> According to the petition, two people asked [Meta AI] to pick a number between 1 and 25. They gave no instructions and made no reference to the election. In one attempt, the AI answered 13. In the other, it answered 22. Those are the party ballot numbers of Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro, respectively. The groups question the coincidence.
My confidence in the validity of their claims tanked right about here.
I'm all for regulating transparency into social media algorithms. Meta most certainly is compromised by foreign actors. But can we choose less stupid hills to die on than numerology and GIFs? Headline is not remotely supported by the evidence.
The example showcased is particularly weak, but the actual scandal with Meta AI is that when they are asked to produce campaign material, they spontaneously produce it with Bolsonaro's number (22), even when not asked. But then they refuse to produce it with other numbers like Lula's 13, saying they can't perform this for a specific candidate. When asked, they admit they were inconsistent in producing Bolsonaro-linked material, but in new chats they reliably continue to do so. See for example what was posted in this thread
If the company putting at risk underlying social contract is not completely dismantled and its head is not sent in jail, the message they get is clear: go on as long as you can sustain the loss and profit. Or at least it's apparently the only way they can interpret it.
Or the public could grow up, learn that algorithms are stochastic, and not let their vote be influenced by the number that pops up when they type in "vote" in the search bar.
If this is influencing your votes your democracy is already lost.
Now look through this thread and be amazed at how most posters are apparently satisfied by this level of evidence and some are even calling for China-style Internet censorship in response. A good reminder that even enlightened progressives are helpless against cognitive bias when they want to believe the worst about their enemies.
Censorship is when you don't leave an information manipulation and mind control tool in the hands of a hostile foreign power. Sure.
As for the evidence, it has been well documented beyond the parent comment's silly examples and it includes shadowbanning popular profiles with certain opinions.
Shadowbans have a high base rate. You notice when it happens to your side and take it as a sign of bias. You don't notice when it happens to the other side, because that is not your circle and you don't track them as closely.
I guarantee your political opponents also think Meta is trying to shadow ban then.
Yup, it seems unfathomable to some commentators that the likes of AfD or Le Pen or Bolsonaro would get popular support were it not for US big tech (interference). Which truly boggles the mind, it seems to be the same narrative that couldn't believe Hillary lost the election and it was the russians fault. Even if that were true, you should still review your policies and how you ran the campaign and learn something from it. Here it's like we're in a world with no reinforcement learning feedback loop.
I mean, ideally I'd have Zuckerberg, Musk, Dorsey and friends in jail forcreating social networks where conflict is rewarded and pushed in front of everyone, leading to the collapse of the social fabric we're seeing throughout the world right now, but censorship is fine by me in the mean time.
your own country flipped its shit and said that Tiktok was CCP propaganda less than a year ago and tried to ban it, so it seems like foreign influence on your politics does seem to be a bad thing.
Need to see details, but it's perfectly plausible that geolocated requests from Brazil get a special treatment during this specific period of elections.
I believe though it is an old phenomenom that if (given the default context) you ask a random number, it will more often than not give numbers from a very small set.
I just used a "Temporary chat" with ChatGPT twice to "Give a random number" and it gave 42 both times (this shuold be rather understandable why it ended up with this). Then I asked "Give a random number in 1-10" twice and it responded with 7 for both (and this too is an old "magic number").
btw today's models run random.randint() by default unless you prohibit python by choosing one of the dumb models, disable thinking, disable tool calls, etc.
They are beholden to the current US admin - as always - only good thing is that the current admin is so blatant that maybe one day even the Germans will realize that you need to have your own social media just you have your own national tv, newspapers etc.
> realize that you need to have your own social media
How could that be made to happen? Should EU somehow move to federated (let’s say per country) instances of Mastodon or something? Or one big platform? How would regular folks get used to it? And how could those initiatives be prevented from falling into irrelevance when network effects are at play?
I agree with the idea, it’s just that there’s the usual hurdles there aren’t necessarily good answers for that I know of.
The Chinese did it. We broke Boeings monopoly with Airbus.
I realize these are heavy handed approaches - but shows what can get done.
Perhaps smaller scale things can work as well: Ie supporting alternatives when they occur - ie tiktok back when it was kinda Chinese - use the China threat to enforce objective standards - rather than just following the us stance.
Use existing monopoly legislation.
All creating an open market place for social media that allows for newcomers and local alternatives rather than the single monopoly that is the situation now.
Notably Germany used to have its own social media. SchülerVZ/StudiVZ/MeinVZ was like Facebook, but German (and with three networks targeted at school kids, university students and everyone, respectively). They did well initially. But by 2011 Facebook had the lead, and from there network effects did the rest to cement Facebook as the winner
The way it should've happened is that over the last 20 years EU governments should have tried to keep tech companies doing well in Europe.
We had video streaming sites like youtube. We had cellphone manufacturers. We had chat applications.
But the conditions for these companies were better outside of Europe. Now we're stuck with everything not made in Europe. (South Korea is more relevant in consumer tech than the EU.)
European governments still haven't swapped off MS.
I’m not following. Youtube has always been an American company. YouTube was founded in San Mateo, California, USA, and it was an American company the whole time before Google bought it.
Perhaps I wasn't very clear - we had video streaming sites before youtube. The local sites could not keep up with youtube.
Could a European competitor have even existed when even youtube struggled with the GEMA lawsuit for over half a decade? And that by the end of it they still had to pay?
