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| ▲ | rockertalker 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I think if you run a website as a main source of your business profitable or not you’re in the tech industry. It’s a question of scale not industry classification or purpose classification. | |
| ▲ | biophysboy 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The thing with those alternative communities is that they sort of orbit around the larger tech platforms. Their agenda is set by the news-of-the-day within certain X/FB/YouTube subcommunities. Its sort of analogous to wire services in traditional media. Additionally, people that post on those platforms originally gained notoriety on the bigger tech platforms, and took their audience with them. | |
| ▲ | betteryet 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Not my point. The original comment said the tech industry can decide to break up the federal government because they don't want to be forced to clean up their act. Societies should be stronger than any industry and fight to maintain freedom, health, peace, and prosperity. If the tech industry is against that, then they should be the ones broken up. | | |
| ▲ | jMyles 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > Societies should be stronger than any industry and fight to maintain freedom, health, peace, and prosperity. I think (I hope!) we all agree with this sentiment. But societies also need to be stronger than states, especially in an age of connection and sharing. States are the main source of uncertainty and violence in the world right now, and I think it's reasonable to hope that the internet will bring the age of peace we pray for. Obviously the social media giants are not it. They are closer to states than they are to algorithms. But I'm wary of siding with states over web apps. What we need are healthier (meaning, chiefly, more decentralized and less rent-seeking) web apps. | | |
| ▲ | betteryet 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Exactly, societies need to be stronger than states too and really need to act early. States can become one person or party and it's game over for a long time. Actually, the American Constitution is pretty great at preventing this exact outcome and I still have a lot of faith in it. | | |
| ▲ | kazen44 3 days ago | parent [-] | | but the constitution is just a piece of paper with some words written on it.
Without an active civic society protection what is enshrined in the document, it is all but powerless. |
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| ▲ | eddythompson80 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > I think (I hope!) we all agree with this sentiment. As long as it's not farming, defense or healthcare of course. Historically speaking at least. | |
| ▲ | thegrimmest 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > They are closer to states than they are to algorithms This seems like nonsense. All the tech industry does is convince people. It doesn't force anyone to do anything. States have a monopoly on violence. No one holds a gun to anyone's head forcing them to consume <insert content you disagree with>. In a country of equals, everyone's opinion, including <position you disagree with>, should hold equal sway, and be resolved via democratic due process. Just because many people hold <position you disagree with> and vote for <politician you find repugnant> doesn't give you any sort of reasonable justification to limit the freedom of others to advocate (including on social media) for it. | | |
| ▲ | jMyles 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I agree with everything you've said with regard to the justice of the matter, but I don't think that there is a free market at work in social media. * So-called "intellectual property" laws dramatically skew what can and cannot be shared * Censorship at the behest of world governments is rampant, and completely overran anything representing a nonviolent scientific dialogue during the recent COVID19 pandemic * States, with their monopoly on the legitimate initiation of force, pick winners and losers at every level of the experience, from chip makers to the duopolistic mobile OS vendors to their app stores to the social media offerings. Sure, network effect may describe the reason people join and stay, but the availability of places to join and stay is in no sense a market phenomenon Consider: the major social media barons meet with POTUS all the freakin' time. Do you suppose that's just because they enjoy his company? | | |
| ▲ | thegrimmest 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > So-called "intellectual property" laws dramatically skew what can and cannot be shared Agree! let's get rid of these :) > Censorship at the behest of world governments is rampant Agree! States have always pursued censorship to maintain power. That doesn't contradict the point that social media companies themselves are not state actors, and are not the problem. > States ... pick winners and losers I'm not sure I'm 100% on board here. States may thumb the scales, but the fact of the existence of FAANG/MANGO seems much more like a market phenomenon than an interventionist project. > social media barons meet with POTUS all the freakin' time There is almost no clearer display of corporate self-preservation than social media vendors kowtowing to the president. Much of what you're outlining is standard run of the mill corruption. The US Government (and others) is acting in contradiction to its stated principles. This is not a new phenomenon, and seems in the category of core human governance challenges. | |
