Politicians often ask for silly things in connection with technologies they don't really understand, to achieve goals they don't really expect to achieve, just in order to look good to a certain part of the electorate.

Consider an analogy between modern social media sites and something like a phone network or postal mail service. What would happen if a politician suggested that phone companies or their national postal service should be required to monitor all communications for some vaguely-defined concept of suspicious activity, and then when something was flagged, have it reviewed by a human and if deemed inappropriate cut off the spread within X hours? It would be considered an absurd suggestion by just about everyone, for being impractical, expensive, intrusive, unreliable and of questionable benefit.

And yet, politicians keep suggesting that social media companies should be able to do almost exactly that. There are demands that these companies magically detect any sort of inappropriate content on their systems, and then remove it quickly. Small details like subjectivity, privacy and practicality never seem to feature in the press conference, though.

That's a terrible analogy, for two reasons.

1. Post and phone have an expectation of privacy so the government can't review them (in the US, at least)

2. There is already a system in place to review all phone calls in real time. It's run by several Western intelligence agencies to get around the monitoring rules mentioned in #1.

1 is merely an accident of history and a subjective question of what you consider a reasonable expectation of privacy.

Even if 2 is true, I doubt that system is preventing people from discussing controversial subjects like, say, climate change or politics, even if what the speakers are saying is untrue.

Yet posters on HN are the first ones to want the government to regulate tech.

It’s funny to see.

“Snowden showed how corrupt the gov’t is and how our privacy is at risk!”

“We should have the gov’t regulate communication on the big social networks!”

I think the last good thing that the government ever did with regards to tech in the US is cell phone number portability.

And I agree with them. Tech is far too unregulated today, and this causes massive damage to our societies.

But regulations should always be reasonable and proportionate, and expecting a social network to police all human communication via their system for vaguely specified bad content does not seem to clear that bar.

Yet the representatives who are going to pass laws are the same people who grilled Zuckerberg for Twitter’s practices.

Do you really trust their competence? All the laws being passed and all we got was shitty pop ups on every website saying “we use cookies”. Of course we also got the DMCA....

The government system in the US is essentially dysfunctional, as far as I can tell from outside. Fortunately, not everywhere is like that. All politicians are politicians, but some are more politician than others.

Another example for keyword matching: I work on a German/Polish team. We sent money for a birthday present from Germany to Poland. Someone used the colleagues' nickname "Kuba" in the subject line. The Paypal account of the Polish colleague was blocked afterwards. But he could resolve the issue via support afaik.

I'm guessing it's because of Cuba.

I'd wonder why the US is still embargoing Cuba after all these years. What's the endgame? What's the goal? The Cuban regime is still there and the Soviets are long gone. It seems petty and spiteful.

Florida is an important swing state, and it’s also the home to a lot of anti-Castro Cubans in exile, and their descendants. Politics.

Letting Cuba off the hook would require politicians to admit they are wrong and have been for decades. In contrast, keeping the sanctions up does not cost the government much and companies have long factored in the sanctions/compliance as cost of doing business, so there is no pressure on politics from that side.

Like most things in America it comes down to political pandering thanks to the two party system. You may have noticed a lot of progress or corruption on the Cuba front in recent memory based on your political affiliation. There is a large “Cuban” American population that primarily hates the regime in control of Cuba and will support the political opponent that is speaking tough on Cuba. Whether you care about Soviet’s or Communism or revenge is irrelevant because what you do care about is south Florida and South Florida still cares deeply.

And we have to care about South Florida because of the undemocratic system of the electoral college.

Just to augment the story: Kuba is not an internet nickname. It is a shorter form of given name Jakub (Jacob). I use Jakub only in documents and during formal events. For everyone else I'm Kuba.

I wonder if Cuba Gooding Jr. has issues any time he tries to do something online with PayPal or such