25 ms·

The ideological bits are: * Dana White added to the board. * "Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content rev

by davidw 2y ago

The ideological bits are: * Dana White added to the board. * "Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content." - like people being in Texas makes them more objective?! The actual mechanisms of running a social media network at scale are tricky and I think most of us would be fine with some experimentation. But it looks pretty political in the broader context, so maybe it's just a way of saying that certain kinds of 'content' like attacking trans people is going to be ok now. I can't quite FB entirely, but Threads looks like a much less interesting option with Blue Sky being available and gaining in popularity.

tptacek 2y ago
I get how the partisan story is easy to tell here, but I'm saying something pretty specific: I think it would have been product development malpractice for this decision not to have been in the works for many, many months, long before the GOP takeover of the federal government was a safe bet. Community Notes has been that successful, and Facebook's fact-checkers have been that much of a product disaster. I've never seen a wrong Facebook fact-check; I am warmly supportive of intrusive moderation; that's not where I'm coming from.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  > I've never seen a wrong Facebook fact-check; Probably because fact checkers are able to make content become unshareable so you not seeing them is the point? But "fact checking" NGOs have a long history of embarrassingly stupid, biased and self-serving decisions. To pick just one example, in 2020 an op-ed in the New York Post arguing that COVID might have come from the coronavirus research lab in Wuhan was banned from Facebook and Twitter because of being labelled by an anonymous fact checker. Who was this fact checker? Turns out one of them was Danielle E. Anderson, an assistant professor at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, who had literally conducted experiments at the Wuhan lab and collaborated with its scientists. You can't possibly get more biased than that, but because she was an academic the sort of people who chose the fact checkers assumed she would be automatically correct. And worse, that anyone who disagreed with her - even mildly - should therefore be banned from the internet. That is the common pattern in every incident that make people mad at "fact checkers" and the reason they have no credibility is that these events happen all the time, are always in favour of left wing beliefs, and they never attempt to learn from these events strongly implying they're deliberate. Indeed the assumption that government funded people are always correct is basically hard-wired into the fact checker ecosystem. They don't attempt to actually work out what's true themselves, so they can't be fixed. This is the kind of thing that Zuck is referring to when he says they're discredited. Wrong fact checks are commonplace, you just won't notice them if you rely on news feeds they control.
- davidw 2y ago
  As a product decision taken independently, maybe. Running one of those things at scale with all kinds of people trying to subvert it for various reasons, including some downright evil ones, is not an easy task. Announced together with everything else and given the timing, I just can't help but think there's a political component to all of it.
  - tptacek 2y ago
    I don't at all doubt that they're going to do whatever they can to cast this presumably longstanding product plan in the light most favorable to the governing majority! I just want to get the causality right.
    - sanderjd 2y ago
      I don't understand though: What makes you think that you are getting the causality right? It seems to me like you're asserting the causality goes one direction, when there doesn't seem to be any evidence (at least in public) for that assertion at the moment. Have I just missed some other information on this that you're basing this on?
      - tcbawo 2y ago
        I think he is suggesting that this move has favorable PR optics for the incoming administration. Making it appear like a conservative victory may give them some slack or earn them some favors.
        sangnoir 2y ago
        Is it not a conservative culture-war victory designed to earn favors? There is no external evidence of this having been anything other than a contingency around November 6 of last year, so it's hard to definitively say it's one or the other.
        disgruntledphd2 2y ago
- ethbr1 2y ago
  I expect it was an easy bone to throw the incoming administration, which the tech world learned from v1 is placatable by giving them PR / sound bite wins. To the broader concern, this feels like Facebook making their original sin again. Namely defunding and destroying revenue for a task that takes money (fact checking) and then expecting a free, community-driven approach to replace it. Turns out, hot takes for clicks are a lot cheaper than journalism. In this case, where is the funding to support nuanced, accurate fact checking at scale from? Because it sure seems like Facebook isn't going to pay. > I've never seen a wrong Facebook fact-check Did you mean to say Note here?
  - tptacek 2y ago
    No, I meant to say Facebook fact-check.
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      > Facebook's fact-checkers have been that much of a product disaster. > I've never seen a wrong Facebook fact-check Confused between these two statements, then.
      - tptacek 2y ago
        Do you believe the success or failure of these moderating features comes down to how accurate they are? People actually like Community Notes; they're part of the discourse on Twitter (even if most of them are pretty bad, some of them are timely and sharp). Meanwhile: Facebook's fact-checking features really do work sort of like PSA's for trolls. All the while, fact-checks barely scratch the surface of the conversations happening on the platform. Facebook and Twitter are also unalike in their social dynamics. It makes sense to think of individual major trending stories on Twitter, which can be "Noted", in a way it doesn't make sense on Meta, which is atomized; people spreading bullshit on Meta are carpet bombing the site with individual hits each hoping to get just a couple eyeballs, rather than a single monster thread everyone sees. (This may be different on Threads, I don't use Threads or know anybody who does).
- Barrin92 2y ago
  >I think it would have been product development malpractice the thing is both community notes and top down moderation, if they have any purpose at all, are product malpractice. If they work, they are always going to be intrusive because that's what they're supposed to do, correct factually wrong information. Community notes is the neighborhood police, top down moderation is the feds but if they do their job either one is going to be annoying by definition. If they're not intrusive they don't perform a corrective function and that's what largely happened to community notes. As time goes on they're more and more snarky and sarcastic meta comments rather than corrections.
  - _DeadFred_ 2y ago
    But because they are community driven, they are snarky in a way that represents the community, which makes me question if they are intrusive at all. They are what the community grows them into.
  - tptacek 2y ago
    It seems pretty clear to me that one of these features generally makes users happy and, at the same time, does correct some misinformation, and the other catches about 0.0001% of the bad stuff and turns it into advertisements for how bad the site is.
    - mrguyorama 2y ago
      How can you possibly call community notes on Twitter a "success" when they demonstrably have not reduced the amount of actively made up shit on the site, and the same people who complain about a fact checker saying "no, vaccines do not change your DNA" are just as upset when that info comes from the community notes box, and the only reason there hasn't been widescale anger about them is because Elon wants to pretend it was his idea.
      - tptacek 2y ago
        I'm not saying Twitter it is good. It is demonstrably not. But you're kidding yourself if you thought Facebook fact checking was suppressing the antivaxers and flat-earthers.
- rwmj 2y ago
  Clegg left a few days ago, and the Oversight Board issued a statement which sounds like they were in the dark: > “We look forward to working with Meta in the coming weeks to understand the changes in greater detail, ensuring its new approach can be as effective and speech-friendly as possible.” [1] So is it possible this was only announced recently. It might have been "in the works" in the C-suite for a bit longer, but there doesn't seem to be any evidence it was widely known before very recently. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/07/meta-facebook-instagram-threads-mark-zuckerberg-remove-fact-checkers-recommend-political-content https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/07/meta-face...
