestinian, and now my feed is packed with anti-Zionist reels. I literally don’t think I’ve ever seen a pro-Israel reel.
I have multiple examples of "neutral" content being invaded by Israeli propaganda, and Facebook even admits they will only show "select comments" and won't allow you to see any other. Even sub comments won't show all responses but only pro Israeli. It's pretty clear that Meta favors these, and it's not just because of external actors trying to influence.
There is evidence here of influence on the Brazilian elections. They were working with Cambridge Analytics to influence British elections.
There has been multiple whistleblowers saying they are offering political favors. There as studies showing they do indeed prefer certain parties.
How long can we keep our heads in the sand? When will it be enough
You can say many bad things about Google, but I think they are still "California liberals" on social issues.
I get AfD content recommendations (lurid, trashy stuff of uhm uncertain truth value) a propos of nothing in the village I grew up in - they are popular there with about 25% in the 2025 election. The region is not even in the east or particularly suffering economically. I don't get these recommendations in Berlin. It seems regional.
The owners of these companies are very much conservative though, not out of any ideology mind you, but because they correctly identify that this is the party that best suits their class interests of fucking over everyone and everything else in order to get richer.
I was careful to say socially and I generally agree with you, but Trump is currently just turning everything into shit that he touches. If you don't directly participate in his grift, you probably lose economically because of him. So I'm not sure how useful it is to back him for economic reasons.
He turns everything to shit, but the it's even more shitty for poorer people. When the rebuilding happens, the rich class will have even more relative power. It's like causing a stock to crash so that you can buy more of it before reversing the crash. (A dump-and-pump?)
To be more precise, capital only seeks to grow its relative power over labor. Making everything shittier is part of it. If you want a clear image of what it is that these people want, look at Russia: a shithole where a few oligarchs hold absolute power, are bound to no laws and lord over a poor, indoctrinated and hopeless populace. Sure, these oligarchs would be richer if Russia was more prosperous, but they don't care about that.
Capital only seeks to grow its relative power over labor. Making everything shittier is part of it.
The exact same can be said of labor. There’s nothing unique to “capital” (ie, rich people) here, it’s just how humans are. By nature, we care more about how big of a slice of the pie we’re getting relative to our neighbors, even if that means we all get a smaller slice than we otherwise would have. That’s exactly what the tragedy of the commons is about.
The miracle of modernity is that we’ve built institutions that incentivize individuals to act in ways that we otherwise wouldn’t, for the greater good. It’s a delicate balance, but capital isn’t unique in its propensity to upset that balance.
I assume you know what you are talking about but some other experts would perhaps say that Russia is a place where power is highly concentrated but wealthy elites - including oligarchs - depend critically on the Kremlin. They run Russia to the extent they go along with the Kremlin. Sure, political dissent faces substantial repression but the population is diverse and should not be reduced to stereotypes.Not everyone can be described as poor, indoctrinated and hopeless, by any means.
Sure, mass censorship by a tech elite captured by a wave of liberal identity politics in california has nothing to do with the right wing cultural backlash.
Being censored from expressing the view that gender is principally a product of sex, or dissenting from state polices of vaccination, or being in revulsion at mass media (liked by mainstream demographics) being hijacked on the alter of fringe "representation". These have had no effect. None.
This hasnt caused everything from the election from a far-right US president to the collapse of the western video games industry, hollywood and the western media ecosystem. A total sucide of western soft and hard power "isn't" something the US has just done in revenge against californian liberalism.
The obliviousness, and arrogance here is, I guess, in keeping with that very same californian liberalism which has "done no wrong" -- other than demanded a world-wide internet echo chambre which reflects only its own values on pain of mass censorship. Values rare even in the US, let alone amongst the whole west, and the 8bn people on the planet.
Well, that's strange. That's not something people in Hollywood are unaware of -- many things killed it, but california liberalism certainly nailed the coffins of the celebrity class
Now "california liberalism" is that manner of virtue-insanity which equates dissent from it own values with fascism -- an era of European mass murder. Having failed to censor, then control, the mass media (incl. public internet), we're now in "insane social persecution" mode again.
Gender is factually, as evidenced via a multitude of highly respected scientific studies conducted by a vast majority of respected experts both medical and psychological, distinct in every way from biological sex.
There is genuinely no room for opinion, disagreement, or dispute on that subject, at all. To disagree is to be, objectively, incorrect.
I can see where you are coming from in a purely politically motivated sense, yes. But the medical and psychological facts do not actually care about politics, and transgender individuals exist regardless of your belief in them.
Language control, and manipulation is definitely a thing in postmodern political struggles, but it's not what's happening exactly here. In the States the social side of politics has been on top for quite some time, so polarization happened on this gradient with terminology (right-left, con-lib) following it.
Also, maybe you shouldn't use that blaming "you" when you don't know who are you answering to? Just a friendly suggestion!
The economic problems hit people, then they (if they are white and / or male) are called bad people with an unfair advantage on top. Seems like not such a great way to get their support tbh.
Even out of political reasoning, they are rigged for engagement and as it turns out fear mongering and hate bring a lot of engagement.
What are people going to watch between a 3 hours in depth debate about the future of the country on topics such as ecology, finance, social security and pension systems VS hundreds of reels about ImMiGrAnT RiOtS in paris?
Why should I believe your claim that AfD content is getting pushed on YouTube? Isn't it more likely that you personally hate AfD and so you find it salient and enraging whenever you see any AfD content at all yourself, regardless of exactly how YouTube's recommendation algorithm works on your account or whether they treat AfD particularly differently than any other political content? Are you actually measuring this?
To be clear I think it's entirely possible that YouTube is adjusting its recommendation algorithm to show AfD content to people more (or perhaps less) than would happen "organically", because AfD is a salient political party in German politics and YouTube knows this. But how do you determine what is the correct amount of AfD content to be recommended to people in a politically-neutral way, that doesn't end up amounting to you arguing that the YouTube algorithm is only fair if it censors political content you personally think is bad?
I think the most charitable explanation for this is that it's because polarizing content (aka ragebait) gets views/plays, which the ranking algorithms directly optimize for.
Also, this isn't a new phenomenon. If you're interested, I'd recommend reading Shoshana Zuboff's 2018 book: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
My impression is, some Bolsonaro favoritism is real, but is it Meta’s fault or a generally-neutral algorithm (e.g. ranking based on upvotes) favoring Bolsonaro because of his supporters (or bots)? If it’s the latter, what should Facebook do?
“End algorithms”? Even a firehouse of newest comment (or most upvoted as suggested) would benefit Bolsonaro if his online support outnumbers opposition. Ban both candidates from the platform, or make every search show them both? That will probably not work; confuse Brazilian citizens why their politicians are being censored (which will influence them because their politician is being attacked by Lula’s court, or even Facebook acknowledges their opponent politician is dangerous); and not end the lawsuits if they continue bringing “evidence” like Meta AI randomly generating Bolsonaro-related numbers.
The most egregious evidence against Meta are suspending Lula’s official accounts. This can also be attributed to a neutral system processing opponents’ mass reports, but has an obvious solution: give every official account immunity from suspension except by the highest level admins, because they’re supposed to only be suspected according to guidelines, and a $trillion company has enough resources to closely monitor high-level official accounts.
But this law may be impossible to comply, without basically shutting down Facebook. The complaints include that Bolsonaro is first in politician search results (someone has to be first), and that asking Meta’s LLM for a random number gives Bolsonaro’s ballot number before Lula’s.
How come? If it is an algorithm, change the algorithm. Newsfeed used to be based on timestamp. Then, lots of weights and statistical analysis went into it to show you what the algorithm thinks will drive most engagement.
What if the algorithms “newest” or “most upvoted” still promote Bolsonaro, because his supporters outnumber opposition? Facebook’s algorithm is more complicated, but that may be the core reason it favors him.
Or they could explicitly promote Lula, but that would be biased towards him…
You say this like it would be a bad thing to shut down Facebook, or at least stop serving Brazil. I think they’d manage to think of solutions if it came to that. But yes, if their final argument is their product can’t comply with the laws of Brazil then it can’t exist in Brazil.
Shutting down Facebook would be excellent, but it would be nice to have better specific justification, which would not apply to almost any site (oh no, what if this comment section has more Bolsonaro comments than Lula ones?)
The justification is that a Brazilian court found it was operating in violation of the laws of Brazil. Thankfully, the justifications don't have to convince you or anyone else on HN. They only have to convince the court.
For reference, Musk tried a similar thing a few years ago, resulting in Twitter being blocked in Brazil, it becoming a punishable crime to use Twitter in Brazil (you could still get there with a VPN but if you were anyone important someone would call the police on you, so they didn't) and Elon complied within days.
Let's take your argument for a moment and apply it to a different industry and see if it makes sense.
In this universe, it's perfectly identical to our current universe other than Meta being a company that makes lawnmowers. They're not the only company that makes lawnmowers, but they're popular.
