Recently I felt somewhat enlightened on this point, specifically in regards to Trump cheating at golf and some of his bald-faced lies, but I’d speculate it applies here too. Others pointed out to me that while it might look petty and ridiculous to normal people, it’s a social power move to get away with things, and serves the purpose of testing what can be gotten away with, and practicing or exercising the push dynamic. It may have little to do with winning a board game, and a lot to do with seeing what people will tolerate and what the thresholds are for being called out; it’s a test of one’s intimidation factor. It may be somewhat important that the cheating is visible. It can also be social signaling to see who comes to their defense when called out, which is an effect that has been playing out on the national stage with obvious lies being repeated, defended, or excused. It’s not about what’s true, but about people showing the rule breaker who’s on their side, and giving them the power to break rules.

This, BTW, to me is a depressing and pessimistic view of power and politics and humanity, and I don’t think these kinds of power moves are something to aspire to, nor do they always work. But as a framework I have to admit it has a lot of explanatory power.

It's pathetic and weird.

The people that work at the company are smart, and I’m sure many of them are compassionate. I just don’t know what kind of people can sign off on product decisions like this that truly erode trust, community fabric, and make our world ultimately so much worse. It’s heartbreaking that someone like zuck is the one leading this initiative, you could pick any random person off the street and they would lead the company in a direction that was better for mankind.

Meditate on the idea of the negative sum game the people who seek power prefer, and then about what you'd rather see them, or yourself do with that power. Because of the things I actually care about, I find that random fantastical/idealistic desire for power to be hollow, something much easier to see in comparison. I don't care about power, for powers sake (the best way, perhaps only way, to obtain power itself). All my power fantasies involve some sort of stopping people from using their power to abuse and take from others.

There's nothing wrong being seduced by power, if you're worried about how it might corrupt your ethical principals, just don't be foolish enough to copy the small minded power seekers (humans do love to emulate the people the see around them). You can seek and hold power, and then use it to do good things. Is that harder? Probably, but I can't articulate a single reason it would be harder than doing good things without power, which most people already don't do. So don't be tricked into power being the thing that corrupts. Most people are just shitty, and very few have meaningful power; sample bias can be a bitch.

This is standard in companies. I've seen companies give a pittance in exchange for a binding NDA and the person took it because they needed to pay rent that month. Meta is evil but in this case so is almost every other company and especially tech companies. Also, giving it back doesn't undo the contract, the deal was done.

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.

As he said “The Western World will find out much more about the situation in Poland from hearing that I was put to jail for giving tampons to a woman, than from reading the books and articles written by other people from the opposition.”

> But I think they've decided that this is a price worth paying, because: [...] c) By destroying Sarah Wynn-Williams, they can terrorize all those thousands of bitter ex-employees into silence about the even graver sins the company has committed.

Mosquito - Human.

You don't swat a mosquito out of fear, you swat it out of preventing a minor nuisance.

A whistleblower is a mosquito that's bitten a human. The most likely outcome is an imminent, violent swat, resulting in career destruction.

This is just false I think. I'd have to search for it, but in some of the recent stories about how morale at Meta is at an all-time low due to the layoffs and fiefdom-building I recall seeing a number of current and former Meta employees comment.

Plus, my guess is that the vast, vast majority of Facebook employees just aren't privy to outright illegal acts, and most people aren't going to break their nondisparagement clause just to break the latest bitchy thing somebody said regarding Zuck.

> 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.

> 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.

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...

Anyone with a tiny bit of video game background called that out from miles away. It was so pathetic. Richest dude in world with spaceship company. Has nothing to prove. Cheats, lies, and gaslights when caught.

Has to be “number one” at a video game that has virtually zero skill where rank is almost entirely who grinds more. Eg time.

What a weird and sad thing to do. So unimaginably insecure.

Any billionaire you know the name of, is probably not too far off from this. There are alot of rich people who are secure with themselves. Zuck aint one if em.

> But I think they've decided that this is a price worth paying, because:

> a) They've done even worse things since Wynn-Williams parted ways with the company; and

> b) They're laying off thousands of workers because their giant bet on AI has been a flop, leaving them with a massive cash crunch; and

> c) By destroying Sarah Wynn-Williams, they can terrorize all those thousands of bitter ex-employees into silence about the even graver sins the company has committed.

I genuinely don't know what this is in reference to but it's notable Christopher Wylie got suspended on FB

Which is obviously more of a priority than any number of horrible things you could report which never get taken down

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?

The Fuckery is a demonstration of that power.

— Mandy Rice-Davies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_he_would,_wouldn%27t_he%3...

(It's a great book, Mark and co. are more awful people we thought they were.)

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

Zuckerberg et al. would actually prefer that we all think that, so that we just stop there and don't proceed to more-effective politics.

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/21/purity-culture/

It's a test of loyalty via a show of power

Masha Gessen has written a fair bit about this.

It’s one of the most famous scenes in The Wire: when Marlo steals a lollipop.

