>His head was turned by the substantial sum of money: “I told my wife, wow, it’s £1,000.”
>Then, to his annoyance, TikTok immediately deleted his account because he was just stealing other people’s videos and reposting them.
and dove straight into fabricating hate, and worst of all after directly confronted seems to literally have no concept of what he was doing or that it was in any way wrong or distasteful.
>The man appears confused by the fuss his actions have caused. He gives the impression that he considered TikTok’s algorithm and the site’s content regulation policies to be the ultimate arbiter of whether a video crossed a line.
>It wasn’t racist,” the man says of his account. He argues that if the videos had really been racist, TikTok’s algorithm would have downgraded the content.
Seems to lack any internal moral compass, basically if the website lets him slander or lie it must be ok because he has no capacity to assess that value for himself.
If this topic interests you, I recommend `Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation`, by Andrew Marantz. Great read but it's definitely stress inducing at times.
I am a member of an expensive gym in our home town. It has a very good gym but also includes spa facilities. The only reason I pay the price is because it also includes a working area, and because I work remotely most of the week, I do it from the gym, so I have no excuse not to exercise and I also find the spa a good way to unwind. It's a nice way to avoid the long commute to the office but also get out the house.
Anyway, the point to the story is money doesn't buy class. The gym parking is gated and leads into a huge parking area. What happens is that a certain percentage of people consider themselves above everyone else and don't fancy walking the extra 20-100 meters to park in an actual parking, so they just park on the "road" that feeds into the the various parking areas, as it is close to the gym. This means it blocks one lane of that road and cars get backed up having to go around the parked cars.
I always hear announcements calling for the owners of certain license plates, and always know it was these cars. It infuriates me so much. Lately the gym has had to resort to cones along the edges of the road to stop the arseholes.
I just can't fathom such people. It feels so alien to me that I (I mean this literally) can't imagine what actually goes through your head to do that. For anyone who is this selfish, can you explain? Does it not occur to you that this is wrong? Or do you know it and just think "life is unfair, I do what is best for me"? I genuinely don't get it.
So yeah, a bit off topic, and I'm unsure if your 20% figure is too high, but there certainly are a lot of people in the world that are just not nice.
About 5% of people are narcissistic sociopaths. They don't believe that other people exist, or at least are anything more than actors in a play they control. Try not to elect one as President.
> Total disregard for common good, maximal selfishness.
Or lacking better alternatives for a decent life aggravated by having zero positive role models and a media/political culture whose only positive value is mo' money.
> I would say about 20% of people are like that.
That depends on region, language and the conditions described above. Placing a numeric value collectively on all of humanity conveys zero useful information.
Surely you don't believe that, given a random sample of 20 people, 19 of them will be amoral, selfish, and have no values? Surely this doesn't align with your real life experience - what are your colleagues, friends, family, neighbours and acquaintances like? Do they meet this ratio?
This endemic of much of the “creator” economy. Anything goes if it gets you clicks. And TikTok does have lose moderation. If this happened on YouTube he would have been demonetised sooner.
Seems to be an extension of something we are dealing with across multiple parts of many societies.
Monetary pursuit has become a guiding principle for alot of people, and its been revealed that such thinking is leading to major societal consequences.
The current Technocratic idealization of efficiency by those in powerful positions is missing the second order consequences of financializing everything, and it appears to me that we are sacrificing societal necessities like trustworthiness and collective responsbility in favor of more efficient markets.
If no corrective action is taken, we can expect increasing issues.
Michael Sandel's "What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets" covers it quite well.
Markets create unfairness by systematically disadvantaging the poor when money becomes necessary to obtain certain goods or quality of goods. Market values corrupt non-market spheres by changing the meaning and value of goods being exchanged (e.g., paying for grades undermines intrinsic desire to learn). Monetary incentives crowd out altruistic motivations and civic duty (e.g., fines becoming fees people willingly pay rather than norms to uphold). Commodification degrades human dignity (e.g., treating drug-addicted women as "baby-making machines" in sterilization-for-cash programs). Markets increase wealth inequality and create segregation in previously egalitarian spaces (e.g., luxury skyboxes in sports stadiums). Market exchanges under severe inequality or economic necessity become coercive, not truly voluntary. Purchased tokens of friendship and personal expressions (apologies, wedding toasts) lose their authenticity and dilute social bonds. Wealthy individuals and countries can pay their way out of moral obligations (e.g., carbon offsets instead of reducing emissions). Markets have infiltrated areas traditionally governed by ethical considerations - medicine, education, personal relationships - without public debate about whether this is desirable. The economic approach treats everything in an ethical vacuum, ignoring morality in favor of purely analyzing incentives.
Thank you, but again I'm just paraphrasing Sandel's work. He really puts into words that which I've personally felt without having the vernacular to put it into words myself (alongside one of his inspirations, Michael Young). I attended a couple of his lectures while he was in the UK, and he was fantastic.
I don't think it's even the money. It's the numbers and numerical "scoring".
You see all the same evil dishonest shit behavior in contexts where the $$ is negligible, fixed or not a KPI individuals are really scored on. Organized religion, academia, Internet comments, etc, etc.
One objection here: pay-for-sterilization doesn't match with the rest of these because this is treating it solely as a cost to the woman, rather than recognizing that there's a benefit in not bringing a child into a horrible life.
The objection is that offering cash exploits vulnerable women's desperation, treating their reproductive capacity as a commodity to be purchased. Even if the outcome might prevent more suffering, which is an individually subjective outcome, the means matters: it degrades the women involved by reducing a profound personal decision to a market transaction under conditions of coercion, where drug addiction makes the offer 'too good to resist.'
Monetary incentives are the foundations of Capitalism. There are only two ways that ethics might get in the way of their profits.
The first is government regulation. We saw lots of deregulation of oversight over the ten years before the 2008 financial crisis. None of the ethically compromised C-suite folks went to jail for their behavior because it was suddenly not a crime. Sometimes you have regulation, but you don't have enforcement of the regulations. This is what we get when the government is comprised of or controlled by capitalists. It's called fascism.
The second is public boycott or revolt. Could the new Target CEO be the result of the recent boycott? Same with Starbucks? Has anyone actually bought a Tesla in the past year? The big tech folks are bending over backwards to hide the fact that they have no real AI business model, making it a gigantic bubble that is about to burst. There is a national frenzy that no one is reporting on people ditching their subscriptions. We are going to see affordability get worse very quickly. It will be interesting to see what happens as more and more people start tightening their purse strings, whether by choice or necessity.
> Sometimes you have regulation, but you don't have enforcement of the regulations.
Indeed. Let us quote the Dune books (since they're trending, and for good reason!):
"Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders.-Law and Governance (The Spacing Guild)"
And if you would let me indulge one more:
"Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class: whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.
-Politics as Repeat Phenomenon (Bene Gesserit Training Manual)"
There is a very, very clear and specific problem: "free" advertising supported sites incentivizes farming user engagement. Farming user engagement needs be sharply curtailed because it's proven to be broadly damaging to society and the direct way to do that is to reduce the incentive, advertising revenue. It's as straightforward as that.
Oddly enough, this comes from Google having a monopoly on web advertising. If you're an advertiser, let's say for the sake of argument you're a company with $80 billion in revenue, and you find your ads placed next to a ragebait post, you might complain to Google, and they will promptly send you a canned response and send your email to Gemini for use in training data. If human eyes ever chance to see your email, it's a good chance that people in that department aren't working hard enough and they should do a layoff.
> Monetary pursuit has become a guiding principle for alot of people
People need money to survive. The wealthy class have made it such that it's harder and harder to earn enough money the normal way. Often it doesn't even pay enough to survive. This is what creative people come up with in order to make a living. And it's obviously not in the wealthy class' interest to make any changes to that.
Doesn't make it excusable. I get it's hard to uphold principles when the stomach is empty. But it's clear the person in the piece wasn't thinking about much else, though he was also clearly not in the streets and starving.