You can still have Facebook, its just if you're german your home server is a german one, with algorithms running on german servers, staffed by Germans and subject to German oversight. It would still even be one big global network.
Right until the Germans decide that something should be blocked globally, not just in Germany. And now you have a problem, because there are going to be 150 other countries demanding the same kind of treatment.
It might work, but it also might bloat the whole operation so much that the social network becomes non-functional.
All which would be owned by a US entity after all, and still at the whims of Meta executives. CLOUD Act makes stuff like that impossible to trust, anything going through US infrastructure or administration needs to be considered compromised at this point.
Amazon/AWS tried this route with their "sovereign cloud" which still ends up being beholden exactly the same way as "real AWS", so what's even the point? Who is even falling for these "tricks"?
As a EU citizen I believe in the citizen's freedom to pick their social media platform, but when it comes to official accounts (e.g. government, the president or prime ministers, etc) I've always believed we should favour open protocols and federation. Public funding of course. Probably an unpopular opinion.
Well the solution is pretty simple: geo block US owned social media and wait a two days for people to move to the best EU alternative. One you remove the foreign subsidized option with complete market share capture, there will be options that can finally compete.
Both the US and the EU are already doing this exact thing with cars, basically.
How is Russia currently moving everyone from Telegram onto some "Max" app? How has China managed to keep the likes of Meta out?
B-but the EU can't do that!
It absolutely can. Just like it can push Chat Control down everyone's throats even though if you held a referendum on it it would be voted down (no, most Jacques the plumbers on the street don't want mass surveillance even if it's "against crime").
> They are beholden to the current US admin - as always
They have, as the joke goes, more money than God and influence all over the world. They are beholden to no one. They have the resources to fight in court against decisions they don’t believe in, and all the lobbying they need to shape established laws.
They choose their actions, and their actions are their own. Every single dollar they donate to the current president but not the previous one is an admission of their allegiance and (lack of) morals.
Having principles and standing for them costs money, and these societal parasites subsist on money and influence. Make no mistake, they will sell their own mother to further their goals, but they don’t have to while they can keep selling everyone else’s.
Or maybe the reason more bribes are paid to the current administration is that the current administration is more receptive to bribes? The ROI on gifts to Trump is probably higher than on gifts to Biden so it makes sense to give more.
> They have, as the joke goes, more money than God and influence all over the world. They are beholden to no one.
The administration can take over them with the snap of a finger if they so desire. They have absolutely no power.
The best example of that is the BBC suit, where the only reason it's happening is because the US doesn't have any control over the entity because it's British.
I don't necessarily disagree that there's a push for politics, my wonder specifically is if you're a complete nerd to the algorithm then it's less likely to recommend you far right politics cause they just don't get clicks
I look for stuff I need on a search engine, watch the video I need only (mostly tutorials) and then leave. I never follow YouTube recommendations anymore - that’s how it keeps you hooked and feeds you what they want you to watch. (It’s also nonsensical and blatantly obvious these days - I went in to watch a video on how to tie a bow tie, why is there a recommendation on “Bolsonaro has Lula shaking in his pants, find out why??”
We banned YouTube for casual entertainment at home years ago - one of the best decisions we ever made, other than the toxic content pushing, it’s also so ad-infested it’s totally worthless anyway.
I remember when YouTube was “better than tv! Content on demand, no ads!”. Those days are long gone
Or maybe AfD hasn’t targeted you for other reasons, so you’re not fighting against a marketing team to avoid the videos, only against the “pure” form of the algorithm.
From my experience Youtube simply recommends more of the type of videos that you actually watched. Watch history overpowers basically anything else you do, your subscriptions have little to no influence. A single click on a 'wrong' video, and you'll get tons of similar ones in your recommendations feed for weeks to come, especially when you end up clicking some of the newly recommend videos. It requires purging unwanted topics from the watch history to actually get rid of them, which so far worked very reliable for me.
I find a lot of social media algorithms are "dumb" in that they will see someone share something saying "x sucks" and interpret that as one being interested in "x".
Either that or it's deliberately showing people stuff it knows they will hate to harvest hate scrolling.
At this point sociala media has become a television, on twitter I just unfollowed everyone who have't followed back and I keep seeing the same antisemitic, antimuslim, anti-EU, anti-woman, anti-immigrant shit. My SO happens to see very similar posts to the point that I can't show her a funny post because she would have already seen it. There are some different posts of course but the money shot is mostly the same.
They probably show posts based on location and background, so essentially just like Fox, CNN, MSNBC but everyone sees theirs from the same screen with the same agenda pushed from all of them.
I have almost no reason to look at my facebook feed, check it perhaps once every 1-2 weeks in case something important was only posted there (not that this helps as they don't show me actual friends actual updates). Recent visit was 50% ads, 25% recommended or weirdly boosted content, including a post from Mark Zuckerberg promoting his AI, and a post whose content I forget from the White House (I live in Germany, the last time I even visited the USA was 2018).
I think the most charitable explanation for this is that it's because polarizing content (aka ragebait) gets views/plays, which the ranking algorithms directly optimize for.
Also, this isn't a new phenomenon. If you're interested, I'd recommend reading Shoshana Zuboff's 2018 book: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
Why should I believe your claim that AfD content is getting pushed on YouTube? Isn't it more likely that you personally hate AfD and so you find it salient and enraging whenever you see any AfD content at all yourself, regardless of exactly how YouTube's recommendation algorithm works on your account or whether they treat AfD particularly differently than any other political content? Are you actually measuring this?