It turns out though that meta has been making lawnmowers illegally unsafe, but meta's business model that let them outcompete everyone else was cutting corners on safety. If meta made their lawnmowers comply with the legal requirement for safety it'd be an existential threat to them.
Now, I ask you, should Meta be allowed to continue selling illegally unsafe lawnmowers?
A more accurate analogy is: Meta’s lawnmowers are “illegally unsafe” because they statistically get stuck less on Bolsonaro supporters’ grass, which just so happens to statistically have less weeds. It’s a stupid law that could be applied to any lawnmower Brazil’s court selectively enforced it on, so no, it should not apply.
As someone who lives here, I’ve noticed a pattern that keeps happening in every election since social media became a big deal in the race. Shortly before campaigns start, the TSE—Brazil’s electoral court meets with reps from the social media platforms operating in Brazil to talk about the ‘rules of the game,’ algorithms, and so on. By the time the campaigns are underway, the rules are already set and agreements have been signed (literally). Still, there’s constant monitoring of results throughout the campaigns, along with efforts to better understand what goes on inside the platforms’ so-called ‘algorithmic black box.’ The rules they set, combined with the results they see, lead to a kind of ‘fine-tuning.’ You can see this in the fact that just this week the TSE asked for more confirmation and details about the algorithms, plus other explanations that, in principle, shouldn’t even have been necessary. It seems to me that this last-minute pressure is meant to get concessions out of these platforms by threatening them and/or to get key information disclosed to the Brazilian state, which could then use it to its own advantage later on. Idk, just my gut feeling of this.
Things like these happen if a state fails to secure its information space. Giving control over it to foreign entities means providing population wide manipulative power to foreign entities with adversarial intentions.
Every state should have foreign agent laws (NGOs must register and must be transparent over their financials). Every state should have control over their information space (especially educational, social and news media). Russia and China understood, Brazil and Europe did not.
It is not so black white. It is a dilemma. There is great value in freedom of expression. But fake expression with the explicit intention to mislead is not so good. It would be best if the population would be better at distinguishing truth from falsehood. Unfortunately much of the population seems to be at a level close to cattle.
The idea that you can't have a foreign nation control the main channels that the population gets their news from, and that their population spends hours a day of their free time staring at, is black and white. And that's the core.
These are thoughts that occur to me too when a safetyist progressive (for want of a better term other than "woke") suggests shutting down information to prevent people seeing the wrong ideas.
But you must see that it is a genuine conundrum. In a free-for-all information landscape (something which did not exist until yesterday), people need to be able to distinguish good information from bad for democracy to survive.
In fairness I think shutting down “wrong ideas” is just what people do when they think their ideas are prominent and want to protect that.
It’s almost weird the way we talk about free speech in 2026, looking back at the 20th century and the Hayes code, and how staid music and TV were prior to 1985-ish. I’m not
defending the censors you’re talking about here - in fact from the other side I might argue there are a whole bunch of perspectives that made it from academia to the pages of the New York Times that never should have escaped. And I make that argument as someone who studied some of this stuff in college.
Maybe my most unpopular of opinions is that - I don’t know if I agree with censorship persay - but I’m not sure it’s healthy the way we’re all in a deluge of all these perspectives. You could get rid of 90% of content in the world and 90% of people would never notice.
It's true though, these people exist. There's bias in everyone, but it takes a special kind of arrogant to call a large portion of the population "cattle" because they are in disagreement.
That's an interpretation I've already seen in other replies. But that's not the idea.
Just visit the website of the NED and look at the many projects the US government finances around the world to meddle in these countries politically in favor of US interests[1]. Nations have to protect themselves against these foreign influences, otherwise they will be eaten alive.
NGOs are just one tool of exerting political influence in foreign nations.
Much more powerful are proprietary digital services like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. Their algorithms control what information people consume every day. If you are the CIA or the NED, that's the tool you need to exert influence on the thinking of the predominantly younger people in foreign countries (e.g. flush anti-China news into the Facebook feeds of younger users in Myanmar or Thailand).
That's why the US government wanted to move control of TikTok within the US to a domestic organization. They knew what was going on.
EDIT: Just take a look at the NED website about Asia[1]. They don't even hide it: 295 projects in 13 Asian countries with a budget of over 50M$ to promote 'democracy' (i.e. US interest, anti-China propaganda). These countries need to act aggressively against these NGOs, because these NGOs do not act in the interests of the country and it's people.
Careful what you’re applying spatial terms to. “Information space” might sound clever to you, but you’re basically redefining hearts & minds in territorial terms, which is really no different than saying that people are the sovereign territory of their countries. Down that road lies a fork in the road, one path takes you back to serfdom, the other way straight to fascism. Neither is a particularly pleasant place to visit, and once you’re there, leaving is rather difficult.
>Giving control over it to foreign entities means providing population wide manipulative power to foreign entities with adversarial intentions.
Alternatively, this blatant use of any tool available to influence non enemy states is disgusting, and forces everyone to a "everyone loses" scenario. Shifting the focus to an insufficiently defended victim removes the focus from the nature of the aggression.
The risk of voter manipulation is just way to high. This also isn't just about manipulation by US companies, the system they created is just to ab-usable by others, too. To make it worse the more ethical values a person has/upright and honest they are the less likely are to use such means but the more likely they would make a good elected politician for the general population. At the same time humans are just way too easy to manipulate.
(Naturally there is also a case for _any_ personalized ads being a high risk for societies, especially democracies, and in turn the concept if it should be banned. Important here is to note that often just basing ads on the "non ad content" they are displayed alongside with is getting you quite far. So if there even is a need for highly personalized ads can be put in question. Through the topic gets far more complicated with highly personalized non ad content recommendation systems..)
I search about vaza jato then I search for less biased sources of his convictions:
Wasn't Lula convicted in 3 levels up to a federal court called STJ?
And then a single federal court judge who never submitted the case to colleagues, simply declared his judgement void based in technicalities?
And then all the investigation restarted from scratch, but since by law he was too old, his crimes prescribed in half the time and he was never investigated again.
The cherry on the top is that this single judge who declared his convictions null was appointed by the felon's political party.
So about a dozen different judges, in municipal, state and federal levels, analysed his multiple charges and declared him guilty in some of them. Then a single federal court judge appointment by the suspect's political party voided all of them.
If you understand what vaza-jato is about you know these convictions were part of a political project then. Fast forward almost ten years and we have the Master scandal which mensalão pales in comparison, all architected and executed by the far right parties.
You don’t get it. When Biden blathered and fell asleep he was senile. When Trump spews word salad and falls asleep it’s clearly some brilliant strategy.
That’s because Trump sends better primate dominance signals than Biden, therefore everything he does is right. That’s how it works. Just ask the brain stem.
Ask any neurologist near you, and they will readily confirm how Trump exhibits all signs of dementia and mental decline on national TV every single day.
Which is evidence of how extraordinary his actions were in January 2021, and how extraordinarily well the billionaire owners of American media (including Zuck) have managed to retcon it as something else.
The surprise is not that he was kicked off the main social media companies, the surprises are that the wheels of US justice turned so slowly that Trump got a chance to be re-elected rather than life in prison, and likewise that the US electorate went for him.
He was given far more leeway than any user in the history of social media.
The fact that they didn't ban him for so long weighs toward being partial to not banning politicians. Which seems to be the opposite of the point you're trying to make.
And I sort of wonder what point you’re trying to make, because you could take two lessons away -
One, Trump may not have been reelected if meta hadn’t banned him. So maybe it was another case of meta trying to help republicans.
Or, if Trump hadn’t been reelected, maybe the republicans wouldn’t be facing one of the worst midterm routes in history.
But honestly I’m not actually sure the point you’re trying to make. Meta hired a Republican strategist into their c suite since then. Sooo much has happened, there’s a lot of historical context to try to put it in.
Do you really believe this? Everything I hear from self described culture warriors like Musk was the left in the 80’s and 90’s was anti censorship as opposed to the moral majority on the right? You would find yourself in narrow company to say the left is fundamentally pro censorship, particularly in America.
Actually you'd find that almost everyone on the right believes the left is fundamentally pro censorship, along with other "facts", like the left is a hive mind of sheep, or the left is controlled by George Soros.
what purpose does playing dumb even serve? the modern left bears no resemblance to classical liberals. in the modern political discourse, being pro free speech puts you on the far right.
the biohazardous wasteland of bluesky, for example, exists entirely because the specimen inhabiting it object to twitter under new management reversing the policy of suppressing wrongthink.
Which far right are you talking about? The lefts version of the far right where everyone to the right of Bernie sanders is Hitler? Or like Joel Webbon / Doug Wilson women shouldn’t vote far right? Who is this anti-free speech moderate right you describe?
Elon describes himself as moderate so is he one of these folks that doesn’t believe in free speech? He would say he stayed in the center and democrats moved left. What speech is this moderate right censoring?
We have tried applying Brazilian laws to these companies and they have run to the US president to transform that into a diplomatic issue. We should have domestic social platforms that actually abide by Brazilian laws faster and without such issues. This has become, not just for Brasil, a huge issue. They are extensions of the US soft power and the companies and the government are using it to make what they want to happen, happen.