Culture is a pendulum, but humans are consistently greedy.
"Journalistic integrity" was a marketing concept designed to sell newspapers at a time when there were hundreds and most were inaccurate. It was extremely profitable to have ethics. (A good reminder that noble minded Benjamin Franklin ran his own periodical that he regularly and intentionally slandered others in.)
Now we have an entrenched media (with their own ethics problems) and there is opportunity to start pumping out garbage again.
As Voltaire said, "History is only the pattern of silken slippers descending the stairs to the thunder of hobnailed boots climbing upward from below." In other words, progress has to be fought for from hard lessons, but once that progress is taken for granted, people let it slip not knowing the value of what they have.
Yes, humans can be greedy - but the question is whether we design our society to encourage and legitimize that greed in every sphere of life, or whether we maintain non-market norms that check it. The journalistic integrity example proves my/Sandel's point; when ethics became profitable, the market accidentally aligned with civic good. But the concern is precisely about areas where market logic systematically corrupts rather than improves outcomes - ie. where introducing money changes the nature of the good itself (like turning civic duty into a fee, or learning into a transaction). The pendulum swings, yes - which is exactly why we need ongoing public debate about where markets belong, rather than passively accepting their expansion into every domain and hoping the pendulum swings back on its own.
There's a huge problem with the media landscape. It's similar to the junk-food problem, or gambling, or addiction to drugs.
We've made a society where "number goes up" is the only measure of success. We don't care whether what makes the number go up is good, and that leads to exploiting the irrationality of consumers.
People know they aren't supposed to eat chips all day. They know they aren't likely to win their bet. They know it's not a good idea to watch the most exciting news.
But they can't help themselves, so they get exploited, and the exploiters are wealthy enough to write it into law that they aren't responsible.
Point this out, and inevitably someone says "who are you to decide what's good for other people", and yes, I used to think this way. Well, one thing is that I'm straight up taking it from the people who are being used. Who wants to be fat? Virtually everyone is eating more than they should. Are we supposed to think this is the revealed, rational preference of everyone? The other thing that changed is that I'm a parent. I have to make choices for my kids, and doing that makes me recognize that people their age aren't the only children. Paternalistic much? Sure. Eat your vegetables!
Who wants to be uninformed? Yet we are. People can just look up the crime statistics in London and see which way it has been going the past couple of decades.
I don't have a solution, I'm afraid, just a diagnosis. We're living in a society that is being abused under the pretense of personal freedom.
Someone better read than me has probably written an essay or two about this, please link. I don't know the best keywords for such a search.
It's the same perspective that asks, "If he's so bad, why doesn't she leave him?" And when she doesn't ultimately reconciles it by blaming her.
It reveals that the emotional relationship to the consequences take priority over the consequences themselves. Whether it's justifying domestic violence or justifying the consequences of an obesity epidemic, or the consequences of a sizeable fraction of people living in a false reality.
Those problems still exist, nothing is solved except if we apply the salve of personal choice, we can avoid meaningful change. It's a nilhistic, defeatist defense mechanism that says much more about the person employing it and their inability to withstand emotional discomfort than the facts of each case - that people regularly take actions that are objectively against their best interest.
Our failure to provide aid and cling to the that really the world is just by hiding behind the idea of rational choice is childishly naive.
I know a lot of people who watch this kind of garbage and find it very convincing. The minute you add a video component, it tricks people into thinking they are seeing something raw and firsthand.
We're all so worried about the effects of AI generated video (with good reason), but the truth is that DIP (Deceptive imagery persuasion) is unbelievably easy and cheap to do anywhere. You can take an innocuous video of a tank from anywhere, and then add a fake caption that says "this is a Venezuela drug cartel" and an average person has almost no defense mechanisms against it.
It's also not something platforms could even police. If anything, nation state actors are already taking this to their advantage.
I've watched it happening again and again. Deceptive image that people want to believe, they won't listen when contradictions are pointed out. And they forget that anyone even pointed out the problem. Few people seem to get it that when there's a thousand bad proofs of something it's probably false--and, for those that do, there's the opposite: present a thousand bad proofs of something true.
As a sidenote, Jim Waterson is doing amazing work at London Centric, single-handedly doing the kind of investigative journalism week after week via Substack funding that traditional media has abandoned. I highly recommend subscribing if you are in the London area.
> He’d previously run a TikTok account that had amassed 24,000 followers. One night, he was astonished to find, he received his first payout from TikTok’s creator scheme.
> His head was turned by the substantial sum of money: “I told my wife, wow, it’s £1,000.”
I’m not familiar with TikTok’s payout rate. Is it really so high that an account with 24K followers can start getting checks that large?
TikTok's algorithm makes follower counts less important than they are on other platforms. The means by which your video gets into people's FYP feed is not very clear but it is very, very common to see content from someone you do not follow, and I think if it shows positive engagement stats it'll get shown to more and more people.
I would assume part of the payout rate would also be determined by level of engagement of those followers, or also people who are not subscribed but are still sitting through your content.
there is a also a very strong anti india sentiment on twitter / x just search for #india or look at the comments of posts made by people like vivek ramaswamy , nikki haley, and any other politician and you ll see it. I wonder if this is some kinda state sponsored campaign for objectives that are not clear to me
> there is a also a very strong anti india sentiment on twitter / x just search for #india or look at the comments of posts made by people like vivek ramaswamy , nikki haley, and any other politician and you ll see it.
In a time of rising anti-immigration and anti-foreigner sentiment across the world, you are shocked by anti-india comments?
> I wonder if this is some kinda state sponsored campaign for objectives that are not clear to me
Or musk got rid of the censors on twitter ( many of whom were of indian origin ) and now people are free to express themselves?
I suppose it's possible but I think the more basic answer is that there's been a huge influx of Indians into the west recently i.e. find an example historically where people don't end up fighting in such situations.
A lot of hateful content is boosted by Russian bots, there were also instances of bot accounts that went silent with Iran internet blackout.
Another example are conspiracy theory content, and some far right channels - like the case of Tenet Media being funded by Russia.
This is the reality we're dealing with, a constant undermining flow of lies and hate to destabilize western democracies.
The result is in sight, and will only get worse because one of the consequences is that these account gradually give permission to be racist, xenophobic, etc. And LLMs are making this worse.
Of course that there's a sentiment that comes with migrants for example, but it's the disinformation that turns up a notch and blows it out of proportion.
At some point comments on social media will have to be disabled.
Single biggest mistake of Social Media was to pay users for what they post. Started with YouTube, went the same way with Facbook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. People only post ragebait or engagement bait or play "the reply guy" with low-effort AI-generated content. Many people in countries like India and Pakistan are doing this because it pays better than their jobs. There was an interesting article on NHK that is always on the top of my mind when it's about this, I actually found it again: https://news.web.nhk/newsweb/na/na-k10014341931000 In Japan they are called "Impression Zombies", kinda fitting.
It's fascinating how he has fully outsourced his conscience to the TikTok content guidelines. With all of the discussion about what restrictions should exist on platforms it never ever occurred to me that people would start to view them as moral authorities.
I feel like the huge and obvious problems with social media hide a small and subtle, but insidious problem: How do I show that I care about you?
I feel like there is a range that might be described:
I don't care very much about you one way or another. (Small/no signal on social media, very unlikely to be boosted)
I care enough to fight for you. (Big Signal on social media, likely to be boosted)
I care enough to calmly discuss the problem. (Small signal on social media, unlikely to be boosted, likely to be trolled, unsatisfying in the face of active fighting words)
---
"How do I show that I care about you?" might also be called "virtue signaling". Unfortunately "virtue signaling" has taken on such a negative meaning that it is no longer useful for communication.
“This article is based on the opinion of one unnamed individual, and it is not representative of the positive and creative experience that millions enjoy every day on TikTok.”
