Why would you assume I was being national (implication: racial) about it. The national and cultural loyalties of the people working on these two products is highly similar.

I trust Instagram more because I was in the room when we said “using dwell as the signal and turning the online learning rate to who-the-fuck-cares is a bit much even for us”.

FB/Meta/IG’s bad, bad misses are just policy at ByteDance.

FB deliberately didn’t build this product because it’s kind of intense even as social media goes. Well ByteDance has decided that we’re all selling crack cocaine to 13-year-olds.

If anyone is going to display a modicum of social responsibility around this new lowest common denominator, it’s almost certainly FB.

It’s weird to find myself defending FB but in this instance it’s merited.

Nationalism is not racial. The implication is that you have more of a problem that China is seeing your data vs America just because it’s not your country, rather than both being equally bad (third party seeing and potentially using your data against your best interests or not compensating you for it).

Nationalism is the belief that your country is inherently better than others just because it is your country.

If everyone held this view then there would be no path that doesn’t lead away from national conflict, because all Chinese would choose China and all US people would choose US in these situations, rather than focusing on objective bad actors.

Are there even any good actors, when it comes to national governments?

Not saying that's an excuse for badness, but let's also not pretend that all governments are equally bad. I would rather the US violate my privacy than China, if those were my only choices.

Granted, currently I'm more or less physically out of reach of China's law enforcement, but well within the US's reach. So China having my data -- at least in the short term -- probably can't hurt me all that much. But longer term? Who knows.

"Equally bad" is objectively subjective. The reality is, especially on a long timeline, corrupt is corrupt and a degree of corruption is largely irrelevant. Instead we use the perceived degree of less corruption to justify nationalism and other things, and it's largely a matter of perspective. You probably wouldn't believe me but you ask the average Chinese person and they think the American government is just as corrupt as the Chinese. You may differ in your opinion. Who's right? Who knows? But I know one thing for sure, and it's that it doesn't matter who is less or more corrupt.

I’m on full take with both NSA and GHCQ minimum. I cut power to hardware when I want privacy. My ex-girlfriend is CIA, but uncle works for a defense contractor, and just for fun: I’m one of 10 or 20 colorful figures in tech who make a great story in the last ten years.

Have I seen shit? Yeah! Are you full of shit? Also yeah, unfortunately.

I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me. Could you elaborate?

I would disagree here. The incentives are quite different, as there are many foreign governments who are actively hostile and use the internet for extremely effective psyops. Social media is the #1 place for psyops with great success.

> The incentives are quite different, as there are many foreign governments who are actively hostile and use the internet for extremely effective psyops.

How does this differentiate them from domestic governments exactly?

For obvious reasons: they want to disrupt society, drop placement in the world, cause internal fractions that divert attention abroad to domestic strive, actively harm populations by spreading dangerous information, move fringes into the center to replace those who are effective with those who are not, cause macro economic harm, replace narratives of foreign adversaries to make them seem friendly or sow doubt that they are in fact doing bad things, rewrite narratives with their value systems instead, destabilize countries and cause civil war, cast doubt on things like democracy to shift the world to autocratic rule, etc etc.

Your question is phrased in a way that would be exactly the kinds of things that foreign adversaries want to achieve online: make people hate their local government so they throw their baby out with the bath water, meanwhile the foreign adversary keeps power with an iron fist and censorship so they don’t suffer the same consequences.

> For obvious reasons: they want to disrupt society, drop placement in the world, cause internal fractions that divert attention abroad to domestic strive, actively harm populations by spreading dangerous information,

Dd we really need foreign governments for this? They do it, but we get plenty of it right here at home. Covid made that plain enough, but so have decades of attacks on education and the middle class. In the US we even have government investigations into our own government for wanting to destabilize the country, cast doubt on our democracy and promote civil war.

I'm not saying foreign governments don't play these kinds of games too, but if pointing out my own nations very real problems and deficiencies makes me sound like foreign adversaries maybe those foreign governments aren't the biggest problem we have and we'd be better served cleaning house and looking at the problems within before pointing fingers at folks outside.

First of all, why would you want additional malfeasance? This is indefensible. It’s like saying with all the police shootings, who cares if foreign army’s are going around and shooting people.

Covid made plain that psyops work extremely well. A huge amount of disinformation came that way, in addition to a domestic audience that was very happy to incorporate it. Having a mistrust of authority in the first place makes this frictionless because it means you trust whatever you read online instead of your local authorities. That makes psyops easy peasy.

You can both not want foreign meddling and want to improve your local situation at the same time. Geopolitical issues are never a serial process, and they never end. There will never be a point where everyone agrees the domestic issues are now “fixed and everything is perfect” so now we can focus on the constant foreign attacks. That’s a false start.

Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. When you burn it all down you’re just left with ashes, and whatever the replacement is almost always cheaper and worse.

You can safely assume that any big company in a G8 country is spilling data to the spook arm of the other 7.

Perhaps but it’s different when it’s an ally and intelligence gathering to face larger threats. That’s not the same thing as trying to bring down another society at large.