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Here you go.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2010/06/08/the-twitter-devolution/

See also...

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/06/evalu...

And these lies, of course, were spread by the social media platforms themselves and their PR departments.

Social media was about staying in touch. Whether that was about your friends and family (Facebook) or your city / neighborhood (Twitter). Algorithmic feeds are what poisoned the well.

At some point societies are going to have to reckon with the fact that democracy, free speech, and unrestricted capitalism simply aren't a sustainable mix. A system that allows people to amass incredible fortunes and use those fortunes to influence other people's beliefs and votes is simply a system that will eventually fall under the control of those ultrawealthy people.

And now they just block you on first approach. Mission accomplished.

Oh well, now we have AI girlfriends as the next trillion dollar industry. We'll get it next time!

I thought that was true only for Zuck …

It was a fairly common narrative during the Arab Spring, when the technology was still relatively novel.

Arab Spring and the Obama campaign. I know, it seems a lifetime ago...

It’s quite the contrast when you look at Twitter then and X now.

> That's why we're fed the narrative that social media is evil and needs to be regulated or banned at all costs.

Social media prioritizing algorithms that feed off division and anger is evil.

If Facebook & Twitter were still ways to simply keep in touch with friends, family, and interest groups, I don't think anyone would care (other than the ads).

Do you remember cases in which it "accelerated political action" ?

Meta is not people, it's a publicly traded company that's practically legally required to make money and grow infinitely.

You however, as people, can choose not to patronize a Meta that assists with transgressions against human rights.

But they do control the routers that peer with external networks.

Saudi could - I think people accept Saudi is a religious oligarchy - but the UAE is a playground of international people avoiding tax and ostensibly a first world country, Facebook being banned would highlight how ridiculous the government that did that is.

Right, but it should be acknowledged that this is likely an amoral decision on Facebook's part (or more charitably, a pragmatic decision) not an immoral one.

The governments that forced these changes in the first place are of course acting immorally, that's not in dispute.

Yes of course, clearly the EU and Saudia Arabia both have equal censorship initiatives and human rights track records.

Apologies for the sarcasm. But I think it’d be helpful for you to expand a little on what you mean by EU “censorship” in this case.

Could be goomba fallacy, but listening to people irl, maybe not.

In a just world Zuckerberg would already be talked of only in past tense. This reality will get flagged/killed without a single Meta employee/astroturfer who does the flagging providing a justification as to why this isn't true.

SBF took money from rich people and nearly lost it.

Zuck made money for rich people.

Criminal culpability must always filter through this lens.

I think what social media companies are doing is both immoral and criminal. In a just world this behavior would count as a crime against humanity and the people responsible would be tried in a court of law accordingly. In a just world we would have strong consumer protection laws which would protect users against the behavior your parent described. And consumer protection agencies would shut these companies down before they were able to cause this much harm, The worst offenders like Zuckerberg would be criminally charged and go to prison.

You are worrying about domestic nation state actors, and you are calling social media to be banned by whom? Some mysterious administrative entity that is surely not a part of the domestic nation state doing the very propaganda you are railing against?

Surely the people with the power to ban the lot of social media don't have their own propaganda to shove down your throat. Surely they will only ban the bad ones where foreign agents spread dangerous ideas and keep the good ones where only upright citizens of their own country can talk about how great everything is.

>Just ban the lot of them and move on.

How do you define social network, though? Is Facebook a social network, even though it includes a marketplace? Is HN a social network? Is Newgrounds a social network....? Seems difficult to stomp out effectively

> now you’ve got a big juicy target maintained by hobbyists.

You'd have a much larger number of targets which makes things somewhat more difficult for those looking to exploit them since they'd have to track down the various platforms and navigate a variety of systems each with their own rules and culture. Fewer of them would allow ads at all and none of them would match facebook in terms of being as easy to weaponize. "Pay us to attack this platform's userbase" is a core part of facebook's business model.

You'd also be much better off when the people maintaining the system are hobbyists because they actually care about the platform and moderation. That's a massive improvement over facebook which does as little as they possibly can, only enough to be able to claim that they do "something" at the next congressional hearing, while still making sure that they can actively censor what they want. Moderation on major social media platforms seem to frustrate the efforts of legitimate users more than spammers and scammers.

