[asdfk-12]

Half of a billion in lobbying dollars well spent by FAANG[1] - business as usual continues for facebook despite their decreasing popularity and repeated scandal and failure, from Cambridge Analytica to Libra.

Those in my immediate circle have mothballed or closed their accounts, although Instagram seems to have more holding power.

1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ajdellinger/2019/04/30/how-the-...

[Railsify]

Members of Congress will use this event as a catalyst for fundraising, soon after the election they will draft legislation that threatens to control and/or regulate the tech giants. Shortly after that the lobbyists representing Big Tech get wind of this new legislation on the horizon and donations will flow like a river to the PACs and re-election campaigns, then the proposed legislation will be shelved.

[wdn]

If you see how much wealth the politicians, especially the one holding important position, you see why they want the job for a merely $200,000 a year.

Clinton and Obama got very wealth after their presidency. Pelosi wealth goes up many fold for becoming speaker of the house. Not only their wealth go up, everyone around them got a lot wealthier too.

[hooande]

Fame has a direct financial value. Any US president is among the most famous and well known people on earth.

trump will make more money from speaking appearances than he did from any of his businesses over the last several decades

[swarnie_]

This is what I've never understood about post presentient lives.

People like Trump and Bush can barely deliver a speech or speak coherently, who is paying to hear them attempt it??

[esja]

Difficult to prove, but many believe these sorts of payments are often a delayed bribe, for services rendered while in office. Look after us while you’re in power and we’ll look after you later. And other politicians watching this will notice, and will behave properly while they are in power as well.

[missedthecue]

On trump, I agree, but Bush? Didn't you see Bush's eulogy for his father? He is a skilled public speaker, in spite of his infamous gaffes.

[swarnie_]

I'll be honest i did not...

He hasn't had much air time over here since leaving office, my opinion of him is all drawn from 2000-2008.

[drcross]

People who want to say to their friends that they were in the same room as those people. It's social capital.

[hooande]

Corporate speeches are like Cameo for really rich people. People will pay for a personal message / attention from a celebrity. It doesn't matter what they say

[rtx]

Same people buying his paintings.

[wavefunction]

Why are you not mentioning any Republicans?

[kortilla]

Because there is plenty coverage of Republican sleaze. The mistake is in thinking one set of politicians is “doing the right thing”.

Additionally, as of tomorrow the Republicans are irrelevant when it comes to the selecting a party to lobby. Democrats control the house, the senate, and the presidency. Keep their coffers lined and you keep the regulation at bay.

[wernercd]

Except Democrats are promising regulation, taxes and the like.

IE the mistaken thought that Democrats won't remove 230 - despite Obama, Biden, etc all saying they want to remove it (if for different reasons than Trump, etc)

https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/17/21070403/joe-biden-presid...

And with promises of Paris Accord, Green New Steal and removal of stuff like the Keystone Pipeline...

It's funny to think "democrat control" and "keep regulations at bay" could be included in the same paragraph.

[kortilla]

> It's funny to think "democrat control" and "keep regulations at bay" could be included in the same paragraph.

Well that’s been how Democrat control has worked out at the federal level for the last 50 years or so. Regulation does indeed get passed, but it’s against narrow industries (e.g. natural resource extraction).

Given the revolving door between the biggest tech companies and the Biden/Obama administration, I suspect that will magically escape anything beyond superficial changes.

[RobRivera]

clearly because of political astroturfing.

there I explicitly stated what you are insinuating with your simple question.

his/her point still stands; famous politicians gain wealth from said fame. can we stay on track here?

[harry8]

Yellen getting paid millions for public speaking to banks and hedge funds. And now she's going to regulate them. I'm sure those million dollar paychecks won't affect her judgement at all. I'm sure the insight based on intelligence and expertise, completely outside of getting an advantage understanding and/or influencing regulatory behaviour is what they all felt was worth the money.

I'm sure it's all completely legal but it's completely corrupt. The best we can hope for is she doesn't let these intended bribes influence her - and she may not.

Fame you say? Do you really believe that? If you do does it matter that the optics are foul and most won't agree? Square that when people are going broke and wondering about food and children's future when considering her millions in fees.

[alsetmusic]

> Why are you not mentioning any Republicans?

That’s a good point. It’s not like Trump’s holdings weren’t fed a line of patrons while he was in office. Seems odd to leave out the most prominent and recent example.