To be clear I think it's entirely possible that YouTube is adjusting its recommendation algorithm to show AfD content to people more (or perhaps less) than would happen "organically", because AfD is a salient political party in German politics and YouTube knows this. But how do you determine what is the correct amount of AfD content to be recommended to people in a politically-neutral way, that doesn't end up amounting to you arguing that the YouTube algorithm is only fair if it censors political content you personally think is bad?
Indeed. US tech has been actively conspiring in lying to the American populace about everything in Canada from politics, election results, public opinion in Canada, resources needed by the US from Canada, etc. They're interfering in the affairs of any country that won't bend to their will.
A lot of bots of US origin are propagating false narratives posing as citizens of these countries.
You can say many bad things about Google, but I think they are still "California liberals" on social issues.
I get AfD content recommendations (lurid, trashy stuff of uhm uncertain truth value) a propos of nothing in the village I grew up in - they are popular there with about 25% in the 2025 election. The region is not even in the east or particularly suffering economically. I don't get these recommendations in Berlin. It seems regional.
The owners of these companies are very much conservative though, not out of any ideology mind you, but because they correctly identify that this is the party that best suits their class interests of fucking over everyone and everything else in order to get richer.
I was careful to say socially and I generally agree with you, but Trump is currently just turning everything into shit that he touches. If you don't directly participate in his grift, you probably lose economically because of him. So I'm not sure how useful it is to back him for economic reasons.
To be more precise, capital only seeks to grow its relative power over labor. Making everything shittier is part of it. If you want a clear image of what it is that these people want, look at Russia: a shithole where a few oligarchs hold absolute power, are bound to no laws and lord over a poor, indoctrinated and hopeless populace. Sure, these oligarchs would be richer if Russia was more prosperous, but they don't care about that.
Sure, mass censorship by a tech elite captured by a wave of liberal identity politics in california has nothing to do with the right wing cultural backlash.
Being censored from expressing the view that gender is principally a product of sex, or dissenting from state polices of vaccination, or being in revulsion at mass media (liked by mainstream demographics) being hijacked on the alter of fringe "representation". These have had no effect. None.
This hasnt caused everything from the election from a far-right US president to the collapse of the western video games industry, hollywood and the western media ecosystem. A total sucide of western soft and hard power "isn't" something the US has just done in revenge against californian liberalism.
The obliviousness, and arrogance here is, I guess, in keeping with that very same californian liberalism which has "done no wrong" -- other than demanded a world-wide internet echo chambre which reflects only its own values on pain of mass censorship. Values rare even in the US, let alone amongst the whole west, and the 8bn people on the planet.
This is how leftists operate. You destroy the language and refer to things as their contradictory opposite. Through principle of explosion [0] you can now provide proof, justification, of anything, even falsehood.
Gender is factually, as evidenced via a multitude of highly respected scientific studies conducted by a vast majority of respected experts both medical and psychological, distinct in every way from biological sex.
There is genuinely no room for opinion, disagreement, or dispute on that subject, at all. To disagree is to be, objectively, incorrect.
I can see where you are coming from in a purely politically motivated sense, yes. But the medical and psychological facts do not actually care about politics, and transgender individuals exist regardless of your belief in them.
The economic problems hit people, then they (if they are white and / or male) are called bad people with an unfair advantage on top. Seems like not such a great way to get their support tbh.
Things like these happen if a state fails to secure its information space. Giving control over it to foreign entities means providing population wide manipulative power to foreign entities with adversarial intentions.
Every state should have foreign agent laws (NGOs must register and must be transparent over their financials). Every state should have control over their information space (especially educational, social and news media). Russia and China understood, Brazil and Europe did not.
It is not so black white. It is a dilemma. There is great value in freedom of expression. But fake expression with the explicit intention to mislead is not so good. It would be best if the population would be better at distinguishing truth from falsehood. Unfortunately much of the population seems to be at a level close to cattle.
The idea that you can't have a foreign nation control the main channels that the population gets their news from, and that their population spends hours a day of their free time staring at, is black and white. And that's the core.
> Unfortunately much of the population seems to be at a level close to cattle.
Not you though. You're a wolf among sheep. A true seer among the blind.
Everyone else is too dumb to know what's right, just manipulated by the media they consume on the Internet.
Not you though. You get all your information from trustworthy sources. Sure, they happen to agree with you 90% of the time but,hey, nobody's perfect, right? Well, except you. You've got all the answers.
If only everyone else would just let you make all the rules. You could get to all the bad people and make sure they stopped saying the wrong thing. Maybe provide them the resources they need to learn the truth and, if they don't want to learn the truth, we'll just keep them away from everyone else until they figure it out.
These are thoughts that occur to me too when a safetyist progressive (for want of a better term other than "woke") suggests shutting down information to prevent people seeing the wrong ideas.
But you must see that it is a genuine conundrum. In a free-for-all information landscape (something which did not exist until yesterday), people need to be able to distinguish good information from bad for democracy to survive.
>Giving control over it to foreign entities means providing population wide manipulative power to foreign entities with adversarial intentions.
Alternatively, this blatant use of any tool available to influence non enemy states is disgusting, and forces everyone to a "everyone loses" scenario. Shifting the focus to an insufficiently defended victim removes the focus from the nature of the aggression.
Ask any neurologist near you, and they will readily confirm how Trump exhibits all signs of dementia and mental decline on national TV every single day.
He was given far more leeway than any user in the history of social media.