It's also a form of gaslighting. It makes people doubt their sanity, because nobody would lie about such a thing. It creates an aura of reality distortion around such people and inside that aura they can define reality as they see fit.

Until we learn to see through this stuff and stop elevating such people to positions of extreme power, we deserve what we get.

Unfortunately there’s a pretty large number of people who actually think we need people like this to “do things.” It’s a self fulfilling prophecy. If you stack the ranks of power with dark triad types, then of course that’s the only kind of person who can work in that world. You create a world where only toxic people can get things done and then are surprised that only toxic people can get things done.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I deleted my Meta account last year and haven't missed it.

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"

Some will lie repeatedly to even avoid paying out a settlement.

In America you have no rights, your lucky if you get paid on time. Even then the actual process to get your back owed wages usually isn't worth the effort.

I worked for a clown once who waited 30 days to tell me he only pays every 60 days.

A friend of mine wasted a full week training, and the employer decided they didn't need him and didn't pay for the training.

If you DARE try and go the legal route you'll find you can basically beg for a settlement, but your employer can just say no.

Going to court isn't going to be worth it since the system is heavily stacked against you.

We don't think of him as a dictator, because a lot of what he did was ultimately reforms necessary to maintain America as a republic. The alternative would have been Nazi America. But he was still exercising dictatorial power, and he was responsible for massively increasing the power of the Presidency as a result. Hell, part of the reason why Trump is so dangerous is specifically because of the damage FDR did to the checks and balances on the Executive Branch.

After all there was a constitutional amendment pass soon after to stop any president from doing what FDR did.

A judge can decide to invalidate the contract entirely, which is what I'm suggesting would be the correct remedy in this case.

The French Revolution was still fresh in minds of these elites - the July Monarchy having just taken place - and yet still they let it escalate to the point of near civil war.

If billionaires fail to support the rule of law, especially if they wield their immense power to press on the scales, they should not be surprised when people lose faith in the more civil option.

The ethics become laughably simple, with as far as they’ve taken the resource imbalance. They should be very worried.

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.

But it's obvious that Facebook want to make writing anything about them in a book and then publicising it an absolutely miserable experience.

I would say the obvious target of this message is Nick Clegg, no?

He's already written one memoir of his time in politics (didn't sell that well) but as a former Deputy Prime Minister in a really unusual coalition government, I think he's likely to have enough things to put in a book again by now.

He also co-created the Facebook/Meta Oversight Board, which reported to him, and was the organisation constructed, ultimately, in time to de-platform Trump, which it did.

He then left Meta shortly before it noticeably, shamefully and transactionally pivoted towards being Trump-compatible.

This is the book everyone wants to read, right? And it won't get written.

I do -- meta's products are inherently addictive and the network effect is powerful, so people would rather cope and complain than take meaningful but inconvenient action. This is how zuck wins, every time.

> I deleted my Meta account last year and haven't missed it.

Me too and so has most of my family.

Its Nick Clegg

The broader point, dating back to at least the French Revolution, is that once you establish the precedent that killing opponents is a way to win, it only takes a decade or two before the most ruthless killers become the winners. All proxy metrics are bad, including electability, but this one is especially awful. I’m more puzzled by why some violent movements do seem to have had some success than by why most didn’t.

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...

So sure, acknowledge that they are denying. The only thing it explains is that horrible entities tend to deny horrible behavior.

In other news, Alito is claiming the Comstock Act is in full force, not the narrowed enforcement we’ve seen for the last, what 100 years?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_Act_of_1873

According to that theory, they can censor mail and any other common carrier (objects and information) on moral grounds. They want to apply it to abortion pills first, but the statements made by the court imply they’ll be clamping down on “obscenities”, sex ed, political speech etc.

Note that this court already overturned the right to privacy (and the 4th amendment) when they overturned Roe v Wade.

That, plus mandatory age checks, porn bans, vpn bans, etc are already happening in blue and red states throughout the US.

By the time 2028 rolls around, if we don’t elect a president willing to charge the current clown show with treason, we will not have a democracy in the US. Court packing would be a tragic under-reaction.

What's the allegation?

He says that when order breaks down, thoughtful moderates are treated as weak cowards, and that simple-minded but aggressive people make the first move and kill off thoughtful people who think they will be able to make compelling arguments.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_fallacy

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

This would be shortly after Wynn-Williams’ 2017 departure from the policy role she describes in the book at hand. And it would be around the time that word was getting around about Facebook’s role in what Amnesty and the UN described as a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya minority in Myanmar. Among other things.

Given the culture Ms. Wynn-Williams describes—and the tumult of the decade he held the policy role—one imagines Mr. Clegg might have some stories to share should he choose to…

I guess that the thread is implying his position would have given him access to newer claims, just as Wynn-Williams' had, and the method of his firing might give him motivation to reveal anything he knows.

Personally I feel that might be giving Clegg to much credit.