One think I'm wondering is how much are the various searches AI invocation etc. personalized, and how much could this turn into a "self fulfilling prophecy" in due to you _or people close to you(1)_ checking if the search is biased the personalization will make it biased. (Assuming this is accidentally, at least from Metas site.)
(1): Might be worth pointing out here that Meta has a long history of basing personalization not just on what you do but what people "close to you" do. E.g. if Meta knows you are in the same location (e.g. same WiFi, not sure if they use that today) and then shortly after the other person searches for idk. air purifiers the chance of you getting air purifier ads is largely increased.
If I'm not mistaken it's much less than that. I remember reading it was R$100k, so ~$20k. Don't have the time to look further now, but this[13] story says at least one of the fines is R$50k(~$10k) per day.
I know 5 Brazilian people in the US and they are all voting for Bolsonaro. Apparently the Lula dude has been in power for 12 years (not in a row). No wonder they want him gone.
I know 30 or more in the US that are all voting Lula. It usually mirrors local US politics demographics in my experience. In a red state you're likely to meet right-leaning Brazilians. In a blue state, left-leaning.
Bolsonaro voters see the US as some kind of capitalist heaven, where they can live out their dreams of becoming rich and powerful without regulations. That is not a surprise. Brazilian expats majorly vote left in the rest of the world.
Of note, this Bolsonaro is the son of the former president, with zero political plans or credentials; his only claim is the name itself and what it represents. I find the idea of a family lineage in government, much, much worse.
Lula was voted in to power, Brazil is still a strong democracy despite the direction it’s going. It is a shame that another viable opposition candidate could not be produced as I’m not fond of having 80+ year olds in that seat, but still better than the alternative.
I think most Brazilian, as other Latin American, voters would rather be a bit more like the US and less like what the left has delivered to them in the past decades.
Well, I strongly disagree, especially if we are talking about the US in the last decade.
Bolsonaro’s government has zero proposals for anything that will lead the country in that direction anyway, and did very little in the four years they had. Some new, fresh leadership is urgently needed, hopefully in 2030 if there’s still elections.
The impression I have is that many Brazilian voters want their version of the American Dream — yet don’t realize that Brazilian society is much different from the American one and that Brazil won’t ever replicate the success of the US, regardless of a government’s policies.
Get Zuckerberg (and whoever else you want) to come to Brazil and then arrest them at the airport when they get off the plane. If you have actual case that is SOP. Difficulty = having an actual case
That would of course incur instant retaliatory tariffs. And the truth is that near all politicians just want to refrain from rocking the boat, hold on to power, and have a nice cushy retirement. Enacting such policies which are good for the people in the long term yet incur the wrath of the US, do the opposite for those goals.
Isn't turning money into influence over people"s behavior more or less their core business model. The company shouldn't be allowed to exist, buy since they are, well of course they're going to keep doing what they're made to do.
Realistically the job of removing artificial bias from social media platforms has become an impossible job, not because the companies governing them are nefarious but because there are such a vast number of entities attempting to create such influence. I don’t envy whoever is being tasked with solving that problem.
It's literally happening in a new way, for one. Also, the alternative to reporting this story is not reporting this story, which might lead us to the impression that interference in South American elections had ended.
We forget this but hard right content is still highly promoted on X, especially related to white supremacy and anti-immigrant, and it is also protected from content violations.
> And hard left content is promoted everywhere else. What’s the point?
I guess it depends on what you consider to be "hard left".
If you consider anything to the left of Elon Musk's anti-immigrant, pro-White positions, unrestrained capitalism for him (although he is pro-tariffs on foreign EVs), to be "hard left", then yes, it is pretty prevalent, but I would argue that is actually representative of reality.
I have a feeling the problem isn’t that malicious unfortunately.
Right-wing folks are driven by social media since ~2016. Their content is emotional, aggressive and naturally conducive to more engagement. It’s what their base feeds on. So a lot of the situations described here are just standard ranking algorithms doing their job.
But that begs the question: is the existence of these platforms that amplify divisive and inflammatory content the problem itself? I vote yes. The power of reaching a wide audience should not be handed off without any cross-checks.
Could be. Another simple explanation is that there is a lot of bot activity messing with the algorithm.
I'm relatively sure I see bot activity on public facebook groups where I live in a blue county in a blue state and see hundreds of vitriolic angry comments that aren't aligned with voters current frustrations (i.e. economy)
I couldn't agree more, in the past TV, newspapers and radio were paid by a specific party to flood the citizens with their own truth without any algorithm. Currently, there aren't a simple way to control information, the ask here is to manipulate the algorithm in favor of something which could later facilitate other sides too.
I am Brazilian, and that is not true. They are simply targets of hatred on social media, and their communication is inefficient.
This is what you would expect from a party that has been in power for 20 years; they only care about winning at any cost.
Surprise: the party’s over.
It's interesting times where American Billionaires are deciding the politics in USA, South America and Europe.
I am sure that everyone involved must be feeling invincible but this is how you build resentment that will last and in most cases result in conflicts or regulations. Probably Musk, Zuckerberg and Thiel will be fine but they will destroy the prospects of the upcoming libertarians and cement the Chinese dominance as they don't have a problem of unruly billionaires and the problem of someone getting rich by doing one thing getting the right to do decide on everything and screw it up for everyone. Sad, I really don't want to live in a China-style political system.
You can resent them all you like; they don’t care as long as nothing is done to them, and nothing is being done. Resentment is worthless without action.
Resentment isn't worthless, the current political climate is a result of overshoot of a resentment towards some liberal policies. The next cycle will overshoot too.
The difference is that US Billionaires are doing it without being elected or officially assuming power to do so. In Europe it is important to keep it official as you can just burn their palaces and run them through the guillotine, which even feels wrong saying it in open on US based forum but that's how it has been since many many generations. Europe has seen so many January 6th over they years.
You know how they say that USA is a very new country and that even some pub in Europe can have longer history? Well, that's true but it doesn't mean that European countries have centuries of continued administration, most are a few decades old as a result of revolution or a war.
Europe is a very violent place for politicians, politicians being oversees and untouchable is a very new phenomenon.
Literally right now France is adopting the policy normally seen in fascist countries, of blocking all social media whenever protesters threaten to actually achieve results.
This… is how it has been for over a century, at this point - with reference to American billionaires specifically. Much of the shape of the modern world is the outcome of political influence by American financial giants, from pre-war industrial staging to post-war outright restructuring of global financial systems to ensure capital flows were favourable to the U.S. - I mean, for God’s sake, Bretton Woods, lend lease, the U.K. aerospace and nuclear programmes.
Strip it back to just billionaires, or their equivalent over time, and thus it always was.
People talk about the “new world order” as though this is some novel concept - but you can saunter back in time past the east India company, the bourbons, the holy Roman emperors, Rome, Greece, Sumeria, and see the same pattern played out throughout history. True power sits with wealth - an impoverished ruler relies on others for his means, and has no power of his own.
The wealthy, those with power, have always decided for the rest, have always had outsized influence, as long as there have been societies with the concept of “mine” and “yours”.
There is some phrase (it was actually on my sons vocab study materials) for a mental disorder where when you become emotionally attached to a conspiracy you begin to see it everywhere.
I am a brazilian. I don't vote for Bolsonaro (neither for Lula).
But this is a load of bullshit that come from Partisan groups.
Bolsonaro voters are a majority on Brazilian social networks. Some of their congressional candidates are young, created their political careers on social networks and have millions of followers. Compared to Lula, Bolsonaro voters are younger, lower or mid middle class and male. Lula has an advantage among the poor and in the rich boomer and generation-x cohorts, with an absolute majority amongst civil service workers, including the judiciary.
It is kind of natural that you'll see more internet content related to Flavio Bolsonaro. To make their presence the same, Meta would need to arbitrarily throttle one or the other side up or down.
The Supreme Federal Court in Brazil has been notorious for censorship. The New York Times has found that it has ordered 223 account-blocking orders since 2020.
35 per year isn't that many, all things considered. I think the USA government blocks more, but not through their supreme court. Whose accounts were blocked, and for what reasons?
Everything is biased. There is no view from nowhere. What you perceive as bias-free is just a reflection of your own bias.
With that in mind, why shouldn't it be in favor of the locals and reflect the values of its own society instead of some tech bros with imperialist ambitions?
> With that in mind, why shouldn't it be in favor of the locals and reflect the values of its own society instead of some tech bros with imperialist ambitions?
The article is discussing a candidate who got the majority of the vote in the 10/4 election. Where did you get the idea that this content doesn't "reflect the values of its own society"?
People want to deflect and blame foreign powers for why their platforms are failing among the electorate. The argument is essentially that they are so right and correct that any deviation from their values could only have occurred due to Bad Guy external intervention, which conveniently justifies why we need mass censorship.
Just do a better job convincing people you're right. Censorship will just mask social problems until the outbreak is even worse.
