At this point Meta doesn't even worry about these news and specially right now that it is trying to please the current adminstration. Over the years I see it got a lot of bad press but they continue to grow their revenue. Investors are happy, nothing else matters probably for the company .
Cambridge Analytica resulted in them largely closing off their API which depending on your view on platform monetization vs moat of less easily accessible social graph was a bullish thing for the company. It was quite a manufactured scandal in my opinion.
It was an API for making apps with Facebook integration, and after they closed it down, Facebook became even more of a walled garden. Perhaps no criticism of Facebook has ever been more trumped up, and it shut down a lot of people making useful, fun, interesting Facebook apps who were afterwards locked out of the platform. Facebook was probably all too happy to remove the functionality and use this as the excuse to do it.
Anyone that remembers the Graffiti Wall knows the real thing that was lost here. It had it's issues (Farmville was the worst / most annoying version of Harvest Moon ever made) but it was worth saving.
It was also worth building the infrastructure required to make it function, because it ultimately damaged Facebook in ways I don't think they really still understand. Their abortive attempt to build a metaverse or a Twitter that feels more like a prison, vs successful, beautiful, creative, wild interpretations of a metaverse that lead to things like Minecraft and Bluesky. They simply won't succeed a these endeavors without meaningful third party access. Improving upon that problem might be a more productive use of their time than kissing political butts if they want to actually succeed in this space.
They just learned, like every single company, that nobody has willpower, ability or memory to keep up with the news. Wait a week or two, say nothing, people will forget. The product is intrenched enough in the society that nobody will move unless something happens to the product itself.
Frankly, can’t really judge them. That is probably the optimal thing to do in the current business environment.
I don't think "keeping up with the news" is really the problem. The problem is that "the news" is primarily about entertainment, not information, and so it isn't actionable. If you care about being informed about actionable information, then your good sources of information are RSS, long-form articles, books, etc.
Yeah totally fair. But honestly, I would blame the people. Eventually they are the ones that vote for politicians that result in uneven game field, so businesses end up playing ball. And I know, leadership needs to have some sort of shame, empathy, morality and etc., but US isn't Japan where some sort of participation of leadership in sexual misconduct between third parties can bring down a TV company to their knees. And i'm not saying whether one is better than the other, it's just what it is.
Lots of blame to go around. I can have it my heart to blame the voters, the systems set up to make sure the voters never get a good choice, the slavers that made that system, the apathetic, the opportunistic, the greedy, the domineering.
Overall though, I feel like if I'm going to single anyone out, its those with the most power and those benefiting the most.
Fair enough, and I agree with you! It is sad how over the years, I’ve lost my belief that one day we’ll all live in a fairly peaceful world where this is never a problem. I understand that it’s practically impossible, but I used to be a naive 12 year old decades ago.
> People keeping up with the news doesn't do much either when our lawmakers are bought and paid for.
This is not true and you'll never understand politics if you think this.
(What actually happens is that being in Congress is such a horrible job that only insane people would want to do it, so the people with money find congresspeople who /already agree with them/ and are trying to keep them from leaving for a less stressful normal career.)
I think it might be OpenSecrets' fault. They're great and all, but they report donations from employees of companies as if they're from the companies themselves, which produces nonsense like "health insurance companies donated to Bernie Sanders". No they didn't!
Your example has no merits on both key factors - means and motive.
Means - your neighbor has no way to murder you without very high risk of getting punished afterwards. Where is Biden could do to FB whatever he wanted without any risk to himself.
Motive - does your neighbor pressures you into doing something worth killing for?
I mean he also said in the same interview that after he pushed back against Biden, Biden opened an anti-trust lawsuit against Meta.
However, the anti-trust lawsuit was filed in the 1st Trump administration. So, I don't really think you can take anything Zuck says outside of a shareholder meeting at face value (where he has an actual penalty for lieing).
yes because the opinion of voters who care about DEI doesn't seem to matter, while voters who demonize it does. why you pretend this won't ressonate well with the electorate of our new president?
you may believe it is a puff piece, and that's subjective, it's fine to think so. but saying it's paid for is a serious accusation and very different from "puff". big time news outlets like the NYT don't do paid content like that - if they have any sponsored content it will be prominently labeled or placed in the Opinion/Editorial section.
