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Posted by HotGarbage 3 hours ago

Zuckerberg's Increasingly Bizarre War on Whistleblowers(pluralistic.net)
179 points | 63 commentspage 2
nullbio 2 hours ago|
People just submitted it. I don't know why. They "trust me". Dumb fucks.
alex1138 1 hour ago||
Oh no, but he was "making a point". Or he was young. He was "right" that it's bad to give up your info (so Zuck hammered home the point by scraping email contacts and using it to populate People You May Know. for your own good)

You didn't hear that out of Myspace or Friendster or anyone else that's trusted with information

Minimum threshold should be "People should be less forgiving of just giving away credentials but now that I have them I'll protect them with my life". Oh well. Apparently I'm just an idiot

He was just joking just like he was joking when he said he'd "fuck the Winklevosses in the ear"

nullbio 43 minutes ago||
Of course, we all make mistakes. Just like when he accidentally made a free VPN to spy on peoples traffic. Sorry bros, networking malfunction!
username135 2 hours ago||
^
gherkinnn 1 hour ago||
Yet another reminder that

a) Meta is a nasty company

b) Zuck has neither the taste nor the vision to get Meta to build anything. He will continue to mine his current platforms to finance whatever is hot that day. Yesterday it was glasses, today it is betting and tomorrow it will be something else. Forever chasing what he can never attain.

c) Reality is banal. Zuck's merry band of sycophants lets him cheat at Settlers of Catan.

liendolucas 2 hours ago||
All that it was ruled against her should be illegal. It should also be illegal for companies to add abusive contract clauses that directly go against basic rights as freedom of speech.

Disgusting set of human beings Zuck and company.

Read the book and then decide if it's worth continuing on FB.

mananaysiempre 2 hours ago|
I mean, a lot of people these days, including a lot of anti-Facebook techies, seem to think it is right and proper to equate “freedom of speech” to the First Amendment to the US Constitution, scoped to the government only, whereas private actors can do whatever. (Though now that I think about it I don’t know if Doctorow does—hopefully not but I’ve been disappointed by quite a few childhood idols in this way over the last decade.)

Unproductive schadenfreude aside, how does one get not punishing opinions—even those that would put the listener in danger if implemented—broadly accepted as a value? I hesitate to say “accepted again” because I’m getting the impression this was always a fringe position, it’s just that on occasion said fringe intersected with the similarly small circle of people whose opinions were broadly publicized.

BoxFour 1 hour ago||
> how does one get not punishing opinions—even those that would put the listener in danger if implemented—broadly accepted as a value?

Taking you literally, I don't think that's possible. Social punishment (in the form of shunning, boycotts, "cancelling", etc) has been around as long as human society has existed and is incredibly popular.

If someone figures out how to reliably solve that, a few nobel prizes are probably awaiting them.

If you want to take a subset of this problem, maybe it's possible: Like if you mean corporations specifically, not all private actors.

mananaysiempre 30 minutes ago||
> Social punishment (in the form of shunning, boycotts, "cancelling", etc) has been around as long as human society has existed and is incredibly popular.

True. There’s a reasonable argument[1] that such things should continue to exist. The strongest way of phrasing it, I think, is that we do not want to have to pass a law against being an arsehole, nor do we actually want the letter of such a law enforced with the full might of the state, but there still needs to be some way of punishing it. The only counterpoint here is, I think, that the severity of such punishments seems to be vastly underestimated.

(If you’re going to refer to ancient societies, many of them used or accepted such a punishment as a substitute for the death penalty, as for instance with the Roman custom of permitting voluntary exile before conviction. And that still in a world where you could travel a few hundred kilometers in the right direction and reasonably expect nobody to ever learn of your sins.)

Also beside the point, however. The question is not whether we should shun people (we should, with a fair few qualifications), but whether such penalties should be levied for words. I posit that no, for an overwhelming majority of words they shouldn’t, where the possible exceptions are somewhere around ongoing mass murder and the Milles Collines[2]; and that letting your opponents speak and listening to them should by default be virtuous, socially rewarded behaviour.

[1] https://dynomight.net/bad/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_T%C3%A9l%C3%A9vision_Lib...

datakan 2 hours ago||
Seems pretty clear to me that he's a full blown sociopath. I know it's bad form to diagnose people online but the guy basically prides himself on it and makes no attempt to hide it. He just doesn't view others as human being.
hyhatqtv 2 hours ago||
> He just doesn't view others as human being

Well (allegedly) being a robot lizard would explain that. Neither are known for a lot of empathy towards human beings.

hack1312 1 hour ago||
You can shit on Zuckerberg easily without devolving into antisemitic tropes
tietjens 1 hour ago||
Seems a reach
hack1312 1 hour ago||
The “lizard people”/“reptilian overlords” conspiracy theory is rooted in antisemitism. It was invented by David Icke, a holocaust denier and endorser of the antisemitic hoax “The Protocols of the Elder Zion”, and plays off the medieval blood libel myths of a shadowy, non-human elite secretly subverting society to manipulate humanity, which “Protocols” built on and is what the conspiracy theory is based on.