I always love the response from TikTok: “It’s only ever one person, guys! It’s never our cackhanded (lack of) moderation!”
Strong emotions drive engagement. There are rather few of them; simple joy / laughter (think cat videos) is one that's relatively easy to evoke, but hate is equally easy to evoke, and it's much stronger.
An extent presentation (IMHO) by Sam Vaknin on how the very way modern social networks operate even down to their structure are deeply destructive and anti-human. Hate has been and always will be the easiest and most monetizable emotion used by platform operators. Hate requires little complexity or nuance making it ideal for short form viral content where every second counts.
The "Internet Hate Machine" is real and it was created that way by design by anti social deeply narcissistic nerds. Youtube Link: https://youtu.be/Ef7bqgeHenU
> “My first video got one million [views],” he says.
I hear this a LOT. It seems Tik Tok sets itself up to let a new person's first video go completely viral, not sure what the "trick" is, but I read it often enough it makes me believe that if your first videos good enough you really can hit over a million. Of course who knows if that million is inflated or what.
As for the rest of the article, this person seems to just not care about the consequences of their actions, its pretty disgusting.
The only evidence provided for any of the videos being fake is that one house they visited had legal residents renting the property. But it's not fake that many London neighborhoods like Earl's Court provide 65% of their social housing to people born outside the UK, of whom 40% are in employment (source: migrationfacts.com), so one error doesn't mean much. Thus it's unclear to me (never having seen any of the videos) whether the misinformation was on TikTok or in this article.
In one thread I am defending anonymity online from government mandated ID laws.
Then I think to the persistent, malevolent, destructive lies that people spread with complete impunity and with faked video and photo evidence. This is not what the first amendment was designed to protect.
Wary of making government the arbiter of truth, I don't know what society should do to combat this evil. In a fantasy world where I were king, the person who ran this tiktok would be in jail.
This person wasn’t anonymous to TikTok. They were doing this for payments.
TikTok had their information! Voluntarily, too.
Forcing everyone to ID themselves to companies would not have changed anything about this story
> In a fantasy world where I were king, the person who ran this tiktok would be in jail.
Now take this thought one step further and imagine if the king was someone you disagreed with, putting people in jail for posting things they didn’t like. Imagine if the king disagreed with you. Straight to jail?
Yes but in my fantasy world I'm the king because my morals and opinions are best for society. And of course I'll always be reasonable and never have a bad day or let my personal interests take priority over the good of my subjects.
Obviously this is just wishful thinking about governance that people have been saying for milennia. Socrates said philosophers should of course be kings / the ruling class.
There's no simple solution to creating a harmonious society, which of course leads people today and from thousands of years ago to say "Gee, wouldn't it just be nice if everyone listened to me about how to act and what to do when people get out line?". It's a fantasy, and a reminder that anyone wanting a benevolent dictator or to give up their responsibility of being a good citizen shouldn't be taken seriously.
But I do pinky promise I would be a good king if everyone wanted to give me a try.
> imagine if the king was someone you disagreed with, putting people in jail for posting things they didn’t like.
Which is why if we passed laws against this kind of thing they shouldn't make posting what the king doesn't like illegal. They should explicitly make it illegal to post disinformation harmful to others. It should work similarly to defamation laws where it makes no difference if you publish something someone else (king or not) doesn't like, as long as it's actually true.
This is a very slippery slope. Who gets to be the arbiter of truth? What if you think something is false, and then it later turns out to be true or at least undetermined?
What if you create all this infrastructure for regulating speech, and then the political winds shift and a strongman president ends up using it to suppress speech they don't like?
The same people who decide truth in a defamation case. Let's not pretend that truth doesn't exist or that it's impossible to determine. Anybody can make a factual error, or make a well-meaning post that turns out to be wrong, but that's not what we're talking about here. We're discussing accounts whose entire purpose is to spread harmful disinformation.
> What if you create all this infrastructure for regulating speech, and then the political winds shift and a strongman president ends up using it to suppress speech they don't like?
Again, if the law banning this practice is well written it will be impossible to do that within the context of the law. The fact that some hypothetical strongman president might be able to get away with suppressing speech by acting outside of the law, or might be able to pass other laws that allow for it, is irrelevant. They could theoretically do anything at anytime to anyone regardless.
I have the same dilemma. Privacy and anonymity has always been a top priority for me, but we can't excuse malicious actors, we shouldn't even accommodate people with good intentions but misguided means if the outcomes are so clearly detrimental to society.
I don't think there is a good answer without limiting freedoms in either direction, and I don't envy the people in government that are earnestly trying to do good for their constituents but are struggling with a solution.
We need laws to stop this sort of thing for sure. I love the first amendment but we place sane limits on it all the time. This seems like one of those things cases where it's easy to draw the line and when people are being paid it's easy to trace the money to those responsible
Pseudonymity is sufficient to curb most antisocial behaviour on social media. A site operator doesn't need to know a malicious user's name but the operator should be able to permanently block someone.
It isn't necessary for anyone to be the arbiter of truth, but some body should be the arbiter of good taste. That someone doesn't need to be the government; it can be the community. Since good taste is subjective, it should be defined democratically.
At this point in history, it seems that unless social media has a mechanism to promote civilised behaviour, society will lose the ability to advance and improve.
It's not that easy to block someone. It's easy to block a particular account, sure.
But there are now people who purposefully make a bunch of accounts to spread lies.
> that unless social media has a mechanism to promote civilised behaviour
We need more Dangs.
He is maybe the major reason this forum is still decent. Tasteful moderation is really hard, I'd say the vast majority of Reddit subs don't have good moderation.
Anonymity leads to the multiple accounts issue. Pseudonymity addresses that. Eg: "We don't know the name of the person behind this identifier in real life, but we see we blocked them last year, so we will deny their request to open a new account with us"
You and I agree the moderation here on HN is fantastic. There is a minority of people who would prefer HN allow spam, bigotry, calls to violence, revenge porn, snuff content, etc. A large community - a nation, for example - should have the ability to 'tyrannize' an antisocial minority into enforcing some base level of standards. For example, at a minimum, to prevent a site operator from showing those types of content to users who do not specifically request them.
You are conflating different things. Anonymous or not, people can post hate on the Internet. That's a question of moderation.
Personally I think it would be easier to just ban anything that is political altogether. Bluesky for example is 90% politics. Just because something can be allowed in some spaces on the Internet that doesn't mean it should be allowed on every single space. No reason for the "funny short video" platform to become a news/opinion essay platform.
Yea, I've also watched mainstream news. Remember that time ABC showed "war footage" that turned out to be footage from some Kentucky gun range?
>combat this evil
Teach media literacy. I know this is utopian even as I say it, because you can't even teach people to close the door behind them, but I sure as hell don't want the government or anyone else to tell me what I'm allowed to read. That right is worth any cost. Any.
The devil's bargain for those on this site: a pleasant work environment and paycheck deriing from engagementmaxxing and the resultant surveillance this provides.
It's a genuinely surprising feeling to live in a place, but see an absolute torrent of malevolent misinformation about it.
The "London has fallen" trope that has been prevalent on social media recently stank of some kind of deliberate manipulation. But increasingly—in part due to stories like this—I wonder if it is actually just all "for the views".
For what it's worth living in NYC often feels the same. There are people who live on Long Island - many just an hour or so from the city - who are convinced it's a hellscape here.
Even people with children who live in the city are somehow able to tolerate the cognitive dissonance of hearing their children talk about the lives they lead while also believing the city is crime-ridden and dangerous.
Also the US politicians suffering from Khan Derangement Syndrome. He really is one of the most anodyne politicians around, obviously no one is genuinely upset about him.
It's definitely being pushed by people looking for views but there is obviously some truth to it when half the businesses around Leicester Square are completely empty frauds.
No, there is not “obviously some truth to it”. There are any number of actual problems with London, including but not limited to a lack of enforcement against obvious frauds, and none of which are the related to the topic being discussed.
