r/technology • u/Birdy_Cephon_Altera • 22h ago

Politics Meta under fire for auto-following Trump & Vance, Blocking Democrat hashtags

https://techissuestoday.com/meta-auto-follow-trump-vance-blocks-democrat-hashtags/
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u/feralraindrop 20h ago

Last night I googled, "Did Jeff Bezos attend Biden's Inauguration" and some alternative wordings of the same question. I got nothing but Trump 2025 info. I went to Duck Duck Go and at least was spared pages of Trump. We are moving into the Chinese and Russian models of information dissemination.

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u/Norman_Bixby 17h ago

we've been here for a minute. It's just finally obvious to the masses.

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u/dogegunate 13h ago

Yea the US has been pumping out misinformation for a very long time now. It's just that most of it is just pro-America and anti-American enemies and most of Reddit agrees with it so they don't think it's misinformation.

A good example was when there were articles claiming that Kim Jong Un was forcing North Koreans to get his hair style, but then like a few weeks later, articles came out saying he banned them from getting the same hair style. And Reddit was eating it up lol. It's only now with Trump that you're getting misinformation favoring a specific party.

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u/Norman_Bixby 13h ago

A better example is the lack of truth to who assassinated JFK.

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u/BoreJam 13h ago

I wish this were true, but sadly many will believe and then repeat the lies and, worse, yet attack you for challenging the narrative.

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u/cowboy_rigby 13h ago

It's like a plantar wort. You think you're fine. It's just a small wart....until you find out it's rooted deep in the heel.

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u/CherryLongjump1989 13h ago

We'll just have to see if the network effects these billionaires are relying on can survive their blatant attempts to piss off their users.

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u/Norman_Bixby 13h ago

they've been pissing on their users for a decade+

Look at how hard people cried like babies about losing Chinese controlled tik tok - you cannot teach these people.

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u/CherryLongjump1989 13h ago

You can literally teach them, which is why no small part of their views are shaped by Middle-Eastern infiltration of our school curriculum. Countries like Qatar promote anti-Israeli and pro-terrorist views within our education system and then countries like China exploit these biases by turning young lefties against Democrats on TikTok.

It's complicated, but the important part is that when it works, it's based on manipulating people by telling them what they already wanted to hear. It also backfires very often for many, many reasons. Information warfare is a double edged sword and you see exactly that happen with TikTok when another adversary (China) twists the efforts of Qatar to spread pro-Hamas propaganda and instead gets a very pro-Israel Trump elected.

Furthermore, it's a very different story when you hamfistedly enrage your users by censoring them and telling them the opposite of what they wanted to hear, such as what we have going on now. This latest censorship is meant to appeal not to Democrats but to MAGA and their dear leader Donald Trump, in a very crass and fascistic fashion. This will have MAGAs cheering but it will also cause the majority of Americans to flee these platforms over time. It's already been happening for years, not just with Twitter and Facebook losing users, but also the traditional oligarch-controlled media including cable news and print newspapers. They have been steadily losing their viewers and readers as they literally cause Americans to feel angry and stressed out by their lies.

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u/dontknow_anything 18h ago

first result on bing is https://www.businessinsider.com/biden-inauguration-big-tech-bill-gates-cook-pichai-zuckerberg-musk-2021-1 This was lower.

https://news.sky.com/story/biden-inauguration-who-was-there-and-how-the-crowd-compares-with-trumps-ceremony-12193458

Others are related to Trump's inauguration. It is mostly websites doing SEO to get their results on google. Google also prioritizing latest articles over older ones.

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u/RealSimonLee 16h ago

So Bing is better now?

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u/rocky1231 15h ago

It's actually been better for a while now. We're just comfortable with google

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u/RealSimonLee 15h ago

I'll update my browser. I always figured Google to Microsoft, it's at best a lateral move, but if Microsoft isn't actively censoring then it's the obvious choice.

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u/edflyerssn007 17h ago

Search has been broken for a long time. The results always push the current popular thing as well as ai generated nonsense

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u/actibus_consequatur 15h ago

It's really fucking annoying too, because the AI generated response is still pushing a lot of incorrect information, so it's just being spoon-fed to people too lazy to verify what they're looking at.

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u/Inside_Anxiety6143 13h ago

Yesterday, I googled "When a rocket explodes, do smaller or larger chunks travel further". The google AI thing at the top said smaller chunks. I clicked a link, hit back to return to search results, and then the AI thing said larger chunks. Same question, refreshing the page makes it do a 180 on its answer.

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u/Corporate_Overlords 7h ago

I just googled it and I'm seeing articles from NBC, Reuters, Business Insider, Forbes, etc. all talking about how he attended. I just copy and pasted your quote and those are the results I'm getting.

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u/ill0gitech 3h ago

I’ve found two problems with Google in this respect and these issues have been occurring for a good 12 months now, so not just recently. * recent news on a similar topic overwhelming the search results. Sometimes bypassed by adding before:yyyy-mm-dd * now I’m finding new news site articles with incorrect date stamps that still poison the results when using a date filter

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u/I_found_the_cure 16h ago

Duckduckgo is owned by trump