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  As a product decision, I agree. But I think that can still be addressed separately from the fact that all the tech leaders in Silicon Valley are bending the knee to Trump (e.g. the Mar-a-Lago visits, the "donations" to his inauguration, etc.) I'll give you an example I find analogous. When Bezos forbid the Washington Post from giving a presidential endorsement, he wrote an op-ed, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/28/jeff-bezos-washington-post-trust/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/28/jeff-bezo.... I pretty much agreed with the vast majority of what he wrote there. What I think is total BS, though, is his purported rationale and the timing of the decision. I think it's absolutely clear he did it because he didn't want to piss off Trump should he win (the "obeying in advance" part), which he did. The reason I believe this is because he made this decision so close to the election, and he apparently didn't feel the need to do this in previous years, or even the fact that WaPo made other political endorsements (e.g. Senate races in Maryland and VA) just before the presidential endorsement was banned. Bezos subsequent Mar-a-Lago visits and Amazon's inauguration "donation" pretty much confirm my view in my opinion. In Zuckerberg's announcement, I thought the part he put in about fact checkers being "politically biased" was unnecessary (not to mention dubious IMO), and cleared seemed done to curry favor with the current powers that be.
  - tptacek 2y ago
    As someone active in "resistance"-type organization from 2017-2021, with fundamentally the same politics now as I had then: I think all this "bend the knees" shit is mostly working to the benefit of the GOP, and I wish people would stop it. We lost an election, in part because we bet that the median voter was prepared to disqualify MAGA Republicans. They are not. Find a new angle, so we can win in the midterms. This isn't working.
    - hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
      I'm not trying to convince other voters. The "bend the knee" shit is not something I'm saying to try to change opinions. Like you say, clearly the majority of Americans don't care. But it I'm pretty surprised at the outright transparent speed with which all these business leaders were willing to pay these naked fealty bribes, especially since for so long so many of them talked about these lofty goals besides just making money. Italians in the 1930s didn't care either when Mussolini made corporations an arm of the state. But that doesn't mean what is happening now is any different.
- toss1 2y ago
  If it was in the works for a long time, then Zuckerberg has been planning to bend the knee to Trump for a long time. Today, Trump in press conference (video at [0]: Q: "Do you think Zuckerberg is responding to the threats you've made to him in the past?" TRUMP: "Probably. Yeah. Probably." This tells us all we need to know. It has nothing to do with facts and everything to do with yielding to political pressure to bend the media to his whims. This is just the most standard and basic elements of autocracy, the autocrat must make all the institutions serve him, not the people. This includes not only the branches of government, but also of society, starting with the press, but also the corporate world, the academy, social groups, and everything else. This is bog-standard autocracy, not democracy. [0] https://x.com/atrupar/status/1876683641113248036 https://x.com/atrupar/status/1876683641113248036
  - emmelaich 2y ago
    Bending left and right according to the government of the day doesn't tell you where the true center is.
    - toss1 2y ago
      Autocracy is not Left or Right. It is corrupting all the institutions to serve the will of the autocrat, not the will of the people. Bending the knee to the autocrat, in this case explicitly changing your rules and operations to enable the autocrat and his followers to more easily spread their lies and intimidation is not political flexibility, it is obeying in advance to be complicit in implementing the autocracy. It would be better if you didn't have to learn that the hard way, but our educational system and information distribution system has failed. This is just a more advanced and accelerated example of that failure. [Edit: yes, my mistake to phrase it as political pressure — it was nothing of the sort — it was authoritarian extortion. Note Zuck has a case before the FTC.]
  - curtisblaine 2y ago
    Autocracts doesn't get democratically elected, as far as I understand. Trump is a democratically elected leader who will end his term at most in 2028. Autocracts tend to not be democratically elected (or to change the rules once they're elected to never be deposed). Zuckerberg will bend his knee to the Democrats if they win next term. This is not autocracy, this is just knowing where the wind blows.
- motorest 2y ago
  > I get how the partisan story is easy to tell here, but I'm saying something pretty specific: I think it would have been product development malpractice for this decision not to have been in the works for many, many months, long before the GOP takeover of the federal government was a safe bet. You're just stating that, in your personal opinion, a scenario would be bad. That says nothing about it actually taking place. You're expressing your personal opinion in response to a message listing facts supporting the belief the scenario is actually taking place. Meaning, it's still plausible this is what is actually happening.
- TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
  I don't understand your point at all. Community Notes on E(x) has been ineffective, because ultimately the point of moderation is to delete posts which aren't true so they receive no reach and spread no disinformation. Not to turn them into a public debate which might as well continue in the posts themselves. Meta's political history has consistently been shady. Meta patented behavioural targeting technology in 2012 and was fined $5bn for its "accidental" links to anti-democratic election-fixers Cambridge Analytica/SCL, who have ties to far-right oligarchs in the US and the UK. If you're looking for an ideological position, look there. The historical record is absolutely clear. And then there are comments from Meta insiders, who - perhaps - have a clearer picture of what's going on than outsiders do. As for malpractice, consider the recent AI rollout and rollback. It was an absolute fiasco for all kinds of reasons, PR and technical, not least of which was the way the bots themselves turned on the company. Threads has already had a mini-exodus because of slanted moderation. Meta is simply not a trustworthy company. So "Oh, let's scrap our moderation and do community notes" is hardly an isolated slip-up on an otherwise unblemished record of noble public service. https://fortune.com/2025/01/04/meta-ai-accounts-bots-false-representation-social-media-facebook-instagram/ https://fortune.com/2025/01/04/meta-ai-accounts-bots-false-r... https://www.platformer.news/meta-fact-checking-free-speech-surrender/ https://www.platformer.news/meta-fact-checking-free-speech-s...
  - RansomStark 2y ago
    > ultimately the point of moderation is to delete posts which aren't true so they receive no reach and spread no disinformation. That assumes that the correct amount of disinformation is zero, personally I wish to maintain my right to be wrong, and my right to tell others of my wrong ideas, and I hope they maintain the right to tell me I'm full of it. Your position on censorship, moderation, as you call it, is your opinion, and your opinion only, and it is at odds with the position of X, and now Meta, who are taking the position that the point of moderation is to respect everyone's right to speech, while making it very obvious to those that care, that the speech may be less than truthful. Essentially everyone gets to speak, and everyone gets to make up their own mind. What a concept! I also maintain a position of truth dies in the dark, and lies die in the light. Most people aren't stupid, community notes breaks the echo chamber and provides a counterpoint. That debate of free ideas has been working pretty well so far. So much so that we can usually tell who the bad guys are by how much the create darkness; how much they take on the role of arbiters of truth, how much they silence critics, think Soviet Russia, or North Korea for some good examples.
- freejazz 2y ago
  I don't think the point of the fact-checkers is so that facebook users like them, and it seems odd to pretend that was ever the point.
- panarky 2y ago
