Zuckerberg knows that threatening Wynn-Williams for standing in wooden silence on a stage makes him look like history's most guillotineable billionaire.
There's quite a bit of competition out there ,,,
mc32 · 2026-06-27 15:35:42 UTC
I kinda get the hate but harking back to the la terreur doesn’t do anyone any favors and instead will engender strange bedfellows.
hedora · 2026-06-27 15:47:53 UTC
Do you have a concrete suggestion that is better in some way?
tetris11 · 2026-06-27 15:50:00 UTC
It took the literal burning down of aristocratic homes during the english reforms of 1832 for the House of Lords to finally sit down with Earl Grey and hash out a bill that would finally grant large populated cities like Manchester actual voting rights.
The French Revolution was still fresh in minds of these elites - the July Monarchy having just taken place - and yet still they let it escalate to the point of near civil war.
JumpCrisscross · 2026-06-27 16:22:59 UTC
The point is a guillotine somewhere else is good. Guillotines at home don’t particularly hurt the rich as a class. (It’s debated whether France’s elite actually consolidated wealth and power through its revolutions.)
dagenleg · 2026-06-27 18:06:04 UTC
Not the best success story, granted, but socialist revolutions in China and Russian Empire had definitely hurt the rich as a class. Definitively even.
JumpCrisscross · 2026-06-27 20:40:57 UTC
> socialist revolutions in China and Russian Empire had definitely hurt the rich
Communist revolutions hurt the rich. As you say, they sowed the seeds of a new oppression. (It’s difficult to see how one could avoid that. If you put a group of people in charge of choosing who to execute and what property to take and give to whom, you’re going to have a tough time clawing that power back.)
Broadly speaking, people angling for violent revolution in America are idiots. The rich ones who count on winding up on top take for granted the quality of their lives in a democracy. The ones who aren’t billionaires, broadly, are historically illiterate about the direction wealth concentration flows amidst violence.
microgpt · 2026-06-28 10:15:24 UTC
Healthcare denials plummeted for a few months after that CEO died
JumpCrisscross · 2026-06-28 13:22:20 UTC
> Healthcare denials plummeted for a few months after that CEO died
Source? I’ve seen this claim, but it doesn’t appear in any aggregate statistics from what I can tell.
Also, middle manager with a “CEO” title. The billionaire who owns the group is fine.
sterlind · 2026-06-27 18:54:43 UTC
"A riot is the language of the unheard." ~ MLK Jr.
gilrain · 2026-06-27 16:06:17 UTC
Oh, well better let them destroy everything with greed then. Wouldn’t want to break, like, five eggs to save every other egg in the world…
The ethics become laughably simple, with as far as they’ve taken the resource imbalance. They should be very worried.
mananaysiempre · 2026-06-27 16:20:23 UTC
The phrase about omelette and eggs (or rather its direct counterpart, about timber and chips) ended up as the unofficial primary justification for Stalin’s Great Purge, so the point about strange bedfellows stands. Twentieth-century Russia is in general a good example of what happens when you systematically eradicate the country’s elites, regardless of how unfairly they have gotten into the position or how miserable everybody else is.
The broader point, dating back to at least the French Revolution, is that once you establish the precedent that killing opponents is a way to win, it only takes a decade or two before the most ruthless killers become the winners. All proxy metrics are bad, including electability, but this one is especially awful. I’m more puzzled by why some violent movements do seem to have had some success than by why most didn’t.
SpicyLemonZest · 2026-06-27 16:27:00 UTC
You generally don't get to choose how few eggs you'd like to break. As Olympe de Gouges found during the French Revolution, revolutions tend to be run by people who enjoy the process of breaking eggs, and if you call for it to stop they may decide that you are an egg who needs breaking.
Ifkaluva · 2026-06-27 17:46:21 UTC
Reminds me of Thucydides describing some of the civil wars that erupted in various cities in the wake of the Pelopponesian war.
He says that when order breaks down, thoughtful moderates are treated as weak cowards, and that simple-minded but aggressive people make the first move and kill off thoughtful people who think they will be able to make compelling arguments.