London definitely has fallen. How far is up to you. But it's a horrible place to live in now. Has been for quite some time and it's slowly getting worse.
It's a stereotype based on real world events. It's not deliberate manipulation. People are just tired of shitholes being put on pedestals.
Lots of places in the world are becoming absolute shitholes. There's an underlying condition that's not totally apparent yet but it exists and people can feel, see it and smell it.
Edit: Now it may seem like London is great to someone who has never lived in a place with an actually decent quality of life, which I'm unsure if you have. Places like East Asia, AU/NZ, various other parts of Europe.
I've lived in both places and I think the narrative is a lot more fair, in terms of day-to-day quality of life for, like, the median resident, about San Francisco than it is about Chicago. The narrative about Chicago basically doesn't connect with anybody's experience here unless they live in places like Lawndale or Englewood. San Francisco's problems are broadly shared by every neighborhood.
"While the social media revolution has come with extraordinary benefits..." curious what Khan would say those benefits are.
It's certainly something a lot of people find entertaining but I would not say there have been "extraordinary benefits" to society or individuals from the average UK adult spending 1h 37m a day[1] of their lives on social media platforms.
"While smoking cigarettes has come with extraordinary benefits, we've seen a surge in people misusing these products and getting sick due to a lack of guardrails, tobacco companies need to do much more to make their product healthy and discourage bad faith actors from developing cancer..."/s
I agree with this entire article, except that it's not just a right-wing phenomenon. Both sides distort the truth for financial gain and from a quantitative POV it's not a false equivalence.
At least in the U.S., from my observations, it's mainly a right-wing phenomenon and borne from the same culture that brought us the likes of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Hal Turner. As a teenager, my friends and I would laugh at this stuff and assume by the time we were having kids, Fox News and similar right-wing, vaguely racist, puritanical media would be diminished to a point where it was hardly noticeable. We were clearly very wrong.
To quote you from an earlier comment of yours: "This is exactly the sensational take (devoid of nuance and information) that we should collectively push back against."
The left has been traditionally anti-capitalist and in favor of improving rights and living conditions. Who on the left is gaining financially from distorting the truth to the level of someone like Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, the Koch Brothers, or Jeff Bezos?
In the favor of improving living conditions? If and only if it is through their ideology. If it is through something which goes against their ideology the goalposts move at the speed of light and out comes some rationalization like "it wasn't really important, what we need is community".
When communism had claims to being more productive growth was the most important thing in the world and why we should adopt their ideology. Now look at the 'degrowth' people what a coincidence and they are literally arguing for worsening living conditions....
That's because Marx was a productivist, and communism was strictly productivist until a decade ago (and still is mainly productivist nowadays).
In a lot of country political ecology used to be liberal/capitalist (save a few radical feminist like D'Eaubonne who linked environment with feminism, but it's less than a minority). Basically Blair's 'third way' but with less nuclear (for some reason, although I think this position is loosing ground in ecologist), and more electric cars.
The degrowth movement is an offshot of that ideology. Degrowth is to political ecologism what anarchism is to communism, based a very Idealist and hopeful view of humanity.
Communists and ecologists are broadly on the 'left', but rarely allied until maybe a decade ago, and again, on minor things (Communists love nuclear,as it is typically something you don't want a capitalist with 'limited liability' to take care of), and while degrowth might be close to anarchists in some way, it is very, very dishonest to put them in the same basket.
True, but rarely you see someone grifting to the left. Each time someone get caught putting his hands, or worse, where he shouldn't, he tends to go rightward, and fast. Same thing when they are caught doing MLMs, always to the right. Even with shitcoiners, the right-wing pivot is fast once your 'racism is bad, but this antiracist coin' is done. I honestly don't know why.
Probably you have either more money, or more forgiving/powerful people on the right? Some grift to the center, but it's very rare, when libs are as powerful and rich as conservative, so I've no idea.
Sorry, i wasn't clear, my bad. You have grifters everywhere, especially in the fringe as when your audience is small, grifting is the best way to make any real amount of money. But when a grifter is caught doing something the public consider bad (SA, but sometime just being caught red-handed stealing money), he either disappear, or grift to the right. No grifter go further left is my point.
I think the internationally known examples are the Tate brothers or the Paul brothers, but among the scammers who got pardonned by trump you will mostly find people who grifted to the right. In my country it is also quite clear. Doctors caught doing weird chamanism and not helping patient? Suddenly it's "cancel culture!!1!". Your "quantum energy" bullshit is caught and proved to be a weird MLM? Cancel culture! Every fucking time.
It happened with people who used to grift for kombaya/hippies with weird chamanism and yoga. Suddenly, 911 was an inside job and Donald Trump is our savior, Q is his prophete. I shit you not, my mother Yoga ayurvedic group went from hippies that use to get scammed into buying essential oils to "open the Chakra" to weird antisemites who purchased trumpm/melania coin in less than 3 years. And we're not even in the US :/
Ah I think i understand. To paraphrase, you're saying that people that are caught tend to take refuge by more rightward grifting.
I cannot speak to your specific experience and i don't necessarily disagree. However, I do think there a potential selection bias here because by our media environment. Agree or not, the media believes that Trump is the most horrible person in the world at the moment. So there is a propensity to attack anyone that is considered allied to the right, so rightward grifters will get more aggressively exposed.
Yes, exactly, I'm not a native speaker and I have trouble explaining nuances on stuff I've thought about in my mother tongue first.
Agree with the selection bias, that one explanation. A second is that a lot of grifters who were caught now want to get pardoned, so maybe it influence their politics. And the third one is that the society as a whole shifted right, so grifters shifted right. When the pendulum will swing back, maybe grifters will also be shifting back (it doesn't match with Russell Brand/Andrew Tate timing though, but it match quite well with the podcast bro crowd and the Paul brothers).
I also think the age and money factor is also a thing (conservative have more disposable income on average, are older on average, so easier and richer targets). When you get caught grifting your audience will decrease. Concentrating on the richest/oldest is just good business.
Man what a PoS this guy was.
he started as a lame re-poster
>His head was turned by the substantial sum of money: “I told my wife, wow, it’s £1,000.” >Then, to his annoyance, TikTok immediately deleted his account because he was just stealing other people’s videos and reposting them.
and dove straight into fabricating hate, and worst of all after directly confronted seems to literally have no concept of what he was doing or that it was in any way wrong or distasteful.
>The man appears confused by the fuss his actions have caused. He gives the impression that he considered TikTok’s algorithm and the site’s content regulation policies to be the ultimate arbiter of whether a video crossed a line.
>It wasn’t racist,” the man says of his account. He argues that if the videos had really been racist, TikTok’s algorithm would have downgraded the content.
Seems to lack any internal moral compass, basically if the website lets him slander or lie it must be ok because he has no capacity to assess that value for himself.
Flippin scary people like that are out there.
If this topic interests you, I recommend `Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation`, by Andrew Marantz. Great read but it's definitely stress inducing at times.
I would say about 20% of people are like that. Total disregard for common good, maximal selfishness.
I am a member of an expensive gym in our home town. It has a very good gym but also includes spa facilities. The only reason I pay the price is because it also includes a working area, and because I work remotely most of the week, I do it from the gym, so I have no excuse not to exercise and I also find the spa a good way to unwind. It's a nice way to avoid the long commute to the office but also get out the house.
Anyway, the point to the story is money doesn't buy class. The gym parking is gated and leads into a huge parking area. What happens is that a certain percentage of people consider themselves above everyone else and don't fancy walking the extra 20-100 meters to park in an actual parking, so they just park on the "road" that feeds into the the various parking areas, as it is close to the gym. This means it blocks one lane of that road and cars get backed up having to go around the parked cars.
I always hear announcements calling for the owners of certain license plates, and always know it was these cars. It infuriates me so much. Lately the gym has had to resort to cones along the edges of the road to stop the arseholes.
