6 ms·

Zuckerberg says the White House pressured Facebook over some Covid-19 content

40 points by typeofhuman 2y ago

andy_ppp 2y ago
I wonder if this is coming up just before the election because of the Harris campaign’s suggested policy of capital gains tax on unrealised gains for people who have over $100m in assets? I think this is a great idea personally given what these people are doing to avoid paying tax including taking out loans against their own share portfolios. EDIT: surprisingly aggressive downvoting on this, seems reasonable to make the point that a lot of owners of social media sites have billions of dollars in taxes riding on a Trump win if this policy happens.
- MangoCoffee 2y ago
  >I wonder if this is coming up just before the election because of the Harris campaign suggesting capital gains tax on unrealised gains for people who have over $100m in assets? say what? If that's the case, then we can expect many wealthy individuals with significant influence to speak out, such as Jeff Bezos with his ownership of The Washington Post.
  - rhelz 2y ago
    Of course, but that's what the opposing party should be doing--just like Democrats were correct to point out all the foibles of Trump. Nobody should just get a free pass.
  - oezi 2y ago
    Only if those wealthy people consider being taxed unfair. They shouldn't.
- taylodl 2y ago
  I'm firmly against taxing unrealised gains - for the fact that they are unrealised. What we should do is re-think the capital gains tax, especially when using securities in lieu of personal income. That's how the C-suite has been avoiding a lot of income tax, and it's not just people having $100M in assets. Also, the top tax rate should be increased, especially for incomes above $10M. Likewise, the FICA cap should be increased. Those few tweaks put us in really good shape, without resorting to taxing unrealised gains.
  - andy_ppp 2y ago
    Sure, I’m definitely not against better solutions but a small sliver of people owning everything and the middle class and poor increasingly owning less and less of the wealth over generations needs to be looked at if we want people to be able to own homes and have consumers to buy things.
    - taylodl 2y ago
      Now you're talking about wealth transfer - and that is already taxed, though we've dropped the amount it's taxed. We could certainly raise the amount it's been taxed, and it should be a progressive tax.
taylodl 2y ago
“I believe the government pressure was wrong and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” Zuckerberg wrote I believe how Zuckerberg handled a pandemic that killed millions of people around the world was wrong. At some point in time, we have to admit to ourselves that misinformation, including misinformation masquerading as "satire", is deadly and we're going to have to come to terms whether spreading deadly misinformation is a constitutionally protected right.
- nilespotter 2y ago
  It is.
  - LargeWu 2y ago
    Not all speech is, or should be, protected speech.
    - gruez 2y ago
      The current standard is "imminent lawless action", which hardly fits covid misinformation.
      - LargeWu 2y ago
        The thing about standards is they are able to be re-evaluated from time to time. I think it's worth examining what legitimate purpose spreading health misinformation serves, and how that is beneficial to society.
        gruez 2y ago
        > I think it's worth examining what legitimate purpose spreading health misinformation serves, and how that is beneficial to society. "it's worth examining what legitimate purpose giving due process to criminals serve, and how that is beneficial to society" Nobody is for spreading misinformation. The trouble is determining what "misinformation" is, and who has the power to determine that.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
progrus 2y ago
The long march has stalled, soon the lizards will break ranks and flee.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
zug_zug 2y ago
Meh, I find this very hard to care about. I suppose to some degree there was some overreaction around covid, but I feel like some portion of the country being actively conspiratorial saps any faith I had that there's some inherent selection algorithm out there in our nature that will elevate rational, calm, evidence-based ideas to the top.
- readthenotes1 2y ago
  I kind of don't know what you're complaining about which I guess is your point. Was it the people who claim that the mask was a government conspiracy? Or the scientist who conspired to just kind of make up masks in six feet? I'm sure it's not the now proven cover-up of the lab leak hypothesis that was considered conspiracy theory that is proved to just simply be a conspiracy.
  - zug_zug 2y ago
    I'm referring to the significant percentage of the population who believed conspiracy theories around vaccines. And then what I saw was media personalities intentionally fanning the flames (e.g. Rogan) because they understood creating cultural rift us-them war out of a nothingburger was a way to maximize engagement. Ideally we'd all be so rational we would have no us-versus-them instincts at all, and could be completely objective and form independent opinions on every issue based on data. But it's very clear that culture has a bit of a mob-mentality, and it's an open question whether we'd be better off with more or less coordination/restriction on our communication.