| ▲ | immibis 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Is this a new technique where you put COVID denialism into an otherwise good comment? Does it have a name? | | |
| ▲ | jMyles 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I think you may have misunderstood my comment - or perhaps misunderstood the consequences of the censorship regime. If anything, it seemed like the denialism was amplified by the censorship. What fell by the wayside were the serious, rigorous dialogue that had previously been the best thinking on epidemiology and public health. I was a moderator and frequent contributor to /r/ebola during the 2014 outbreak; during that time I reached out and began to form relationships with (and respect spectrums for) various epidemiologists and academic departments. And it was really hard during the COVID19 pandemic to watch people like John Ioannidis, David Katz, Sunetra Gupta, Michael Levitt, etc. be totally cut out of the conversation while a group of second-stringers who were willing to toe the corporate line took their place. Was it your experience that the censorship worked to _stem_ denialism? It seemed to me that it made it much louder and much worse, muddying the water of genuine discussion and research. | | |
| ▲ | mullingitover 3 days ago | parent [-] | | The idea that real, serious scientific debate was stymied by social media platform policies doesn't pass the smell test for me. Facebook/twitter/et al were making good faith efforts to stop the flood of downright harmful misinformation, and government didn't force them to do it. None of even the most questionable scientists were ever silenced. Those folks had the right wing press broadcasting their worst ideas to the world, the didn't even need social media when they could get on Fox News every day of the week. It was the final attempt of social media even trying to be something more than a cancer. Now? Every social media platform (especially Facebook and twitter) would have zero problems being the driver of modern day pogroms, complete with running betting markets on the outcomes, if it would keep their share prices up. | | |
| ▲ | jMyles 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > None of even the most questionable scientists were ever silenced. ...a literal nobel laureate, a literal Einstein scholar, and literally the author of the most cited paper in the history of open publishing were all censored. Multiple scholars of the Hoover Institution. The director of Oxford Center for EBM. An author of the most widely-assigned textbook in preventative epidemiology. Two editors-in-chief of BMJ publications. Literally the BMJ itself had articles removed from Facebook! The British Journal of Medicine was censored from Facebook dude! Tenured professors form Yale, Johns Hopkins, Oxford, Harvard, and Standard (several from Stanford in particular) had their work either totally removed or subject to shadowban-style censorship. What can you possibly be talking about? I'm broadly anti-credentialist, but I can't fathom not noticing what happened: The world's foremost experts were silenced; we all watched it happen. Let's not mince words here: there was a _thunderous_ chorus of the world's top experts opining against lockdowns. And social media depicted something entirely different, and entirely false. It wasn't like... close. Lockdowns never gained anything resembling mainstream support in the actual real world of epidemiology. David Katz, Michael Levitt, Carl Henegan, Monica Ghandi, Scott Atlas, Vinay Prasad, Eran Bendavid, Sunetra Gupta, John fucking Ioannidis (my personal favorite author of medical science for over a decade prior to COVID19, and arguably the most accomplished medical scientist of our generation)... I can go on and on and on. How on earth are you conducting your "smell test"?! All the most impressive minds of our age were cast aside so some second-stringers from suburban Virginia, who had been collecting a paycheck from NIH and CDC but not doing anything resembling continuing education at their alma maters, could babble nonsense about interdiction and hold aloft the Imperial study which they obviously didn't understand (and which all of us who read it knew it was destined to retracted from the word go). There were a tiny few serious academics who endorsed lockdowns. And some were genuine experts who simply got it wrong. I respect Carl Bergstrom and Marc Lipsitch enormously, and I give them credit for sticking their head above the parapet - I think they genuinely believed in horizontal interdiction and, although they were absolutely wrong, I don't think they were intentional being propagandistic. And I don't think they went out intending to be amplified as they were. I only wish their other work were amplified as much as when it was convenient for the lockdown narrative. ...but it's simply, totally false that accomplished academics and experts weren't censored. I can't even approach that with a straight face. | | |
| ▲ | immibis 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | A lot of people with credentials join the grift train, yes. Apparently it's quite profitable. Listing many of them isn't really an argument that the grift is true. | | |
