There was this brief moment where star trek broke my suspension of disbelief. How is there not social media and the Internet in the star trek future? Sure they didn't have it when the show was written, but there still felt to be a disconnect.
Now I think, "how can there be a star trek future while we have social media and the Internet?"
Honestly, it's probably what started the eugenics war.
But as a pass time, I’m fair certain Holodecks buried pretty much everything else for good. Movies, songs, books, and as hard as it may be for tech people to believe..
In Star Trek they don’t have television. I remember there was an episode where it is mentioned as a dead medium from the 20th century.
I’m guessing they don’t have films either.
They do have written books though.
Now the Star Trek TNG film Star Trek First Contact takes place in the 21st century and features rock and roll and characters talking in “modern” parlance.
I’m guessing that in between the 21st century and the 24th century mankind advanced and stopped watching tv and movies and went back to reading books.
Perhaps they advanced and abandoned social media as well. The Star Trek’s version of forums and the internet could be an idealized version of Hacker News where everyone actually follows the rules and Dang the AI moderator can just chill and not do much. It’s very possible.
It doesn't help Joel Kaplan was their main policy executive until this year. It doesn't help either to read all the beans spilled in "Careless People" about how Zuckerberg and Sandberg discovered they could use Facebook's/Meta's reach to tilt the political landscape and force candidates to be on their side regarding regulations.
They've been doing this for a decade, no reckoning yet in sight.
Isn't the more likely reason due to suspicious bot activity? I doubt a trillion dollar org cares much about these small candidates.
I don't rule it out entirely. In 2021 we saw a coordinated deplatforming of a sitting president across practically every social media platform. But this seems too low stakes
Yes an extremely contentious race if you pay attention to politics. A year ago if anyone had said Dems have a chance of a Senate majority during the midterms you'd have been laughed out of the building.
Small candidates have a lot of impact, especially when you want to (for example) build a data center. Not that this is necessary to explain it—the cost of the censorship to Meta is negligible (an employee presses a button or an AI makes an API call), so even a small reward is worthwhile.
> In 2021 we saw a coordinated deplatforming of a sitting president across practically every social media platform.
It wasn’t coordinated, it was a bunch of social media companies responding to the same event, notably the president in question using his social media accounts to try to overthrow the US government.
It's not. Meta did the same thing during Brazil's elections. Left-wing politicians' and influencer's accounts suspended, while right wings' stayed working. Even with the widespread knowledge that the right is notorious for using bot accounts to inflate followers and to generate engagement.
The big tech companies are on the side of power and money.
If you have a strong reaction to this, and had the opposite reaction when social media lockouts were used against the other party, I’d suggest a new approach: decide where you stand on the tool/weapon based on foundational principles, regardless of whether it’s currently being wielded by people you agree or disagree with.
Agreed, that’s the point. The first part describes the inconsistency; the second is how to avoid it. If your principles lead you to react the same way both times, the test doesn’t apply to you.
Were any of the candidates blocked here inciting a violent insurrection in an attempt to overturn an election? Because I'm pretty comfortable with that being grounds for blocking.
I love the main character syndrome on display. You have this regional Florida race, not particularly competitive. They do campaign events all day every day. They see an issue with their Instagram account which gets fixed an hour later and they immediately think it's Zuck behind the scenes in his war room following her race and rally with a big red button on his desk to cut her off at the crucial window. Incredible stuff.
> They see an issue with their Instagram account which gets fixed an hour later and they immediately think it's Zuck behind the scenes in his war room following her race and rally with a big red button on his desk to cut her off at the crucial window. Incredible stuff.
This isn't the first time Meta has pulled the plug on rallies and leftwing organizations [1]. It's also not out of character for them to try and push right wing narratives. [2]
I mean, companies are responsible for the actions of their employees within a certain scope and it is not outside the realm of possibility that an individual interested in curtailing the momentum of this candidate works at Meta in a capacity that would allow interfering with the account.