Playing obvious problems of Brazil‘s judiciary system down like that are clear red flags for somebody not for 1 sec contemplating how he would react if the political camps would be reversed in this situation. It is their sovereignty if the censorship happens on speech you don’t like
Let's face it: Tech CEOs have aligned with fascists (techno-fascism) because - and that's a general rule throughout history (see pre-WWII industrial titans aligned with Nazi-leaders): Industry leaders of large corporations and authoritarians share the same goal : ultimate control and power over others.
I think tech ceos
follow one simple variable: $CURRENT_POLITICAL_POWER
have lefties in power for the next of the decade and you'll see how datacenters become all about clean energy investment, climate change starts to matter, "don't be evil" starts to take shape
Exactly! When it comes to liberal movements, it's a 'blue outfit that they were', but when they support authoritarians , it's much closer to their true colors since the way they came into private power and hold it shares the same mindset (unequal distribution of power versus more equal flat distribution).
How does internet censorship 2016-2024 fit into your model?
It’s more simple than that. Industry tends to align with government because they have power and they want that power to be benefit them. If you’re a large company it would be stupid not to try to maintain that relationship.
Yes, I think we actually agree, and maybe I should have been clearer. Of course industry leaders always try to play nicely, e.g. if liberal/democratic party is in power, they will 'wear their liberal outfit'.
Yet, from a pure intrinsic values perspective, people that are power-seeking are alike in industry and politics, and when they support an authoritarian state/movement instead of a democratic one, it shows their true intentions.
What might give for some pause, if you listen carefully to the more "alt right" voices, Trump is the "moderate" or even "liberal" by their standards, by their own words.
I give up!! Finally! The discourse is pointless here. How many of the productive years of my life have I spent on forums like these? I don't know if I am conversing with people, bots, or antihumanist misanthropes. People trust Meta these days, AYFK? I am going to sign-off and touch some grass.
Dirty b@stards the lot of them, it's gone from "well, we better tow the line to protect our market position", to full throated support of outright fascism.
At a point on time, there should be more structured and unbiased content in social media before elections in democratic countries to help people make their decisions.
This should be regulated to avoid interference from anyone.
The biggest problem now is that the billionaires behind social media nowadays will push for a liberal / right wing agenda in the west for their own interests.
Basically with corruption you can control what democracies do. We see this with the orange mafia in charge of the USA right now - even though sometimes it also yields entertainment, indirectly:
"The most accomplished masterpiece of contemporary capitalism is neither the iPhone, nor the unicorn startup, nor even the visionary billionaire.
No.
Its flagship product, its anthropological jewel, its greatest achievement, is the right-wing poor person. A genuine feat of social engineering: materially deprived, yet rich in convictions that run counter to their own interests.
They have been carefully molded. They have been taught that their problems always come from below or from next door — the immigrant, the welfare recipient, the civil servant, the unemployed — never from above.
They have been taught to hate taxes while surviving thanks to public services. To defend heirs to fortunes while having nothing to pass on themselves. To applaud those who crush them, as long as they speak loudly and promise law and order.
The right-wing poor person is a fascinating creature. They vote against their own interests with fervor, convinced that one day, perhaps, they too will find themselves on the right side of the fence.
They mistake brutality for courage, authoritarianism for protection, injustice for merit. They are sold fear in a ready-made package, identity at bargain prices, and anger in bulk on a monthly subscription.
At the dawn of this new world, the monsters do not emerge from the margins: they rise from the ballot boxes, television studios, and simplistic slogans.
They thrive on manufactured misery and sabotaged political awareness.
Capitalism has not merely produced poverty; it has achieved something far worse: it has made the poor docile, obedient, spiteful, and grateful.
Very well put. I would like to add a less-eloquent epilogue to the story.
This curious animal was laid bare by the discovery that we are hackable by nature, and hacked by behaviour science. Though it took a few decades to get going, the understanding of how to influence motivation and decision-making is now very mature.
In order to arrive at this understanding, you need data, and lots of it. The social media platforms have performed the function of data aggregators and testing grounds for algorithmic control. But it was not the tech companies who came up with plans, only the tools to put them into practice.
The culprits, though they operate in shade, are generally non-partisan and understand that divide-and-conquer has always been an effective strategy. These people sometimes work in intelligence bureaus, but not always. They are, however, always known to those agencies. After all, you do not need to know you are an asset to be an asset.
The algorithms, necessarily kept as protected IP, are statistical engines that profile and predict, producing probabilistic outcomes and estimates. Before LLMs, one might have argued "but how can probabilistic algos really produce something meaningful?", now I would think people might have a different take, if they could see the layers and weights.
An emperor used to need an army, and this is what replaces it for non-violent insurrection and domestic control. Many will even state their ambitions publicly, and sometimes (though less frequently these days) their procedure. What they are doing is not strictly illegal, because the law gives "sovereignty" to a person's choices, without recognition that their choices might not be their own. Libertarianism has played right into their hands, in this sense.
A masterpiece, not only of conception, but also social engineering, with a technological endoskeleton built on the aggregated data we all willingly give them. All information feeds the machine, just as every financial transaction cements the central bank's authority.
Sleeping giants is one of the most shadiest anti-democratic organizations that, once you grasp what they are actually doing, there’s literally nothing else left to do for voters than what you described. Its subversive unethical manipulation (there are offshoots in Europe as well) is a reason for me to go scorched earth and auto-inverse: anybody that’s not distancing himself from them is unelectable, anybody who promises to put them on a chopping block gets my vote.
> This is exactly the kind of stupidity that helps people like Trump reelected.
You mean when people admittedly have no knowledge of a subject but still speak authoritatively about it, viscerally criticising one of the sides and even suggesting fowl play, instead of taking care to be humble and understand the context before speaking or making accusations?
I agree, that is very much the kind of attitude that got us into the current situation.
These billionaire ghouls need to answer for their many attempts on our Republics. Democracy can't survive when its most powerful members are working against it. We have to take them done ASAP, unless we want an encore of the 1940s.
Capital naturally compounds, and financial resources naturally seek political influence, so to combat the root of all evil is simply to cap individual's wealth versus society so they can't rig the game in their favor.
“The average IQ of the bottom third (lowest 33.33%) of the population is approximately - 83.6 - on a standard IQ scale (mean of 100 and standard deviation of 15).” - MM
The real question is do idiots rolling 83.6 iq have the right to self determination no matter the cost to everyone else? Or should the more intelligent reading club context clues able take over management for the good of all?
My confidence in the validity of their claims tanked right about here.
I'm all for regulating transparency into social media algorithms. Meta most certainly is compromised by foreign actors. But can we choose less stupid hills to die on than numerology and GIFs? Headline is not remotely supported by the evidence.
https://www.reddit.com/r/brasil/comments/1x965on/eu_n%C3%A3o...
What would be useful here is leaking the system prompt for the Meta AI inside WhatsApp
- Meta has suspended Lula's facebook account a week from the election day, and many advertising instagram and facebook accounts associated with his campaign have been consistently suspended and then reactivated with days of delay (this is a huge loss in the context of a political campaign)
- The reach of his opponents is being inflated to unexplainable proportions while people are having trouble finding Lula's profile by searching for... lula. And then you got people like Nikolas Ferreira, whose videos consistently reach several times his follower numbers and reach several times more views, likes, shares, etc than people like Kim Kardashian, Beyoncé, Messi, etc. He's a Brazilian politician who speaks Portuguese and talks about strictly Brazilian subjects. He recently posted a MUTED video that reached 60 million views in hours.
- Lula's big WhatsApp channel for coordinating online campaign actions with voters kept getting suspended over and over
- There are reports from Brazilian META EMPLOYEES talking about the unresponsiveness of the internal American team to solve reports they made regarding Lula's platform issues
There are so many problems I can't even list them all here without making it a wall of text. It's just too obvious.
This used to be an under the hood and frowned upon type of maneuver, but now it is much more rampant and far reaching thanks to AI
It also doesn't help that it's easy to lump 'the left' with 'everything I don't like re social issues' because the institutional left is basically neoliberals who prefer to talk social politics to avoid talking about economics.
As for the evidence, it has been well documented beyond the parent comment's silly examples and it includes shadowbanning popular profiles with certain opinions.
I guarantee your political opponents also think Meta is trying to shadow ban then.
That sarcastic comment justifies all Putin's laws about "foreign agents", "undesirable organizations", "extremist organizations" and such.
So Putin can justify anything with words - what they say doesnt really matter or reflect reality. The actions and outcomes matter.
A: social media is a mind control tool that can be used for targeted political manipulation, as shown by the cambridge analytica scandal and plenty of other research.
B: the US is a hostile foreign power in relation to South America, as proven by its continuous threats, embargoes, tariff wars, coups and more recently the unashamed declaration of a "Donroe doctrine"
?
If the provider can tamper with the algorithm to filter out information that goes against its political preferences, how is that ineffective or not targeted political manipulation? The idea of democracy presumes that the public can be well informed in order to take decisions.
Hint: it is not the same beliefs plus anger. Anger is only a proxy, it isn't polarization itself.
