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Paracompact 53 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
rootsudo 32 minutes ago [-]
Ok, but what about Vote + number? As stated so: "On Instagram, a search for the same word showed a GIF reading “Vote 13.”"
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?
Need to see details, but it's perfectly plausible that geolocated requests from Brazil get a special treatment during this specific period of elections.
realo 28 minutes ago [-]
Have you considered that Meta could simply be compromised by Meta's own Management, which leads to inference in the elections of foreign countries?
That is what seems to be happening here.
chvid 6 minutes ago [-]
“ Meta most certainly is compromised by foreign actors.”
How is meta compromised by foreign actors? And who are the foreign actors?
JuniperMesos 4 minutes ago [-]
Well if you're Brazil, the entirety of Meta is a foreign actor - Meta is headquartered in Menlo Park, California, the United States of America.
shevy-java 9 minutes ago [-]
Ok but then the question is: why would AI pick two numbers, out of 1 to 25? Should that not be evenly distributed instead? Why is the AI so skewed?
sva_ 33 minutes ago [-]
That seems a bit schizophrenic
raverbashing 11 minutes ago [-]
Most of the "algorithmic transparency" people are activist members of big NGOs
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
GuestFAUniverse 1 hours ago [-]
It's the same here. AfD content gets pushed on YT. No matter how often I ignore channels.
Big tech is so rigged (intensional or not), the question if it is socially net negative has become rhetorical.
3 minutes ago [-]
chvid 1 hours ago [-]
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.
KronisLV 45 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
chvid 11 minutes ago [-]
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.
wongarsu 9 minutes ago [-]
Notably Germany used to have its own social media. SchülerVZ/StudiVZ/MeinVZ was like Facebook, but German. 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
Aerroon 12 minutes ago [-]
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.
dismalpedigree 5 minutes ago [-]
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.
bad_haircut72 29 minutes ago [-]
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.
Aerroon 3 minutes ago [-]
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.
embedding-shape 10 minutes ago [-]
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"?
moffkalast 5 minutes ago [-]
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.
latexr 43 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
tormeh 23 minutes ago [-]
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.
graemep 22 minutes ago [-]
yes, I think if anything its the other way around - the current US administration is behold to them.
The problem is that the same is true for many politicians. They do a lot of lobbying in Europe too.
freecodeio 24 minutes ago [-]
I wonder if it has something to do with profiling. Because as far as my eyes can see my youtube is strictly educational, scientific and engineering.
stingraycharles 17 minutes ago [-]
YouTube definitely provides recommendations based on your watch history and overall profile.
freecodeio 9 minutes ago [-]
I don't necessarily disagree that there's a push for politics, my wonder specifically is if you're a complete nerd to the algorithm then it's less likely to recommend you far right politics cause they just don't get clicks
loloquwowndueo 3 minutes ago [-]
So don’t follow the recommendations?
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
YeahThisIsMe 1 hours ago [-]
I've literally only been recommended their crap once and "don't recommend channel" has been working fine.
You might simply have been engaging with related content unknowingly, even if it's only one critical of them.
scratcheee 1 hours ago [-]
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.
RobotToaster 60 minutes ago [-]
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.
bluegatty 8 minutes ago [-]
This is anecdotal, it's not evidence. The whole point of this discussion is figuring out the difference.
AfD is controversial - it's click bait - the algorithm is feeding 'action' - that's the problem.
JimmyBiscuit 3 minutes ago [-]
Yeah. I never get any AfD videos on my youtube feed (living in germany). I guess Meta isnt pushing right wing narratives then. Phew, we got lucky
woadwarrior01 46 minutes ago [-]
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.
ahartmetz 1 hours ago [-]
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.
thrance 1 hours ago [-]
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.
ahartmetz 53 minutes ago [-]
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.
mjburgess 56 minutes ago [-]
Californian liberalism is one of the principle causes of the far-right backlash you're addressing.
Terr_ 53 minutes ago [-]
That implies the far-right would have otherwise just sat peacefully at home doing crossword puzzles, until triggered into acting.
I don't think that's ever been true.
easterncalculus 6 minutes ago [-]
If you think this has nothing to do with otherwise normal people signing onto these policies I genuinely don’t know what to tell you.
mjburgess 36 minutes ago [-]
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.
drsnow 11 minutes ago [-]
Holy shit.