Mattasher 2y ago
The use of "some" here in the headline seems dishonest and diminishing of what was done. Like, "some people were effected by the car crash". Technically true, but effectively more narrative than journalism, especially since among that censored "some" was a lot of true information and experiences.
drooopy 2y ago
Has mark zuckerberg ever expressed any regret for the fact that his platforms have played a role in instigating conflict and lethal violence in many different parts of the world over the years or is this his only regret?
- seydor 2y ago
  I think he apologized publicly to some people whose relatives had been victimized through social media
- cameldrv 2y ago
  Ultimately to maximize engagement you want to get people obsessed with something. Whether it’s sometimes violent racism, vaccine paranoia, national politics, whatever, you just need to get them obsessed, and then they will spend hours every day on your site feeding this beast and go insane. Then you will sell lots of ads and get rich. In this case, the government was saying: “Hey we have no problem in general with you driving people insane, but in this particular topic, having a bunch of antivax lunatics ain’t helping with the pandemic.” IMO the problem is not the content per se, it’s the massive psychological manipulation. It’s incompatible with a free, functioning democracy.
  - TYPE_FASTER 2y ago
    > Ultimately to maximize engagement you want to get people obsessed with something. Whether it’s sometimes violent racism, vaccine paranoia, national politics, whatever, you just need to get them obsessed, and then they will spend hours every day on your site feeding this beast and go insane. Then you will sell lots of ads and get rich. Yes. This is exactly what Elon is doing with X at the moment.
rhelz 2y ago
When the plague struck, I was living in NY city, in a large apartment building. *Every* *single* *day* one of my neighbors was wheeled out the front doors, feet-first, never to return. Then it was *two* neighbors a day... The hospital beds were filling up so fast, they were building tent hospitals in Central Park. So many bodies were piling up in morgues that there was serious talk about having mass burials. It is very easy to armchair quarterback how this should have played out--5 years later, with the benefit of hindsight. Yes, lots of things could have been handled better. Yes, we should do postmortems to find out what could be done better next time. But FFS, both the government and corporate leaders had to make decisions in real time--decisions they knew would have real consequences, and decisions they knew had the possibility of being wrong. They didn't have the luxury of perfection. It was a once-in-a-century pandemic, and they had to act in the face of partial information. All things considered, they did a pretty good job.
- seydor 2y ago
  There were a bunch of cities, countries and states that did provably better job - NY was one of the worst-hit places in the world. So, no.
  - rhelz 2y ago
    chuckle there it is. While I was in NYC, my sister was living in a rural town, population of around 100. She was mystified why our governor was making us wash our hands and wear masks. Why, they weren't doing any of that in her town, and nobody died at all!! How could we just let our civil liberties be violated like that!!! Friend, I'm only telling you what I saw with my own eyes. NYC was one of the first hit, because it one of the most connected cities with the rest of the world, and it was one of the hardest hit, because of the very high population density. There was no one-size-fits-all policy--some policies were more apropos for rural places, some were more apropos for dense urban centers. But that doesn't mean that the policies apropos to a farmhouse in a 1,000-acre cornfield would have had better results in NYC.
    - TMWNN 2y ago
seydor 2y ago
It looks like there is a come-back of free speech on big tech. Probably because their interests and some government's interests do not align as of lately . Not that I 'm complaining but if this is really a trend, it took way too long to take us back to 2001 Also interesting that the AP article doesn't mention the hunter biden story censorhip that zuck mentions in the same letter.
- ImJamal 2y ago
  Wasn't AP complicit in the laptop censorship? I feel like they claimed there was no evidence. Maybe I am mixing them up with another new org?
- pupppet 2y ago
  There's no such thing as free speech on a private platform. If you disagree, go walk on set to make your views known tonight on the 6 o'clock news and see how that works out for you.
  - mekal 2y ago
    There certainly is...Zuck can censor whatever he wants but just because it's a private platform doesn't mean the gov can censor it, or pressure him to do so. You saw the "White House pressured Facebook" part...right?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41365868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41365868
josefritzishere 2y ago
There a retcon in that article. They say Biden and 2020 but Trump was president in 2020. Biden was sworn in January 2021.