Zuck is a humongous piece of shit destroying the world and Israel is committing genocide but we can say so without resorting to bigotry.

cyanydeez 2 hours ago|||
at some point we have to accept that money turns normal people into paychopaths along multiple trajectories. and tax the shit out of them to prevent the healthcare costs.
hack1312 1 hour ago||
“Paychopaths” is a pretty apt typo
pydry 2 hours ago|||
This is quite normal. Most billionaires spend their life surrounded by people who flatter them and indulge their every whim and agree with their every prejudice.
throwyawayyyy 2 hours ago||
It's the Silicon Valley circular-reasoning meritocracy in action: those with the billions deserve to have the billions because they have managed to get the billions. Every extra dollar only goes to prove how little they need to listen to those with less.
ryandrake 1 hour ago||
Not just Silicon Valley, although SV is definitely the poster child for this mentality. It’s a problem all over the world. Obtaining X fully justifies having X. Nobody cares about the “how.”
bwfan123 1 hour ago||
> Nobody cares about the “how.”

The rich man is also perceived by the lizard brain to be wise, intelligent, witty, and handsome.

consensus1 1 hour ago||
You don't know anything about him. He doesn't speak in public much and every single source on him has obvious incentives to lie.
mschuster91 1 hour ago||
> Lukashenka knew that arresting children for eating ice cream would make him a laughingstock abroad. Zuckerberg knows that threatening Wynn-Williams for standing in wooden silence on a stage makes him look like history's most guillotineable billionaire. But both Lukashenka and Zuckerberg are willing to be thought a thin-skinned bully, so long as that means the people they oppress the most are too terrified to ever challenge their authority.

... but eventually, external circumstances change, despite all the vain hope of those in power that they don't.

For Lukashenka, it's Ukraine blasting Russia's oil infrastructure to pieces - his regime has always depended on Mother Russia, but should Mother Russia (hopefully) collapse, he's done for.

And for Zuckerberg? And all the other vile big tech execs that kissed Trump's ring [1]? The population is fed up, radical (at least when measured by usual US standards) politicians have actual chances of getting elected on the Democrat side... they all will face justice.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/09/google-mi...

avalys 2 hours ago|
“Zuck is also revealed to have given the Chinese state access to all of Facebook and the power to censor content they disliked, as part of a failed bid to get permission to offer a Facebook service in China.”

This did not happen and I’m not aware of any evidence or allegations that it did. Williams claims that Meta indicated they would accept China’s demand to give the Chinese government access to Chinese users’ data, as a condition of being allowed to operate in China. This is not the same as access to “all of Facebook”, and it didn’t happen at all because operating permission was never granted.

So, the author is a liar who distorts facts to make for a more interesting article. Don’t waste your time listening to people with no integrity.

What else that this article claims is distorted bullshit, I wonder?

Next time you read an article from “Pluralistic”, ask yourself, are they telling the truth or are they lying to push an agenda?

I have no particular connection to Zuck or Meta. I just find this behavior incredibly obnoxious and hypocritical.

GlibMonkeyDeath 2 hours ago||
That's a quote from Corey Doctorow, not Sarah Wynn-Williams. I read her book. She was pretty careful to use your language (i.e., that it was offered, but not implemented, and was China-only data from what she related. Not that that is great either, of course...)

Her main allegations (that Facebook/Meta optimizes for profit at the expense of everything else) seem pretty unsurprising. I mean, given what has been observed, is this in any way controversial?

avalys 32 minutes ago||
I’m referring to Doctorow’s credibility, not Williams.
ppsreejith 15 minutes ago|||
Agreed. I don't like that you're downvoted for pointing this out as the language is very weasel-wordy (revealed to have? by who? what is all of Facebook?):

> Zuck is also revealed to have given the Chinese state access to all of Facebook

Tbf, the book actually makes the right claim that it's Chinese user data, not all of Facebook so the article is to blame.

potatos22 2 hours ago|||
it was called project aldrain. multiple internal employees made company wide memos on internal platforms and resigned. they factually did the stuff your talking about.
laweijfmvo 2 hours ago|||
i think the article is saying that’s what the book claims, not whether it’s true or false.
loeg 1 hour ago|||
> So, the author [Doctorow] is a liar who distorts facts to make for a more interesting article. Don’t waste your time listening to people with no integrity.

> What else that this article claims is distorted bullshit, I wonder?

E.g., "including its knowing encouragement of a genocide in Myanmar." You can certainly accuse Facebook of being incompetent at monitoring and moderating speech in Myanmar but calling it "knowing" or "encouraging" is just a lie. There's plenty to criticize without lying, but the lying ruins your case.

hedora 2 hours ago||
The Chinese rejected the offer, so I’m not sure what your point is.

Here’s an article from the Atlantic that was sponsored by the Koch Brothers (so, good luck arguing one sided political bias!) on Zuck’s strategy for whitewashing censorship of political speech:

https://web.archive.org/web/20191115132324/https://www.theat...