The fact that they didn't ban him for so long weighs toward being partial to not banning politicians. Which seems to be the opposite of the point you're trying to make.
Which is evidence of how extraordinary his actions were in January 2021, and how extraordinarily well the billionaire owners of American media (including Zuck) have managed to retcon it as something else.
The surprise is not that he was kicked off the main social media companies, the surprises are that the wheels of US justice turned so slowly that Trump got a chance to be re-elected rather than life in prison, and likewise that the US electorate went for him.
The whole point of the left is to censor their opposition.
Leftist ideas don't survive long in the real world/critical debate
.
So censoring opposition opinions (and jailing opponents) has been the lefts go to for more than 100 years.
I know 5 Brazilian people in the US and they are all voting for Bolsonaro. Apparently the Lula dude has been in power for 12 years (not in a row). No wonder they want him gone.
Bolsonaro voters see the US as some kind of capitalist heaven, where they can live out their dreams of becoming rich and powerful without regulations. That is not a surprise.
This Bolsonaro is the son of the former president, with zero political plans or credentials; his only claim is the name itself and what it represents. I find the idea of a family lineage in government, much, much worse.
Lula was voted in to power, Brazil is still a strong democracy despite the direction it’s going. It is a shame that another viable opposition candidate could not be produced as I’m not fond of having 80+ year olds in that seat, but still better than the alternative.
I have a feeling the problem isn’t that malicious unfortunately.
Right-wing folks are driven by social media since ~2016. Their content is emotional, aggressive and naturally conducive to more engagement. It’s what their base feeds on. So a lot of the situations described here are just standard ranking algorithms doing their job.
But that begs the question: is the existence of these platforms that amplify divisive and inflammatory content the problem itself? I vote yes. The power of reaching a wide audience should not be handed off without any cross-checks.
It's interesting times where American Billionaires are deciding the politics in USA, South America and Europe.
I am sure that everyone involved must be feeling invincible but this is how you build resentment that will last and in most cases result in conflicts or regulations. Probably Musk, Zuckerberg and Thiel will be fine but they will destroy the prospects of the upcoming libertarians and cement the Chinese dominance as they don't have a problem of unruly billionaires and the problem of someone getting rich by doing one thing getting the right to do decide on everything and screw it up for everyone. Sad, I really don't want to live in a China-style political system.
You can resent them all you like; they don’t care as long as nothing is done to them, and nothing is being done. Resentment is worthless without action.
Resentment isn't worthless, the current political climate is a result of overshoot of a resentment towards some liberal policies. The next cycle will overshoot too.
The difference is that US Billionaires are doing it without being elected or officially assuming power to do so. In Europe it is important to keep it official as you can just burn their palaces and run them through the guillotine, which even feels wrong saying it in open on US based forum but that's how it has been since many many generations. Europe has seen so many January 6th over they years.
You know how they say that USA is a very new country and that even some pub in Europe can have longer history? Well, that's true but it doesn't mean that European countries have centuries of continued administration, most are a few decades old as a result of revolution or a war.
Europe is a very violent place for politicians, politicians being oversees and untouchable is a very new phenomenon.
Basically with corruption you can control what democracies do. We see this with the orange mafia in charge of the USA right now - even though sometimes it also yields entertainment, indirectly:
This is exactly the kind of stupidity that helps people like Trump reelected. I know nothing about Brazilian politics, but this looks like a desperate attempt to undermine the opposition or pull Meta into needless controversy, and I have no idea how complicit the courts are in all this.
So what if searching for “brasil” returns a Bolsonaro GIF? I tried it myself, and the obvious explanation is that he’s wearing a Brazilian flag tshirt and dancing rather comically. How does a GIF appearing in search results imply political bias?
Sleeping giants is one of the most shadiest anti-democratic organizations that, once you grasp what they are actually doing, there’s literally nothing else left to do for voters than what you described. Its subversive unethical manipulation (there are offshoots in Europe as well) is a reason for me to go scorched earth and auto-inverse: anybody that’s not distancing himself from them is unelectable, anybody who promises to put them on a chopping block gets my vote.
> This is exactly the kind of stupidity that helps people like Trump reelected.
You mean when people admittedly have no knowledge of a subject but still speak authoritatively about it, viscerally criticising one of the sides and even suggesting fowl play, instead of taking care to be humble and understand the context before speaking or making accusations?
I agree, that is very much the kind of attitude that got us into the current situation.
Let's face it: Tech CEOs have aligned with fascists (techno-fascism) because - and that's a general rule throughout history (see pre-WWII industrial titans aligned with Nazi-leaders): Industry leaders of large corporations and authoritarians share the same goal : ultimate control and power over others.
I think tech ceos
follow one simple variable: $CURRENT_POLITICAL_POWER
have lefties in power for the next of the decade and you'll see how datacenters become all about clean energy investment, climate change starts to matter, "don't be evil" starts to take shape
Exactly! When it comes to liberal movements, it's a 'blue outfit that they were', but when they support authoritarians , it's much closer to their true colors since the way they came into private power and hold it shares the same mindset (unequal distribution of power versus more equal flat distribution).
How does internet censorship 2016-2024 fit into your model?
It’s more simple than that. Industry tends to align with government because they have power and they want that power to be benefit them. If you’re a large company it would be stupid not to try to maintain that relationship.
Yes, I think we actually agree, and maybe I should have been clearer. Of course industry leaders always try to play nicely, e.g. if liberal/democratic party is in power, they will 'wear their liberal outfit'.