40 points by typeofhuman 2y ago

I wonder if this is coming up just before the election because of the Harris campaign’s suggested policy of capital gains tax on unrealised gains for people who have over $100m in assets? I think this is a great idea personally given what these people are doing to avoid paying tax including taking out loans against their own share portfolios. EDIT: surprisingly aggressive downvoting on this, seems reasonable to make the point that a lot of owners of social media sites have billions of dollars in taxes riding on a Trump win if this policy happens.

MangoCoffee 2y ago
>I wonder if this is coming up just before the election because of the Harris campaign suggesting capital gains tax on unrealised gains for people who have over $100m in assets? say what? If that's the case, then we can expect many wealthy individuals with significant influence to speak out, such as Jeff Bezos with his ownership of The Washington Post.
- rhelz 2y ago
  Of course, but that's what the opposing party should be doing--just like Democrats were correct to point out all the foibles of Trump. Nobody should just get a free pass.
- oezi 2y ago
  Only if those wealthy people consider being taxed unfair. They shouldn't.
taylodl 2y ago
I'm firmly against taxing unrealised gains - for the fact that they are unrealised. What we should do is re-think the capital gains tax, especially when using securities in lieu of personal income. That's how the C-suite has been avoiding a lot of income tax, and it's not just people having $100M in assets. Also, the top tax rate should be increased, especially for incomes above $10M. Likewise, the FICA cap should be increased. Those few tweaks put us in really good shape, without resorting to taxing unrealised gains.
- andy_ppp 2y ago
  Sure, I’m definitely not against better solutions but a small sliver of people owning everything and the middle class and poor increasingly owning less and less of the wealth over generations needs to be looked at if we want people to be able to own homes and have consumers to buy things.
  - taylodl 2y ago
    Now you're talking about wealth transfer - and that is already taxed, though we've dropped the amount it's taxed. We could certainly raise the amount it's been taxed, and it should be a progressive tax.

taylodl 2y ago

“I believe the government pressure was wrong and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” Zuckerberg wrote I believe how Zuckerberg handled a pandemic that killed millions of people around the world was wrong. At some point in time, we have to admit to ourselves that misinformation, including misinformation masquerading as "satire", is deadly and we're going to have to come to terms whether spreading deadly misinformation is a constitutionally protected right.

nilespotter 2y ago
It is.
- LargeWu 2y ago
  Not all speech is, or should be, protected speech.
  - gruez 2y ago
    The current standard is "imminent lawless action", which hardly fits covid misinformation.
    - LargeWu 2y ago
      The thing about standards is they are able to be re-evaluated from time to time. I think it's worth examining what legitimate purpose spreading health misinformation serves, and how that is beneficial to society.
      - gruez 2y ago
        > I think it's worth examining what legitimate purpose spreading health misinformation serves, and how that is beneficial to society. "it's worth examining what legitimate purpose giving due process to criminals serve, and how that is beneficial to society" Nobody is for spreading misinformation. The trouble is determining what "misinformation" is, and who has the power to determine that.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

progrus 2y ago

The long march has stalled, soon the lizards will break ranks and flee.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

zug_zug 2y ago

Meh, I find this very hard to care about. I suppose to some degree there was some overreaction around covid, but I feel like some portion of the country being actively conspiratorial saps any faith I had that there's some inherent selection algorithm out there in our nature that will elevate rational, calm, evidence-based ideas to the top.

readthenotes1 2y ago
I kind of don't know what you're complaining about which I guess is your point. Was it the people who claim that the mask was a government conspiracy? Or the scientist who conspired to just kind of make up masks in six feet? I'm sure it's not the now proven cover-up of the lab leak hypothesis that was considered conspiracy theory that is proved to just simply be a conspiracy.
- zug_zug 2y ago
  I'm referring to the significant percentage of the population who believed conspiracy theories around vaccines. And then what I saw was media personalities intentionally fanning the flames (e.g. Rogan) because they understood creating cultural rift us-them war out of a nothingburger was a way to maximize engagement. Ideally we'd all be so rational we would have no us-versus-them instincts at all, and could be completely objective and form independent opinions on every issue based on data. But it's very clear that culture has a bit of a mob-mentality, and it's an open question whether we'd be better off with more or less coordination/restriction on our communication.