| ▲ | jMyles 2 days ago | parent [-] | | What a bizarre and reckless take. I thought this 'no true scotsman' nonsense was put to bed in 2022. By this metric, who is _not_ a grifter? You have to be Scott Gottleib or Peter Daszak - shilling pseudoscience while sitting on the boards of corporations making billions from the pandemic - to _not_ be a grifter? Is that it? | | |
| ▲ | immibis 2 days ago | parent [-] | | It seems my opinions are influenced by facts, and not by a parade of firstname lastnames. Thank you for testing this hypothesis. |
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| ▲ | mullingitover 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Literally the BMJ itself had articles removed from Facebook! These people got their stuff published in the British Medical Journal, so nobody in the scientific community had the slightest problem seeing it. Facebook posted a fact check where the story was shared pointing out some problems with it. They didn’t “censor” anything. It was frankly entirely reasonable and the BMJ should have done better in the first place. Facebook did “combat bad speech with more speech”, the thing you’re supposed to do, and the cranks absolutely lost their minds. In any case, the danger is over now and we can rest easy knowing that Facebook won’t lift a finger to prevent millions from being misled about vaccines causing autism. They’ll sell ads alongside the posts! phew | | |
| ▲ | jMyles 2 days ago | parent [-] | | ...let's get our facts straight here. I hope we can agree on this nutshell: * During phase III of the Pfizer trial, there was an unblinding event which was not initially disclosed. At first, it appeared that it might only have been a few dozen participants, but later disclosures showed that it was more serious. * The BMJ learned of this - again, only knowing about a few dozen patients - from the regional director of the contractor carrying out one of the arms of the trial, who was fired the same day she reported the unblinding to the FDA (as required by law). This disclosure included photographs of documents, in the study area, with unblinding information on them. * The BMJ published what was, in retrospect, an extremely cautious report, even though by that time it was becoming clear that the problem went even beyond mass unblinding and into falsified data, so much so that the contractor's quality control check team were overwhelmed trying to catch up in the days between Jackson's termination and the publication of the report. * In response, Facebook added an inane "fact check", calling the BMJ a "news blog", and which got several of the above facts wrong. In fact, the "fact check" didn't actually make any coherent assertions about the actual content of the article at all. It seemed its primary function was to add an insinuation of doubt, via scary red boxes, about the BMJ report, without any critique of the substance or merits. * Three days later, Facebook went further - preventing the story from being shared at all, and adding warnings to users commenting on the article (in places where it had already been shared) that they risked having their accounts degraded or terminated for spreading misinformation. * All the while, board members of Pfizer (one of who was a former FDA commissioner) were permitted to deny these assertions and smear the whistleblowers (in what, in retrospect, turns out to have been actual misinformation) with no "fact checks" or prohibitions on sharing. * Months later, Facebook acknowledged that they took these actions at the urging of the White House. ...I don't think it's the least bit far-fetched to call this "censorship". | | |
| ▲ | mullingitover 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Facebook 'reduced distribution,' they didn't block. And again, your original claim was that social media somehow blocked scientific debate, which is categorically false. All these claims are hand-waving away the fact that this was published in the BMJ from the outset. Facebook could throw all their servers in a wood chipper today and it would have zero effect on scientific debate in the world. |
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| ▲ | immibis 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | All that a state does is convince people. States don't really exist. They're fictional constructs that sometimes convince a police officer to break into a murderer's home and kidnap him. And most of us agree that's a good thing. However sometimes they convince a police officer to break into a protestor's home and kidnap him. And some of us agree that's a bad thing. Other times they convince bomb makers to make bombs and convince aircraft mechanics to attach them to airplanes and convince pilots to fly over hospitals and press the release button. That's bad too - sadly not everyone agrees on that. | | |
| ▲ | jMyles 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | You've written this with a certain sardonic tone, seemingly in efforts to show the person to whom you're responding that their view necessarily leads to the particular brand of anarchism you're espousing. And I must say, I find your argument and phraseology very convincing. I agree with everything you've said here; states are not imbued with any particular magic. They simply convince people to do things that, if people weren't filled with the mindset of exceptions that seem to come when engaging in public services, they'd never ever do. I have a degree in political science, and I wish that the reading material required to get that degree displayed more of the technique you've used here. | | |