Yet, from a pure intrinsic values perspective, people that are power-seeking are alike in industry and politics, and when they support an authoritarian state/movement instead of a democratic one, it shows their true intentions.
What might give for some pause, if you listen carefully to the more "alt right" voices, Trump is the "moderate" or even "liberal" by their standards, by their own words.
The Supreme Federal Court in Brazil has been notorious for censorship. The New York Times has found that it has ordered 223 account-blocking orders since 2020.
Playing obvious problems of Brazil‘s judiciary system down like that are clear red flags for somebody not for 1 sec contemplating how he would react if the political camps would be reversed in this situation. It is their sovereignty if the censorship happens on speech you don’t like
Everything is biased. There is no view from nowhere. What you perceive as bias-free is just a reflection of your own bias.
With that in mind, why shouldn't it be in favor of the locals and reflect the values of its own society instead of some tech bros with imperialist ambitions?
> With that in mind, why shouldn't it be in favor of the locals and reflect the values of its own society instead of some tech bros with imperialist ambitions?
The article is discussing a candidate who got the majority of the vote in the 10/4 election. Where did you get the idea that this content doesn't "reflect the values of its own society"?
People want to deflect and blame foreign powers for why their platforms are failing among the electorate. The argument is essentially that they are so right and correct that any deviation from their values could only have occurred due to Bad Guy external intervention, which conveniently justifies why we need mass censorship.
Just do a better job convincing people you're right. Censorship will just mask social problems until the outbreak is even worse.
These billionaire ghouls need to answer for their many attempts on our Republics. Democracy can't survive when its most powerful members are working against it. We have to take them done ASAP, unless we want an encore of the 1940s.
Capital naturally compounds, and financial resources naturally seek political influence, so to combat the root of all evil is simply to cap individual's wealth versus society so they can't rig the game in their favor.
At a point on time, there should be more structured and unbiased content in social media before elections in democratic countries to help people make their decisions.
This should be regulated to avoid interference from anyone.
The biggest problem now is that the billionaires behind social media nowadays will push for a liberal / right wing agenda in the west for their own interests.
"The most accomplished masterpiece of contemporary capitalism is neither the iPhone, nor the unicorn startup, nor even the visionary billionaire.
No.
Its flagship product, its anthropological jewel, its greatest achievement, is the right-wing poor person. A genuine feat of social engineering: materially deprived, yet rich in convictions that run counter to their own interests.
They have been carefully molded. They have been taught that their problems always come from below or from next door — the immigrant, the welfare recipient, the civil servant, the unemployed — never from above.
They have been taught to hate taxes while surviving thanks to public services. To defend heirs to fortunes while having nothing to pass on themselves. To applaud those who crush them, as long as they speak loudly and promise law and order.
The right-wing poor person is a fascinating creature. They vote against their own interests with fervor, convinced that one day, perhaps, they too will find themselves on the right side of the fence.
They mistake brutality for courage, authoritarianism for protection, injustice for merit. They are sold fear in a ready-made package, identity at bargain prices, and anger in bulk on a monthly subscription.
At the dawn of this new world, the monsters do not emerge from the margins: they rise from the ballot boxes, television studios, and simplistic slogans.
They thrive on manufactured misery and sabotaged political awareness.
Capitalism has not merely produced poverty; it has achieved something far worse: it has made the poor docile, obedient, spiteful, and grateful.
Very well put. I would like to add a less-eloquent epilogue to the story.
This curious animal was laid bare by the discovery that we are hackable by nature, and hacked by behaviour science. Though it took a few decades to get going, the understanding of how to influence motivation and decision-making is now very mature.
In order to arrive at this understanding, you need data, and lots of it. The social media platforms have performed the function of data aggregators and testing grounds for algorithmic control. But it was not the tech companies who came up with plans, only the tools to put them into practice.
The culprits, though they operate in shade, are generally non-partisan and understand that divide-and-conquer has always been an effective strategy. These people sometimes work in intelligence bureaus, but not always. They are, however, always known to those agencies. After all, you do not need to know you are an asset to be an asset.
The algorithms, necessarily kept as protected IP, are statistical engines that profile and predict, producing probabilistic outcomes and estimates. Before LLMs, one might have argued "but how can probabilistic algos really produce something meaningful?", now I would think people might have a different take, if they could see the layers and weights.
An emperor used to need an army, and this is what replaces it for non-violent insurrection and domestic control. Many will even state their ambitions publicly, and sometimes (though less frequently these days) their procedure. What they are doing is not strictly illegal, because the law gives "sovereignty" to a person's choices, without recognition that their choices might not be their own. Libertarianism has played right into their hands, in this sense.
A masterpiece, not only of conception, but also social engineering, with a technological endoskeleton built on the aggregated data we all willingly give them. All information feeds the machine, just as every financial transaction cements the central bank's authority.
The fun thing is, the original nazis were quite pro-workers. The original fascists tried to address some concerns of the working class too. Leaders of both started out in far-left circles before jumping on the other side of the shoehorn. Which worked out much better for them.
Modern far-right frequently pays at least lip service to concerns of poor working class. At the same time modern left has become champaign left. Caring less and less about the actual working class.
And then the left becomes surprised that poor working class sometimes go to the other side…
My confidence in the validity of their claims tanked right about here.
I'm all for regulating transparency into social media algorithms. Meta most certainly is compromised by foreign actors. But can we choose less stupid hills to die on than numerology and GIFs? Headline is not remotely supported by the evidence.
https://www.reddit.com/r/brasil/comments/1x965on/eu_n%C3%A3o...