Waterluvian · 2026-06-27 16:10:42 UTC
I think some people imagine the rule of law to be a replacement for the law of nature. I think it sits in front, protecting all parties from a much more violent form of justice.
If billionaires fail to support the rule of law, especially if they wield their immense power to press on the scales, they should not be surprised when people lose faith in the more civil option.
loeg · 2026-06-27 16:59:08 UTC
Where are you seeing billionaires not supporting the rule of law (and Zuckerberg in particular)?
microgpt · 2026-06-28 10:14:38 UTC
Every time they don't arrest the pedophile in chief, for example?
jjgreen · 2026-06-27 16:21:04 UTC
I'd be a happy tricoteur
nullbio · 2026-06-27 15:12:08 UTC
People just submitted it. I don't know why. They "trust me". Dumb fucks.
username135 · 2026-06-27 15:15:20 UTC
^
alex1138 · 2026-06-27 16:36:03 UTC
Oh no, but he was "making a point". Or he was young. He was "right" that it's bad to give up your info (so Zuck hammered home the point by scraping email contacts and using it to populate People You May Know. for your own good)
You didn't hear that out of Myspace or Friendster or anyone else that's trusted with information
Minimum threshold should be "People should be less forgiving of just giving away credentials but now that I have them I'll protect them with my life". Oh well. Apparently I'm just an idiot
He was just joking just like he was joking when he said he'd "fuck the Winklevosses in the ear"
nullbio · 2026-06-27 17:28:32 UTC
Of course, we all make mistakes. Just like when he accidentally made a free VPN to spy on peoples traffic. Sorry bros, networking malfunction!
menloshark · 2026-06-28 08:22:06 UTC
If you like him so much, you should go work for him. Then call us back
alex1138 · 2026-06-28 15:10:44 UTC
What? Sorry, how much more sarcasm should I have in one post? It's clear that I don't like what he did
And sometimes I outright wasn't being sarcastic. But my point was some people say "he was right for saying that". But you don't hear that from literally anyone else. Google doesn't say it. Banks don't say it. The minimum threshold as I said in my comment was "I'll defend personal info" even if you think people theoretically shouldn't give it a way. But Zuck for example has been known to password scrape
The whole comment was about me not liking him
menloshark · 2026-06-29 00:55:15 UTC
look, he's bad, don't work for him, just burn this into your memory, it's not that complicated
nullbio · 2026-06-29 05:18:34 UTC
I thought it was pretty obvious that your post was sarcasm, fwiw. I think people just skimmed it.
LightBug1 · 2026-06-27 15:15:09 UTC
I submit that the human brain isn't equipped to handle control of multi-hundreds of billions of dollars cap and the working lives of hundreds of thousands of individuals. Particularly if you're morally suspect to begin with.
This is just one of countless obvious examples.
wat10000 · 2026-06-27 15:17:49 UTC
Money is power. Power corrupts.
smt88 · 2026-06-27 15:31:55 UTC
I wonder if power actually corrupts, or if it’s really that attaining power requires pretending to be a good person, and the mask can fall off after the power is attained.
raverbashing · 2026-06-27 15:34:44 UTC
I don't think it's fair to blame money in this case
yard2010 · 2026-06-27 15:38:24 UTC
It might be the other way around. There are powerful people with money that simply behave. A few assholes turn things into shit for everyone, when they also have money it just becomes worse.
smt88 · 2026-06-27 15:30:09 UTC
FDR is a very interesting case study. He had the country in the palm of his hand and could have cemented his (or his party’s) power permanently, but instead he left the republic intact.
lokar · 2026-06-27 15:35:54 UTC
That’s not what the right thinks. They are obsessed with him and rolling back the new deal.
hyhatqtv · 2026-06-27 15:47:39 UTC
The New Deal was mostly rolled back a while ago. After all corporatism did generally fall out of fashion for after WW2 (and of course there was quite a bit of opposition of state planning due to geopolitical reasons in the 50s and later)
lokar · 2026-06-27 17:20:28 UTC
Social security? And the follow-up, Medicare?
hedora · 2026-06-27 18:34:27 UTC
Those are both being actively dismantled.
myroon5 · 2026-06-28 02:09:16 UTC
Social Security and Medicare are ~26% and ~16.5% of the federal budget (excluding the 15% of the budget that's just financing previous years' budgets):
He and the congress (and probably most of the country would have supported it) . There is an argument to be made that the Supreme Court was at least partially usurping the powers of the legislative and executive branches to impose its political policies.