We’re talking about posts promoting prescription medications. There were always strict rules about this on Facebook (banned by default) and the fact that most of these posts ever stayed up was more likely a result of oversight and possibly politics in the first place. You certainly don’t see almost anything about other prescription meds.
> "The company restored some of the accounts and posts on Thursday, after The New York Times asked about the actions."
It would appear the posts were OK after all.
> You certainly don’t see almost anything about other prescription meds.
I get pretty much non-stop Ozempic ads on Facebook.
> "Aid Access, one of the largest abortion pill providers in the United States, said some posts were removed on its Facebook account and blurred out on its Instagram account since November, with more posts blurred in recent days. The abortion pill service said it has been blocked from accessing its Facebook account since November, and its Instagram account was suspended last week, though it has since been restored."
You don't think the November timing is the slightest bit suspicious?
- Has this happened before?
- are they actually compliant with the rules? Or are they being banned and then unbanned because we’re sympathetic to them?
- was anyone mass reporting them? Was this human or automatic?
- how often are these things banned?
It’s really a miracle most of these outfits are operating at all. In most cases we’re talking about filling out an anonymous form to get prescription medication. It’s not legal. Some of them try to provide a form of legality as a cover (“we definitely have a doctor review your anonymous form”) but not anything that would hold up to scrutiny. It’s not surprising that very few of them are likely following Facebooks rules on top of that.
Of course maybe they should be legal and the situation should be totally different, but Facebook banning grey market prescription drug sellers that almost certainly violate their rules is not surprising. It’s also not surprising they ease up when the NYT asks about it even if there are rule violations because I doubt Meta wants any part of this debate.
People buy highly illegal drugs on the Internet all the time. Yes, most people regard an address as sufficiently anonymous, and either way, it's obviously not meaningfully doctor-supervised if a possibly-imaginary doctor never sees anything but an internet form you filled out.
Again, I am not saying things should be this way, but we're talking about black/grey market prescription drug suppliers mailing prescription drugs to people pseudonymously/anonymously, usually/sometimes in violation of US law and almost certainly nearly always in violation of the FB rules I posted above.
If this was literally any other prescription drug, nobody would find this result surprising.
NB: In contradiction to one of your downthread posts, very few of these places are taking insurance information. (Maybe even "none", but I am willing to believe someone does.) Usually one of their selling points is that it is "private". The article for example cites Aid Access, which does not. Neither do any of the sites in the downstream commenter I clicked on. I encourage you to actually look at these sites and see how easy it is. I am not saying that it is a bad thing, but clearly it is not aboveboard.
I would encourage you to check out the actual affected accounts from the article, which are listed.
> The Instagram account of Hey Jane, another abortion pill provider, was recently invisible in Instagram search, said Rebecca Davis, who leads marketing at Hey Jane.
I did, as I said, I went through Aid Access. I checked some of the others as well.
> Telehealth, looking to take Medicaid.
"Looking to take Medicaid" is a strange way of saying they currently do not accept any form of insurance.
Hey Jane is the only one I have seen thus far. And of course, there's a reason why they also accept eg. Cashapp rather than just taking CC/debit cards - they expect most of their customers will not want them to have any actual information on them.
And again, any prescription med promotion, including 100 legit prescription meds, require some byzantine bureaucratic process with FB themselves - not just being legal or de facto legal.
Listed there I checked some of their recommended stores. The first that I clicked accept Bitcoin payment and require no insurance details (medside24). It does look like it's possible to do this fully anonymous without much hassle. I have no problem with that by the way.
Oh good, an unalterable ledger stating the wallet associated with you paid for an abortion medication. Good thing the US is in a social headspace where none of us believe that that will be made retroactively illegal.
Bitcoin is absolutely not anonymous. To believe otherwise is a grave error.
Having trouble getting past the paywall. Can you confirm that these were posts directly promoting the prescription drugs, or were other posts by this organization also hidden?
>At this point Meta doesn't even worry about these news and specially right now that it is trying to please the current adminstration
You may not agree with the current administration, but they won the popular vote. What would you rather them do, defy the current administration? Sounds pretty anti-democratic to me. Am I missing a deeper principle here or is it just a matter of "companies should do what I think is right"?