What would be useful here is leaking the system prompt for the Meta AI inside WhatsApp
It's one thing to discard it as "numerology and gifs" but it's another to willfully disrupt legal elections in a soverign country.
Or is a decade a really long time and we've all forgotten about Cambridge Analytica?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica
Reinforcement feedback loops, etc
If this is influencing your votes your democracy is already lost.
As for the evidence, it has been well documented beyond the parent comment's silly examples and it includes shadowbanning popular profiles with certain opinions.
I guarantee your political opponents also think Meta is trying to shadow ban then.
That person was then politely told to rtfa and given more substance than they thought was in there.
And what did you do?
That’s quite ironic.
your own country flipped its shit and said that Tiktok was CCP propaganda less than a year ago and tried to ban it, so it seems like foreign influence on your politics does seem to be a bad thing.
That is what seems to be happening here.
How is meta compromised by foreign actors? And who are the foreign actors?
The truth doesn't matter, what matters is getting more government money, and more regulation to get more financing, etc
NGOs are big business, and be assured, they don't care about fairness one bit more than Meta
I believe though it is an old phenomenom that if (given the default context) you ask a random number, it will more often than not give numbers from a very small set.
I just used a "Temporary chat" with ChatGPT twice to "Give a random number" and it gave 42 both times (this shuold be rather understandable why it ended up with this). Then I asked "Give a random number in 1-10" twice and it responded with 7 for both (and this too is an old "magic number").
btw today's models run random.randint() by default unless you prohibit python by choosing one of the dumb models, disable thinking, disable tool calls, etc.
We are talking about 2 trials, right? Or did they do more repetitions?
What would be the "correct" numbers to get from 2 trials that show an even distribution?
Big tech is so rigged (intensional or not), the question if it is socially net negative has become rhetorical.
How could that be made to happen? Should EU somehow move to federated (let’s say per country) instances of Mastodon or something? Or one big platform? How would regular folks get used to it? And how could those initiatives be prevented from falling into irrelevance when network effects are at play?
I agree with the idea, it’s just that there’s the usual hurdles there aren’t necessarily good answers for that I know of.
I realize these are heavy handed approaches - but shows what can get done.
Perhaps smaller scale things can work as well: Ie supporting alternatives when they occur - ie tiktok back when it was kinda Chinese - use the China threat to enforce objective standards - rather than just following the us stance.
Use existing monopoly legislation.
All creating an open market place for social media that allows for newcomers and local alternatives rather than the single monopoly that is the situation now.
They are the minimum.
We had video streaming sites like youtube. We had cellphone manufacturers. We had chat applications.
But the conditions for these companies were better outside of Europe. Now we're stuck with everything not made in Europe. (South Korea is more relevant in consumer tech than the EU.)
European governments still haven't swapped off MS.
Could a European competitor have even existed when even youtube struggled with the GEMA lawsuit for over half a decade? And that by the end of it they still had to pay?
It might work, but it also might bloat the whole operation so much that the social network becomes non-functional.
Amazon/AWS tried this route with their "sovereign cloud" which still ends up being beholden exactly the same way as "real AWS", so what's even the point? Who is even falling for these "tricks"?
Both the US and the EU are already doing this exact thing with cars, basically.
B-but the EU can't do that!
It absolutely can. Just like it can push Chat Control down everyone's throats even though if you held a referendum on it it would be voted down (no, most Jacques the plumbers on the street don't want mass surveillance even if it's "against crime").
They have, as the joke goes, more money than God and influence all over the world. They are beholden to no one. They have the resources to fight in court against decisions they don’t believe in, and all the lobbying they need to shape established laws.
They choose their actions, and their actions are their own. Every single dollar they donate to the current president but not the previous one is an admission of their allegiance and (lack of) morals.
Having principles and standing for them costs money, and these societal parasites subsist on money and influence. Make no mistake, they will sell their own mother to further their goals, but they don’t have to while they can keep selling everyone else’s.
The problem is that the same is true for many politicians. They do a lot of lobbying in Europe too.
The administration can take over them with the snap of a finger if they so desire. They have absolutely no power.
The best example of that is the BBC suit, where the only reason it's happening is because the US doesn't have any control over the entity because it's British.
I look for stuff I need on a search engine, watch the video I need only (mostly tutorials) and then leave. I never follow YouTube recommendations anymore - that’s how it keeps you hooked and feeds you what they want you to watch. (It’s also nonsensical and blatantly obvious these days - I went in to watch a video on how to tie a bow tie, why is there a recommendation on “Bolsonaro has Lula shaking in his pants, find out why??”
We banned YouTube for casual entertainment at home years ago - one of the best decisions we ever made, other than the toxic content pushing, it’s also so ad-infested it’s totally worthless anyway.
I remember when YouTube was “better than tv! Content on demand, no ads!”. Those days are long gone
AfD is controversial - it's click bait - the algorithm is feeding 'action' - that's the problem.
You might simply have been engaging with related content unknowingly, even if it's only one critical of them.
Either that or it's deliberately showing people stuff it knows they will hate to harvest hate scrolling.
They probably show posts based on location and background, so essentially just like Fox, CNN, MSNBC but everyone sees theirs from the same screen with the same agenda pushed from all of them.
I have almost no reason to look at my facebook feed, check it perhaps once every 1-2 weeks in case something important was only posted there (not that this helps as they don't show me actual friends actual updates). Recent visit was 50% ads, 25% recommended or weirdly boosted content, including a post from Mark Zuckerberg promoting his AI, and a post whose content I forget from the White House (I live in Germany, the last time I even visited the USA was 2018).