[Izkata]

Trump didn't make money off of the presidency, if anything he spent (2016-2017) or lost (2020) wealth: https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/09/politics/forbes-400-donald-tr...

[macg333]

Just because he didn't make money because he's a failure at business and his particular ventures were negatively affected by the coronavirus (the explanation given in your article) completely ignores that he funneled a substantial amount of tax payer dollars into his private ventures by spending so much time there with his security detail.

[bernulli]

That’s not what the article says at all. It says that his hotel businesses went south due to COVID. That’s orthogonal to the myriad ways he extracted money from being a president.

[lostlogin]

His tax returns show he didn’t make any to start with - or possibly more accurately, he just avoided saying he made any money and thereby didn’t pay any tax.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/27/us/donald-tru...

[chillwaves]

Does this comment account for his $500M+ "loan"?

[pfisch]

I honestly think you'd have a hard time finding any politician that made more than trump from his office. Mar a lago was literally a place to go pay 200k so you could lobby trump.

His re-election campaign ran out of money! How could that even be possible without massive embezzlement!?

His fake stop the steal con pulled in over 200 mil! Most of that is going to end up in his pocket.

[triceratops]

You mean other than charging the Secret Service for his weekly stays at his resort? Or how lobbyists in DC made sure to book at a Trump property?

[swader999]

Trump apparently decreased his wealth severely.

[indigochill]

> then the proposed legislation will be shelved

My bet is when legislation appears it will pass and subtly entrench the incumbents. Win-win!

[austincheney]

> to control and/or regulate the tech giants

What is it exactly that qualifies Facebook to be a tech company? A database? A website? They display advertising.

[tsimionescu]

Perhaps it is the fact that they are one of the largest employers of software engineers in the world.

[austincheney]

That’s it? Expedia employs over 15000 software engineers, far more than anything else, and they aren’t a software company. Samsung has more software engineers than most tech companies have total employees and they aren’t a software company.

[Railsify]

They move information around using software datacenters and the internet.

[zionic]

Patiently waiting for Apple and google to remove the facebook app, and AWS to... well... say they can’t join AWS someday.

[kommissar]

They use aws for some things. For example, https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/facebook-uses-...

[vmception]

Actually maybe municipalities can go after data centers. Discretionary permits, zoning etc.

[efwfwef]

> their decreasing popularity

FTFY: in the US

> repeated scandal and failure

At this point what large company hasn't had breaches or cancelled projects? Hell, is your company doing OK in terms of security? Are they hashing passwords correctly? How large is the security team? My company doesn't even hash passwords...

At some point you need to stop living in a bubble and recognize that plenty of people, businesses, communities, etc. rely on the app in a positive way.

I can understand that you're not using it, or think it's evil, but not everyone shares your opinion.

[jarkhen]

> My company doesn't even hash passwords...

I understand this is somewhat my privilege speaking here, but I don't think I could continue working at a company that didn't do something as basic as hashing passwords (and refused to prioritize fixing that as soon as I pointed it out). It's a massive ethical, if not legal (IANAL), liability -- and a huge breach of users' trust. It's 2021, hashing user passwords is astonishingly easy; I can't imagine any remotely justifiable excuse for something like that.

[dane-pgp]

For what it's worth, the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity publishes recommendations[0] for measures that digital services should implement to fulfil their responsibilities under the GDPR. One of the recommendations, K.6 is:

> User passwords must be stored in a “hashed” form.

These guidelines aren't legal requirements for every service, but if a data breach occurred, and passwords were leaked, regulators would presumably point to this recommendation, and the ease of complying with it, and take that into consideration when issuing a fine.

[0] https://www.enisa.europa.eu/risk-level-tool/help

[yawaramin]

> At this point what large company hasn't had breaches or cancelled projects?

'Breaches' and 'cancelled projects' aren't the only scandals and failures to come out of Facebook ... just the other day on HN front page was an article (from 2018) where Facebook openly admitted that their platform enabled the Myanmar crisis.

[Daho0n]

>FTFY: in the US

No, in lots of places. In Scandinavia Facebook is "for old people".

>not everyone shares your opinion

I do and everyone I have asked (and maybe informed as part of asking) agrees. The thing is that people are lazy - it is not that they don't think Facebook is evil - they are just too lazy to do anything about it. Very few informed people sees facebook as Not Evil.