I just can't fathom such people. It feels so alien to me that I (I mean this literally) can't imagine what actually goes through your head to do that. For anyone who is this selfish, can you explain? Does it not occur to you that this is wrong? Or do you know it and just think "life is unfair, I do what is best for me"? I genuinely don't get it.
So yeah, a bit off topic, and I'm unsure if your 20% figure is too high, but there certainly are a lot of people in the world that are just not nice.
About 5% of people are narcissistic sociopaths. They don't believe that other people exist, or at least are anything more than actors in a play they control. Try not to elect one as President.
This is a good pop-science book about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Psychopath_Test
> Total disregard for common good, maximal selfishness.
Or lacking better alternatives for a decent life aggravated by having zero positive role models and a media/political culture whose only positive value is mo' money.
> I would say about 20% of people are like that.
That depends on region, language and the conditions described above. Placing a numeric value collectively on all of humanity conveys zero useful information.
Only 20!? More like 90 to 95%
Surely you don't believe that, given a random sample of 20 people, 19 of them will be amoral, selfish, and have no values? Surely this doesn't align with your real life experience - what are your colleagues, friends, family, neighbours and acquaintances like? Do they meet this ratio?
This endemic of much of the “creator” economy. Anything goes if it gets you clicks. And TikTok does have lose moderation. If this happened on YouTube he would have been demonetised sooner.
When someone has a complete lack of values like this, it always makes me wonder what their upbringing was like.
These people are everywhere.
Instagram serves me antisemetic content consistently with no way for me to downvote it. Likewise when it tries to rage bait me with islamophobic shit.
I do not engage or upvote other than taking screenshots and reporting. At this point I just don't open Instagram except for messages from friends
It is incredible that they literally fund selfish assholes to do this. What worse is that they will not reap the vile harvest.
Yes, there are people like that out there. If this makes your head spin, I can't imagine what the Epstein Files must be doing to you!
Seems to be an extension of something we are dealing with across multiple parts of many societies. Monetary pursuit has become a guiding principle for alot of people, and its been revealed that such thinking is leading to major societal consequences.
The current Technocratic idealization of efficiency by those in powerful positions is missing the second order consequences of financializing everything, and it appears to me that we are sacrificing societal necessities like trustworthiness and collective responsbility in favor of more efficient markets. If no corrective action is taken, we can expect increasing issues.
Michael Sandel's "What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets" covers it quite well.
Markets create unfairness by systematically disadvantaging the poor when money becomes necessary to obtain certain goods or quality of goods. Market values corrupt non-market spheres by changing the meaning and value of goods being exchanged (e.g., paying for grades undermines intrinsic desire to learn). Monetary incentives crowd out altruistic motivations and civic duty (e.g., fines becoming fees people willingly pay rather than norms to uphold). Commodification degrades human dignity (e.g., treating drug-addicted women as "baby-making machines" in sterilization-for-cash programs). Markets increase wealth inequality and create segregation in previously egalitarian spaces (e.g., luxury skyboxes in sports stadiums). Market exchanges under severe inequality or economic necessity become coercive, not truly voluntary. Purchased tokens of friendship and personal expressions (apologies, wedding toasts) lose their authenticity and dilute social bonds. Wealthy individuals and countries can pay their way out of moral obligations (e.g., carbon offsets instead of reducing emissions). Markets have infiltrated areas traditionally governed by ethical considerations - medicine, education, personal relationships - without public debate about whether this is desirable. The economic approach treats everything in an ethical vacuum, ignoring morality in favor of purely analyzing incentives.
This is one of the most amazing comments I have read on HN.
You absolutely get to the core of why and how 'leaving it to the market' and money-oriented choices remove social cohesion, trust, and fairness.
Thank you, but again I'm just paraphrasing Sandel's work. He really puts into words that which I've personally felt without having the vernacular to put it into words myself (alongside one of his inspirations, Michael Young). I attended a couple of his lectures while he was in the UK, and he was fantastic.
I don't think it's even the money. It's the numbers and numerical "scoring".
You see all the same evil dishonest shit behavior in contexts where the $$ is negligible, fixed or not a KPI individuals are really scored on. Organized religion, academia, Internet comments, etc, etc.
One objection here: pay-for-sterilization doesn't match with the rest of these because this is treating it solely as a cost to the woman, rather than recognizing that there's a benefit in not bringing a child into a horrible life.
The objection is that offering cash exploits vulnerable women's desperation, treating their reproductive capacity as a commodity to be purchased. Even if the outcome might prevent more suffering, which is an individually subjective outcome, the means matters: it degrades the women involved by reducing a profound personal decision to a market transaction under conditions of coercion, where drug addiction makes the offer 'too good to resist.'
Monetary incentives are the foundations of Capitalism. There are only two ways that ethics might get in the way of their profits.
The first is government regulation. We saw lots of deregulation of oversight over the ten years before the 2008 financial crisis. None of the ethically compromised C-suite folks went to jail for their behavior because it was suddenly not a crime. Sometimes you have regulation, but you don't have enforcement of the regulations. This is what we get when the government is comprised of or controlled by capitalists. It's called fascism.
The second is public boycott or revolt. Could the new Target CEO be the result of the recent boycott? Same with Starbucks? Has anyone actually bought a Tesla in the past year? The big tech folks are bending over backwards to hide the fact that they have no real AI business model, making it a gigantic bubble that is about to burst. There is a national frenzy that no one is reporting on people ditching their subscriptions. We are going to see affordability get worse very quickly. It will be interesting to see what happens as more and more people start tightening their purse strings, whether by choice or necessity.
> Sometimes you have regulation, but you don't have enforcement of the regulations.
Indeed. Let us quote the Dune books (since they're trending, and for good reason!):
"Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders. -Law and Governance (The Spacing Guild)"
And if you would let me indulge one more:
"Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class: whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy. -Politics as Repeat Phenomenon (Bene Gesserit Training Manual)"
Excellent quotes! Thanks for sharing.
There is a very, very clear and specific problem: "free" advertising supported sites incentivizes farming user engagement. Farming user engagement needs be sharply curtailed because it's proven to be broadly damaging to society and the direct way to do that is to reduce the incentive, advertising revenue. It's as straightforward as that.
Oddly enough, this comes from Google having a monopoly on web advertising. If you're an advertiser, let's say for the sake of argument you're a company with $80 billion in revenue, and you find your ads placed next to a ragebait post, you might complain to Google, and they will promptly send you a canned response and send your email to Gemini for use in training data. If human eyes ever chance to see your email, it's a good chance that people in that department aren't working hard enough and they should do a layoff.
> Monetary pursuit has become a guiding principle for alot of people
People need money to survive. The wealthy class have made it such that it's harder and harder to earn enough money the normal way. Often it doesn't even pay enough to survive. This is what creative people come up with in order to make a living. And it's obviously not in the wealthy class' interest to make any changes to that.
Doesn't make it excusable. I get it's hard to uphold principles when the stomach is empty. But it's clear the person in the piece wasn't thinking about much else, though he was also clearly not in the streets and starving.
Culture is a pendulum, but humans are consistently greedy.
"Journalistic integrity" was a marketing concept designed to sell newspapers at a time when there were hundreds and most were inaccurate. It was extremely profitable to have ethics. (A good reminder that noble minded Benjamin Franklin ran his own periodical that he regularly and intentionally slandered others in.)
Now we have an entrenched media (with their own ethics problems) and there is opportunity to start pumping out garbage again.
As Voltaire said, "History is only the pattern of silken slippers descending the stairs to the thunder of hobnailed boots climbing upward from below." In other words, progress has to be fought for from hard lessons, but once that progress is taken for granted, people let it slip not knowing the value of what they have.
