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r721 commented on Want to sway an election? Here’s how much fake online accounts cost   science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/rbanffy
mettamage · a day ago
I'm from the Netherlands. That is slightly relevant given that we have 20+ parties here, so I'm coming in with that mindset. I understand that Americans have a 2 party political system which makes things a lot more entrenched.

The political parties I've voted for (all across the board) have never felt to me like "our guys". They simply felt like the most sane option at the time.

Not everyone sinks into political tribalism.

I simply want a sane democratic voting process.

And I find first past the post voting to be insane. It seems that a country is then doomed into having a 2 party system.

From a CS course called distributed systems, we know that if you only have a single source of failure, that's a vulnerability right there. A 2 party system can be a single source of failure if one of the two political parties is corrupted and gains too much power. To be fair, that could also happen when there are 20+ parties, but it is less likely.

r721 · 19 hours ago
>It seems that a country is then doomed into having a 2 party system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law

r721 commented on Meta shuts down global accounts linked to abortion advice and queer content   theguardian.com/global-de... · Posted by u/ta988
snickerbockers · 4 days ago
Julian Assange wrote an excellent book on this topic called "when Google met wikileaks" about a decade ago which i found to be eye-opening. The backdrop is the "arab spring" uprisings of the early 10s, which were widely touted by leaders in both silicon Valley and Washington as an example of the positive impacts of social media, a mere five years before this opinion was suddenly reversed when some of these positive effects came home.

The titular event is an account of when one of Google's executives came to britain to meet him in person (at this point he's fighting extradition to the United States but has not yet sequestered himself inside the Ecuadorian embassy). From the conversation Assange gets the impression that the Google exec is acting as an unofficial envoy of the US state department in hopes of convincing him to "play ball" by publishing more and more information which will advance the arab spring narrative. The rest of the book is his own personal investigation into the incestuous links between US foreign policy, social media corporations and the so-called "arab spring".

r721 · 4 days ago
And after that he decided to become an ally of Russian government to help them spread conspiracy theories (about Seth Rich for example):

>In the end, the most charitable interpretation of Assange’s “dissembling” as Mueller calls it, in the Seth Rich hoax is that he genuinely couldn’t rule out the possibility that Rich was his source. The Mueller report demolished that final moral refuge. Rich had been dead four days when Assange received the DNC files.

https://archive.is/56RiI

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Seth_Rich#WikiLeaks_...

r721 commented on Meta shuts down global accounts linked to abortion advice and queer content   theguardian.com/global-de... · Posted by u/ta988
andsoitis · 4 days ago
What matters is the reason for them being shuttered.

I totally believe that those accounts have been shut down (without checking even one), but I do not buy that it is for the mere fact that they link to abortion info or queer content which is the framing in the article and a lot of the assumption in this discussion thread, because the counter evidence is clear and voluminous.

I get that people are passionate about topics that are important to them, but I will also say that one ought to keep a level head, even if only for one’s one emotional resilience.

I also accept that people need to vent (against corporations, rich people, government, etc.) and I try to give people the space to do so even when I think they’re wrong. At the same time, I think what is more helpful is to lean in with curiosity and not to assume you’re right.

r721 · 4 days ago
Imagine you are a media outlet. How exactly would you verify the claim if everything you have is a link to suspended account and testimony of account owner (and Meta doesn't want to comment on details)?

Deleted Comment

r721 commented on     · Posted by u/relaxy
r721 commented on Cloudflare was down   cloudflare.com/... · Posted by u/mektrik
r721 · 10 days ago
Just after Matthew Prince's interview at Wired :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46157295

u/r721

KarmaCake day14076October 31, 2012View Original