Also, please don't do FTFY reddit post crap.

[efwfwef]

woah your personal anecdote really helps!

[misiti3780]

What company? Just need to know so I can close/avoid making an account.

[908087]

> My company doesn't even hash passwords...

I can't imagine anything even resembling a reasonable excuse for not doing something as basic as hashing passwords, and I don't even want to imagine what else isn't being done by a company which operates in that manner.

[Kalium]

> How large is the security team?

More importantly, how big is their whiskey budget?

It's not the greatest proxy, but how regularly your security team drinks is a not-terrible way to gauge how much trouble your org is going to be in should something happen.

[dmd]

Is the correlation positive or negative?

[Kalium]

As things seem worse, the whiskey budget per person grows.

[EhhhhSql]

It's worth noting that quite a few politicians hold facebook stock, most notably Nancy Pelosi. I believe most of her current personal wealth is from facebook stock.

My point is not to be skeptical of Pelosi from some partisan perspective; I have never voted Republican. I merely aim to cast doubt on whether anything will fundamentally change.

[jiofih]

Did a quick fact check on this. Her husband is an investor and traded options* for tech companies including Facebook, which she disclosed out of their own will since she was attacking them at the time. Basically everyone has been trading FAANG in the past year so that tells you nothing.

* which also means most likely he never actually held the stocks

[vinay_ys]

This should be a pretty easy to verify claim. Do you have any source for this?

[downandout]

What’s interesting about this to me is that Facebook, where most of the planning took place, is still online, while Parler has been, for all intents and purposes, killed. I wonder why AANG isn’t colluding to kill F like they did with Parler - by tomorrow morning - now that this has come to light. It seems only fair given that we now have an established standard of user behavior that dictates whether or not companies can continue to exist.

[dragonwriter]

> Parler has been, for all intents and purposes, killed.

Parler wasn't “killed” because planning took place there, but because they were openly at least unable if not actually unwilling to take action against a huge backlog of specific problem identified to them; the problem was current and forward, not retrospective.

[rj_kidwin]

Amazon has stated that it warned Parler for months without redress, but to offer another perspective, the CEO of Parler stated in an interview that they were notified the day before they got the plug pulled, sought to work with AWS on solving the issue, then were "deplatformed" the following day.

He said she said, but obviously both sides are incentivized to make themselves look clean

[boomboomsubban]

Though I doubt that Parler has many employees, it seems unlikely the emails from your hosting company would be read by the CEO. It's entirely possible both people are telling the truth.

[three_seagrass]

Your CTO of your social media startup would definitely surface threats of deplatforming from your cloud provider to the CEO.

[boomboomsubban]

In a well run organization with great employees that is what you would expect to happen.

[AzzieElbab]

How did you come up with that conclusion? Honestly, just asking

[nl]

Not the OP, but it's the reason AWS gave:

In an email obtained by BuzzFeed News, an AWS Trust and Safety team told Parler Chief Policy Officer Amy Peikoff that the calls for violence propagating across the social network violated its terms of service. Amazon said it was unconvinced that the service’s plan to use volunteers to moderate calls for violence and hate speech would be effective.

“Recently, we’ve seen a steady increase in this violent content on your website, all of which violates our terms," the email reads. "It’s clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service.”

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-p...

[AzzieElbab]

Even that does not say any planning was done on parler.

[downandout]

This does [1]. According to the description, Parler was the "preferred" platform for planning of right-wing election-related violence. According to the video, now that Parler is gone, Telegram, a tool that over 500 million people use everyday for entirely legitimate purposes, is now nothing more than an outlet for Qanon. If this isn't a prima facie example of the completely balanced, factual, and accurate reporting by our friends at MSNBC, I don't know what is.

[1] https://www.msnbc.com/ali-velshi/watch/far-right-extremists-...

[nl]

The parent post was pointing out that Parler was banned because of an ineffective to moderate content going forward (not if things were historically planned there or not).

[ttt0]

If anything, the same is true for other platforms like Facebook and Twitter as well.

[berryjerry]

Parler was killed for one reason. They said they wouldn't ban Trump. It's probably tamer than Facebook, Twitter or even Reddit where one search and you can find threats and calls for violence.