  Both professional fact-checkers and Community Notes have a pretty low false-positive rate. It's the false negatives that are the differentiator, but false negatives are by definition invisible to the user. When you evaluate moderation as a "product" you place more weight on factors that are mostly losers for third-party fact checkers and winners for Community Notes: speed and annoying tone. But since false negatives are never seen, there's no visible "product" to be annoyed by. Sure, the platform fills up with even more disinfo, but users blame that on other user, not the moderation "product". And this is where Community Notes fails. Because Notes require consensus from multiple groups with histories of diverse ideological perspectives, when one perspective has an interest in propagating disinfo, no Community Note appears. Some studies show something like 75% of clear disinfo doesn't get a Community Note on X when it involves a hot partisan shibboleth. False negatives are mostly invisible failures that make the entire platform worse, but the user can't blame it on a "product" because it's really the absence of a product that's the problem.
marbro 2y ago
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- davidw 2y ago
  That's a housing problem. California is very NIMBY and doesn't build enough homes. That has nothing to do with how 'objective' fact checking or content review or whatever is from people in both places. This is just very thinly coded language signalling who they're going to favor.
philwelch 2y ago
Austin is much closer to the center of mainstream American sentiment than the SF Bay Area, but it’s still to the left of center.
- davidw 2y ago
  And Redding, California is far to the right of it. It's just coded language for who they're going to favor, otherwise it makes no sense at all, as it's possible to find people of all political stripes in both states, as well as employees who would take their duty to stick to the facts very seriously.
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
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  - philwelch 2y ago
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  - intended 2y ago
    It’s a Cost reduction garbed in PR. They have teams in Austin already.
- ternnoburn 2y ago
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  - pesus 2y ago
    You're generally correct, but I imagine you won't get a good reaction on HN to this viewpoint. Most people on here unfortunately don't really an understanding of politics beyond a very surface level one.
    - _DeadFred_ 2y ago
      HN is not a political site and Deng doesn't allow much politics. Your generalization is based purely on only the surface level discussion allowed. Maybe it's you that doesn't have nuanced 'understanding'?
AlchemistCamp 2y ago
> "Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content." - like people being in Texas makes them more objective?! The FB office in Austin, Texas is a moderately left-leaning area. Their office in Silicon Valley is about the most extreme left-wing place in the country. At the very least, teams at their Texas offices will have more overlap with the median voter than the ones in California. If their Texas offices were in rural rancher country, then I'd agree with your concern that it would just be swapping one bias for another.
- davidw 2y ago
  It's not about actual employees, it's about signalling "Texas - yay!" and "California - booooo!" in order to make good with the incoming administration.
  - tptacek 2y ago
    Well, that and moderators being able to afford 1-bedroom apartments.
    - asdff 2y ago
      Says more about fb being penny pinching than anything. The kid working the panda express in california can afford a 1br apartment, why not a fb moderator?
      - davidw 2y ago
        > The kid working the panda express in california can afford a 1br apartment A lot of them can't, actually, but that's really a different problem.
        asdff 2y ago
        Have you seen panda express job postings lately? It's like north of $20 an hour with full medical, dental, vacation, sick days, 401k. Higher than that for shift lead and managers I'm sure. Sure beats when I worked fast food for minimum wage and had to find my own sub when I got sick.
starik36 2y ago
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paxys 2y ago
You forgot the biggest one – replacing Nick Clegg as their global policy chief with Joel Kaplan, a Republican lobbyist.
- tptacek 2y ago
  Seems like not the biggest one? That seems like the kind of role you take knowing you're going to hold it only so long as you have a rapport with the current governing majorities.
- TheKarateKid 2y ago
  This is on par for Meta. Don't forget that Cheryl Sandberg was their Democratic Party liaison.
cryptonector 2y ago
GP was asking about how fact checking is better than community notes, but you're saying that Meta's community notes will be worse than fact checking, which may be but which is not responsive to GP's question.
deleted 2y ago
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quicpr 2y ago
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jimbokun 2y ago
I can’t help but roll my eyes at mindless euphemisms like “attacking trans people.” There are very serious issues involving trans people with no easy answers. Like allowing minors access to irreversible treatments. Like women’s sports. Like the safety of women only spaces. I bring this up because on so many questions like these, the progressive reaction is to shut down any discussion and isolate themselves from exposure to any ideas different from their own. It doesn’t work. And it doesn’t help anyone. And maybe this has something to do with why Facebook is migrating to a “Community Notes” model.
- eynsham 2y ago
  Is it not possible that ‘attacking trans people’ is both (sometimes) a euphemism for criticism of maximalist positions and (at other times) a perfectly normal term that designates approximately what ‘attacking x’ generally means? There is such a thing as an unsubstantive and utterly unpleasant insult explicitly motivated by the fact that its target is trans. Many trans people say that there are many such, and one does not need to believe everything that trans people say (surely with the result of inconsistency!) to think that the evidence they present is not wholly concocted. Others may misidentify respectable, good, or correct arguments as ‘attacks’ in narrower senses, but that no more makes the underlying categories meaningless than the misapplication of such descriptions as ‘true’, ‘valid’, ‘scientifically established’, or ‘by definition’. I have no general pithy answer to what one should do about the sorts of attack I have described, but I venture that it is reasonable to talk or attempt to do something about them. What term would you prefer?
  - jimbokun 2y ago
    It’s possible theoretically. In practice people complaining about attacks on trans people almost always want to shut down discussion about related topics all together.
    - irisgrunn 2y ago
      Yes because it has no real life consequences like https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01979-5.epdf https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01979-5.epdf or https://goodlawproject.org/rise-of-deaths-young-trans-people/ https://goodlawproject.org/rise-of-deaths-young-trans-people...
lr1970 2y ago
> The ideological bits are: ... Should we expect Meta doing 180 degrees u-turns every 4 years when another party wins US Presidential elections?
- matwood 2y ago
  Only when the incoming party has threatened going after anyone who was against them with criminal charges.
  - throwaway69123 2y ago
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    - rcpt 2y ago
      No it doesn't
- tptacek 2y ago
  No, I expect over time they'll gradually settle into an equilibrium that works in both sets of circumstances.
- intended 2y ago
  Given the extremes of presidential candidates, I think the answer is Yes, since there exists no middle ground between fact and fiction. Or I guess you can just capitulate and leave it all to users to handle on their own, and wash your hands of the whole thing.
adolph 2y ago
> "Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. Prediction: it'll be cali-expats in Austin and nothing changes.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  They’ll be inside the jurisdiction of whatever rules Texas feels like making.
- disgruntledphd2 2y ago
  Nah, loads of the current staff will leave, but they'll hire equivalent people in Austin.
andrepd 2y ago
The whole thing is ideological. Trump and Musk are undertaking their takeover on government, and so the trillion dollar companies which control the rules of the spaces in which the vast majority of our discourse today happens, do their thing and kiss the ring. We can debate the merits of notes vs factcheck. But it's hard to see the bullshit about freedom of speech as anything other than that: you are now allowed to express opinions that the new regime shares. Long live the king.
paul7986 2y ago
Blue Sky is what mastodon was when musk bought Twitter now X. Also currently in the App Store (iPhone) bluesky sits at 167 .. Musk's X at 46 and Facebook at 19.
- immibis 2y ago
  BlueSky is what Twitter was some time before Musk bought it. Given time, it will become what Twitter is now, too. It's just too profitable. Mastodon was its own thing and remains its own thing.