Yes, humans can be greedy - but the question is whether we design our society to encourage and legitimize that greed in every sphere of life, or whether we maintain non-market norms that check it. The journalistic integrity example proves my/Sandel's point; when ethics became profitable, the market accidentally aligned with civic good. But the concern is precisely about areas where market logic systematically corrupts rather than improves outcomes - ie. where introducing money changes the nature of the good itself (like turning civic duty into a fee, or learning into a transaction). The pendulum swings, yes - which is exactly why we need ongoing public debate about where markets belong, rather than passively accepting their expansion into every domain and hoping the pendulum swings back on its own.
Yes. Greed is king right now.
There's a huge problem with the media landscape. It's similar to the junk-food problem, or gambling, or addiction to drugs.
We've made a society where "number goes up" is the only measure of success. We don't care whether what makes the number go up is good, and that leads to exploiting the irrationality of consumers.
People know they aren't supposed to eat chips all day. They know they aren't likely to win their bet. They know it's not a good idea to watch the most exciting news.
But they can't help themselves, so they get exploited, and the exploiters are wealthy enough to write it into law that they aren't responsible.
Point this out, and inevitably someone says "who are you to decide what's good for other people", and yes, I used to think this way. Well, one thing is that I'm straight up taking it from the people who are being used. Who wants to be fat? Virtually everyone is eating more than they should. Are we supposed to think this is the revealed, rational preference of everyone? The other thing that changed is that I'm a parent. I have to make choices for my kids, and doing that makes me recognize that people their age aren't the only children. Paternalistic much? Sure. Eat your vegetables!
Who wants to be uninformed? Yet we are. People can just look up the crime statistics in London and see which way it has been going the past couple of decades.
I don't have a solution, I'm afraid, just a diagnosis. We're living in a society that is being abused under the pretense of personal freedom.
Someone better read than me has probably written an essay or two about this, please link. I don't know the best keywords for such a search.
It's the same perspective that asks, "If he's so bad, why doesn't she leave him?" And when she doesn't ultimately reconciles it by blaming her.
It reveals that the emotional relationship to the consequences take priority over the consequences themselves. Whether it's justifying domestic violence or justifying the consequences of an obesity epidemic, or the consequences of a sizeable fraction of people living in a false reality.
Those problems still exist, nothing is solved except if we apply the salve of personal choice, we can avoid meaningful change. It's a nilhistic, defeatist defense mechanism that says much more about the person employing it and their inability to withstand emotional discomfort than the facts of each case - that people regularly take actions that are objectively against their best interest.
Our failure to provide aid and cling to the that really the world is just by hiding behind the idea of rational choice is childishly naive.
I know a lot of people who watch this kind of garbage and find it very convincing. The minute you add a video component, it tricks people into thinking they are seeing something raw and firsthand.
We're all so worried about the effects of AI generated video (with good reason), but the truth is that DIP (Deceptive imagery persuasion) is unbelievably easy and cheap to do anywhere. You can take an innocuous video of a tank from anywhere, and then add a fake caption that says "this is a Venezuela drug cartel" and an average person has almost no defense mechanisms against it.
It's also not something platforms could even police. If anything, nation state actors are already taking this to their advantage.
Exactly--we don't need AI video for the problem.
I've watched it happening again and again. Deceptive image that people want to believe, they won't listen when contradictions are pointed out. And they forget that anyone even pointed out the problem. Few people seem to get it that when there's a thousand bad proofs of something it's probably false--and, for those that do, there's the opposite: present a thousand bad proofs of something true.
As a sidenote, Jim Waterson is doing amazing work at London Centric, single-handedly doing the kind of investigative journalism week after week via Substack funding that traditional media has abandoned. I highly recommend subscribing if you are in the London area.
It's a shame he's doing it on Substack, where hate brings views.
> He’d previously run a TikTok account that had amassed 24,000 followers. One night, he was astonished to find, he received his first payout from TikTok’s creator scheme.
> His head was turned by the substantial sum of money: “I told my wife, wow, it’s £1,000.”
I’m not familiar with TikTok’s payout rate. Is it really so high that an account with 24K followers can start getting checks that large?
TikTok's algorithm makes follower counts less important than they are on other platforms. The means by which your video gets into people's FYP feed is not very clear but it is very, very common to see content from someone you do not follow, and I think if it shows positive engagement stats it'll get shown to more and more people.
I would assume part of the payout rate would also be determined by level of engagement of those followers, or also people who are not subscribed but are still sitting through your content.
Yes, as long as you’re eligible for monetization
Payments are for views and not followers.
It can range from $0.40 to $1.00 per 1000 views depending on the video. So, 1 Million Views can pay around $400-$1000.
Hate videos are advertiser poison so payouts are lower. I'd assume $0.4 per 1000 viewers or even lower. So, $1000 will require ~2.5 million views.
I can see that happening. Right Wingers are dedicated viewers and if a channels fulfills their narrow viewpoint they will watch every video.
That said, YT handles this better than Tiktok. People can be sent to demonization hole if they keep posting stuff like this on YT.
Apparently yes, as long as you vomit far right hate.
there is a also a very strong anti india sentiment on twitter / x just search for #india or look at the comments of posts made by people like vivek ramaswamy , nikki haley, and any other politician and you ll see it. I wonder if this is some kinda state sponsored campaign for objectives that are not clear to me
I bet there are many well-moneyed interests that would benefit from discord and conflicts in the Western society writ large.
A worldwide social network is subject to the worldwide political pressures, like any other media would be.
I think it might be related to support disrupting the US work visa process somehow. Like the strange "actually Indians" meme on Reddit etc.
What does make it strange?
Dunno it felt out of place and forced. Just a feeling I have no data.
> there is a also a very strong anti india sentiment on twitter / x just search for #india or look at the comments of posts made by people like vivek ramaswamy , nikki haley, and any other politician and you ll see it.
In a time of rising anti-immigration and anti-foreigner sentiment across the world, you are shocked by anti-india comments?
> I wonder if this is some kinda state sponsored campaign for objectives that are not clear to me
Or musk got rid of the censors on twitter ( many of whom were of indian origin ) and now people are free to express themselves?
I suppose it's possible but I think the more basic answer is that there's been a huge influx of Indians into the west recently i.e. find an example historically where people don't end up fighting in such situations.
A lot of hateful content is boosted by Russian bots, there were also instances of bot accounts that went silent with Iran internet blackout.
Another example are conspiracy theory content, and some far right channels - like the case of Tenet Media being funded by Russia.
This is the reality we're dealing with, a constant undermining flow of lies and hate to destabilize western democracies.
The result is in sight, and will only get worse because one of the consequences is that these account gradually give permission to be racist, xenophobic, etc. And LLMs are making this worse.
Of course that there's a sentiment that comes with migrants for example, but it's the disinformation that turns up a notch and blows it out of proportion.
At some point comments on social media will have to be disabled.
Single biggest mistake of Social Media was to pay users for what they post. Started with YouTube, went the same way with Facbook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. People only post ragebait or engagement bait or play "the reply guy" with low-effort AI-generated content. Many people in countries like India and Pakistan are doing this because it pays better than their jobs. There was an interesting article on NHK that is always on the top of my mind when it's about this, I actually found it again: https://news.web.nhk/newsweb/na/na-k10014341931000 In Japan they are called "Impression Zombies", kinda fitting.
It's fascinating how he has fully outsourced his conscience to the TikTok content guidelines. With all of the discussion about what restrictions should exist on platforms it never ever occurred to me that people would start to view them as moral authorities.
I feel like the huge and obvious problems with social media hide a small and subtle, but insidious problem: How do I show that I care about you?
I feel like there is a range that might be described:
---"How do I show that I care about you?" might also be called "virtue signaling". Unfortunately "virtue signaling" has taken on such a negative meaning that it is no longer useful for communication.
TikTok should be sowed with salt like Carthage back then...along with these hate-influencers. We need new social media now.
As long as there is a financial benefit to lying, there will always be people willing to do so.
I personally believe that many of these "influencers" do not believe any of the stuff they spew into the public space.