This is something that has been measured and its growth has correlated with deployment of algorithmic social media in country after country (where it not all deploy at the same time).
That person was then politely told to rtfa and given more substance than they thought was in there.
And what did you do?
That’s quite ironic.
It’s disappointing to see it upvoted to the top of the thread. Seems many people are looking to dismiss the issue rather than fully consider it.
When in fact, it comes after
> The petition describes a GIF search on WhatsApp for the word “brasil.” The first result was an image of Flávio Bolsonaro. It showed his ticket number and identified his running mate.
> According to the records sent to the court, the same result appeared on three separate accounts. The groups use this to ask whether its top position comes from systematic ranking criteria.
> A similar check on Instagram also showed images of the senator among the first results. Users who searched for “brasil” found three images of Flávio Bolsonaro in the top positions
> On WhatsApp, a GIF search for the word “ladrão” (thief) returned a caricature of the president in a striped uniform, a reference to prison dress. Another result carried the message “Supporting the Workers’ Party is a mental illness.”
> On Instagram, a search for the same word showed a GIF reading “Vote 13.” That is the Workers’ Party election number, tied to Lula’s candidacy.
And you could also think that the authors would be for censorship and completely crazy, when in fact:
> They are not claiming that they have proven bias in Meta, choosing instead to posit the question to the Superior Electoral Court.
That's all ignoring the fact that Trump and the US openly support Bolsonora, who is in jail for attempting a coup after losing the election.
And Brazil, AFAIK, was a military dictatorship until, what, 40 years ago? To my knowledge, without a "hard cut" that would have investigated this part of the country's history.
I am not Brazilian, who knows, I can't tell whether Lula is corrupt, or anything, what I have not seen is proof of the election fraud claims put forward by Bolsonaro sr.?
Not irrelevant since his son of course rehabilitates him and wants to "correct the public record".
And also, imprisoning him of course was a strong move that also needs justification.
But it would be cool to limit political content on platforms with non-audited, non-public and intransparent engagement algorithms.
Just as it would be good to stop intransparent flow of big money into politics.
The latter is a sentiment that Trump catered to when he became president for the first time. Of course, only in a twisted, cynical way: "the system is broken, so I alone can fix it".
Regardless of anyone's political affiliation: Meta has a long history of not giving a shit whether their engagement algorithms at best... "damage" democratic processes, so I don't see any reason to be smug about it.
As for WhatsApp GIF searches. Searches for "brasil" shows one candidate as the first person after GIFs of the flag. Search results before you have started typing anything shows the other candidate.
You can search for any negative term that one side commonly uses against the other, and WhatsApp will suggest GIFs of the person. Do you understand that millions of normal people send these GIFs to each other in WhatsApp groups and private messages? Of course they're going to turn up in top suggested.
Do an image search on Google for a common derogatory term of any (in)famous politician you know of and look at the results.
Of course, it could be organic. I shortened my text a bit so it's not explicitly mentioned anymore, but I still wrote about "engagement algorithms".
It doesn't need to be a political influence dial at Meta's HQ.
Regardless of whether there is intentional influence by the platform, or the platform intransparently favors other actors who in turn use the platform, it's a problem. Even when the platforms just do it for simple financial reasons or political opportunism.
On HN, people are usually quick to lament to damaging effects of engagement optimization on public discourse.
I thought mentioning that I cannot judge whether Lula is a corrupt president (I assume that's what's meant by "criminal") is enough to make clear that I am not arguing for silencing opinions.
What I would like to see is addressing Social Media's role in weaponizing outrage advertisement using slander, and also, platforms getting away with not making transparent how they weight political advertisement in elections.
In my opinion, electoral advertisement should be regulated, and it is regulated, in many countries. This does not prevent you from sending memes on WhatsApp, it might prevent a platform from suggesting political memes to you when you did not explicitly seek out partisan content.
Regarding the rest:
Lula has been imprisoned because of corruption, Bolsonaro has been imprisoned because of his coup attempt.
Seems hard to argue about that in one-sided way, and I'm not gonna make any explicit stance here, I am not from Brazil.
It seems impossible to assess whether one of the two is in fact not guilty of the crimes they were charged for. What I did notice though were the election fraud claims, and consensus seemed to be that they are false. The coup attempt also seems to be undisputed.
The EU has sought out trade deals with Brazil, which was more easily possible with Lula, AFAIK.
I'm not gonna defend everything (sry, not "anything") the EU does here either.
My point was how the public deals with election fraud claims and coups.
And it does seem strange to normalize those openly, even 5 years after the capitol storm.
---
But, to be clear: I am not interested in advocating for Lula in Brazil, that's a Brazil problem and I don't know enough to have an opinion on this. Maybe a gut feeling, but it's easy to get rid of that by reading from the other side (e.g. about corruption, crime rates etc).
That was hopefully not something I said in my initial comment either, because viewing politics as a football match is not healthy, and Germany has its own problems which are more relevant to me - and yet, German politics would still not be something I want to comment about extensively here.
I only wanted to comment on the role of Social Media in political elections. The fact that coup attempts are now so openly normalized in many countries considered democratic (US, Turkey, Brazil)... might seem odd to me, but that's more of an "illusion of stability" thing I guess.
It's actually not, a cursory understanding of Brazilian politics is all that's needed to understand this in context. Lula was essentially "acquitted" for his crimes, as it was proved after he served a few years in prison that the charges were brought under false pretenses by partisan operators. (https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/04/brazil-crimi...)
It was also quite convenient for liberals and the right wing at the time to jail Lula, as he was at the apex of his popularity and was making life hard for the Brazilian bourgeoisie. Bolsonarism can essentially be read as a revolt of the Brazilian elite against Lula's economic policies which stepped on the toes of a few powerful sectors of the Brazilian capitalist class.
Lula has a long history of successfully managing capitalism as a socialist. Brazilian politics is extremely corrupt and pay-to-play, and the Bolsonaros are essentially a crime family in their own right. Flavio, the son running for president, has been convicted of embezzlement when he was a state congressman and is literally under investigation right now for money laundering and bank fraud.
your own country flipped its shit and said that Tiktok was CCP propaganda less than a year ago and tried to ban it, so it seems like foreign influence on your politics does seem to be a bad thing.
The irony and hypocrisy are hilarious.
When faced between the choice of "genocide" or "no genocide", do you also pick "a little genocide is fine", or has the market already priced it in so you can stop thinking about it ?
I'll spell my point out, just so it's clear to you: the idea that we should imprison someone for creating an online space where people offer vapid incendiary takes and then argue about them is itself a vapid incendiary take. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything about the corrosive influence of social media, that we shouldn't have a different regulatory or policy environment with respect to these things, but "throw them all in jail!" is exactly the kind of stupid take that you're railing against them for encouraging.
It's one thing to discard it as "numerology and gifs" but it's another to willfully disrupt legal elections in a soverign country.
Or is a decade a really long time and we've all forgotten about Cambridge Analytica?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica
Especially if they're the same exact people who whine at the top of their lungs that our elections are the subject of foreign interference (even when it isn't). If one does a thing to someone else, they have zero leg to stand on when they think it's being done to them (even when it's not). Some of our first childhood lessons are "Lying is bad" and "Two wrongs don't make a right". Beyond ridiculous that the (supposedly adult) people in charge of our nation and corporations aren't able to handle lessons that most of the rest of us learn and understand as tiny children.
Perhaps in Brazil it’s illegal for political messages go viral on social media at all? Then I could see how there’s an issue here. But that isn’t my understanding.
CA put out quizzes and in that era of Facebook the average user absolutely did not think filling in a quiz meant giving some organisation your data.
People probably didn't think about them being run by third parties at all - it was just a fun thing to fill in shared by friends and family.
The average person who did understand these things, before the mid 2010s, was very passionate about open standards. The zeitgeist at the time was that you should be able to do anything through the API that you can do through the official app; it wasn’t until 2015 (https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/28/facebook-api-shut-down/) that Facebook turned off their official API for letting third parties dig through your friends’ entire profiles. If Facebook had announced in 2017 that they’re turning off API access to the timeline, which they ended up doing as part of the Cambridge Analytica response, people would have been very frustrated and would not have believed that it was a privacy-first measure.
Reinforcement feedback loops, etc
If this is influencing your votes your democracy is already lost.
The public can fight Facebook in the same way an infant can fight Muhammad Ali.
I'm not sure i want to live in that world.
That is what seems to be happening here.
How is meta compromised by foreign actors? And who are the foreign actors?
The numerology is weak evidence on its own, but it is decidedly odd in connection with the other examples. If a pattern persists in seemingly irrelevant areas and favours one candidate in a political race then the call for clarification is valid.
Or at least a serious enough issue for a court to order Meta to desist while the legal trial is ongoing.
The truth doesn't matter, what matters is getting more government money, and more regulation to get more financing, etc
NGOs are big business, and be assured, they don't care about fairness one bit more than Meta
And you can always claim it's biased towards one side. So, which one is which then?