I would rather companies do whatever they thought was best with no regards to the current administration, unless forced by law to take some action. Large companies feeling like they need to take actions to please the current President is not great.
Any scenario in which a billionaire, with all their power and resources, is deeply scared of pissing off the President - to the point of doing a public 180 on everything - is one in which us much less powerful regular people should be very scared.
>defying an administration that you disagree with, within the rule of law, is just about the most American and democratic thing I can imagine.
Purdue Pharma caused the opioid crisis which killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. State and federal governments thinks it's liable for billions in damages. Perdue disagrees and is fighting it tooth and nail in the courts, which is within their rights. Would you characterize this as "the most American and democratic thing I can imagine"?
Having the right to attempt to defend yourself in court - even if you're a shitty person/organization - is very American, yes. Electing governments in part to try and prosecute said shitty people/organizations is similarly quite democratic.
>Having the right to attempt to defend yourself in court - even if you're a shitty person/organization - is very American, yes.
I'm not arguing they shouldn't have the right to defend themselves in court, only that most people wouldn't think that as being "patriotic". It's also not hard to find people characterizing Citizens United v. FEC as "undemocratic", even though it theoretically emobies the democratic principles of free speech and the supreme court acting as a check.
There's a pretty wide gulf between "abortion should be legal in at least most or all cases" and "ads for abortion pills on facebook". The company's spokesperson specifically mentioned it was taken down due to regulations relating to advertising drugs.
If the reason for the takedown was "we don't allow ads for drugs of any variety on the platform" or "regulations prevent us from allowing ads for medicines on our platform" then sure, I have no problem with that. I can complain about the quality or consistency of that enforcement, but sure, if that's the reason, that's fine.
If the reason for the takedown is that the popular will of the people, as manifest in the preferences of the current President, deems this thing bad, and therefore we're taking it down, then that's a) inaccurate and b) deeply out of step with American tradition, principle, and governing philosophy.
>If the reason for the takedown is that the popular will of the people, as manifest in the preferences of the current President, deems this thing bad, and therefore we're taking it down, then that's a) inaccurate and b) deeply out of step with American tradition, principle, and governing philosophy.
Is the implication here that any sort of proactive action by companies to dodge enforcement actions a bad thing? For instance, if after Biden appointed Lina Khan to the FTC, and M&A firms suddenly stopped doing deals out of anti-trust concerns, is that bad? Or is it somehow only limited to advertising?
So I'd started writing a response to this, but it got a bit long and abstract and it was a work day, so I kind of left it, but an article dropped into my lap today which was almost too perfect as a demonstration of what I was trying to get to:
> Now Mr. Trump is back in the White House, and many executives at CBS’s parent company, Paramount, believe that settling the lawsuit would increase the odds that the Trump administration does not block or delay their planned multibillion-dollar merger with another company, according to several people with knowledge of the matter.
In general, if an incoming administration signals a change in regulatory priorities or interpretation, and that causes businesses broadly to adjust their business plans, I think that's a reasonable reflection, after a relatively long chain and with all the caveats of the US electoral system, of the "people's will" as expressed in governance after an election. Lina Khan indicated that the FTC was going to take a much closer look at mergers with a renewed eye towards competition, not just consumer wellbeing, and that broadly changed the math on whether companies expected their mergers to go through. That's what I would expect - that's the point of government and regulation here, and the change in those priorities following an election fits broadly into "the government as the people's tool for constraining powerful actors."
However, a company changing its policies or plans specifically because it is concerned about the whims and wills of the president - in other words, companies specifically attempting to curry personal favor with the president to get better treatment - is not that. If Paramount was worried that recent changes to the law or changes to how the FCC or FTC interpreted regulations affected their chances of winning the lawsuit or getting the merger through in the same way that, say, NBC would be worried about it, that's normal. Paramount is worried that the president is angry at them and they are going to be specifically targeted, and so they're going to give the president a large cash settlement so he'll instruct the FTC to let them complete their merger. That's not normal - or at least, it's not good.