I'd put my money on "Randall, the over-worked sys admin" over the half-assed AI moderator bots employed by Musk and Zuckerberg

Randall’s eagle eye friend and fellow US-based sysadmin notices attacks on his own server, reports it to his congressperson, and the fed stands up protection for the whole fediverse in short order.

The government in the US will prevent others from immediately physically infringing on your rights, say to brew beer. So they’d help us online too even at the expense of corporate platforms right?

What exactly would you like banned and how would you define what should be banned and what shouldn’t?

I assume you want FB and Insta banned. What about Reddit? YouTube? Hacker news? Discord? X? Dating apps? Snapchat? WhatsApp? iMessage? Gmail? Just curious where exactly you draw the line, and how you’d implement the ban.

> Social networks are cancer. Just ban the lot of them and move on

I've been pushing for the under-14 ban, which is popular in almost every country with polling, and holy shit is it a pigpen to wade through.

The idea that they would ban their propaganda networks, but not their alternatives, is really baffling...

Not opposite, a different problem.

If you remove one viewpoint because of government mandate, while still carrying the other, your platform is creating a biased viewpoint to influence people, that’s on the platform.

Strong disagree on this one! The problem is the company will do anything to stay operational in these repressive countries, including helping them hide human rights abuses (among other things).

The logic that if the local government was more open about their repressive policies then Meta would happily help spread that information is probably true but I don't think anyone has ever disagreed with that.

The transnational private sector is neither morally consistent nor geopolitically neutral.

The transnational private sector is neither morally consistent nor geopolitically neutral.

The transnational private sector is neither morally consistent nor geopolitically neutral.

One could (naively) hope that goliath corporations used their massive lobbying power for good. There was a time, long, long, ago, Google refused to operate in China because it refused to censor itself.

Since no matter how much power they have they won't behave good let's go ahead and regulate the shit out of them and tear them into tiny mangable pieces.

If we had a thousand different smaller federated platforms it would be harder for governments to impose rules on them anyways.

> The private company would gladly connect everyone.

They'll gladly connect everyone except those people/places they personally don't like, or anyone their friends/business partners don't like, or anyone they are paid/bribed to leave disconnected, or anyone who it isn't profitable to connect, or anyone who is profitable to connect but not profitable enough to be worth the bother, etc.

Connecting more than none is an admirable goal, but if a company is not objecting this policy in covert and overt ways, they're being just complicit for monies.

Being complicit is something, but being complicit while trying to sugarcoat or hide it is something else.

>The private company would gladly connect everyone.

they do plenty of completely arbitrary censorship voluntarily. no government had mandated the frenzied erasure of certain viewpoints during certain events of 2020-2023, for example.

> The problem is the governments in those places, and not the private company.

Do you think Meta will comply if North Korea or Iran requests same censorship?

If your answer is "No, they will not comply", then problem is the company

Public companies want only one thing, and it’s disgusting.

But seriously, they would gladly connect three people and leave everyone else out if it were most profitable. The fact freedom, such as it still is, is unevenly distributed is no excuse and we are not obligated to shrug and go, “Eh, what do you want this super valuable corporation to do?” We make it valuable as human beings. It should have a responsibility toward us. The fact it does not is a flaw in the system, not a fact of life.

> taxed for their contribution to obesity

It's always amazing how fatties can shift responsibility onto others. The calorie count for Cola is listed right on the bottle. Just don't drink it if you're to fat. And spend a few hours teaching your fat kids to read.

I hear you, there are countless problems to solve. My "..in a just world.." was doing a lot of heavy lifting.

> I mean at least they are giving you a free service and you essentially take part in a transaction.

Yes, it is akin to a transaction, but we cannot ignore the power imbalance between the user and the corporation. They actively engineer their platforms to keep you glued to the screen. It is far from free. You pay with time, money spent on whatever is advertised to you and a lot of other things.

My proposal was analogous to say tobacco tax or carbon tax and the like. We somehow made it essential to be on social media, it is proven to be harmful, policy action to shift priorities.