Accusing them without due evidence is sloppy, but it's not like the claim carries genuinely zero possibility of being true.
You honestly think meta couldn’t setup an automated system to target democratic candidate’s accounts and mess with them during a scheduled rally or live stream? As if zuck has to personally do anything to make that happen? This is hardly tinfoil hat territory, it would be trivial to put in place, and until I see it is coincidentally happening to their R counterparts, it tracks with Zuck’s current political leanings.
>“We are calling on Meta to immediately restore the page and provide an explanation for its removal,” she continued. “Voters deserve access to critical election information, especially in these final days.”
>Nixon reported that the account was back up an hour later.
The account was created only 1 week earlier and was flagged as a campaign impersonation account.
Whether that's honest and truthful, we can only know if Meta is transparent. But, not including that information shows what the article's intent is.
> "During campaign season, we pay particular attention to accounts that could be impersonating candidates or campaigns and misleading voters. The account in question was created only a week and a half ago, so our systems automatically and mistakenly assessed it to be impersonating the Nixon for Senate campaign. The account was restored on Tuesday evening after three hours."
After what Facebook tried pulling in Brazil, it is incredibly naive to think this was just another oopsie-daisy that once again, one that just so happens to impact the left, again.
I've been reading the book "Careless People," and I came upon these passages just yesterday, referring to Mark Zuckerberg in 2015:
> Mark opens the meeting by talking admiringly about what he calls “street fighter tactics” that Uber is employing against politicians around the world and how successful they’ve been.
> He launches into a spiel about Empereror Augustus, his favorite emperor, who led the transformation of Rome from a republic to an empire.
> He wants to establish a team within Facebook to figure out how to build the tools that will use the algorithm and platform to pressure adversaries, including politicians who oppose us, to bolster the policy team.
so, like most things, it's likely a blessed invididual in meta is given the privlege of doing whatever they want, as part of the "boys will be boys" club.
The simplest explanation is that it's chaotic damage from whatever overzealous autocensorship systems they have. The extent of the damage is moderated based on who you know - whether it's social media reach to someone employed there who knows the strings to pull, pay to play line to an account rep, or even ahead-of-time "this needs to be protected" due to threats/back scratching from/of the regime.
At least to me, this is a good working explanation - the conspiracy angles prove things that don't need to be proven to effect sustainable solutions. The real issue, as it has always been, is that we need to move away from these centralized communications technologies controlled by corpos. Their concentrated power is what makes their censorship inevitable.
So pragmatically as things stand - while it's completely understandable that political campaigns (and everyone else) need to engage with where people are, they should also be making it a point to nudge followers to distributed forums. Use censorship-eager popular forums to recruit new followers, but maintain your base of members with censorship-resistant communication methods.
Or politically, assuming a critical mass of people frustrated at this problem that we can effect change, what we need is anti-trust enforcement that breaks up these companies into smaller entities, chiefly by un-bundling apps (client software) from hosting services and mandating published APIs for the two markets to interact.
It's the simplest explanation, but it's also the explanation you or I would reach for as a fig leaf if we were trying to get away with something shady.
I guess the best approach is to look at a string of such events, and see if they add up to a consistent pattern of behaviour. The longer the string, the less likely it is to be accidental. (But this assumes the bad actor isn't trying to cover their tracks in active ways. Ho hum).
The change I would like to see: feeds must be in date order, most recent first. Posts should only appear in feeds if you have actively chosen to "follow" the originating account in some way.
I honestly think these two simple changes would solve many of the problems we have today, as a society.
> I guess the best approach is to look at a string of such events, and see if they add up to a consistent pattern of behaviour.
Sure, except, why? Such behavior is [unfortunately] not currently illegal, so it's not like proving it would mean it could be straightforwardly punished.
Then furthermore, the specific groups that feel aggrieved shift based on who is in power. The only way to get actual reform is to form a coalition with people who don't feel particularly aggrieved right now, but still respect that it could happen to them in the future.