“This article is based on the opinion of one unnamed individual, and it is not representative of the positive and creative experience that millions enjoy every day on TikTok.”
I always love the response from TikTok: “It’s only ever one person, guys! It’s never our cackhanded (lack of) moderation!”
I always remember this excellent sci-fi story about exactly such things: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
Strong emotions drive engagement. There are rather few of them; simple joy / laughter (think cat videos) is one that's relatively easy to evoke, but hate is equally easy to evoke, and it's much stronger.
We are living thru the 'doctors prescribing cigarettes' era of lucrative fear-mongering.
An extent presentation (IMHO) by Sam Vaknin on how the very way modern social networks operate even down to their structure are deeply destructive and anti-human. Hate has been and always will be the easiest and most monetizable emotion used by platform operators. Hate requires little complexity or nuance making it ideal for short form viral content where every second counts.
The "Internet Hate Machine" is real and it was created that way by design by anti social deeply narcissistic nerds. Youtube Link: https://youtu.be/Ef7bqgeHenU
> “My first video got one million [views],” he says.
I hear this a LOT. It seems Tik Tok sets itself up to let a new person's first video go completely viral, not sure what the "trick" is, but I read it often enough it makes me believe that if your first videos good enough you really can hit over a million. Of course who knows if that million is inflated or what.
As for the rest of the article, this person seems to just not care about the consequences of their actions, its pretty disgusting.
The only evidence provided for any of the videos being fake is that one house they visited had legal residents renting the property. But it's not fake that many London neighborhoods like Earl's Court provide 65% of their social housing to people born outside the UK, of whom 40% are in employment (source: migrationfacts.com), so one error doesn't mean much. Thus it's unclear to me (never having seen any of the videos) whether the misinformation was on TikTok or in this article.
In one thread I am defending anonymity online from government mandated ID laws.
Then I think to the persistent, malevolent, destructive lies that people spread with complete impunity and with faked video and photo evidence. This is not what the first amendment was designed to protect.
Wary of making government the arbiter of truth, I don't know what society should do to combat this evil. In a fantasy world where I were king, the person who ran this tiktok would be in jail.
This person wasn’t anonymous to TikTok. They were doing this for payments.
TikTok had their information! Voluntarily, too.
Forcing everyone to ID themselves to companies would not have changed anything about this story
> In a fantasy world where I were king, the person who ran this tiktok would be in jail.
Now take this thought one step further and imagine if the king was someone you disagreed with, putting people in jail for posting things they didn’t like. Imagine if the king disagreed with you. Straight to jail?
That's why I said it was a fantasy, and why I didn't suggest it as policy.
There is such a thing as objective truth and objective lies, though, don't deny that.
Yes but in my fantasy world I'm the king because my morals and opinions are best for society. And of course I'll always be reasonable and never have a bad day or let my personal interests take priority over the good of my subjects.
Obviously this is just wishful thinking about governance that people have been saying for milennia. Socrates said philosophers should of course be kings / the ruling class.
There's no simple solution to creating a harmonious society, which of course leads people today and from thousands of years ago to say "Gee, wouldn't it just be nice if everyone listened to me about how to act and what to do when people get out line?". It's a fantasy, and a reminder that anyone wanting a benevolent dictator or to give up their responsibility of being a good citizen shouldn't be taken seriously.
But I do pinky promise I would be a good king if everyone wanted to give me a try.
Right, it's a fantasy. Like I said in my original comment.
> imagine if the king was someone you disagreed with, putting people in jail for posting things they didn’t like.
Which is why if we passed laws against this kind of thing they shouldn't make posting what the king doesn't like illegal. They should explicitly make it illegal to post disinformation harmful to others. It should work similarly to defamation laws where it makes no difference if you publish something someone else (king or not) doesn't like, as long as it's actually true.
This is a very slippery slope. Who gets to be the arbiter of truth? What if you think something is false, and then it later turns out to be true or at least undetermined?
What if you create all this infrastructure for regulating speech, and then the political winds shift and a strongman president ends up using it to suppress speech they don't like?
> Who gets to be the arbiter of truth?
The same people who decide truth in a defamation case. Let's not pretend that truth doesn't exist or that it's impossible to determine. Anybody can make a factual error, or make a well-meaning post that turns out to be wrong, but that's not what we're talking about here. We're discussing accounts whose entire purpose is to spread harmful disinformation.
> What if you create all this infrastructure for regulating speech, and then the political winds shift and a strongman president ends up using it to suppress speech they don't like?
Again, if the law banning this practice is well written it will be impossible to do that within the context of the law. The fact that some hypothetical strongman president might be able to get away with suppressing speech by acting outside of the law, or might be able to pass other laws that allow for it, is irrelevant. They could theoretically do anything at anytime to anyone regardless.
I have the same dilemma. Privacy and anonymity has always been a top priority for me, but we can't excuse malicious actors, we shouldn't even accommodate people with good intentions but misguided means if the outcomes are so clearly detrimental to society.
I don't think there is a good answer without limiting freedoms in either direction, and I don't envy the people in government that are earnestly trying to do good for their constituents but are struggling with a solution.
> This is not what the first amendment was designed to protect.
There is no codified constitution in the United Kingdom.
A reasonable compromise might be to require ID before payments are made to people.
In a lot of places this is required by KYC regulations anyway.
Don’t forget that not only they can do that, but they also disproportionate amount of damage (see US elections).
We need laws to stop this sort of thing for sure. I love the first amendment but we place sane limits on it all the time. This seems like one of those things cases where it's easy to draw the line and when people are being paid it's easy to trace the money to those responsible
Thought here: perhaps the answer is a restriction on promotion of material that doesn't expose a real identity.
Pseudonymity is sufficient to curb most antisocial behaviour on social media. A site operator doesn't need to know a malicious user's name but the operator should be able to permanently block someone.
It isn't necessary for anyone to be the arbiter of truth, but some body should be the arbiter of good taste. That someone doesn't need to be the government; it can be the community. Since good taste is subjective, it should be defined democratically.
At this point in history, it seems that unless social media has a mechanism to promote civilised behaviour, society will lose the ability to advance and improve.
It's not that easy to block someone. It's easy to block a particular account, sure.
But there are now people who purposefully make a bunch of accounts to spread lies.
> that unless social media has a mechanism to promote civilised behaviour
We need more Dangs.
He is maybe the major reason this forum is still decent. Tasteful moderation is really hard, I'd say the vast majority of Reddit subs don't have good moderation.
Anonymity leads to the multiple accounts issue. Pseudonymity addresses that. Eg: "We don't know the name of the person behind this identifier in real life, but we see we blocked them last year, so we will deny their request to open a new account with us"
You and I agree the moderation here on HN is fantastic. There is a minority of people who would prefer HN allow spam, bigotry, calls to violence, revenge porn, snuff content, etc. A large community - a nation, for example - should have the ability to 'tyrannize' an antisocial minority into enforcing some base level of standards. For example, at a minimum, to prevent a site operator from showing those types of content to users who do not specifically request them.
You are conflating different things. Anonymous or not, people can post hate on the Internet. That's a question of moderation.
Personally I think it would be easier to just ban anything that is political altogether. Bluesky for example is 90% politics. Just because something can be allowed in some spaces on the Internet that doesn't mean it should be allowed on every single space. No reason for the "funny short video" platform to become a news/opinion essay platform.
>faked video and photo evidence
Yea, I've also watched mainstream news. Remember that time ABC showed "war footage" that turned out to be footage from some Kentucky gun range?
>combat this evil
Teach media literacy. I know this is utopian even as I say it, because you can't even teach people to close the door behind them, but I sure as hell don't want the government or anyone else to tell me what I'm allowed to read. That right is worth any cost. Any.
The epitaph for civil society.
The devil's bargain for those on this site: a pleasant work environment and paycheck deriing from engagementmaxxing and the resultant surveillance this provides.
This is not sustainable.
It's a genuinely surprising feeling to live in a place, but see an absolute torrent of malevolent misinformation about it.