> Wouldn't it normatively be more in keeping with a proper distinction between public and private to say lobby your congressman to stop the ceaseless funding and weapon deployments to countries in the ME that don't share our values?

If an individual lobbying the government wouldn't be overpowered by monied corporate interest in the government, maybe. Sadly that's not the case, at least in the US.

> The NSA has all your data anyway.

Yes, and this is incredibly unpopular and if we had a real representative democracy we'd be able to do something about it.

> In some jurisdictions you can even claim a right to be forgotten.

This too is popular and would be codified more broadly if, again, it wasn't for corporate lobbyists.

> Do you really think such public entities are more trustworthy than their private bedfellows merely because they fall on opposite lines of the public/private divide?

To beat a dead horse...

> the fact that a majority of your fellow citizens (in the USA at least) don't actually care about their (and by extension - your) privacy or human rights in the Middle East

Factually untrue.

The Iran war is incredibly unpopular, beating Iraq and Vietnam in unpopularity this quickly into the operation [1]

Most Americans want us to stop funding Israel [2]

Most Americans are against spying on fellow Americans (esp democrats/the left; tho republicans love a good ole police state)[3].

I'd argue strongly the reason these numbers aren't more in favor of anti-intervention and privacy is decades and decades of propaganda and fear mongering (about socialism/communism during the Cold War and before, about the Middle East/muslims since the oil crisis and before) because of, you guessed it, corporations lobbying for military engagement, oil contracts etc.

There is a thoroughly documented history of American corporations lobbying the government to, here is a brief list:

- Hawaiian overthrow (1893): sugar (dole, spreckles) - Spanish-American war (Cuba, Philippines, Puerto Rico) (1898): sugar, tobacco, shipping - Columbia/Panama (1903): canal rights - Nicaragua (1909-1933): United Fruit, banking - Honduras (1903, 1907, 1911, 1924): United Fruit and others - Dominican Republic (1916–1924, 1965): sugar again - Iran (1953): oil - Guatemala (1954): United Fruit! - Congo (1960-61): copper/cobalt - Brazil (1964): mining - Indonesia (1965–66): mining, oil - Chile (1970-73): copper - Iraq (2003): oil, war contractors - Iran (2025-26): oil, war contractors

There are many more - some more contested than others - but the above list have clear historical documentation linking them to corporate interests.

Socialism, communism, "terrorism", the war on drugs, "democracy", and Iran getting nukes have all been helpful tools for US corporations to curry influence with bought politicians to have the US colonize or dismantle other countries for their benefit.

Your analysis puts all the blame directly on citizens vs looking at root causes and the obvious successes of corporate and government propaganda on the opinions of Americans.

Let's instead look at who benefits most from these wars and try and dismantle their ability to influence opinion and government and work towards a more representational and fair government we have a say in.

[1]: https://www.natesilver.net/p/iran-war-polls-popularity-appro... [2]: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20260519-poll-shows-majori... [3]: https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/52425-what-americans-think...

Buddy... Are you a doctor? Are you a scientist? Why do you think that you have an inalienable right to proselytize your "health practices" on a public forum?

My experience was that there wasn't nearly enough moderation on social media about Covid. The absurd amount of misinformation was the final straw that finally got me to leave Facebook and Instagram.

I doubt my semi-monthly marketplace usage is contributing more than it costs. If everyone used just the bare minimum free feature set, the company would not be viable.

This is the answer. Stop operating in authoritarian states and ignore their laws. If those states want to censor what their population can see, it's on them to establish a firewall.

While we're fantasizing about evil people doing the noble thing: the fourth option is for Meta to takes its vast wealth and help build resilient uncensorable communications instead of doubling down on centralized and surveilled social networks.

Meta has also been regularly nuking/blocking rights-related accounts in countries that do support human rights.

E.g. in The Netherlands. First they did a mass block last December, then again in April:

https://www.at5.nl/artikelen/237924/meta-verwijdert-instagra...

Some were reinstated again, but not all and not after they have been offline for to long.

Meta is not a political or moral entity, it's a for profit tech company. I don't see why it would be expected to make judgement calls on government requirements. Are we expecting Meta to take a political stance for or against specific policies in every country in which it operates? How would its politics be determined? I think the sensible thing for the corporation to do is to operate as widely as possible and follow the rules where it operates.