Algorithmic transparency is a deeply unprofitable and difficult task, with people from all sides screeching at you thinking you're biased against them. Governments obviously shouldn't be involved (unless you're a fan of state-controlled media), and so the only people that will take this on are people that care enough about the impact of social media on society to give up careers in the private sector.
If you care so much, you can always join one of these NGOs! You won't. I guarantee you they are not as biased as you think they are, and they certainly don't hold a "shadow ban this guy" hammer.
"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
I believe though it is an old phenomenom that if (given the default context) you ask a random number, it will more often than not give numbers from a very small set.
I just used a "Temporary chat" with ChatGPT twice to "Give a random number" and it gave 42 both times (this shuold be rather understandable why it ended up with this). Then I asked "Give a random number in 1-10" twice and it responded with 7 for both (and this too is an old "magic number").
btw today's models run random.randint() by default unless you prohibit python by choosing one of the dumb models, disable thinking, disable tool calls, etc.
We are talking about 2 trials, right? Or did they do more repetitions?
What would be the "correct" numbers to get from 2 trials that show an even distribution?
Big tech is so rigged (intensional or not), the question if it is socially net negative has become rhetorical.
There is a national broadcast apparatus in Germany, directly funded by the people in form of mandatory household monthly contributions. It definitely needs improvements and is far from ideal but it doesn’t work at behest of government (budget pressures, etc.). It was designed to resist the top down pressure from the admins (lessons learned from what Nazis did). AfD along with some private news networks backed by the likes of Telekom are really pushing to abolish it.
How could that be made to happen? Should EU somehow move to federated (let’s say per country) instances of Mastodon or something? Or one big platform? How would regular folks get used to it? And how could those initiatives be prevented from falling into irrelevance when network effects are at play?
I agree with the idea, it’s just that there’s the usual hurdles there aren’t necessarily good answers for that I know of.
I realize these are heavy handed approaches - but shows what can get done.
Perhaps smaller scale things can work as well: Ie supporting alternatives when they occur - ie tiktok back when it was kinda Chinese - use the China threat to enforce objective standards - rather than just following the us stance.
Use existing monopoly legislation.
All creating an open market place for social media that allows for newcomers and local alternatives rather than the single monopoly that is the situation now.
They are the minimum.
And StudiVZ, which I never liked, made that slowly die out. Facebook came later.
I would very much prefer to still be part of local social media (where you could resolve issues with the admin directly), but federated to other networks.
We had video streaming sites like youtube. We had cellphone manufacturers. We had chat applications.
But the conditions for these companies were better outside of Europe. Now we're stuck with everything not made in Europe. (South Korea is more relevant in consumer tech than the EU.)
European governments still haven't swapped off MS.
Could a European competitor have even existed when even youtube struggled with the GEMA lawsuit for over half a decade? And that by the end of it they still had to pay?
It might work, but it also might bloat the whole operation so much that the social network becomes non-functional.
Amazon/AWS tried this route with their "sovereign cloud" which still ends up being beholden exactly the same way as "real AWS", so what's even the point? Who is even falling for these "tricks"?
Both the US and the EU are already doing this exact thing with cars, basically.
https://www.blast-info.fr/articles/2026/information-exclusiv...
But the reason is not sovereignty - it's to make sure people can't receive communications not approved by the (fascist*) French government.
* Please do not mince words or make excuses. We know they are fascist because they're shooting the population in the streets and turning off the internet, just like bad countries do. So far this is isomorphic to the Arab Spring.
B-but the EU can't do that!
It absolutely can. Just like it can push Chat Control down everyone's throats even though if you held a referendum on it it would be voted down (no, most Jacques the plumbers on the street don't want mass surveillance even if it's "against crime").
They have, as the joke goes, more money than God and influence all over the world. They are beholden to no one. They have the resources to fight in court against decisions they don’t believe in, and all the lobbying they need to shape established laws.
They choose their actions, and their actions are their own. Every single dollar they donate to the current president but not the previous one is an admission of their allegiance and (lack of) morals.
Having principles and standing for them costs money, and these societal parasites subsist on money and influence. Make no mistake, they will sell their own mother to further their goals, but they don’t have to while they can keep selling everyone else’s.
The problem is that the same is true for many politicians. They do a lot of lobbying in Europe too.
The administration can take over them with the snap of a finger if they so desire. They have absolutely no power.
The best example of that is the BBC suit, where the only reason it's happening is because the US doesn't have any control over the entity because it's British.
No, no they cannot. They sure want you to believe that, though, and the longer that fantasy is left unchecked, the more power it gets. The current administration is not omnipotent, and that is exemplified by the times it was pushed back (not by the bootlicker CEOs at major US tech companies, obviously).
Like John Oliver said, use the four key words that make weak bullies go away: “fuck you, make me”.
https://youtu.be/ohPToBog_-g?t=1610
That’s not the argument. Unfortunately, reading comprehension and engaging in good faith continues to decline rapidly on HN.
Not being beholden to someone does not mean you have power over them. For example: you are not beholden to me and thus don’t have to do anything I say; but that doesn’t mean I have to do anything you say either, I’m not beholden to you.
I look for stuff I need on a search engine, watch the video I need only (mostly tutorials) and then leave. I never follow YouTube recommendations anymore - that’s how it keeps you hooked and feeds you what they want you to watch. (It’s also nonsensical and blatantly obvious these days - I went in to watch a video on how to tie a bow tie, why is there a recommendation on “Bolsonaro has Lula shaking in his pants, find out why??”
We banned YouTube for casual entertainment at home years ago - one of the best decisions we ever made, other than the toxic content pushing, it’s also so ad-infested it’s totally worthless anyway.
I remember when YouTube was “better than tv! Content on demand, no ads!”. Those days are long gone
AfD is controversial - it's click bait - the algorithm is feeding 'action' - that's the problem.
There is very little chance that Meta is doing algorithmic political adjustments at the behest of Zuck.
It's conspiracy theory without a shred of evidence.
As much as Zuck is a maligned actor, that's not how these things work thee.
X - yes, that could happen there, Meta and Google are different kinds of organizations.
Meta is feeding you click bait without bother.
YouTube is feeding you clickbait wit some concern, especially for advertisers.
X is almost entirely feeding you clickbait, and very aggressively amplifying clickbait voices, and heavily promoting those voices Elon wants promoted.
None of them are making up and promoting magical weird memes.
Edit: I should add, the political interference will directly happen but in a censorial way. If they can do something under the cover of 'upsets advertisers' - they will do that
YouTube wouldn't take ads for the film attacking Elon. I this is one of those Type B kinds of influences, not amplifying or making clickbait but a form of narrative censorship. But - they will do it within the limits and constraints of their own system. They are not sneaking into the lab and magically adjusting the algo. They are finding corporate/legal justification and doing it within that framework. If investors push hard enough and there's any thread of concern, lawyers can make a case. Elon might have threatened to sue, or do all sorts of things, and YT comes up with an excuse for whatever.
Finally - there is state intervention. State actors will ask them to do stuff. Sometimes through process aka FBI requests, sometimes through influence 'for state interests'. Again more on the Type B side.
You may see this kind of activity in trying to stop AfD etc later. German State might make the case that ABC actors are known to promote Nazi propaganda, this is illegal in Germany, you will be fined and banned unless you remove x y and z accounts etc etc.. That could happen for sure, even with dubious legal considerations all the way around.
They probably show posts based on location and background, so essentially just like Fox, CNN, MSNBC but everyone sees theirs from the same screen with the same agenda pushed from all of them.
I have almost no reason to look at my facebook feed, check it perhaps once every 1-2 weeks in case something important was only posted there (not that this helps as they don't show me all actual friends actual updates). Recent visit was 50% ads, 25% recommended or weirdly boosted content, including a post from Mark Zuckerberg promoting his AI, and a post whose content I forget from the White House (I live in Germany, the last time I even visited the USA was 2018).
You might simply have been engaging with related content unknowingly, even if it's only one critical of them.
Either that or it's deliberately showing people stuff it knows they will hate to harvest hate scrolling.
A lot of bots of US origin are propagating false narratives posing as citizens of these countries.
Somehow none of the hundreds of thousands of software engineers that have worked there have managed to uncover exactly what this purpose is despite having access to the monorepos and visibility into the recommendation engine pipelines.
On the modern internet, people confuse conspiratorial thinking for well-reasoned thinking. But an idea is not correct just because it is interesting or exciting.
It's not a secret that Meta is selling political preferences on its platform, as they have been for decades. Several Meta employee have blown the whistle about it already.
I favorite reels that are pro-Palestinian, and now my feed is packed with anti-Zionist reels. I literally don’t think I’ve ever seen a pro-Israel reel.
There is evidence here of influence on the Brazilian elections. They were working with Cambridge Analytics to influence British elections.
There has been multiple whistleblowers saying they are offering political favors. There as studies showing they do indeed prefer certain parties.
How long can we keep our heads in the sand? When will it be enough
I get AfD content recommendations (lurid, trashy stuff of uhm uncertain truth value) a propos of nothing in the village I grew up in - they are popular there with about 25% in the 2025 election. The region is not even in the east or particularly suffering economically. I don't get these recommendations in Berlin. It seems regional.