j45 2y ago
Perhaps part of it is the optics that California is interpreting it for other places?
- harimau777 2y ago
  How is it any better for Texas to interpret it for other places?
  - deadbabe 2y ago
    Because liberals in Austin Texas have far more experience in what it means for liberal and conservative opinions to coexist together in one place, vs California where liberal opinions are the default and everything else must be shunned.
  - j45 2y ago
    Not saying it’s better for anywhere, only how California might be seen.
paulddraper 2y ago
Well, it's Austin, TX. Travis County was blue 69-29. Hardly a politically conservative place.
- deleted 2y ago
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nailer 2y ago
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deleted 2y ago
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devvvvvvv 2y ago
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- sterlind 2y ago
  except when it comes to banning books in schools. and prohibiting classroom discussions on race or LGBT topics. somehow free speech never seems to cut both ways with these people.
  - devvvvvvv 2y ago
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pavlov 2y ago
> “maybe it's just a way of saying that certain kinds of 'content' like attacking trans people is going to be ok now” The new policy explicitly says that allegations of mental illness are not allowed except if the target is gay or trans, so, yeah… https://www.wired.com/story/meta-immigration-gender-policies-change/ https://www.wired.com/story/meta-immigration-gender-policies...
- curtisblaine 2y ago
  > it allows “allegations of mental illness or abnormality, based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird.’” I think you misread that: it allows allegations of mental illness even on the basis of gender and religion, which before weren't allowed. It still allows allegations of mental illness based on other factors, because they were never disallowed in the first place.
  - pavlov 2y ago
    No, it’s explicitly so that allegations of mental illness are forbidden except if the target is gay or trans. Here’s another source: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/meta-new-hate-speech-rules-allow-users-call-lgbtq-people-mentally-ill-rcna186700 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/meta-new-hate-spee... And the original document: https://transparency.meta.com/en-gb/policies/community-standards/hateful-conduct/ https://transparency.meta.com/en-gb/policies/community-stand... Tier 2 forbids insults based on: Mental characteristics, including but not limited to allegations of stupidity, intellectual capacity, and mental illness, and unsupported comparisons between PC groups on the basis of inherent intellectual capacity. We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like “weird.” There’s no ambiguity. Allegations of mental illness or abnormality are explicitly allowed based on gender or sexual orientation, but no other reason.
    - lupire 2y ago
tgma 2y ago
> like people being in Texas makes them more objective?! This is the least charitable interpretation. Obviously, it is not talking about a single person moving to Texas suddenly changing colors like a chameleon (although I suspect there is quite a bit of merit to that due to groupthink and community speech policing in BayArea/LA). And yes, I think it won't be a stretch to think Texas would be more objective representation of general US PoV and less of a monoculture than FB sites in California. This is not a value judgement, just a natural function of the distribution of people.
- squigz 2y ago
  > And yes, I think it won't be a stretch to think Texas would be more objective representation of general US PoV and less of a monoculture than FB sites in California But... how?
- pavlov 2y ago
  Is the distribution of people in Austin so very different from the Bay Area? Both states are internally diverse. And it’s just silly to suggest that “groupthink and community speech policing” is something that exists in California but not Texas.
  - tgma 2y ago
    > Is the distribution of people in Austin so very different from the Bay Area? If we just go by presidential election, Travis County's result is more balanced than SF and San Mateo, almost on par with Alameda county, so the answer is "slightly." However, the moment you get exposed outside the core Austin area, you deal with predominantly red areas. To get the same effect you have to go as far as Placer County or Sonoma, so I don't think the FB workers in Bay Area (SF/Menlo Park) have quite the same level of exposure.
  - cloverich 2y ago
    Its slightly but consistently different. I moved from Austin (after 30+ years in TX) to the west coast, and the group think / speech policing is extremely noticeable to me (spend most of my time in Portland and SF), even though its not extremely different. That being said I think a more nuanced but still political take on the move is, having moderators is important, and its less likely those moderation will be pressured to shut down if the moderators are actual jobs in a red state. Further the jobs are low skill jobs so they can be moved back (or elsewhere) as needed. Easy move even if the political capital is minor.
gitaarik 2y ago
Isn't it a bit of a stereo type prejudgement to say all Texans are like that?
rcpt 2y ago
Threads is confusing as all hell. Who are these random people? Which post am I replying to? Does this appear on my Instagram?
verdverm 2y ago
> most of us would be fine with some experimentation This is why ATProto is a great foundation for to the next generation of social media applications. It makes experimentation easier and open for all. It removes the cost of switching to the better alternatives. ATProto enables real competition on a single, common social media fabric.
- nunobrito 2y ago
  No it isn't. The only implementation of ATProto so far has been heavily criticized for immediately blocking anyone with wrong opinions, while at the same permitting pedolovers post without much trouble (that butterfly logo is a well-known pedophile logo). More reports about the awful actions of bluesky/ATProto: https://www.newsweek.com/conservatives-join-bluesky-face-abuse-censorship-1988883 https://www.newsweek.com/conservatives-join-bluesky-face-abu...
  - verdverm 2y ago
    The Bluesky pedo trope is a right wing falsehood, yet another piece of their misinformation agenda ATProto is an open protocol, anyone can add content to the network. Bluesky is a company that operates the most used application, a micro logging platform like Twitter. Musk Social has far more awful actions and far more awful personal posts by the oligarch himself. The "awful" thing of blocking trolls on Bluesky is what makes it a place with more and better engagement. We don't all need to read all the awful shit people write online in the name of "free speech". I have every right to ignore or remove content I don't like from my information diet. The benefit of ATProto is that if you don't agree with the content moderation policies of Bluesky, you can write just a different client (many already exist) and subscribe to different moderation providers (many already exist), all without having to rebuild your social followings
    - nunobrito 2y ago
      So basically you do admit to have moderation in place to deal with "awful shit", which in your eyes looks fine. But at the same time more than half of the western world is nowadays disagreeing with you and winning elections across different places. In fact, even Zuckerberg had to reduce their censorship and discrimination towards others. Your platform is just a safe space, but it ain't defacto decentralized nor valuing an impartial worldview the slightest. Enjoy it.
raxxor 2y ago
I don't know Dana White and I don't know any predecessor. It isn't really relevant though apart from which actions they indeed did take in their approach. Your second point about why people in Texas might be less biased is the distance to primary locations of tech companies perhaps? I don't think that it is convincing, but a lack of trust is the most severe problem of fact checkers. I believe the concept cannot work though, especially if I look at the broader context. No, user feedback is the better control mechanism. Also these fact checkers would never be independent and they would develop their own interest for even more moderation. They would never report that there isn't any more controversial content to be checked, because that is their raison d'être from day one.
- freejazz 2y ago
  > I don't know Dana White Oh, he runs the UFC and also the new slap fighting league. What that has to do with Facebook? I have no idea.
  - lupire 2y ago
    Facebook is a rhetorical slap fighting league.
billy99k 2y ago
[flagged]
- nunobrito 2y ago
  Time to go NOSTR. Less drama, full speed.
BurningFrog 2y ago
Moving the moderation teams to Texas may be a way to induce a lot of the people working there to quit. Texas is of course also an easier place to run a business.

