YHK - yet another hacker news clone

so, like most things, it's likely a blessed invididual in meta is given the privlege of doing whatever they want, as part of the "boys will be boys" club.

They randomly suspend small business accounts too for no reason.

It's getting harder to believe this is accidental when it's 3 leftist situations in a row in such a short time.

I love the main character syndrome on display. You have this regional Florida race, not particularly competitive. They do campaign events all day every day. They see an issue with their Instagram account which gets fixed an hour later and they immediately think it's Zuck behind the scenes in his war room following her race and rally with a big red button on his desk to cut her off at the crucial window. Incredible stuff.

Depressing and worrisome. But at least there is a small funny bit to it. When the president was a Democrat, Facebook did this to Republicans. When the president’s a Republican, they do it to Democrats. Evidently, they don’t even have a side. They just flip-flop to support whoever is in charge

I've been reading the book "Careless People," and I came upon these passages just yesterday, referring to Mark Zuckerberg in 2015:

> Mark opens the meeting by talking admiringly about what he calls “street fighter tactics” that Uber is employing against politicians around the world and how successful they’ve been.

> He launches into a spiel about Empereror Augustus, his favorite emperor, who led the transformation of Rome from a republic to an empire.

> He wants to establish a team within Facebook to figure out how to build the tools that will use the algorithm and platform to pressure adversaries, including politicians who oppose us, to bolster the policy team.

>“We are calling on Meta to immediately restore the page and provide an explanation for its removal,” she continued. “Voters deserve access to critical election information, especially in these final days.”

>Nixon reported that the account was back up an hour later.

There was this brief moment where star trek broke my suspension of disbelief. How is there not social media and the Internet in the star trek future? Sure they didn't have it when the show was written, but there still felt to be a disconnect.

Now I think, "how can there be a star trek future while we have social media and the Internet?"

Honestly, it's probably what started the eugenics war.

The simplest explanation is that it's chaotic damage from whatever overzealous autocensorship systems they have. The extent of the damage is moderated based on who you know - whether it's social media reach to someone employed there who knows the strings to pull, pay to play line to an account rep, or even ahead-of-time "this needs to be protected" due to threats/back scratching from/of the regime.

At least to me, this is a good working explanation - the conspiracy angles prove things that don't need to be proven to effect sustainable solutions. The real issue, as it has always been, is that we need to move away from these centralized communications technologies controlled by corpos. Their concentrated power is what makes their censorship inevitable.

So pragmatically as things stand - while it's completely understandable that political campaigns (and everyone else) need to engage with where people are, they should also be making it a point to nudge followers to distributed forums. Use censorship-eager popular forums to recruit new followers, but maintain your base of members with censorship-resistant communication methods.

Or politically, assuming a critical mass of people frustrated at this problem that we can effect change, what we need is anti-trust enforcement that breaks up these companies into smaller entities, chiefly by un-bundling apps (client software) from hosting services and mandating published APIs for the two markets to interact.

This article is bait.

The account was created only 1 week earlier and was flagged as a campaign impersonation account.

Whether that's honest and truthful, we can only know if Meta is transparent. But, not including that information shows what the article's intent is.

> "During campaign season, we pay particular attention to accounts that could be impersonating candidates or campaigns and misleading voters. The account in question was created only a week and a half ago, so our systems automatically and mistakenly assessed it to be impersonating the Nixon for Senate campaign. The account was restored on Tuesday evening after three hours."

Fecebook out of all FAGMAN companies should be dissolved for good: it produces nothing of a value (they don’t make an useful products like email in google or a hardware laptop in MS for example), even big products like whatsapp or instagram were acquired, it is comically evil, it’s probably the first company to eavesdrop on its users daily convos through their apps to show ads, and it operates like a mafia or a syndicate, and you would know if you had your account auto flagged or banned, there’s no email or a person to talk to (that was before AI chat support too), you need to know someone who knows someone who knows someone to pull some strings inside to look at your account..

If you have a strong reaction to this, and had the opposite reaction when social media lockouts were used against the other party, I’d suggest a new approach: decide where you stand on the tool/weapon based on foundational principles, regardless of whether it’s currently being wielded by people you agree or disagree with.