Making it into a personal us-vs-them just makes it so people who don't care about your "us" aren't inclined to see the issue!
> The change I would like to see: feeds must be in date order, most recent first. Posts should only appear in feeds if you have actively chosen to "follow" the originating account in some way.
Sure, but keep in mind this is still a political solution, whether through regulation or through shaming these speech censors. Meaning it requires the political will I am describing above.
Also from a technical perspective I don't see that this would directly address the problem in the article. You still need another point, getting there indirectly - if the only feeds shown were subscribed ("followed"), there should never be a reason to censor an account from speaking to people who have subscribed to it.
Depressing and worrisome. But at least there is a small funny bit to it. When the president was a Democrat, Facebook did this to Republicans. When the president’s a Republican, they do it to Democrats. Evidently, they don’t even have a side. They just flip-flop to support whoever is in charge
Source? I recall major platforms suspending accounts that were literally posting nazi propaganda in violation of platform rules. I don’t recall a single instance of meta suspending the page of an otherwise rule-abiding Republican candidate’s account in the middle of a rally.
This is the assymetry that the left have to deal with. The far right spew hateful propoganda and get themselves banned. Suddenly the platforms are biased towards the left. Zuck even got in on this to curry favours
That’s exactly right. Every time I heard hand-wringing about some right-wing person getting suspended, it’d inevitably trace back to that person saying something incredibly outlandish, racist, or otherwise rule breaking. I did not see one example of anyone being suspended for being a Republican. Not one. Zero.
Fecebook out of all FAGMAN companies should be dissolved for good: it produces nothing of a value (they don’t make an useful products like email in google or a hardware laptop in MS for example), even big products like whatsapp or instagram were acquired, it is comically evil, it’s probably the first company to eavesdrop on its users daily convos through their apps to show ads, and it operates like a mafia or a syndicate, and you would know if you had your account auto flagged or banned, there’s no email or a person to talk to (that was before AI chat support too), you need to know someone who knows someone who knows someone to pull some strings inside to look at your account..
Now I think, "how can there be a star trek future while we have social media and the Internet?"
Honestly, it's probably what started the eugenics war.
But as a pass time, I’m fair certain Holodecks buried pretty much everything else for good. Movies, songs, books, and as hard as it may be for tech people to believe..
Even social media.
I’m guessing they don’t have films either.
They do have written books though.
Now the Star Trek TNG film Star Trek First Contact takes place in the 21st century and features rock and roll and characters talking in “modern” parlance.
I’m guessing that in between the 21st century and the 24th century mankind advanced and stopped watching tv and movies and went back to reading books.
Perhaps they advanced and abandoned social media as well. The Star Trek’s version of forums and the internet could be an idealized version of Hacker News where everyone actually follows the rules and Dang the AI moderator can just chill and not do much. It’s very possible.
They've been doing this for a decade, no reckoning yet in sight.
Lol what "loyalty" are you talking about?
Marjorie Taylor Greene
And others
And Trump was banned for multiple years, this Dem account was blocked 1 hour and people are already crying wolf
I don't rule it out entirely. In 2021 we saw a coordinated deplatforming of a sitting president across practically every social media platform. But this seems too low stakes
EDIT: I’m mistaken, this is a US senate candidate. I was confused by the ambiguous wording in the article.
EDIT: I’m mistaken, this is a US senate candidate. I was confused by the ambiguous wording in the article.
> In 2021 we saw a coordinated deplatforming of a sitting president across practically every social media platform.
It wasn’t coordinated, it was a bunch of social media companies responding to the same event, notably the president in question using his social media accounts to try to overthrow the US government.
The big tech companies are on the side of power and money.
You pretend like this is somehow a partisan issue
Are you, by chance, of the left?
All research I’ve seen on this shows the right significantly outbotting the left.
If you actually do this, then it doesn’t matter whether the outcomes seem to help one party vs another.