Uhhrrr · 2026-06-27 17:25:08 UTC
Before the court packing threat, they were limiting the federal government's power to regulate commerce within states. Which is a power it doesn't actually have.
pdonis · 2026-06-27 17:40:01 UTC
And then they reversed course with Wickard v. Filburn and said it was perfectly OK for Congress to regulate, not just commerce within a single state, but farmers growing their own food on their own land for their own use. So FDR ended up getting what he wanted anyway.
jfengel · 2026-06-27 18:03:14 UTC
They have whatever power the Supreme Court decides they have. The Supreme Court decided that was their job, and thus far everyone has accepted it. The Court interprets the Constitution, which is vague enough to mean whatever a bare majority wishes it to mean.
danny_codes · 2026-06-28 00:00:34 UTC
> and thus far everyone has accepted it
For now. SC is becoming more partisan, which causes SC's credibility to decline. I assume there's a point where SC loses too much credibility and the existing system of balancing power breaks down.
hedora · 2026-06-27 17:40:42 UTC
At the time, the court was nearly as bad as currently.
In other news, Alito is claiming the Comstock Act is in full force, not the narrowed enforcement we’ve seen for the last, what 100 years?
According to that theory, they can censor mail and any other common carrier (objects and information) on moral grounds. They want to apply it to abortion pills first, but the statements made by the court imply they’ll be clamping down on “obscenities”, sex ed, political speech etc.
Note that this court already overturned the right to privacy (and the 4th amendment) when they overturned Roe v Wade.
That, plus mandatory age checks, porn bans, vpn bans, etc are already happening in blue and red states throughout the US.
By the time 2028 rolls around, if we don’t elect a president willing to charge the current clown show with treason, we will not have a democracy in the US. Court packing would be a tragic under-reaction.
yard2010 · 2026-06-27 15:41:11 UTC
As The President told FDR in Rick and Morty: "Try having an historical administration after Facebook goes online, you old-timey bitch!"
hyhatqtv · 2026-06-27 15:43:03 UTC
Well actual dictators generally do those things because they need to subvert the constitutional to stay in power. Roosevelt didn’t need any of that in order to make sure he remained president for the remainder of his lifetime.
After all there was a constitutional amendment pass soon after to stop any president from doing what FDR did.
kmeisthax · 2026-06-27 16:26:30 UTC
FDR actually kinda did do that. He broke the Washington precedent and ran for President four times, he scared the Supreme Court shitless to the point where they signed off on blatantly unconstitutional land grabs against Japanese emigrants, and the Democratic Party was able to ride high on the fumes of the Progressive movement for decades afterward.
We don't think of him as a dictator, because a lot of what he did was ultimately reforms necessary to maintain America as a republic. The alternative would have been Nazi America. But he was still exercising dictatorial power, and he was responsible for massively increasing the power of the Presidency as a result. Hell, part of the reason why Trump is so dangerous is specifically because of the damage FDR did to the checks and balances on the Executive Branch.
zhoBEENG · 2026-06-28 13:42:21 UTC
Thank you for this; you are completely correct but this is not the narrative on the streets. He was a tyrant (in the original sense) and dictator who believed in absolute power of the executive, which paved the way for Trump. His federalization program wiped out the America that existed before. Like Trump, he ruled via mob passion. He was America’s Marius.
ceejayoz · 2026-06-27 15:30:47 UTC
Especially once you start icing out people who push back.
bhickey · 2026-06-27 15:20:15 UTC
> Kaplan is an oaf whose plan to provide paid internet access to refugee camps falls apart once he learns that refugees in camps don't have any money (he also takes points off of Wynn-Williams' workplace evaluation for being "unresponsive" over a period when she was in a near-death coma).
