On Hacker News
Facebook is paying people overseas promoting Alberta separatism
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notable voices
The 5-second version
- Foreign actors often promote divisive content like Alberta separatism primarily to earn social media income rather than advance geopolitical agendas.
- Low-income country users monetize engagement-driven nationalist content on platforms like X/Twitter through payment programs.
- X's location-revealing feature exposed many foreign-operated accounts pretending to be local voices, putting it ahead of Facebook on transparency.
- Platform leadership engagement levels correlate with awareness of manipulation problems: Musk's active use likely drove X's location feature, while Zuckerberg's disconnection may delay Meta's response.
- The incentive structure of social media monetization creates an exploitable market where manufactured controversy becomes a viable business model for individuals globally.
Top voices
Verbatim comments from the thread's most notable / highest-karma participants.
Paying money for a particular viewpoint is promoting it. This is not complicated. (yes, this is a serious problem with content monetization intermediaries; somehow as soon as the topic is sexual everyone immediately understands what the problem is and rushes to condemn the intermediary)Read on HN ↗
No they released the feature. The more controversial part was X also announced they’d start a large ban campaign to kill off foreign accounts posting stuff low quality politics memes like this just for money. This got push back as a bunch of big accounts claiming it would create false positive bans and they had legitimate interest in the topics despite not being American etc. I didn’t follow it closely after that but I believe it still led to some foreign accounts being banned, just not at the s…Read on HN ↗
> Wars and support of wars do not generally rely on public support Up until Iran, wars in America had large general support. Americans liked wars and their support for leadership went up when those wards started. And Americans politicians who wanted those wars put a lot of work into making people support wars. Russians supported invasion of Ukraine. And Putin made sure they will. Even Germans prior WWI and WWII supported and wanted war. Ironically, especially young wanting to prove their mascu…Read on HN ↗
IME most people calling themselves a “free speech absolutist” absolutely believe those who agree with them should be free to speak, and anyone that might affect them negatively or just disagree should be stopped from oppressing or endangering them. The term usually means as little as the “democratic” in DPRK. A true free speech absolutist would not be concerned with paid speech being blocked, in fact they should really be against paid speech, at least in the sense being discussed here. The poin…Read on HN ↗