Governments suppress information all the time. We know of a huge list of thousands of documents and terabytes of video implicating people in child abuse and as important as that is, we aren't getting all of the information. That's the government position. Redact and suppress. It's up to the people to demand transparency from their government and if they don't demand it and fight for it, they won't get it. Corporations like Meta aren't there to help fight the power.

Is it better for human rights for a channel of communication to exist only if every single person can use it? Or is it a net positive for these communication channels to exist, albeit in an imperfect form?

Operating in these countries helps gather information in them.

It's called shareholders. When you need a single person with a single share to be able to sue the company for not doing its fiduciary duty that is the result.

operating here is the buying and selling of ads

Then Meta should exit that country.

It’s off-topic.

Consumer activism is trash. Wait until you can't file your taxes without facebook. Not using Uber won't bring taxis back, you'll just end up walking.

I say this as someone who closed my facebook account 15 years ago, and who never opened an Uber account.

That’s the beauty of this design, you only seed what you share. If something is not worth seeding, you don’t share it. You are only responsible for the seed you selected to reseed. That also acts as a verifier in case someone edits the comment later on. You put an id based on the timestamp and every user uses a signature that allows others to verify original source. The client could theoretically auto trust certain signatures if it is proven to be from a trusted user.

There you go. I skipped over that. Both of the activists mentioned by name seem to be genuinely brave people standing up for real human rights.

I'm curious why WhatsApp isn't much more popular in the USA. Is it the lack of anonymity?

I jumped ship, and the friends and family who are important to me are still on the ship, by and large.

Yet I've never felt as though I'm missing out. We communicate via alternative forms (texts, calls, hanging out in person) and I have never felt disconnected.

The whole trope about people being worried about missing out is misplaced - that feeling is exactly what these products are designed to imbue in their users. Ultimately, if you value others, you'll make the effort to connect somehow, and if they value you, they'll return that energy. If that two-way street doesn't exist, if they're not willing to give back a similar effort, then why do we need to know what they're doing or thinking every day?

I mean, you're commenting in text format on a web forum to strangers using pseudonyms right now. Why is that valid but the use of social media isn't?

I will do as I please, thanks.

Thanks for the reply.. yeah I might just be at the "fuck it" point. I've done that before and it always makes me feel healthier (calmer, sleep better, etc).

The offline world is where the people are.

Social is where the accounts are, many of which have a nonhuman substrate with the goal of coercing alignment out of you.

Bluesky both isn't an alternative to Facebook and is generally terrible too.

Care to characterize these ideals for us then?

Yep, as I described.

I still remember when Messenger would block certain links, including links to news outlets to curry favour with organisations and governments.

"Arabia" is the name of the entire peninsula. There's half a dozen countries there.

KSA works too and matches UAE pattern.

I have heard lots of people who refer to it as Saudi and that would be a reasonable way to do it IMO.

Yes. Say Saudi.

What about "Meta blocks human rights accounts for audiences in Saudi Arabia and UAE"? I don't think "reaching" adds much to the headline

> usually forgetting the other country that has "United States" in their name

Mexico?

the term "Americans" always bothered me, though it's commonly used to refer to US

And yet the title kept the equivalent of "United". Except that there isn't a region of the world called "United", but there is one called "Arabia", and it isn't the country.

It could have used "Saudi" for more clarity while saving one character

Yes, but it means something different to the name of the country. It means a region.

Geographically Arabia is more than just Saudi Arabia, so the title is inaccurate.

There has been a bit of a trend. I do appreciate dissenting comments on HN even when I've gotten a bit defensive over them

Did you have a different account before a year ago? HN discourages the same individual rotating accounts.

It was probably the Reddit exodus. A lot of people from Reddit realized that HN has the same topics as Reddit and has the same upvote/downvote interface around the same time Reddit was having its API changes. The folks who did it were the kind who felt strongly enough about Reddit's leadership that they brought their strong opinions here.

Nothing you can do about open forums really. They all regress to the mean user who has enough time to spend hitting the up and downvote arrows on the website all day.