The "London has fallen" trope that has been prevalent on social media recently stank of some kind of deliberate manipulation. But increasingly—in part due to stories like this—I wonder if it is actually just all "for the views".
For what it's worth living in NYC often feels the same. There are people who live on Long Island - many just an hour or so from the city - who are convinced it's a hellscape here.
Even people with children who live in the city are somehow able to tolerate the cognitive dissonance of hearing their children talk about the lives they lead while also believing the city is crime-ridden and dangerous.
Also the US politicians suffering from Khan Derangement Syndrome. He really is one of the most anodyne politicians around, obviously no one is genuinely upset about him.
It's definitely being pushed by people looking for views but there is obviously some truth to it when half the businesses around Leicester Square are completely empty frauds.
No, there is not “obviously some truth to it”. There are any number of actual problems with London, including but not limited to a lack of enforcement against obvious frauds, and none of which are the related to the topic being discussed.
One of the "British" racist social media posters turned out to be Pakistani, another Sri Lankan: https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2025-11-16/kin...
Both in it for the money.
London definitely has fallen. How far is up to you. But it's a horrible place to live in now. Has been for quite some time and it's slowly getting worse.
It's a stereotype based on real world events. It's not deliberate manipulation. People are just tired of shitholes being put on pedestals.
Lots of places in the world are becoming absolute shitholes. There's an underlying condition that's not totally apparent yet but it exists and people can feel, see it and smell it.
Edit: Now it may seem like London is great to someone who has never lived in a place with an actually decent quality of life, which I'm unsure if you have. Places like East Asia, AU/NZ, various other parts of Europe.
I've lived in Chicago and San Francisco, both places also victims of this type of narrative.
I've lived in both places and I think the narrative is a lot more fair, in terms of day-to-day quality of life for, like, the median resident, about San Francisco than it is about Chicago. The narrative about Chicago basically doesn't connect with anybody's experience here unless they live in places like Lawndale or Englewood. San Francisco's problems are broadly shared by every neighborhood.
It's such a bummer to see such blatant manipulation, and even worse to see people buy into it wholesale.
"While the social media revolution has come with extraordinary benefits..." curious what Khan would say those benefits are.
It's certainly something a lot of people find entertaining but I would not say there have been "extraordinary benefits" to society or individuals from the average UK adult spending 1h 37m a day[1] of their lives on social media platforms.
"While smoking cigarettes has come with extraordinary benefits, we've seen a surge in people misusing these products and getting sick due to a lack of guardrails, tobacco companies need to do much more to make their product healthy and discourage bad faith actors from developing cancer..."/s
[1] https://wearesocial.com/uk/blog/2025/02/digital-2025/
Maybe replace "benefits" with "profits"?
I agree with this entire article, except that it's not just a right-wing phenomenon. Both sides distort the truth for financial gain and from a quantitative POV it's not a false equivalence.
At least in the U.S., from my observations, it's mainly a right-wing phenomenon and borne from the same culture that brought us the likes of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Hal Turner. As a teenager, my friends and I would laugh at this stuff and assume by the time we were having kids, Fox News and similar right-wing, vaguely racist, puritanical media would be diminished to a point where it was hardly noticeable. We were clearly very wrong.
To quote you from an earlier comment of yours: "This is exactly the sensational take (devoid of nuance and information) that we should collectively push back against."
The left has been traditionally anti-capitalist and in favor of improving rights and living conditions. Who on the left is gaining financially from distorting the truth to the level of someone like Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, the Koch Brothers, or Jeff Bezos?
I don't understand what is sensationalist with my comment.
- I didn't make an outrageous or extrordinary claim.
- I didn't paint either side as crazy, broken or evil.
- I'm not leveraging charged language like racial slurs, or historical tragedies (nazi-ism).
- I'm not personally attacking anyone or encouraging any violence.
In the favor of improving living conditions? If and only if it is through their ideology. If it is through something which goes against their ideology the goalposts move at the speed of light and out comes some rationalization like "it wasn't really important, what we need is community".
When communism had claims to being more productive growth was the most important thing in the world and why we should adopt their ideology. Now look at the 'degrowth' people what a coincidence and they are literally arguing for worsening living conditions....
That's because Marx was a productivist, and communism was strictly productivist until a decade ago (and still is mainly productivist nowadays).
In a lot of country political ecology used to be liberal/capitalist (save a few radical feminist like D'Eaubonne who linked environment with feminism, but it's less than a minority). Basically Blair's 'third way' but with less nuclear (for some reason, although I think this position is loosing ground in ecologist), and more electric cars.
The degrowth movement is an offshot of that ideology. Degrowth is to political ecologism what anarchism is to communism, based a very Idealist and hopeful view of humanity.
Communists and ecologists are broadly on the 'left', but rarely allied until maybe a decade ago, and again, on minor things (Communists love nuclear,as it is typically something you don't want a capitalist with 'limited liability' to take care of), and while degrowth might be close to anarchists in some way, it is very, very dishonest to put them in the same basket.
True, but rarely you see someone grifting to the left. Each time someone get caught putting his hands, or worse, where he shouldn't, he tends to go rightward, and fast. Same thing when they are caught doing MLMs, always to the right. Even with shitcoiners, the right-wing pivot is fast once your 'racism is bad, but this antiracist coin' is done. I honestly don't know why.
Probably you have either more money, or more forgiving/powerful people on the right? Some grift to the center, but it's very rare, when libs are as powerful and rich as conservative, so I've no idea.
>True, but rarely you see someone grifting to the left.
Not true. There are plenty of grifters on the left.
Both sides use the same pattern:
- Look at the crazy stuff *their* people are doing.
- We should all be angry -> generates clicks revenue.
- Donate/Buy XYZ to save the humanity/yourself.
Sorry, i wasn't clear, my bad. You have grifters everywhere, especially in the fringe as when your audience is small, grifting is the best way to make any real amount of money. But when a grifter is caught doing something the public consider bad (SA, but sometime just being caught red-handed stealing money), he either disappear, or grift to the right. No grifter go further left is my point.
I think the internationally known examples are the Tate brothers or the Paul brothers, but among the scammers who got pardonned by trump you will mostly find people who grifted to the right. In my country it is also quite clear. Doctors caught doing weird chamanism and not helping patient? Suddenly it's "cancel culture!!1!". Your "quantum energy" bullshit is caught and proved to be a weird MLM? Cancel culture! Every fucking time.
It happened with people who used to grift for kombaya/hippies with weird chamanism and yoga. Suddenly, 911 was an inside job and Donald Trump is our savior, Q is his prophete. I shit you not, my mother Yoga ayurvedic group went from hippies that use to get scammed into buying essential oils to "open the Chakra" to weird antisemites who purchased trumpm/melania coin in less than 3 years. And we're not even in the US :/
Ah I think i understand. To paraphrase, you're saying that people that are caught tend to take refuge by more rightward grifting.
I cannot speak to your specific experience and i don't necessarily disagree. However, I do think there a potential selection bias here because by our media environment. Agree or not, the media believes that Trump is the most horrible person in the world at the moment. So there is a propensity to attack anyone that is considered allied to the right, so rightward grifters will get more aggressively exposed.
Yes, exactly, I'm not a native speaker and I have trouble explaining nuances on stuff I've thought about in my mother tongue first.
Agree with the selection bias, that one explanation. A second is that a lot of grifters who were caught now want to get pardoned, so maybe it influence their politics. And the third one is that the society as a whole shifted right, so grifters shifted right. When the pendulum will swing back, maybe grifters will also be shifting back (it doesn't match with Russell Brand/Andrew Tate timing though, but it match quite well with the podcast bro crowd and the Paul brothers).
I also think the age and money factor is also a thing (conservative have more disposable income on average, are older on average, so easier and richer targets). When you get caught grifting your audience will decrease. Concentrating on the richest/oldest is just good business.