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.
true_religion 21 minutes ago [-]
I was not aware that Hollywood, video games, nor the Western media system as a whole had collapsed.
The only thing true about your statement is that the mere existence of California has been used to justify right wing candidates entire platform.
14 minutes ago [-]
vrganj 35 minutes ago [-]
Identity politics is a liberal, i.e. right wing affectation.
It has nothing to do with the left.
broken-kebab 17 minutes ago [-]
You seem to be very confused about multiple meanings of both "liberal", and "left".
rdevilla 7 minutes ago [-]
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rdevilla 10 minutes ago [-]
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vrganj 48 minutes ago [-]
The inherent contradictions of capitalism coming to a rear are.
California liberalism is just a convenient bogeyman.
ahartmetz 41 minutes ago [-]
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.
ocd 1 hours ago [-]
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.
mrtksn 56 minutes ago [-]
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.
ben_w 43 minutes ago [-]
Similar, but more slop and less evil.
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 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).
coffinbirth 1 hours ago [-]
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.
cjfd 1 hours ago [-]
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.
parineum 46 minutes ago [-]
> Unfortunately much of the population seems to be at a level close to cattle.
Not you though. You're a wolf among sheep. A true seer among the blind.
Everyone else is too dumb to know what's right, just manipulated by the media they consume on the Internet.
Not you though. You get all your information from trustworthy sources. Sure, they happen to agree with you 90% of the time but,hey, nobody's perfect, right? Well, except you. You've got all the answers.
If only everyone else would just let you make all the rules. You could get to all the bad people and make sure they stopped saying the wrong thing. Maybe provide them the resources they need to learn the truth and, if they don't want to learn the truth, we'll just keep them away from everyone else until they figure it out.
cjfd 31 minutes ago [-]
This is a rather stupid caricature.
bluebarbet 21 minutes ago [-]
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.
torben-friis 23 minutes ago [-]
>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.
vlyan 1 hours ago [-]
Meta, along with every other large platform, had previously banned the sitting president of the United States.
khalic 1 hours ago [-]
You mean the senile reality tv star who kept breaking their TOS? Yeah totally the same thing…
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.
pavlov 1 hours ago [-]
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.
avaer 35 minutes ago [-]
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.
easterncalculus 3 minutes ago [-]
There were literal genoicdes conducted on the platform unobstructed at the same time. They banned him because they wanted to. Be serious.
vrganj 1 hours ago [-]
What US companies do to US politicians is an internal matter for the US.
As soon as they start interfering with democratic processes in other countries, it's imperialism.
microtonal 1 hours ago [-]
The daily fine is so meaninglessly small ($99,000 per day) that there is very little incentive to do anything.
pjmlp 35 minutes ago [-]
This will only get fixed when people get jailed by ignoring court orders, fines for big tech do nothing.
polyamid23 10 minutes ago [-]
We could start fining in percentage of revenue.
k__ 15 minutes ago [-]
We really need governments to force companies to mark bots and allow users to block all of them.
It's getting ridiculous online.
shevy-java 10 minutes ago [-]
These corporations ruin and sabotage democracy.
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:
If you think Brazilian courts are neutral in general, ummm
KitN 13 minutes ago [-]
This reminds me of the iconic hearing where someone asks "Why does Trumps image show up when I search idiot on Google?".
Cuts to Sundar starring blankly.
mentalgear 56 minutes ago [-]
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.
freecodeio 22 minutes ago [-]
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
pjc50 15 minutes ago [-]
You'll have that in the marketing, but the underlying actions will remain the same.
mentalgear 4 minutes ago [-]
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).
groundzeros2015 13 minutes ago [-]
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.
mentalgear 6 minutes ago [-]
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.
ETH_start 57 minutes ago [-]
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.
vrganj 47 minutes ago [-]
As is its sovereign right. It is not Meta's right to interfere with Brazil's sovereignty.
mantas 33 minutes ago [-]
I’m sure that court is not biased and those banned accounts ain’t in favor of some local factions.
vrganj 32 minutes ago [-]
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?
woodpanel 30 minutes ago [-]
Freedom of speech for me, censorship for thee.