by davidw 2y ago

tptacek 2y ago

I get how the partisan story is easy to tell here, but I'm saying something pretty specific: I think it would have been product development malpractice for this decision not to have been in the works for many, many months, long before the GOP takeover of the federal government was a safe bet. Community Notes has been that successful, and Facebook's fact-checkers have been that much of a product disaster. I've never seen a wrong Facebook fact-check; I am warmly supportive of intrusive moderation; that's not where I'm coming from.

mike_hearn 2y ago
> I've never seen a wrong Facebook fact-check; Probably because fact checkers are able to make content become unshareable so you not seeing them is the point? But "fact checking" NGOs have a long history of embarrassingly stupid, biased and self-serving decisions. To pick just one example, in 2020 an op-ed in the New York Post arguing that COVID might have come from the coronavirus research lab in Wuhan was banned from Facebook and Twitter because of being labelled by an anonymous fact checker. Who was this fact checker? Turns out one of them was Danielle E. Anderson, an assistant professor at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, who had literally conducted experiments at the Wuhan lab and collaborated with its scientists. You can't possibly get more biased than that, but because she was an academic the sort of people who chose the fact checkers assumed she would be automatically correct. And worse, that anyone who disagreed with her - even mildly - should therefore be banned from the internet. That is the common pattern in every incident that make people mad at "fact checkers" and the reason they have no credibility is that these events happen all the time, are always in favour of left wing beliefs, and they never attempt to learn from these events strongly implying they're deliberate. Indeed the assumption that government funded people are always correct is basically hard-wired into the fact checker ecosystem. They don't attempt to actually work out what's true themselves, so they can't be fixed. This is the kind of thing that Zuck is referring to when he says they're discredited. Wrong fact checks are commonplace, you just won't notice them if you rely on news feeds they control.
davidw 2y ago
As a product decision taken independently, maybe. Running one of those things at scale with all kinds of people trying to subvert it for various reasons, including some downright evil ones, is not an easy task. Announced together with everything else and given the timing, I just can't help but think there's a political component to all of it.
- tptacek 2y ago
  I don't at all doubt that they're going to do whatever they can to cast this presumably longstanding product plan in the light most favorable to the governing majority! I just want to get the causality right.
  - sanderjd 2y ago
    I don't understand though: What makes you think that you are getting the causality right? It seems to me like you're asserting the causality goes one direction, when there doesn't seem to be any evidence (at least in public) for that assertion at the moment. Have I just missed some other information on this that you're basing this on?
    - tcbawo 2y ago
      I think he is suggesting that this move has favorable PR optics for the incoming administration. Making it appear like a conservative victory may give them some slack or earn them some favors.
      - sangnoir 2y ago
        Is it not a conservative culture-war victory designed to earn favors? There is no external evidence of this having been anything other than a contingency around November 6 of last year, so it's hard to definitively say it's one or the other.
        disgruntledphd2 2y ago
ethbr1 2y ago
I expect it was an easy bone to throw the incoming administration, which the tech world learned from v1 is placatable by giving them PR / sound bite wins. To the broader concern, this feels like Facebook making their original sin again. Namely defunding and destroying revenue for a task that takes money (fact checking) and then expecting a free, community-driven approach to replace it. Turns out, hot takes for clicks are a lot cheaper than journalism. In this case, where is the funding to support nuanced, accurate fact checking at scale from? Because it sure seems like Facebook isn't going to pay. > I've never seen a wrong Facebook fact-check Did you mean to say Note here?
- tptacek 2y ago
  No, I meant to say Facebook fact-check.
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    > Facebook's fact-checkers have been that much of a product disaster. > I've never seen a wrong Facebook fact-check Confused between these two statements, then.
    - tptacek 2y ago
      Do you believe the success or failure of these moderating features comes down to how accurate they are? People actually like Community Notes; they're part of the discourse on Twitter (even if most of them are pretty bad, some of them are timely and sharp). Meanwhile: Facebook's fact-checking features really do work sort of like PSA's for trolls. All the while, fact-checks barely scratch the surface of the conversations happening on the platform. Facebook and Twitter are also unalike in their social dynamics. It makes sense to think of individual major trending stories on Twitter, which can be "Noted", in a way it doesn't make sense on Meta, which is atomized; people spreading bullshit on Meta are carpet bombing the site with individual hits each hoping to get just a couple eyeballs, rather than a single monster thread everyone sees. (This may be different on Threads, I don't use Threads or know anybody who does).
Barrin92 2y ago
>I think it would have been product development malpractice the thing is both community notes and top down moderation, if they have any purpose at all, are product malpractice. If they work, they are always going to be intrusive because that's what they're supposed to do, correct factually wrong information. Community notes is the neighborhood police, top down moderation is the feds but if they do their job either one is going to be annoying by definition. If they're not intrusive they don't perform a corrective function and that's what largely happened to community notes. As time goes on they're more and more snarky and sarcastic meta comments rather than corrections.
- _DeadFred_ 2y ago
  But because they are community driven, they are snarky in a way that represents the community, which makes me question if they are intrusive at all. They are what the community grows them into.
- tptacek 2y ago
  It seems pretty clear to me that one of these features generally makes users happy and, at the same time, does correct some misinformation, and the other catches about 0.0001% of the bad stuff and turns it into advertisements for how bad the site is.
  - mrguyorama 2y ago
    How can you possibly call community notes on Twitter a "success" when they demonstrably have not reduced the amount of actively made up shit on the site, and the same people who complain about a fact checker saying "no, vaccines do not change your DNA" are just as upset when that info comes from the community notes box, and the only reason there hasn't been widescale anger about them is because Elon wants to pretend it was his idea.
    - tptacek 2y ago
      I'm not saying Twitter it is good. It is demonstrably not. But you're kidding yourself if you thought Facebook fact checking was suppressing the antivaxers and flat-earthers.
rwmj 2y ago
Clegg left a few days ago, and the Oversight Board issued a statement which sounds like they were in the dark: > “We look forward to working with Meta in the coming weeks to understand the changes in greater detail, ensuring its new approach can be as effective and speech-friendly as possible.” [1] So is it possible this was only announced recently. It might have been "in the works" in the C-suite for a bit longer, but there doesn't seem to be any evidence it was widely known before very recently. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/07/meta-facebook-instagram-threads-mark-zuckerberg-remove-fact-checkers-recommend-political-content https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/07/meta-face...
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