Also, this isn't a new phenomenon. If you're interested, I'd recommend reading Shoshana Zuboff's 2018 book: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
To be clear I think it's entirely possible that YouTube is adjusting its recommendation algorithm to show AfD content to people more (or perhaps less) than would happen "organically", because AfD is a salient political party in German politics and YouTube knows this. But how do you determine what is the correct amount of AfD content to be recommended to people in a politically-neutral way, that doesn't end up amounting to you arguing that the YouTube algorithm is only fair if it censors political content you personally think is bad?
A lot of bots of US origin are propagating false narratives posing as citizens of these countries.
I get AfD content recommendations (lurid, trashy stuff of uhm uncertain truth value) a propos of nothing in the village I grew up in - they are popular there with about 25% in the 2025 election. The region is not even in the east or particularly suffering economically. I don't get these recommendations in Berlin. It seems regional.
If you don't then actions might be taken against you see CBS and other media having to pay.
DoJ choosing who to look at.
I don't think that's ever been true.
Being censored from expressing the view that gender is principally a product of sex, or dissenting from state polices of vaccination, or being in revulsion at mass media (liked by mainstream demographics) being hijacked on the alter of fringe "representation". These have had no effect. None.
This hasnt caused everything from the election from a far-right US president to the collapse of the western video games industry, hollywood and the western media ecosystem. A total sucide of western soft and hard power "isn't" something the US has just done in revenge against californian liberalism.
The obliviousness, and arrogance here is, I guess, in keeping with that very same californian liberalism which has "done no wrong" -- other than demanded a world-wide internet echo chambre which reflects only its own values on pain of mass censorship. Values rare even in the US, let alone amongst the whole west, and the 8bn people on the planet.
The only thing true about your statement is that the mere existence of California has been used to justify right wing candidates entire platform.
It has nothing to do with the left.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Men are women.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_explosion
In general, I'd recommend familiarizing yourself with the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Gender is factually, as evidenced via a multitude of highly respected scientific studies conducted by a vast majority of respected experts both medical and psychological, distinct in every way from biological sex.
There is genuinely no room for opinion, disagreement, or dispute on that subject, at all. To disagree is to be, objectively, incorrect.
I can see where you are coming from in a purely politically motivated sense, yes. But the medical and psychological facts do not actually care about politics, and transgender individuals exist regardless of your belief in them.
California liberalism is just a convenient bogeyman.
Every state should have foreign agent laws (NGOs must register and must be transparent over their financials). Every state should have control over their information space (especially educational, social and news media). Russia and China understood, Brazil and Europe did not.
Not you though. You're a wolf among sheep. A true seer among the blind.
Everyone else is too dumb to know what's right, just manipulated by the media they consume on the Internet.
Not you though. You get all your information from trustworthy sources. Sure, they happen to agree with you 90% of the time but,hey, nobody's perfect, right? Well, except you. You've got all the answers.
If only everyone else would just let you make all the rules. You could get to all the bad people and make sure they stopped saying the wrong thing. Maybe provide them the resources they need to learn the truth and, if they don't want to learn the truth, we'll just keep them away from everyone else until they figure it out.
But you must see that it is a genuine conundrum. In a free-for-all information landscape (something which did not exist until yesterday), people need to be able to distinguish good information from bad for democracy to survive.
Alternatively, this blatant use of any tool available to influence non enemy states is disgusting, and forces everyone to a "everyone loses" scenario. Shifting the focus to an insufficiently defended victim removes the focus from the nature of the aggression.
It clearly is an enemy state. The US, that is.
He also didn't rape children and steal billions while destroying the world economy...
The fact that they didn't ban him for so long weighs toward being partial to not banning politicians. Which seems to be the opposite of the point you're trying to make.
The surprise is not that he was kicked off the main social media companies, the surprises are that the wheels of US justice turned so slowly that Trump got a chance to be re-elected rather than life in prison, and likewise that the US electorate went for him.
As soon as they start interfering with democratic processes in other countries, it's imperialism.
/Yeah this will be censored too. QED.
This Bolsonaro is the son of the former president, with zero political plans or credentials; his only claim is the name itself and what it represents. I find the idea of a family lineage in government, much, much worse.
Lula was voted in to power, Brazil is still a strong democracy despite the direction it’s going. It is a shame that another viable opposition candidate could not be produced as I’m not fond of having 80+ year olds in that seat, but still better than the alternative.
Right-wing folks are driven by social media since ~2016. Their content is emotional, aggressive and naturally conducive to more engagement. It’s what their base feeds on. So a lot of the situations described here are just standard ranking algorithms doing their job.
But that begs the question: is the existence of these platforms that amplify divisive and inflammatory content the problem itself? I vote yes. The power of reaching a wide audience should not be handed off without any cross-checks.
It has to end. Millions of lives are at sake.
It's getting ridiculous online.
I am sure that everyone involved must be feeling invincible but this is how you build resentment that will last and in most cases result in conflicts or regulations. Probably Musk, Zuckerberg and Thiel will be fine but they will destroy the prospects of the upcoming libertarians and cement the Chinese dominance as they don't have a problem of unruly billionaires and the problem of someone getting rich by doing one thing getting the right to do decide on everything and screw it up for everyone. Sad, I really don't want to live in a China-style political system.