The same Joel Kaplan who was involved in a coup?
alex1138 · 2026-06-27 16:47:43 UTC
And now head of global policy at Metabook
KaiserPro · 2026-06-27 19:25:29 UTC
> The same Joel Kaplan who was involved in a coup?
Brooks Brothers demonstration for the 2000 election
joquarky · 2026-06-27 20:16:05 UTC
That is one of those events that makes me dislike the many worlds interpretation.
datakan · 2026-06-27 15:28:20 UTC
Seems pretty clear to me that he's a full blown sociopath. I know it's bad form to diagnose people online but the guy basically prides himself on it and makes no attempt to hide it. He just doesn't view others as human being.
pydry · 2026-06-27 15:34:15 UTC
This is quite normal. Most billionaires spend their life surrounded by people who flatter them and indulge their every whim and agree with their every prejudice.
throwyawayyyy · 2026-06-27 15:38:42 UTC
It's the Silicon Valley circular-reasoning meritocracy in action: those with the billions deserve to have the billions because they have managed to get the billions. Every extra dollar only goes to prove how little they need to listen to those with less.
ryandrake · 2026-06-27 16:36:44 UTC
Not just Silicon Valley, although SV is definitely the poster child for this mentality. It’s a problem all over the world. Obtaining X fully justifies having X. Nobody cares about the “how.”
bwfan123 · 2026-06-27 17:07:05 UTC
> Nobody cares about the “how.”
The rich man is also perceived by the lizard brain to be wise, intelligent, witty, and handsome.
Terr_ · 2026-06-27 18:12:14 UTC
An aspect of the "just-world fallacy", where ultimately good things happen to good people, so if a good thing happened to you, you must have been good, etc.
at some point we have to accept that money turns normal people into paychopaths along multiple trajectories. and tax the shit out of them to prevent the healthcare costs.
hack1312 · 2026-06-27 16:40:41 UTC
“Paychopaths” is a pretty apt typo
hyhatqtv · 2026-06-27 15:49:16 UTC
> He just doesn't view others as human being
Well (allegedly) being a robot lizard would explain that. Neither are known for a lot of empathy towards human beings.
consensus1 · 2026-06-27 16:48:45 UTC
You don't know anything about him. He doesn't speak in public much and every single source on him has obvious incentives to lie.
avalys · 2026-06-27 15:35:58 UTC
“Zuck is also revealed to have given the Chinese state access to all of Facebook and the power to censor content they disliked, as part of a failed bid to get permission to offer a Facebook service in China.”
This did not happen and I’m not aware of any evidence or allegations that it did. Williams claims that Meta indicated they would accept China’s demand to give the Chinese government access to Chinese users’ data, as a condition of being allowed to operate in China. This is not the same as access to “all of Facebook”, and it didn’t happen at all because operating permission was never granted.
So, the author is a liar who distorts facts to make for a more interesting article. Don’t waste your time listening to people with no integrity.
What else that this article claims is distorted bullshit, I wonder?
Next time you read an article from “Pluralistic”, ask yourself, are they telling the truth or are they lying to push an agenda?
I have no particular connection to Zuck or Meta. I just find this behavior incredibly obnoxious and hypocritical.
laweijfmvo · 2026-06-27 15:56:41 UTC
i think the article is saying that’s what the book claims, not whether it’s true or false.
GlibMonkeyDeath · 2026-06-27 15:57:10 UTC
That's a quote from Corey Doctorow, not Sarah Wynn-Williams. I read her book. She was pretty careful to use your language (i.e., that it was offered, but not implemented, and was China-only data from what she related. Not that that is great either, of course...)