If you don't then actions might be taken against you see CBS and other media having to pay.
DoJ choosing who to look at.
The exact same can be said of labor. There’s nothing unique to “capital” (ie, rich people) here, it’s just how humans are. By nature, we care more about how big of a slice of the pie we’re getting relative to our neighbors, even if that means we all get a smaller slice than we otherwise would have. That’s exactly what the tragedy of the commons is about.
The miracle of modernity is that we’ve built institutions that incentivize individuals to act in ways that we otherwise wouldn’t, for the greater good. It’s a delicate balance, but capital isn’t unique in its propensity to upset that balance.
I don't think that's ever been true.
Being censored from expressing the view that gender is principally a product of sex, or dissenting from state polices of vaccination, or being in revulsion at mass media (liked by mainstream demographics) being hijacked on the alter of fringe "representation". These have had no effect. None.
This hasnt caused everything from the election from a far-right US president to the collapse of the western video games industry, hollywood and the western media ecosystem. A total sucide of western soft and hard power "isn't" something the US has just done in revenge against californian liberalism.
The obliviousness, and arrogance here is, I guess, in keeping with that very same californian liberalism which has "done no wrong" -- other than demanded a world-wide internet echo chambre which reflects only its own values on pain of mass censorship. Values rare even in the US, let alone amongst the whole west, and the 8bn people on the planet.
The only thing true about your statement is that the mere existence of California has been used to justify right wing candidates entire platform.
Well, that's strange. That's not something people in Hollywood are unaware of -- many things killed it, but california liberalism certainly nailed the coffins of the celebrity class
Now "california liberalism" is that manner of virtue-insanity which equates dissent from it own values with fascism -- an era of European mass murder. Having failed to censor, then control, the mass media (incl. public internet), we're now in "insane social persecution" mode again.
You may want to catch up on what has happened
Gender is factually, as evidenced via a multitude of highly respected scientific studies conducted by a vast majority of respected experts both medical and psychological, distinct in every way from biological sex.
There is genuinely no room for opinion, disagreement, or dispute on that subject, at all. To disagree is to be, objectively, incorrect.
I can see where you are coming from in a purely politically motivated sense, yes. But the medical and psychological facts do not actually care about politics, and transgender individuals exist regardless of your belief in them.
It has nothing to do with the left.
Also, maybe you shouldn't use that blaming "you" when you don't know who are you answering to? Just a friendly suggestion!
In general, I'd recommend familiarizing yourself with the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
California liberalism is just a convenient bogeyman.
What are people going to watch between a 3 hours in depth debate about the future of the country on topics such as ecology, finance, social security and pension systems VS hundreds of reels about ImMiGrAnT RiOtS in paris?
To be clear I think it's entirely possible that YouTube is adjusting its recommendation algorithm to show AfD content to people more (or perhaps less) than would happen "organically", because AfD is a salient political party in German politics and YouTube knows this. But how do you determine what is the correct amount of AfD content to be recommended to people in a politically-neutral way, that doesn't end up amounting to you arguing that the YouTube algorithm is only fair if it censors political content you personally think is bad?
Also, this isn't a new phenomenon. If you're interested, I'd recommend reading Shoshana Zuboff's 2018 book: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
“End algorithms”? Even a firehouse of newest comment (or most upvoted as suggested) would benefit Bolsonaro if his online support outnumbers opposition. Ban both candidates from the platform, or make every search show them both? That will probably not work; confuse Brazilian citizens why their politicians are being censored (which will influence them because their politician is being attacked by Lula’s court, or even Facebook acknowledges their opponent politician is dangerous); and not end the lawsuits if they continue bringing “evidence” like Meta AI randomly generating Bolsonaro-related numbers.
The most egregious evidence against Meta are suspending Lula’s official accounts. This can also be attributed to a neutral system processing opponents’ mass reports, but has an obvious solution: give every official account immunity from suspension except by the highest level admins, because they’re supposed to only be suspected according to guidelines, and a $trillion company has enough resources to closely monitor high-level official accounts.
How come? If it is an algorithm, change the algorithm. Newsfeed used to be based on timestamp. Then, lots of weights and statistical analysis went into it to show you what the algorithm thinks will drive most engagement.
Or they could explicitly promote Lula, but that would be biased towards him…
Content ranking algorithms, specially on social networks, are very complex and usually engineered towards generating engagement.
And it seems to work as intended given the amount of engagement is post.
In this universe, it's perfectly identical to our current universe other than Meta being a company that makes lawnmowers. They're not the only company that makes lawnmowers, but they're popular.
It turns out though that meta has been making lawnmowers illegally unsafe, but meta's business model that let them outcompete everyone else was cutting corners on safety. If meta made their lawnmowers comply with the legal requirement for safety it'd be an existential threat to them.
Now, I ask you, should Meta be allowed to continue selling illegally unsafe lawnmowers?
Every state should have foreign agent laws (NGOs must register and must be transparent over their financials). Every state should have control over their information space (especially educational, social and news media). Russia and China understood, Brazil and Europe did not.
But you must see that it is a genuine conundrum. In a free-for-all information landscape (something which did not exist until yesterday), people need to be able to distinguish good information from bad for democracy to survive.
It’s almost weird the way we talk about free speech in 2026, looking back at the 20th century and the Hayes code, and how staid music and TV were prior to 1985-ish. I’m not defending the censors you’re talking about here - in fact from the other side I might argue there are a whole bunch of perspectives that made it from academia to the pages of the New York Times that never should have escaped. And I make that argument as someone who studied some of this stuff in college.
Maybe my most unpopular of opinions is that - I don’t know if I agree with censorship persay - but I’m not sure it’s healthy the way we’re all in a deluge of all these perspectives. You could get rid of 90% of content in the world and 90% of people would never notice.
Just visit the website of the NED and look at the many projects the US government finances around the world to meddle in these countries politically in favor of US interests[1]. Nations have to protect themselves against these foreign influences, otherwise they will be eaten alive.
NGOs are just one tool of exerting political influence in foreign nations.
Much more powerful are proprietary digital services like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. Their algorithms control what information people consume every day. If you are the CIA or the NED, that's the tool you need to exert influence on the thinking of the predominantly younger people in foreign countries (e.g. flush anti-China news into the Facebook feeds of younger users in Myanmar or Thailand).
That's why the US government wanted to move control of TikTok within the US to a domestic organization. They knew what was going on.
EDIT: Just take a look at the NED website about Asia[1]. They don't even hide it: 295 projects in 13 Asian countries with a budget of over 50M$ to promote 'democracy' (i.e. US interest, anti-China propaganda). These countries need to act aggressively against these NGOs, because these NGOs do not act in the interests of the country and it's people.
[1]: Example: https://www.ned.org/region/asia-2/
Alternatively, this blatant use of any tool available to influence non enemy states is disgusting, and forces everyone to a "everyone loses" scenario. Shifting the focus to an insufficiently defended victim removes the focus from the nature of the aggression.
- personalized ads
- election ads
by law strictly two different things.
The risk of voter manipulation is just way to high. This also isn't just about manipulation by US companies, the system they created is just to ab-usable by others, too. To make it worse the more ethical values a person has/upright and honest they are the less likely are to use such means but the more likely they would make a good elected politician for the general population. At the same time humans are just way too easy to manipulate.
(Naturally there is also a case for _any_ personalized ads being a high risk for societies, especially democracies, and in turn the concept if it should be banned. Important here is to note that often just basing ads on the "non ad content" they are displayed alongside with is getting you quite far. So if there even is a need for highly personalized ads can be put in question. Through the topic gets far more complicated with highly personalized non ad content recommendation systems..)
Wasn't Lula convicted in 3 levels up to a federal court called STJ?
And then a single federal court judge who never submitted the case to colleagues, simply declared his judgement void based in technicalities?
And then all the investigation restarted from scratch, but since by law he was too old, his crimes prescribed in half the time and he was never investigated again.
The cherry on the top is that this single judge who declared his convictions null was appointed by the felon's political party.
So about a dozen different judges, in municipal, state and federal levels, analysed his multiple charges and declared him guilty in some of them. Then a single federal court judge appointment by the suspect's political party voided all of them.
That’s because Trump sends better primate dominance signals than Biden, therefore everything he does is right. That’s how it works. Just ask the brain stem.
He also didn't rape children and steal billions while destroying the world economy...
The surprise is not that he was kicked off the main social media companies, the surprises are that the wheels of US justice turned so slowly that Trump got a chance to be re-elected rather than life in prison, and likewise that the US electorate went for him.
The fact that they didn't ban him for so long weighs toward being partial to not banning politicians. Which seems to be the opposite of the point you're trying to make.
One, Trump may not have been reelected if meta hadn’t banned him. So maybe it was another case of meta trying to help republicans.
Or, if Trump hadn’t been reelected, maybe the republicans wouldn’t be facing one of the worst midterm routes in history.