As a product decision, I agree. But I think that can still be addressed separately from the fact that all the tech leaders in Silicon Valley are bending the knee to Trump (e.g. the Mar-a-Lago visits, the "donations" to his inauguration, etc.) I'll give you an example I find analogous. When Bezos forbid the Washington Post from giving a presidential endorsement, he wrote an op-ed, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/28/jeff-bezos-washington-post-trust/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/28/jeff-bezo.... I pretty much agreed with the vast majority of what he wrote there. What I think is total BS, though, is his purported rationale and the timing of the decision. I think it's absolutely clear he did it because he didn't want to piss off Trump should he win (the "obeying in advance" part), which he did. The reason I believe this is because he made this decision so close to the election, and he apparently didn't feel the need to do this in previous years, or even the fact that WaPo made other political endorsements (e.g. Senate races in Maryland and VA) just before the presidential endorsement was banned. Bezos subsequent Mar-a-Lago visits and Amazon's inauguration "donation" pretty much confirm my view in my opinion. In Zuckerberg's announcement, I thought the part he put in about fact checkers being "politically biased" was unnecessary (not to mention dubious IMO), and cleared seemed done to curry favor with the current powers that be.
- tptacek 2y ago
  As someone active in "resistance"-type organization from 2017-2021, with fundamentally the same politics now as I had then: I think all this "bend the knees" shit is mostly working to the benefit of the GOP, and I wish people would stop it. We lost an election, in part because we bet that the median voter was prepared to disqualify MAGA Republicans. They are not. Find a new angle, so we can win in the midterms. This isn't working.
  - hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
    I'm not trying to convince other voters. The "bend the knee" shit is not something I'm saying to try to change opinions. Like you say, clearly the majority of Americans don't care. But it I'm pretty surprised at the outright transparent speed with which all these business leaders were willing to pay these naked fealty bribes, especially since for so long so many of them talked about these lofty goals besides just making money. Italians in the 1930s didn't care either when Mussolini made corporations an arm of the state. But that doesn't mean what is happening now is any different.
toss1 2y ago
If it was in the works for a long time, then Zuckerberg has been planning to bend the knee to Trump for a long time. Today, Trump in press conference (video at [0]: Q: "Do you think Zuckerberg is responding to the threats you've made to him in the past?" TRUMP: "Probably. Yeah. Probably." This tells us all we need to know. It has nothing to do with facts and everything to do with yielding to political pressure to bend the media to his whims. This is just the most standard and basic elements of autocracy, the autocrat must make all the institutions serve him, not the people. This includes not only the branches of government, but also of society, starting with the press, but also the corporate world, the academy, social groups, and everything else. This is bog-standard autocracy, not democracy. [0] https://x.com/atrupar/status/1876683641113248036 https://x.com/atrupar/status/1876683641113248036
- emmelaich 2y ago
  Bending left and right according to the government of the day doesn't tell you where the true center is.
  - toss1 2y ago
    Autocracy is not Left or Right. It is corrupting all the institutions to serve the will of the autocrat, not the will of the people. Bending the knee to the autocrat, in this case explicitly changing your rules and operations to enable the autocrat and his followers to more easily spread their lies and intimidation is not political flexibility, it is obeying in advance to be complicit in implementing the autocracy. It would be better if you didn't have to learn that the hard way, but our educational system and information distribution system has failed. This is just a more advanced and accelerated example of that failure. [Edit: yes, my mistake to phrase it as political pressure — it was nothing of the sort — it was authoritarian extortion. Note Zuck has a case before the FTC.]
- curtisblaine 2y ago
  Autocracts doesn't get democratically elected, as far as I understand. Trump is a democratically elected leader who will end his term at most in 2028. Autocracts tend to not be democratically elected (or to change the rules once they're elected to never be deposed). Zuckerberg will bend his knee to the Democrats if they win next term. This is not autocracy, this is just knowing where the wind blows.
motorest 2y ago
> I get how the partisan story is easy to tell here, but I'm saying something pretty specific: I think it would have been product development malpractice for this decision not to have been in the works for many, many months, long before the GOP takeover of the federal government was a safe bet. You're just stating that, in your personal opinion, a scenario would be bad. That says nothing about it actually taking place. You're expressing your personal opinion in response to a message listing facts supporting the belief the scenario is actually taking place. Meaning, it's still plausible this is what is actually happening.
TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
I don't understand your point at all. Community Notes on E(x) has been ineffective, because ultimately the point of moderation is to delete posts which aren't true so they receive no reach and spread no disinformation. Not to turn them into a public debate which might as well continue in the posts themselves. Meta's political history has consistently been shady. Meta patented behavioural targeting technology in 2012 and was fined $5bn for its "accidental" links to anti-democratic election-fixers Cambridge Analytica/SCL, who have ties to far-right oligarchs in the US and the UK. If you're looking for an ideological position, look there. The historical record is absolutely clear. And then there are comments from Meta insiders, who - perhaps - have a clearer picture of what's going on than outsiders do. As for malpractice, consider the recent AI rollout and rollback. It was an absolute fiasco for all kinds of reasons, PR and technical, not least of which was the way the bots themselves turned on the company. Threads has already had a mini-exodus because of slanted moderation. Meta is simply not a trustworthy company. So "Oh, let's scrap our moderation and do community notes" is hardly an isolated slip-up on an otherwise unblemished record of noble public service. https://fortune.com/2025/01/04/meta-ai-accounts-bots-false-representation-social-media-facebook-instagram/ https://fortune.com/2025/01/04/meta-ai-accounts-bots-false-r... https://www.platformer.news/meta-fact-checking-free-speech-surrender/ https://www.platformer.news/meta-fact-checking-free-speech-s...
- RansomStark 2y ago
  > ultimately the point of moderation is to delete posts which aren't true so they receive no reach and spread no disinformation. That assumes that the correct amount of disinformation is zero, personally I wish to maintain my right to be wrong, and my right to tell others of my wrong ideas, and I hope they maintain the right to tell me I'm full of it. Your position on censorship, moderation, as you call it, is your opinion, and your opinion only, and it is at odds with the position of X, and now Meta, who are taking the position that the point of moderation is to respect everyone's right to speech, while making it very obvious to those that care, that the speech may be less than truthful. Essentially everyone gets to speak, and everyone gets to make up their own mind. What a concept! I also maintain a position of truth dies in the dark, and lies die in the light. Most people aren't stupid, community notes breaks the echo chamber and provides a counterpoint. That debate of free ideas has been working pretty well so far. So much so that we can usually tell who the bad guys are by how much the create darkness; how much they take on the role of arbiters of truth, how much they silence critics, think Soviet Russia, or North Korea for some good examples.
freejazz 2y ago
I don't think the point of the fact-checkers is so that facebook users like them, and it seems odd to pretend that was ever the point.
panarky 2y ago
Both professional fact-checkers and Community Notes have a pretty low false-positive rate. It's the false negatives that are the differentiator, but false negatives are by definition invisible to the user. When you evaluate moderation as a "product" you place more weight on factors that are mostly losers for third-party fact checkers and winners for Community Notes: speed and annoying tone. But since false negatives are never seen, there's no visible "product" to be annoyed by. Sure, the platform fills up with even more disinfo, but users blame that on other user, not the moderation "product". And this is where Community Notes fails. Because Notes require consensus from multiple groups with histories of diverse ideological perspectives, when one perspective has an interest in propagating disinfo, no Community Note appears. Some studies show something like 75% of clear disinfo doesn't get a Community Note on X when it involves a hot partisan shibboleth. False negatives are mostly invisible failures that make the entire platform worse, but the user can't blame it on a "product" because it's really the absence of a product that's the problem.