Her main allegations (that Facebook/Meta optimizes for profit at the expense of everything else) seem pretty unsurprising. I mean, given what has been observed, is this in any way controversial?
avalys · 2026-06-27 17:38:53 UTC
I’m referring to Doctorow’s credibility, not Williams.
potatos22 · 2026-06-27 15:58:18 UTC
it was called project aldrain. multiple internal employees made company wide memos on internal platforms and resigned. they factually did the stuff your talking about.
hedora · 2026-06-27 16:01:43 UTC
The Chinese rejected the offer, so I’m not sure what your point is.
Here’s an article from the Atlantic that was sponsored by the Koch Brothers (so, good luck arguing one sided political bias!) on Zuck’s strategy for whitewashing censorship of political speech:
> So, the author [Doctorow] is a liar who distorts facts to make for a more interesting article. Don’t waste your time listening to people with no integrity.
> What else that this article claims is distorted bullshit, I wonder?
E.g., "including its knowing encouragement of a genocide in Myanmar." You can certainly accuse Facebook of being incompetent at monitoring and moderating speech in Myanmar but calling it "knowing" or "encouraging" is just a lie. There's plenty to criticize without lying, but the lying ruins your case.
ppsreejith · 2026-06-27 17:56:30 UTC
Agreed. I don't like that you're downvoted for pointing this out as the language is very weasel-wordy (revealed to have? by who? what is all of Facebook?):
> Zuck is also revealed to have given the Chinese state access to all of Facebook
Tbf, the book actually makes the right claim that it's Chinese user data, not all of Facebook so the article is to blame.
stellar678 · 2026-07-01 00:47:45 UTC
Thing about Doctorow is, his primary driver is rage-based attention on himself. He seems to have very little regard for evidence or facts if that gets in the way of a rage-inducing story.
If we're going to have an effective movement checking bad behavior of big tech companies, we better start policing people like Doctorow who put themselves at the center of things with made-up shit and risk blowing the credibility of the whole movement.
liendolucas · 2026-06-27 15:37:17 UTC
All that it was ruled against her should be illegal. It should also be illegal for companies to add abusive contract clauses that directly go against basic rights as freedom of speech.
Disgusting set of human beings Zuck and company.
Read the book and then decide if it's worth continuing on FB.
mananaysiempre · 2026-06-27 16:06:30 UTC
I mean, a lot of people these days, including a lot of anti-Facebook techies, seem to think it is right and proper to equate “freedom of speech” to the First Amendment to the US Constitution, scoped to the government only, whereas private actors can do whatever. (Though now that I think about it I don’t know if Doctorow does—hopefully not but I’ve been disappointed by quite a few childhood idols in this way over the last decade.)
Unproductive schadenfreude aside, how does one get not punishing opinions—even those that would put the listener in danger if implemented—broadly accepted as a value? I hesitate to say “accepted again” because I’m getting the impression this was always a fringe position, it’s just that on occasion said fringe intersected with the similarly small circle of people whose opinions were broadly publicized.
BoxFour · 2026-06-27 16:53:31 UTC
> how does one get not punishing opinions—even those that would put the listener in danger if implemented—broadly accepted as a value?
Taking you literally, I don't think that's possible. Social punishment (in the form of shunning, boycotts, "cancelling", etc) has been around as long as human society has existed and is incredibly popular.
If someone figures out how to reliably solve that, a few nobel prizes are probably awaiting them.
If you want to take a subset of this problem, maybe it's possible: Like if you mean corporations specifically, not all private actors.
mananaysiempre · 2026-06-27 17:41:07 UTC
> Social punishment (in the form of shunning, boycotts, "cancelling", etc) has been around as long as human society has existed and is incredibly popular.
True. There’s a reasonable argument[1] that such things should continue to exist. The strongest way of phrasing it, I think, is that we do not want to have to pass a law against being an arsehole, nor do we actually want the letter of such a law enforced with the full might of the state, but there still needs to be some way of punishing it. The only counterpoint here is, I think, that the severity of such punishments seems to be vastly underestimated.
(If you’re going to refer to ancient societies, many of them used or accepted such a punishment as a substitute for the death penalty, as for instance with the Roman custom of permitting voluntary exile before conviction. And that still in a world where you could travel a few hundred kilometers in the right direction and reasonably expect nobody to ever learn of your sins.)