But honestly I’m not actually sure the point you’re trying to make. Meta hired a Republican strategist into their c suite since then. Sooo much has happened, there’s a lot of historical context to try to put it in.
The Ayatollah.
Most of it is psychological projection.
the biohazardous wasteland of bluesky, for example, exists entirely because the specimen inhabiting it object to twitter under new management reversing the policy of suppressing wrongthink.
Elon describes himself as moderate so is he one of these folks that doesn’t believe in free speech? He would say he stayed in the center and democrats moved left. What speech is this moderate right censoring?
As soon as they start interfering with democratic processes in other countries, it's imperialism.
(1): Might be worth pointing out here that Meta has a long history of basing personalization not just on what you do but what people "close to you" do. E.g. if Meta knows you are in the same location (e.g. same WiFi, not sure if they use that today) and then shortly after the other person searches for idk. air purifiers the chance of you getting air purifier ads is largely increased.
13: https://g1.globo.com/jornal-nacional/noticia/2026/10/23/meta...
Of note, this Bolsonaro is the son of the former president, with zero political plans or credentials; his only claim is the name itself and what it represents. I find the idea of a family lineage in government, much, much worse.
Lula was voted in to power, Brazil is still a strong democracy despite the direction it’s going. It is a shame that another viable opposition candidate could not be produced as I’m not fond of having 80+ year olds in that seat, but still better than the alternative.
Bolsonaro’s government has zero proposals for anything that will lead the country in that direction anyway, and did very little in the four years they had. Some new, fresh leadership is urgently needed, hopefully in 2030 if there’s still elections.
Allocate risk to each according to their reward.
- https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/technology/twitter-far-ri...
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/10/29/elon-mu...
- https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/x-has-disproportionate...
- https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/elon-musk-turned-x...
We forget this but hard right content is still highly promoted on X, especially related to white supremacy and anti-immigrant, and it is also protected from content violations.
I guess it depends on what you consider to be "hard left".
If you consider anything to the left of Elon Musk's anti-immigrant, pro-White positions, unrestrained capitalism for him (although he is pro-tariffs on foreign EVs), to be "hard left", then yes, it is pretty prevalent, but I would argue that is actually representative of reality.
Right-wing folks are driven by social media since ~2016. Their content is emotional, aggressive and naturally conducive to more engagement. It’s what their base feeds on. So a lot of the situations described here are just standard ranking algorithms doing their job.
But that begs the question: is the existence of these platforms that amplify divisive and inflammatory content the problem itself? I vote yes. The power of reaching a wide audience should not be handed off without any cross-checks.
I'm relatively sure I see bot activity on public facebook groups where I live in a blue county in a blue state and see hundreds of vitriolic angry comments that aren't aligned with voters current frustrations (i.e. economy)
It's getting ridiculous online.
It has to end. Millions of lives are at sake.
I am sure that everyone involved must be feeling invincible but this is how you build resentment that will last and in most cases result in conflicts or regulations. Probably Musk, Zuckerberg and Thiel will be fine but they will destroy the prospects of the upcoming libertarians and cement the Chinese dominance as they don't have a problem of unruly billionaires and the problem of someone getting rich by doing one thing getting the right to do decide on everything and screw it up for everyone. Sad, I really don't want to live in a China-style political system.
If I have to choose between being subject of the Chinese Communist party or American psychopath billionaires, I'll gladly choose the party.
You know how they say that USA is a very new country and that even some pub in Europe can have longer history? Well, that's true but it doesn't mean that European countries have centuries of continued administration, most are a few decades old as a result of revolution or a war.
Europe is a very violent place for politicians, politicians being oversees and untouchable is a very new phenomenon.
Strip it back to just billionaires, or their equivalent over time, and thus it always was.
People talk about the “new world order” as though this is some novel concept - but you can saunter back in time past the east India company, the bourbons, the holy Roman emperors, Rome, Greece, Sumeria, and see the same pattern played out throughout history. True power sits with wealth - an impoverished ruler relies on others for his means, and has no power of his own.
The wealthy, those with power, have always decided for the rest, have always had outsized influence, as long as there have been societies with the concept of “mine” and “yours”.
Cuts to Sundar starring blankly.
With that in mind, why shouldn't it be in favor of the locals and reflect the values of its own society instead of some tech bros with imperialist ambitions?
The article is discussing a candidate who got the majority of the vote in the 10/4 election. Where did you get the idea that this content doesn't "reflect the values of its own society"?
People want to deflect and blame foreign powers for why their platforms are failing among the electorate. The argument is essentially that they are so right and correct that any deviation from their values could only have occurred due to Bad Guy external intervention, which conveniently justifies why we need mass censorship.
Just do a better job convincing people you're right. Censorship will just mask social problems until the outbreak is even worse.
Playing obvious problems of Brazil‘s judiciary system down like that are clear red flags for somebody not for 1 sec contemplating how he would react if the political camps would be reversed in this situation. It is their sovereignty if the censorship happens on speech you don’t like
People that want to do good things and people that want to do bad things don't deserve the same treatment. Neutrality is complicity.
have lefties in power for the next of the decade and you'll see how datacenters become all about clean energy investment, climate change starts to matter, "don't be evil" starts to take shape
Took me a moment to parse the typo
It’s more simple than that. Industry tends to align with government because they have power and they want that power to be benefit them. If you’re a large company it would be stupid not to try to maintain that relationship.
Yet, from a pure intrinsic values perspective, people that are power-seeking are alike in industry and politics, and when they support an authoritarian state/movement instead of a democratic one, it shows their true intentions.
And they have their favorite phrase:
May flying spaghetti monster, help us all.This should be regulated to avoid interference from anyone.
The biggest problem now is that the billionaires behind social media nowadays will push for a liberal / right wing agenda in the west for their own interests.
Basically with corruption you can control what democracies do. We see this with the orange mafia in charge of the USA right now - even though sometimes it also yields entertainment, indirectly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvfePoni9eM
No.
Its flagship product, its anthropological jewel, its greatest achievement, is the right-wing poor person. A genuine feat of social engineering: materially deprived, yet rich in convictions that run counter to their own interests.
They have been carefully molded. They have been taught that their problems always come from below or from next door — the immigrant, the welfare recipient, the civil servant, the unemployed — never from above.
They have been taught to hate taxes while surviving thanks to public services. To defend heirs to fortunes while having nothing to pass on themselves. To applaud those who crush them, as long as they speak loudly and promise law and order.
The right-wing poor person is a fascinating creature. They vote against their own interests with fervor, convinced that one day, perhaps, they too will find themselves on the right side of the fence.
They mistake brutality for courage, authoritarianism for protection, injustice for merit. They are sold fear in a ready-made package, identity at bargain prices, and anger in bulk on a monthly subscription.
At the dawn of this new world, the monsters do not emerge from the margins: they rise from the ballot boxes, television studios, and simplistic slogans.
They thrive on manufactured misery and sabotaged political awareness.
Capitalism has not merely produced poverty; it has achieved something far worse: it has made the poor docile, obedient, spiteful, and grateful.
A masterpiece, I'm telling you!"
Maximino Fernández
This curious animal was laid bare by the discovery that we are hackable by nature, and hacked by behaviour science. Though it took a few decades to get going, the understanding of how to influence motivation and decision-making is now very mature.
In order to arrive at this understanding, you need data, and lots of it. The social media platforms have performed the function of data aggregators and testing grounds for algorithmic control. But it was not the tech companies who came up with plans, only the tools to put them into practice.
The culprits, though they operate in shade, are generally non-partisan and understand that divide-and-conquer has always been an effective strategy. These people sometimes work in intelligence bureaus, but not always. They are, however, always known to those agencies. After all, you do not need to know you are an asset to be an asset.
The algorithms, necessarily kept as protected IP, are statistical engines that profile and predict, producing probabilistic outcomes and estimates. Before LLMs, one might have argued "but how can probabilistic algos really produce something meaningful?", now I would think people might have a different take, if they could see the layers and weights.
An emperor used to need an army, and this is what replaces it for non-violent insurrection and domestic control. Many will even state their ambitions publicly, and sometimes (though less frequently these days) their procedure. What they are doing is not strictly illegal, because the law gives "sovereignty" to a person's choices, without recognition that their choices might not be their own. Libertarianism has played right into their hands, in this sense.
A masterpiece, not only of conception, but also social engineering, with a technological endoskeleton built on the aggregated data we all willingly give them. All information feeds the machine, just as every financial transaction cements the central bank's authority.
You mean when people admittedly have no knowledge of a subject but still speak authoritatively about it, viscerally criticising one of the sides and even suggesting fowl play, instead of taking care to be humble and understand the context before speaking or making accusations?
I agree, that is very much the kind of attitude that got us into the current situation.
“The average IQ of the bottom third (lowest 33.33%) of the population is approximately - 83.6 - on a standard IQ scale (mean of 100 and standard deviation of 15).” - MM
The real question is do idiots rolling 83.6 iq have the right to self determination no matter the cost to everyone else? Or should the more intelligent reading club context clues able take over management for the good of all?