marbro 2y ago

[flagged]

davidw 2y ago
That's a housing problem. California is very NIMBY and doesn't build enough homes. That has nothing to do with how 'objective' fact checking or content review or whatever is from people in both places. This is just very thinly coded language signalling who they're going to favor.

philwelch 2y ago

Austin is much closer to the center of mainstream American sentiment than the SF Bay Area, but it’s still to the left of center.

davidw 2y ago
And Redding, California is far to the right of it. It's just coded language for who they're going to favor, otherwise it makes no sense at all, as it's possible to find people of all political stripes in both states, as well as employees who would take their duty to stick to the facts very seriously.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  [flagged]
- philwelch 2y ago
  [flagged]
- intended 2y ago
  It’s a Cost reduction garbed in PR. They have teams in Austin already.
ternnoburn 2y ago
[flagged]
- pesus 2y ago
  You're generally correct, but I imagine you won't get a good reaction on HN to this viewpoint. Most people on here unfortunately don't really an understanding of politics beyond a very surface level one.
  - _DeadFred_ 2y ago
    HN is not a political site and Deng doesn't allow much politics. Your generalization is based purely on only the surface level discussion allowed. Maybe it's you that doesn't have nuanced 'understanding'?

AlchemistCamp 2y ago

> "Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content." - like people being in Texas makes them more objective?! The FB office in Austin, Texas is a moderately left-leaning area. Their office in Silicon Valley is about the most extreme left-wing place in the country. At the very least, teams at their Texas offices will have more overlap with the median voter than the ones in California. If their Texas offices were in rural rancher country, then I'd agree with your concern that it would just be swapping one bias for another.

davidw 2y ago
It's not about actual employees, it's about signalling "Texas - yay!" and "California - booooo!" in order to make good with the incoming administration.
- tptacek 2y ago
  Well, that and moderators being able to afford 1-bedroom apartments.
  - asdff 2y ago
    Says more about fb being penny pinching than anything. The kid working the panda express in california can afford a 1br apartment, why not a fb moderator?
    - davidw 2y ago
      > The kid working the panda express in california can afford a 1br apartment A lot of them can't, actually, but that's really a different problem.
      - asdff 2y ago
        Have you seen panda express job postings lately? It's like north of $20 an hour with full medical, dental, vacation, sick days, 401k. Higher than that for shift lead and managers I'm sure. Sure beats when I worked fast food for minimum wage and had to find my own sub when I got sick.

starik36 2y ago

[dead]

paxys 2y ago

You forgot the biggest one – replacing Nick Clegg as their global policy chief with Joel Kaplan, a Republican lobbyist.

tptacek 2y ago
Seems like not the biggest one? That seems like the kind of role you take knowing you're going to hold it only so long as you have a rapport with the current governing majorities.
TheKarateKid 2y ago
This is on par for Meta. Don't forget that Cheryl Sandberg was their Democratic Party liaison.

cryptonector 2y ago

GP was asking about how fact checking is better than community notes, but you're saying that Meta's community notes will be worse than fact checking, which may be but which is not responsive to GP's question.

deleted 2y ago

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quicpr 2y ago

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jimbokun 2y ago

I can’t help but roll my eyes at mindless euphemisms like “attacking trans people.” There are very serious issues involving trans people with no easy answers. Like allowing minors access to irreversible treatments. Like women’s sports. Like the safety of women only spaces. I bring this up because on so many questions like these, the progressive reaction is to shut down any discussion and isolate themselves from exposure to any ideas different from their own. It doesn’t work. And it doesn’t help anyone. And maybe this has something to do with why Facebook is migrating to a “Community Notes” model.

eynsham 2y ago
Is it not possible that ‘attacking trans people’ is both (sometimes) a euphemism for criticism of maximalist positions and (at other times) a perfectly normal term that designates approximately what ‘attacking x’ generally means? There is such a thing as an unsubstantive and utterly unpleasant insult explicitly motivated by the fact that its target is trans. Many trans people say that there are many such, and one does not need to believe everything that trans people say (surely with the result of inconsistency!) to think that the evidence they present is not wholly concocted. Others may misidentify respectable, good, or correct arguments as ‘attacks’ in narrower senses, but that no more makes the underlying categories meaningless than the misapplication of such descriptions as ‘true’, ‘valid’, ‘scientifically established’, or ‘by definition’. I have no general pithy answer to what one should do about the sorts of attack I have described, but I venture that it is reasonable to talk or attempt to do something about them. What term would you prefer?
- jimbokun 2y ago
  It’s possible theoretically. In practice people complaining about attacks on trans people almost always want to shut down discussion about related topics all together.
  - irisgrunn 2y ago
    Yes because it has no real life consequences like https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01979-5.epdf https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01979-5.epdf or https://goodlawproject.org/rise-of-deaths-young-trans-people/ https://goodlawproject.org/rise-of-deaths-young-trans-people...

lr1970 2y ago

> The ideological bits are: ... Should we expect Meta doing 180 degrees u-turns every 4 years when another party wins US Presidential elections?

matwood 2y ago
Only when the incoming party has threatened going after anyone who was against them with criminal charges.
- throwaway69123 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - rcpt 2y ago
    No it doesn't
tptacek 2y ago
No, I expect over time they'll gradually settle into an equilibrium that works in both sets of circumstances.
intended 2y ago
Given the extremes of presidential candidates, I think the answer is Yes, since there exists no middle ground between fact and fiction. Or I guess you can just capitulate and leave it all to users to handle on their own, and wash your hands of the whole thing.

adolph 2y ago

> "Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. Prediction: it'll be cali-expats in Austin and nothing changes.

bee_rider 2y ago
They’ll be inside the jurisdiction of whatever rules Texas feels like making.
disgruntledphd2 2y ago
Nah, loads of the current staff will leave, but they'll hire equivalent people in Austin.

andrepd 2y ago

The whole thing is ideological. Trump and Musk are undertaking their takeover on government, and so the trillion dollar companies which control the rules of the spaces in which the vast majority of our discourse today happens, do their thing and kiss the ring. We can debate the merits of notes vs factcheck. But it's hard to see the bullshit about freedom of speech as anything other than that: you are now allowed to express opinions that the new regime shares. Long live the king.

paul7986 2y ago

Blue Sky is what mastodon was when musk bought Twitter now X. Also currently in the App Store (iPhone) bluesky sits at 167 .. Musk's X at 46 and Facebook at 19.

immibis 2y ago
BlueSky is what Twitter was some time before Musk bought it. Given time, it will become what Twitter is now, too. It's just too profitable. Mastodon was its own thing and remains its own thing.

j45 2y ago

Perhaps part of it is the optics that California is interpreting it for other places?