Also beside the point, however. The question is not whether we should shun people (we should, with a fair few qualifications), but whether such penalties should be levied for words. I posit that no, for an overwhelming majority of words they shouldn’t, where the possible exceptions are somewhere around ongoing mass murder and the Milles Collines[2]; and that letting your opponents speak and listening to them should by default be virtuous, socially rewarded behaviour.
> The only counterpoint here is, I think, that the severity of such punishments seems to be vastly underestimated.
I suppose I disagree: Modern forms of this ("cancelling") are well-aware of the economic impact it can have on individuals, and indeed often this is the intended outcome. People on all sides of the political spectrum here understand the impact of impoverishment and homelessness (though they obviously disagree on what should be done about it).
> The question is not whether we should shun people (we should, with a fair few qualifications), but whether such penalties should be levied for words
I don't see how you ever disentangle these two. For a large part of the populace, there are some combinations of words they will find abhorrent and want to punish. The exact nature of that punishment is up for debate, but we've largely settled on the status quo here.
If you can find some way to keep people from wanting to punish some subset of words universally then congratulations, a few nobel prizes are indeed yours.
microgpt · 2026-06-28 10:13:33 UTC
Is that even something to be solved? If you say you want to gas the Jews, on most social media you get kicked out and I think that's fine.
KaiserPro · 2026-06-27 19:36:02 UTC
The problem for Wynn-Williams is that she would have signed a non-disparage agreement with facebook to get that healthcare and payment after being sacked. She hints at it in the book.
The reason why I assert this is because everyone who accepts a payoff from facebook also has to sign one. Like Facebook's employment contracts, which are essentially identical apart from the bonus, name, title and location, I strongly suspect the non-disparagement agreement is also largely the same.
They basically say that "Meta agrees to not call you a piece of shit, but you agree to never talk about facebook in public. if you do, we will ask for all that money back, as a debt"
Now, as its contract law, and depending on where the contract says its valid, there might be ways to allow what Wynn-Williams is doing. After all, you cant contract out of legal obligations.
If Cory spent more time actually doing research, rather than reeling off allegories like an LLM, we might have got some actual insight from him. Alas, its down to randoms on HN to do that.
nilirl · 2026-06-27 15:43:50 UTC
> denied her access to the legal system in all her dealings with Meta
How ... how is that legal? Why would that ever be made legal?
Apparently businesses can use contracts to opt out of regular public courts and agree on using a neutral decision-maker; an arbitrator.
But then the post says:
> Meta got its arbitrator – a lawyer who is paid by Meta to adjudicate contractual disputes instead of an actual judge
Huh? How's that legal?
Turns out, the law requires arbitrators to be neutral, but not the people choosing the arbitrators.
Arbitration services are businesses. So even though Meta doesn't directly pay the arbitrator, they pay the business picking the arbitrator.
Meaning, Meta has a long-term relationship with the arbitration service provider. They can choose to take their business elsewhere, if unhappy.
Imagine being Wynn-Williams, having a company of this size put a target on your head. I wonder how many live in silence because the paycheck is too good or the punishment too bad.
But an even larger point: most of HN is probably employed by a company that aspires to be Meta; HN is run by a VC fund that wants to make many Metas; and worse, unfortunately, I sometimes dream of being a Zuckerberg.
I am thoroughly seduced by a power I've never felt, even if I see it as poison.
CPLX · 2026-06-27 16:12:39 UTC
It’s not legal. There is a current federal lawsuit on this exact topic.
grayhatter · 2026-06-27 16:24:23 UTC
> I am thoroughly seduced by a power I've never felt, even if I see it as poison.
Meditate on the idea of the negative sum game the people who seek power prefer, and then about what you'd rather see them, or yourself do with that power. Because of the things I actually care about, I find that random fantastical/idealistic desire for power to be hollow, something much easier to see in comparison. I don't care about power, for powers sake (the best way, perhaps only way, to obtain power itself). All my power fantasies involve some sort of stopping people from using their power to abuse and take from others.