If I have to choose between being subject of the Chinese Communist party or American psychopath billionaires, I'll gladly choose the party.
You know how they say that USA is a very new country and that even some pub in Europe can have longer history? Well, that's true but it doesn't mean that European countries have centuries of continued administration, most are a few decades old as a result of revolution or a war.
Europe is a very violent place for politicians, politicians being oversees and untouchable is a very new phenomenon.
Basically with corruption you can control what democracies do. We see this with the orange mafia in charge of the USA right now - even though sometimes it also yields entertainment, indirectly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvfePoni9eM
So what if searching for “brasil” returns a Bolsonaro GIF? I tried it myself, and the obvious explanation is that he’s wearing a Brazilian flag tshirt and dancing rather comically. How does a GIF appearing in search results imply political bias?
You mean when people admittedly have no knowledge of a subject but still speak authoritatively about it, viscerally criticising one of the sides and even suggesting fowl play, instead of taking care to be humble and understand the context before speaking or making accusations?
I agree, that is very much the kind of attitude that got us into the current situation.
have lefties in power for the next of the decade and you'll see how datacenters become all about clean energy investment, climate change starts to matter, "don't be evil" starts to take shape
It’s more simple than that. Industry tends to align with government because they have power and they want that power to be benefit them. If you’re a large company it would be stupid not to try to maintain that relationship.
Yet, from a pure intrinsic values perspective, people that are power-seeking are alike in industry and politics, and when they support an authoritarian state/movement instead of a democratic one, it shows their true intentions.
And they have their favorite phrase:
May flying spaghetti monster, help us all.Cuts to Sundar starring blankly.
Playing obvious problems of Brazil‘s judiciary system down like that are clear red flags for somebody not for 1 sec contemplating how he would react if the political camps would be reversed in this situation. It is their sovereignty if the censorship happens on speech you don’t like
People that want to do good things and people that want to do bad things don't deserve the same treatment. Neutrality is complicity.
With that in mind, why shouldn't it be in favor of the locals and reflect the values of its own society instead of some tech bros with imperialist ambitions?
The article is discussing a candidate who got the majority of the vote in the 10/4 election. Where did you get the idea that this content doesn't "reflect the values of its own society"?
People want to deflect and blame foreign powers for why their platforms are failing among the electorate. The argument is essentially that they are so right and correct that any deviation from their values could only have occurred due to Bad Guy external intervention, which conveniently justifies why we need mass censorship.
Just do a better job convincing people you're right. Censorship will just mask social problems until the outbreak is even worse.
This should be regulated to avoid interference from anyone.
The biggest problem now is that the billionaires behind social media nowadays will push for a liberal / right wing agenda in the west for their own interests.
No.
Its flagship product, its anthropological jewel, its greatest achievement, is the right-wing poor person. A genuine feat of social engineering: materially deprived, yet rich in convictions that run counter to their own interests.
They have been carefully molded. They have been taught that their problems always come from below or from next door — the immigrant, the welfare recipient, the civil servant, the unemployed — never from above.
They have been taught to hate taxes while surviving thanks to public services. To defend heirs to fortunes while having nothing to pass on themselves. To applaud those who crush them, as long as they speak loudly and promise law and order.
The right-wing poor person is a fascinating creature. They vote against their own interests with fervor, convinced that one day, perhaps, they too will find themselves on the right side of the fence.
They mistake brutality for courage, authoritarianism for protection, injustice for merit. They are sold fear in a ready-made package, identity at bargain prices, and anger in bulk on a monthly subscription.
At the dawn of this new world, the monsters do not emerge from the margins: they rise from the ballot boxes, television studios, and simplistic slogans.
They thrive on manufactured misery and sabotaged political awareness.
Capitalism has not merely produced poverty; it has achieved something far worse: it has made the poor docile, obedient, spiteful, and grateful.
A masterpiece, I'm telling you!"
Maximino Fernández
This curious animal was laid bare by the discovery that we are hackable by nature, and hacked by behaviour science. Though it took a few decades to get going, the understanding of how to influence motivation and decision-making is now very mature.
In order to arrive at this understanding, you need data, and lots of it. The social media platforms have performed the function of data aggregators and testing grounds for algorithmic control. But it was not the tech companies who came up with plans, only the tools to put them into practice.
The culprits, though they operate in shade, are generally non-partisan and understand that divide-and-conquer has always been an effective strategy. These people sometimes work in intelligence bureaus, but not always. They are, however, always known to those agencies. After all, you do not need to know you are an asset to be an asset.
The algorithms, necessarily kept as protected IP, are statistical engines that profile and predict, producing probabilistic outcomes and estimates. Before LLMs, one might have argued "but how can probabilistic algos really produce something meaningful?", now I would think people might have a different take, if they could see the layers and weights.
An emperor used to need an army, and this is what replaces it for non-violent insurrection and domestic control. Many will even state their ambitions publicly, and sometimes (though less frequently these days) their procedure. What they are doing is not strictly illegal, because the law gives "sovereignty" to a person's choices, without recognition that their choices might not be their own. Libertarianism has played right into their hands, in this sense.
A masterpiece, not only of conception, but also social engineering, with a technological endoskeleton built on the aggregated data we all willingly give them. All information feeds the machine, just as every financial transaction cements the central bank's authority.
Modern far-right frequently pays at least lip service to concerns of poor working class. At the same time modern left has become champaign left. Caring less and less about the actual working class.
And then the left becomes surprised that poor working class sometimes go to the other side…