harimau777 2y ago
How is it any better for Texas to interpret it for other places?
- deadbabe 2y ago
  Because liberals in Austin Texas have far more experience in what it means for liberal and conservative opinions to coexist together in one place, vs California where liberal opinions are the default and everything else must be shunned.
- j45 2y ago
  Not saying it’s better for anywhere, only how California might be seen.

paulddraper 2y ago

Well, it's Austin, TX. Travis County was blue 69-29. Hardly a politically conservative place.

deleted 2y ago
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nailer 2y ago

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deleted 2y ago

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devvvvvvv 2y ago

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sterlind 2y ago
except when it comes to banning books in schools. and prohibiting classroom discussions on race or LGBT topics. somehow free speech never seems to cut both ways with these people.
- devvvvvvv 2y ago
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pavlov 2y ago

> “maybe it's just a way of saying that certain kinds of 'content' like attacking trans people is going to be ok now” The new policy explicitly says that allegations of mental illness are not allowed except if the target is gay or trans, so, yeah… https://www.wired.com/story/meta-immigration-gender-policies-change/ https://www.wired.com/story/meta-immigration-gender-policies...

curtisblaine 2y ago
> it allows “allegations of mental illness or abnormality, based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird.’” I think you misread that: it allows allegations of mental illness even on the basis of gender and religion, which before weren't allowed. It still allows allegations of mental illness based on other factors, because they were never disallowed in the first place.
- pavlov 2y ago
  No, it’s explicitly so that allegations of mental illness are forbidden except if the target is gay or trans. Here’s another source: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/meta-new-hate-speech-rules-allow-users-call-lgbtq-people-mentally-ill-rcna186700 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/meta-new-hate-spee... And the original document: https://transparency.meta.com/en-gb/policies/community-standards/hateful-conduct/ https://transparency.meta.com/en-gb/policies/community-stand... Tier 2 forbids insults based on: Mental characteristics, including but not limited to allegations of stupidity, intellectual capacity, and mental illness, and unsupported comparisons between PC groups on the basis of inherent intellectual capacity. We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like “weird.” There’s no ambiguity. Allegations of mental illness or abnormality are explicitly allowed based on gender or sexual orientation, but no other reason.
  - lupire 2y ago

tgma 2y ago

> like people being in Texas makes them more objective?! This is the least charitable interpretation. Obviously, it is not talking about a single person moving to Texas suddenly changing colors like a chameleon (although I suspect there is quite a bit of merit to that due to groupthink and community speech policing in BayArea/LA). And yes, I think it won't be a stretch to think Texas would be more objective representation of general US PoV and less of a monoculture than FB sites in California. This is not a value judgement, just a natural function of the distribution of people.

squigz 2y ago
> And yes, I think it won't be a stretch to think Texas would be more objective representation of general US PoV and less of a monoculture than FB sites in California But... how?
pavlov 2y ago
Is the distribution of people in Austin so very different from the Bay Area? Both states are internally diverse. And it’s just silly to suggest that “groupthink and community speech policing” is something that exists in California but not Texas.
- tgma 2y ago
  > Is the distribution of people in Austin so very different from the Bay Area? If we just go by presidential election, Travis County's result is more balanced than SF and San Mateo, almost on par with Alameda county, so the answer is "slightly." However, the moment you get exposed outside the core Austin area, you deal with predominantly red areas. To get the same effect you have to go as far as Placer County or Sonoma, so I don't think the FB workers in Bay Area (SF/Menlo Park) have quite the same level of exposure.
- cloverich 2y ago
  Its slightly but consistently different. I moved from Austin (after 30+ years in TX) to the west coast, and the group think / speech policing is extremely noticeable to me (spend most of my time in Portland and SF), even though its not extremely different. That being said I think a more nuanced but still political take on the move is, having moderators is important, and its less likely those moderation will be pressured to shut down if the moderators are actual jobs in a red state. Further the jobs are low skill jobs so they can be moved back (or elsewhere) as needed. Easy move even if the political capital is minor.

gitaarik 2y ago

Isn't it a bit of a stereo type prejudgement to say all Texans are like that?

rcpt 2y ago

Threads is confusing as all hell. Who are these random people? Which post am I replying to? Does this appear on my Instagram?

verdverm 2y ago

> most of us would be fine with some experimentation This is why ATProto is a great foundation for to the next generation of social media applications. It makes experimentation easier and open for all. It removes the cost of switching to the better alternatives. ATProto enables real competition on a single, common social media fabric.

nunobrito 2y ago
No it isn't. The only implementation of ATProto so far has been heavily criticized for immediately blocking anyone with wrong opinions, while at the same permitting pedolovers post without much trouble (that butterfly logo is a well-known pedophile logo). More reports about the awful actions of bluesky/ATProto: https://www.newsweek.com/conservatives-join-bluesky-face-abuse-censorship-1988883 https://www.newsweek.com/conservatives-join-bluesky-face-abu...
- verdverm 2y ago
  The Bluesky pedo trope is a right wing falsehood, yet another piece of their misinformation agenda ATProto is an open protocol, anyone can add content to the network. Bluesky is a company that operates the most used application, a micro logging platform like Twitter. Musk Social has far more awful actions and far more awful personal posts by the oligarch himself. The "awful" thing of blocking trolls on Bluesky is what makes it a place with more and better engagement. We don't all need to read all the awful shit people write online in the name of "free speech". I have every right to ignore or remove content I don't like from my information diet. The benefit of ATProto is that if you don't agree with the content moderation policies of Bluesky, you can write just a different client (many already exist) and subscribe to different moderation providers (many already exist), all without having to rebuild your social followings
  - nunobrito 2y ago
    So basically you do admit to have moderation in place to deal with "awful shit", which in your eyes looks fine. But at the same time more than half of the western world is nowadays disagreeing with you and winning elections across different places. In fact, even Zuckerberg had to reduce their censorship and discrimination towards others. Your platform is just a safe space, but it ain't defacto decentralized nor valuing an impartial worldview the slightest. Enjoy it.

raxxor 2y ago

I don't know Dana White and I don't know any predecessor. It isn't really relevant though apart from which actions they indeed did take in their approach. Your second point about why people in Texas might be less biased is the distance to primary locations of tech companies perhaps? I don't think that it is convincing, but a lack of trust is the most severe problem of fact checkers. I believe the concept cannot work though, especially if I look at the broader context. No, user feedback is the better control mechanism. Also these fact checkers would never be independent and they would develop their own interest for even more moderation. They would never report that there isn't any more controversial content to be checked, because that is their raison d'être from day one.

freejazz 2y ago
> I don't know Dana White Oh, he runs the UFC and also the new slap fighting league. What that has to do with Facebook? I have no idea.
- lupire 2y ago
  Facebook is a rhetorical slap fighting league.

billy99k 2y ago

[flagged]

nunobrito 2y ago
Time to go NOSTR. Less drama, full speed.

BurningFrog 2y ago

Moving the moderation teams to Texas may be a way to induce a lot of the people working there to quit. Texas is of course also an easier place to run a business.