The second part of your comment invalidates the test in the first part of your comment.
It's a statewide race.
> They see an issue with their Instagram account which gets fixed an hour later and they immediately think it's Zuck behind the scenes in his war room following her race and rally with a big red button on his desk to cut her off at the crucial window. Incredible stuff.
This isn't the first time Meta has pulled the plug on rallies and leftwing organizations [1]. It's also not out of character for them to try and push right wing narratives. [2]
[1] https://www.ms.now/news/instagram-shut-down-a-no-kings-accou...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
Accusing them without due evidence is sloppy, but it's not like the claim carries genuinely zero possibility of being true.
>Nixon reported that the account was back up an hour later.
The account was created only 1 week earlier and was flagged as a campaign impersonation account.
Whether that's honest and truthful, we can only know if Meta is transparent. But, not including that information shows what the article's intent is.
> "During campaign season, we pay particular attention to accounts that could be impersonating candidates or campaigns and misleading voters. The account in question was created only a week and a half ago, so our systems automatically and mistakenly assessed it to be impersonating the Nixon for Senate campaign. The account was restored on Tuesday evening after three hours."
You pretend like this is somehow a partisan issue
Trump was banned for years and that seems to be ok with you
A Dem account is banned 1 hour and you cry wolf "the mask has come off"
The audacity
This was. As was the messing with Lula. That was when the mask really came off. Thankfully, the people prevailed.
> Mark opens the meeting by talking admiringly about what he calls “street fighter tactics” that Uber is employing against politicians around the world and how successful they’ve been.
> He launches into a spiel about Empereror Augustus, his favorite emperor, who led the transformation of Rome from a republic to an empire.
> He wants to establish a team within Facebook to figure out how to build the tools that will use the algorithm and platform to pressure adversaries, including politicians who oppose us, to bolster the policy team.
At least to me, this is a good working explanation - the conspiracy angles prove things that don't need to be proven to effect sustainable solutions. The real issue, as it has always been, is that we need to move away from these centralized communications technologies controlled by corpos. Their concentrated power is what makes their censorship inevitable.
So pragmatically as things stand - while it's completely understandable that political campaigns (and everyone else) need to engage with where people are, they should also be making it a point to nudge followers to distributed forums. Use censorship-eager popular forums to recruit new followers, but maintain your base of members with censorship-resistant communication methods.
Or politically, assuming a critical mass of people frustrated at this problem that we can effect change, what we need is anti-trust enforcement that breaks up these companies into smaller entities, chiefly by un-bundling apps (client software) from hosting services and mandating published APIs for the two markets to interact.
I guess the best approach is to look at a string of such events, and see if they add up to a consistent pattern of behaviour. The longer the string, the less likely it is to be accidental. (But this assumes the bad actor isn't trying to cover their tracks in active ways. Ho hum).
The change I would like to see: feeds must be in date order, most recent first. Posts should only appear in feeds if you have actively chosen to "follow" the originating account in some way.
I honestly think these two simple changes would solve many of the problems we have today, as a society.
Sure, except, why? Such behavior is [unfortunately] not currently illegal, so it's not like proving it would mean it could be straightforwardly punished.
Then furthermore, the specific groups that feel aggrieved shift based on who is in power. The only way to get actual reform is to form a coalition with people who don't feel particularly aggrieved right now, but still respect that it could happen to them in the future.
Making it into a personal us-vs-them just makes it so people who don't care about your "us" aren't inclined to see the issue!
> The change I would like to see: feeds must be in date order, most recent first. Posts should only appear in feeds if you have actively chosen to "follow" the originating account in some way.
Sure, but keep in mind this is still a political solution, whether through regulation or through shaming these speech censors. Meaning it requires the political will I am describing above.
Also from a technical perspective I don't see that this would directly address the problem in the article. You still need another point, getting there indirectly - if the only feeds shown were subscribed ("followed"), there should never be a reason to censor an account from speaking to people who have subscribed to it.