There is no mediocrity Republicans won't embrace. When their leader is revealed to be a pedophile, they start defending pedophilia. Haven't seen a single one turn on Trump over the Epstein files yet.
Honestly it's not even that moderation doesn't care. Garry Tan and PG were big DOGE fans, and I'm not silly enough to believe that the moderation are unaware of that fact.
There's been far too many flagged Musk stories that never get unflagged to put it down to simple incompetence and neglect.
I mean, honestly, "HN voting is poorly designed and is vulnerable to coordinated action" would explain it fairly neatly; I'd totally buy that this is incompetence vs malice by the operators.
With respect, if you believe that then you likely aren't aware of the true scale of the problem. Unless they follow /active, /new, and have [showdead] on, people have very little idea just how much is getting suppressed here... And it's a lot, especially this past year, and extremely especially if it's anything Musk-related.
Another reason most people here don't know how bad it's got is because posts about the poor flagging system are explicitly disallowed. For that reason alone it's quite hard to say this is purely incompetence with no malice.
You can ask mods for permission to make a post about the flagging system - you'll be denied. People have tried making posts about all the Musk stories being flagged - flagged by moderation. Every time. Quickly.
So, no. Unfortunately, this isn't a case where I'm happy to assume incompetence. Look at where we're at - a post about the richest tech bro in the world enabling mass creep shit of the worst kind remains flagged for hours. That's absolutely vile - and far from a rare event here.
> As so often, following the money will reveal who actually has an interest here.
Do you mean to imply that the teens are a tool used by some secret cabal to attack Musk? Most likely their parents are paying for the lawyers in an attempt to get some justice from a billionaire that enabled a fucked up case of CSAM.
More than just enabling a fucked up case of CSAM, it's more like an energy intensive, environment destroying factory that produces CSAM.
Once again, I'm asking when we can start the Butlerian Jihad?
Incidentally, is the USA now becoming a safe haven for pedophiles? It just seems odd how other countries are investigating high profile people with ties to Epstein, but the USA celebrates them and even votes the biggest offender into the highest office.
Economics sort of works ok when money transfers are used to mediate, y'know, the exchange of goods and services. Nearly everything else turns out to be a pretty obvious moral hazard.
The WP is his propaganda tool contributing to maintaining this billionaire-friendly environment. Trump gave the bourgeoisie trillions in tax cuts last year, and Bezos is a major receiver of this present himself. It's hard to quantify, but these captured media together are much more valuable to oligarchs than any other ventures of theirs, certainly more than their space toys. Hence why Ellison would spend $100B of his personal wealth to add CNN to his catalogue, or why Musk spent so much on X and doesn't seem to care too much about making it profitable.
One of the big lessons of the last decade is that media can have billionaires as their primary market. The Free Press got huge because of infusions of cash from the rich. Media that flatters the opinions of billionaires and projects their propaganda into the world can be enormously valuable even if it isn't making traditional cash. It is a return to a patronage model.
Garry Tan has even said this expressly. That the rich should simply own their own parallel media so they can project their will against the will of the people.
Here's a controversial opinion -- it's actually always been this way.
Hearst used his newspapers to manipulate the American public into war against the Spanish Empire.
Government lies (babies in incubators, yellow cake...) were used to push two Iraq wars on the American public by the media.
The abnormal thing is that we had maybe 10-15 years where the press put up at least a pretense of acting impartial as power shifted from pineapple and arms companies to tech monopolies.
I think the bigger change is that wealth is continuing to concentrate. The more wealth accrues under a few hands the more these people are able to exploit disproportionate control over the information environment.
The nuclear agreements with Iran worked very well, Iran followed them and there was peace. Then Trump unilateraly decided they weren't good enough anymore, refused Iran's requests to negotiate new ones, and joined Israel in their forever war against muslims in the goal of establishing a "Greater Israel".
The joint US-Israeli venture is the sole aggressor in this war, that much is clear to everyone not completely brainwashed.
Your analysis is useless, irrespective of how correct it is. There are countries with a freer press that fare better. Throwing your hands in the air and saying "it's all pointless, only fools care about improving things" is detrimental to fixing this mess.
This isn't rude, this is fucking insulting, and you know it.
> Collectively you don’t speak your minds and do not defend those who dare to do so.
Unlike Americans? Your democracy is in peril, not ours. Your press is under attack. Your free speech is threatened. Stop revelling in your ignorance and go do something about it.
Or don't. Maybe the world's ready to move on from American hegemony.
Neither of these two groups you mention hold any meaningful power anywhere, and have zero links with the issue of age verification: your comment is pure disinformation.
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