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
vrganj 29 minutes ago [-]
Of course. It would be cowardly to not take a side.
People that want to do good things and people that want to do bad things don't deserve the same treatment. Neutrality is complicity.
braiamp 24 minutes ago [-]
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mrtksn 1 hours ago [-]
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.
latexr 1 hours ago [-]
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.
mrtksn 1 hours ago [-]
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.
bamboozled 39 minutes ago [-]
Its one of the most Orwellian situations I can think of.
44 minutes ago [-]
rwyinuse 20 minutes ago [-]
I agree. As an EU citizen, I'm much more worried of spying and election interference from USA than China these days.
If I have to choose between being subject of the Chinese Communist party or American psychopath billionaires, I'll gladly choose the party.
drstewart 14 minutes ago [-]
Is this because of your mistaken belief that the Chinese Communist party doesn't filter and censor the Internet for their subjects?
shubhamjain 1 hours ago [-]
This is exactly the kind of stupidity that helps people like Trump reelected. I know nothing about Brazilian politics, but this looks like a desperate attempt to undermine the opposition or pull Meta into needless controversy, and I have no idea how complicit the courts are in all this.
So what if searching for “brasil” returns a Bolsonaro GIF? I tried it myself, and the obvious explanation is that he’s wearing a Brazilian flag tshirt and dancing rather comically. How does a GIF appearing in search results imply political bias?
hdgvhicv 57 minutes ago [-]
I’m immune to a trillion dollar brainwashing industry. It’s everyone else that is manipulated which makes it so valuable.
woodpanel 36 minutes ago [-]
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.
latexr 24 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
thrance 1 hours ago [-]
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.
mentalgear 50 minutes ago [-]
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.
khalic 1 hours ago [-]
And once again meta is interfering with election. The scum of the earth…
aennassiri 1 hours ago [-]
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.
medlazik 53 minutes ago [-]
"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.
A masterpiece, I'm telling you!"
Maximino Fernández
mantas 26 minutes ago [-]
The fun thing is, the original nazis were quite pro-workers. The original fascists tried to address some concerns of the working class too. Leaders of both started out in far-left circles before jumping on the other side of the shoehorn. Which worked out much better for them.
Modern far-right frequently pays at least lip service to concerns of poor working class. At the same time modern left has become champaign left. Caring less and less about the actual working class.
And then the left becomes surprised that poor working class sometimes go to the other side…
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.
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
That is what seems to be happening here.
How is meta compromised by foreign actors? And who are the foreign actors?
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
Big tech is so rigged (intensional or not), the question if it is socially net negative has become rhetorical.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
AfD is controversial - it's click bait - the algorithm is feeding 'action' - that's the problem.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The only thing true about your statement is that the mere existence of California has been used to justify right wing candidates entire platform.
It has nothing to do with the left.
California liberalism is just a convenient bogeyman.
A lot of bots of US origin are propagating false narratives posing as citizens of these countries.
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 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).
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.
Not you though. You're a wolf among sheep. A true seer among the blind.
Everyone else is too dumb to know what's right, just manipulated by the media they consume on the Internet.
Not you though. You get all your information from trustworthy sources. Sure, they happen to agree with you 90% of the time but,hey, nobody's perfect, right? Well, except you. You've got all the answers.
If only everyone else would just let you make all the rules. You could get to all the bad people and make sure they stopped saying the wrong thing. Maybe provide them the resources they need to learn the truth and, if they don't want to learn the truth, we'll just keep them away from everyone else until they figure it out.
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.
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 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.
As soon as they start interfering with democratic processes in other countries, it's imperialism.
It's getting ridiculous online.
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
Cuts to Sundar starring blankly.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
So what if searching for “brasil” returns a Bolsonaro GIF? I tried it myself, and the obvious explanation is that he’s wearing a Brazilian flag tshirt and dancing rather comically. How does a GIF appearing in search results imply political bias?
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.
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.
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
Modern far-right frequently pays at least lip service to concerns of poor working class. At the same time modern left has become champaign left. Caring less and less about the actual working class.
And then the left becomes surprised that poor working class sometimes go to the other side…