They didn’t. They won 49.8%. But I’ve got to be honest, any logic along those lines rings very hollow these days. We’ve been told over and over about the “tyranny of the majority” being why a number of sparsely populated states get a disproportionate vote on the country’s destiny. To pivot just because the popular vote flipped to the other side (which, again, it didn’t) feels very… convenient.
I don't have a horse in this race nor a particular interest in US elections but I don't think your definition of popular vote is the commonly used one (i.e. candidate doesn't have to have more than 50% to win it).
I definitely think it's better for companies to do what's right than what's wrong, and I'm not sure I follow your implication that this is a shallower principle than calibrating what I think companies should do against the winner of the most recent federal elections. It would be a harder question if there were a law which requires Instagram or Facebook to block and hide posts from abortion pill providers, but there isn't.
Ideally, each individual, with society deciding via laws and regulation when people disagree.
> Does this boil down to just "I don't agree with what meta is doing"?
No, this boils down to "it is bad for even billionaires to be terrified of opposing the new President". Who has, for the record, previously called for Zuck's imprisonment.
>No, this boils down to "it is bad for even billionaires to be terrified of opposing the new President". Who has, for the record, previously called for Zuck's imprisonment.
That's a total 180 from the OP and most of this comment thread, which was seemingly about excoriating meta/zuck's behavior.
Everyone who makes a decision has the responsibility to judge whether it's right.
It would be one thing if Meta content teams sat down, thought about it, and decided that abortion pills aren't something they're comfortable having on their platform. But then they wouldn't have restored accounts when the New York Times started asking. It looks a lot more like an unprincipled decision to make their lives a bit easier by putting their thumbs on the scale against views the government doesn't like. (It's not like they've never done that before!)
> You may not agree with the current administration, but they won the popular vote
A republican candidate narrowly won the popular vote for the first time in 20 years, a metric that has no value in our system of government. And somehow you think this factoid puts the current administration in a position where they dare not be defied? Give me a fucking break.
>A republican candidate narrowly won the popular vote for the first time in 20 years, a metric that has no value in our system of government.
I can't tell whether you're trying to make a nitpicky point about how the president is elected, or you're trying to claim the concept of political legitimacy doesn't exist.
I think they're claiming that the popular vote has no real relationship to political legitimacy in the US, which is true, because the electoral college/FPTP system is explicitly designed to render the popular vote essentially meaningless through layers of abstraction and gatekeeping. It's only really useful for propaganda, and not even that useful - Republicans claimed a sweeping mandate from the masses even in 2016 when millions more people voted for Hillary Clinton.
Political legitimacy isn't static, but it is primarily demarcated by hard numbers in our system. And going by the hard numbers - the ones actually referenced in binding documents - the Republican Party currently has one of the weakest grasps on power of any ruling party in our country's modern history. A rational administration would appreciate that fact and govern accordingly.
> You may not agree with the current administration, but they won the popular vote. What would you rather them do, defy the current administration? Sounds pretty anti-democratic to me.
Does this concept of yours apply to, say, the Heritage Foundation, Musk's Twitter, Fox News, etc. during the Biden presidency?
>Does this concept of yours apply to, say, the Heritage Foundation, Musk's Twitter, Fox News, etc. during the Biden presidency?
The Heritage Foundation and Fox News are basically advocacy organizations so their remit includes criticizing the government. For that reason they get a pass. I don't know what you're referring to with "Musk's Twitter [...] during the Biden presidency", so you're going to have to elaborate.
The roles are entirely reversed here. Rather than the company voluntarily complying with the administration, musk alleges that biden administration officials illegally try to pressure twitter. I agree that if trump tried to illegally pressure zuck into censoring abortion pills, that would be improper on the part of trump, but at the same time I wouldn't fault zuck for caving.
>Yes, that was and is explicitly legal.
>(Morally shitty. But that's freedom!)
The question is whether it's "democratic", not whether it's illegal. The fact that you think it's "morally shitty", suggests think that you agree it's antidemocratic.
> I agree that if trump tried to illegally pressure zuck into censoring abortion pills, that would be improper on the part of trump, but at the same time I wouldn't fault zuck for caving.
He is clearly caving to pressure, either present or expected.
> The fact that you think it's "morally shitty", suggests think that you agree it's antidemocratic.
No. Democracy and shittiness are not mutually exclusive.