Mattasher 2y ago

The use of "some" here in the headline seems dishonest and diminishing of what was done. Like, "some people were effected by the car crash". Technically true, but effectively more narrative than journalism, especially since among that censored "some" was a lot of true information and experiences.

drooopy 2y ago

Has mark zuckerberg ever expressed any regret for the fact that his platforms have played a role in instigating conflict and lethal violence in many different parts of the world over the years or is this his only regret?

seydor 2y ago
I think he apologized publicly to some people whose relatives had been victimized through social media
cameldrv 2y ago
Ultimately to maximize engagement you want to get people obsessed with something. Whether it’s sometimes violent racism, vaccine paranoia, national politics, whatever, you just need to get them obsessed, and then they will spend hours every day on your site feeding this beast and go insane. Then you will sell lots of ads and get rich. In this case, the government was saying: “Hey we have no problem in general with you driving people insane, but in this particular topic, having a bunch of antivax lunatics ain’t helping with the pandemic.” IMO the problem is not the content per se, it’s the massive psychological manipulation. It’s incompatible with a free, functioning democracy.
- TYPE_FASTER 2y ago
  > Ultimately to maximize engagement you want to get people obsessed with something. Whether it’s sometimes violent racism, vaccine paranoia, national politics, whatever, you just need to get them obsessed, and then they will spend hours every day on your site feeding this beast and go insane. Then you will sell lots of ads and get rich. Yes. This is exactly what Elon is doing with X at the moment.

rhelz 2y ago

When the plague struck, I was living in NY city, in a large apartment building. *Every* *single* *day* one of my neighbors was wheeled out the front doors, feet-first, never to return. Then it was *two* neighbors a day... The hospital beds were filling up so fast, they were building tent hospitals in Central Park. So many bodies were piling up in morgues that there was serious talk about having mass burials. It is very easy to armchair quarterback how this should have played out--5 years later, with the benefit of hindsight. Yes, lots of things could have been handled better. Yes, we should do postmortems to find out what could be done better next time. But FFS, both the government and corporate leaders had to make decisions in real time--decisions they knew would have real consequences, and decisions they knew had the possibility of being wrong. They didn't have the luxury of perfection. It was a once-in-a-century pandemic, and they had to act in the face of partial information. All things considered, they did a pretty good job.

seydor 2y ago
There were a bunch of cities, countries and states that did provably better job - NY was one of the worst-hit places in the world. So, no.
- rhelz 2y ago
  chuckle there it is. While I was in NYC, my sister was living in a rural town, population of around 100. She was mystified why our governor was making us wash our hands and wear masks. Why, they weren't doing any of that in her town, and nobody died at all!! How could we just let our civil liberties be violated like that!!! Friend, I'm only telling you what I saw with my own eyes. NYC was one of the first hit, because it one of the most connected cities with the rest of the world, and it was one of the hardest hit, because of the very high population density. There was no one-size-fits-all policy--some policies were more apropos for rural places, some were more apropos for dense urban centers. But that doesn't mean that the policies apropos to a farmhouse in a 1,000-acre cornfield would have had better results in NYC.
  - TMWNN 2y ago

seydor 2y ago

It looks like there is a come-back of free speech on big tech. Probably because their interests and some government's interests do not align as of lately . Not that I 'm complaining but if this is really a trend, it took way too long to take us back to 2001 Also interesting that the AP article doesn't mention the hunter biden story censorhip that zuck mentions in the same letter.

ImJamal 2y ago
Wasn't AP complicit in the laptop censorship? I feel like they claimed there was no evidence. Maybe I am mixing them up with another new org?
pupppet 2y ago
There's no such thing as free speech on a private platform. If you disagree, go walk on set to make your views known tonight on the 6 o'clock news and see how that works out for you.
- mekal 2y ago
  There certainly is...Zuck can censor whatever he wants but just because it's a private platform doesn't mean the gov can censor it, or pressure him to do so. You saw the "White House pressured Facebook" part...right?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41365868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41365868

josefritzishere 2y ago

There a retcon in that article. They say Biden and 2020 but Trump was president in 2020. Biden was sworn in January 2021.