| ▲ | mullingitover 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I mean, it's good prose but it's just sort of hand-waving away all the history of how we ended up with modern states. States solve a lot of problems, they're not perfect but I'm pretty passionate about not living in walled cities because there are hordes of raiders who go around enslaving everyone. | | |
| ▲ | immibis 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I think you both may have misunderstood my comment. It's not about history. It's simply a rebuttal to the idea that something which "only convinces" is less influential than a state. States themselves also fall into that category, and therefore we can see that things in that category can be so influential they need forceful restraint. |
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| ▲ | thegrimmest 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > States have a monopoly on violence This could be amended to "States have a monopoly legitimate on violence". Your comment seems to deny the existence of "legitimacy" as a concept. How do you distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate use of force? | | |
| ▲ | immibis 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | No, states can't do violence because they don't have hands, so they can't hold guns or bats. The violence is done on behalf of the state by some of the people it convinces, mostly police officers and soldiers. |
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| ▲ | betteryet 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | EU is holding, but the fact that every authoritarian (US, China, Russia) is trying to break it apart should tell you something. It's like the only one remaining, and they don't like it. You may not agree, but VDL and KK have more balls than most men who have run the EU in recent history. | | |
| ▲ | atmosx 3 days ago | parent [-] | | If they had any, they would be in front line… not asking me to go get myself killed :-) |
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| ▲ | wrxd 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | So unpopular that the only country who ever decided to leave is now regretting its decision | | |
| ▲ | atmosx 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Just to make myself clear: I don’t think the UK made the right move. But if you ask most countries in referendums they will choose to leave. Ps. I know HN likes the EU very much because they see it as an opposing power to their home issues but it’s not that. The EU, in its current form, has many structural problems. That doesn’t mean that Europeans like Musk, Trump or Biden. |
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| ▲ | victorbjorklund 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | What are you talking about? Lots of countries have voted to join EU. Any country can leave when they want. EU is still popular in most countries. | | |
| ▲ | atmosx 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Can you name a referendum of a country within the EU that has to do with the EU in some form or capacity and received a positive vote? Netherlands, France, Italy and Greece all voted at a certain point in time. The result was always a “no”. The EU is not popular, within Europe, at all. Maybe the idea is great, but the implementation is certainly not. | | |
| ▲ | kazen44 3 days ago | parent [-] | | what are you on about?
this idea of a referendum is a straw man. Member states joined the EU through mechanisms of their state. (Acts of parlements, referendum or something else). Also, the votes you are described are all about the implementation of certain ideas/legislation inside the context of the EU, not about the organisation itself? | | |
| ▲ | atmosx 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > what are you on about? I'm a European citizen, stating the obvious. Happens to be the contrary of what most ppl in here think it is. > Member states joined the EU through mechanisms of their state. (Acts of parlements, referendum or something else). They did. That was a long time ago. When the EU was created the expectation was to align salaries, social welfare networks through access to cheap lending through the common currency, even though politicians like Margaret Thatcher understood the role of the ECB the moment it was proposed. Indeed her last speech as a PM in the house of commons is legendary[^1]. > Also, the votes you are described are all about the implementation of certain ideas/legislation inside the context of the EU, not about the organisation itself? Most voters don't make that distinction. The fact that every time a government wants to implement an unpopular idea uses the EU as an excuse doesn't help ofc. To recap: given the opportunity, the majority of countries in Europe would choose to live the EU today, if you ask them. It was much easier for the UK to do so, because they were not part of the monetary union. [^1]: "[...] the point of that kind of Europe with a central bank is no democracy, taking powers away from every single Parliament, and having a single currency, a monetary policy and interest rates which take all political power away from us.", M. Thatcher, Excerpt from her last speeh as UK's PM (1990). |
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