[notacoward]

There are two really simple reasons. One is that any such collusion would itself be a breach of anti-trust. The other is that they can't. Facebook has its own servers in its own data centers, its own fiber lines, etc. They could remove the apps from the iOS and Android app stores, but that wouldn't affect the billions who already have the app or get it preinstalled by carriers. And that's all beside the question of whether Facebook deserves such special treatment, either compared to the others or at all.

[alsetmusic]

This reminds me of a discussion with a parent who was distressed about Parler being deplatformed. She was never on it, but her choices of news media told her this was “bad”.

I argued that threats of violence were viable on the platform. She didn’t seem to believe me. I later sent screenshots of violent rhetoric that I found with a quick web search. No response.

There are people who refuse the validity of reality right up until they can’t anymore. Then silence.

[downandout]

If you’re referring to me being silent, the discussion seems to have made my point for me. I didn’t see the need to further interject. But here’s my take...

If you listen to mainstream media, you’ll see them telling their audience that Parler was “deplatformed” because the planning for the Capital attack occurred there - in fact you would get the impression that the planning only occurred there. Yet it turns out that Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter users also engaged in this behavior, and most of it occurred on Facebook.

There are two possible explanations for this. The first is that these “news” sources are knowingly lying to their audience about the reason big tech colluded to kill Parler. The second is that they believe what they are saying, which means that there is a new standard by which we decide whether or not social networks are allowed to operate - if attacks are planned on a given platform, big tech colludes to instantly shut it down.

We know that as of this morning, Facebook is still fully operational. So we either have “news” sources openly lying to their almost exclusively Democratic audience, or there is extreme hypocrisy in the way that big tech applies the new “Parler Standard”. It is one or the other, and neither of these say good things about our society.

[dragonwriter]

> If you listen to mainstream media, you’ll see them telling their audience that Parler was “deplatformed” because the planning for the Capital attack occurred there

I do listen to, and read, mainstream media (and others), and I haven't seen that explanation. I've seen lots of people on the right attributing it vaguely to the MSM to lead into arguments against it, but that's the only place I've seen that explanation of the deplatforming, rather than the failure to moderate when unacceptable content was identified.

> in fact you would get the impression that the planning only occurred there.

Again, no, I've seen plenty of references to planning elsewhere, social media and otherwise, in the MSM. Again, this is a frequent thing I've seen people with a right-wing media preference attribute without detail to the MSM, but not actually seen in the MSM.

[downandout]

Read this video description [1]. "NBC’s Anna Schecter reports that extremists are recalibrating and planning for January 20th even though their preferred app to plan, Parler, was shut down". Does that not directly say that Parler was the "preferred" app for the planning of right-wing election violence? I won't spend all morning detailing the rest of them (there are too many), but arguing that mainstream media is not saying that planning occurred on Parler is about as ridiculous as Kamala Harris' argument that the US Supreme Court has no jurisdiction over California jails - an argument she made when she was trying to keep nonviolent prisoners in custody in direct violation of a Supreme Court order [2].

The larger point, though, is the hypocrisy surrounding the continued operation of Facebook while Parler was shutdown. The first paragraph of this [3] pretty much says it all:

"Parler all but vanished from the internet this week. Major tech platforms, including Apple and Amazon, booted the social network popular with the far-right for what the companies said was a failure to moderate incitement and violent rhetoric on its service that contributed to last week's deadly Capitol riots."

Does the report we are discussing in this thread not clearly underscore the fact that Facebook also failed to "to moderate incitement and violent rhetoric on its service that contributed to last week's deadly Capitol riots"? If that is the standard by which all social networks are judged, then should Facebook not meet the same fate? It's hypocritical that they are still online today.

Are you arguing that Facebook is not guilty of the exact same crime for which Parler was executed?

[1] https://www.msnbc.com/ali-velshi/watch/far-right-extremists-...

[2] https://prospect.org/justice/how-kamala-harris-fought-to-kee...

[3] https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/12/tech/parler-online-violence/i...

[dragonwriter]

None of your reports communicates either of the two claims you attributed as consistent messages of the mainstream media uphtread:

(1) that Parler was deplatformed because planning for the Capitol attack took place on the platform, (taking your best swing, you've managed to find an article presenting the incitement—not planning—cause for deplatforming as being specifically about incitement for the Capitol attack.)

(2) Planning for the Capitol attack took place exclusively on Parler, (the closest you got to this was the claim that Parler was a “preferred” app for planning for extremist groups, not that it was the exclusive venue for planning the attack)