There's nothing wrong being seduced by power, if you're worried about how it might corrupt your ethical principals, just don't be foolish enough to copy the small minded power seekers (humans do love to emulate the people the see around them). You can seek and hold power, and then use it to do good things. Is that harder? Probably, but I can't articulate a single reason it would be harder than doing good things without power, which most people already don't do. So don't be tricked into power being the thing that corrupts. Most people are just shitty, and very few have meaningful power; sample bias can be a bitch.
jacobgold · 2026-06-27 15:59:25 UTC
Meta said in a statement that its “she accepted a large severance payment years ago...”
This is the only point from Meta that is legitimate. If she accepted payment in exchange for signing an NDA and then violated it, the appropriate remedy in this should be that she returns the money.
Which doesn't change the fact that Zuckerberg should be ashamed of using NDAs as a weapon like this. It's very small minded from a man who clearly wants to see himself as a great man of history.
bob001 · 2026-06-27 16:09:55 UTC
> using NDAs as a weapon like this.
This is standard in companies. I've seen companies give a pittance in exchange for a binding NDA and the person took it because they needed to pay rent that month. Meta is evil but in this case so is almost every other company and especially tech companies. Also, giving it back doesn't undo the contract, the deal was done.
jacobgold · 2026-06-27 16:16:43 UTC
Yes, NDAs are very common, but there are more and less ethical ways to use them.
A judge can decide to invalidate the contract entirely, which is what I'm suggesting would be the correct remedy in this case.
consensus1 · 2026-06-27 16:40:40 UTC
What grounds are there to void this contract that was agreed on my both parties?
jacobgold · 2026-06-27 16:53:31 UTC
We don't have all of the facts but the contract could be voided if it was signed under duress, used to hide misconduct and prevent whistleblowing, etc.
Comments
There's quite a bit of competition out there ,,,
The French Revolution was still fresh in minds of these elites - the July Monarchy having just taken place - and yet still they let it escalate to the point of near civil war.
Communist revolutions hurt the rich. As you say, they sowed the seeds of a new oppression. (It’s difficult to see how one could avoid that. If you put a group of people in charge of choosing who to execute and what property to take and give to whom, you’re going to have a tough time clawing that power back.)
Broadly speaking, people angling for violent revolution in America are idiots. The rich ones who count on winding up on top take for granted the quality of their lives in a democracy. The ones who aren’t billionaires, broadly, are historically illiterate about the direction wealth concentration flows amidst violence.
Source? I’ve seen this claim, but it doesn’t appear in any aggregate statistics from what I can tell.
Also, middle manager with a “CEO” title. The billionaire who owns the group is fine.
The ethics become laughably simple, with as far as they’ve taken the resource imbalance. They should be very worried.
The broader point, dating back to at least the French Revolution, is that once you establish the precedent that killing opponents is a way to win, it only takes a decade or two before the most ruthless killers become the winners. All proxy metrics are bad, including electability, but this one is especially awful. I’m more puzzled by why some violent movements do seem to have had some success than by why most didn’t.
He says that when order breaks down, thoughtful moderates are treated as weak cowards, and that simple-minded but aggressive people make the first move and kill off thoughtful people who think they will be able to make compelling arguments.
If billionaires fail to support the rule of law, especially if they wield their immense power to press on the scales, they should not be surprised when people lose faith in the more civil option.
You didn't hear that out of Myspace or Friendster or anyone else that's trusted with information
Minimum threshold should be "People should be less forgiving of just giving away credentials but now that I have them I'll protect them with my life". Oh well. Apparently I'm just an idiot
He was just joking just like he was joking when he said he'd "fuck the Winklevosses in the ear"
And sometimes I outright wasn't being sarcastic. But my point was some people say "he was right for saying that". But you don't hear that from literally anyone else. Google doesn't say it. Banks don't say it. The minimum threshold as I said in my comment was "I'll defend personal info" even if you think people theoretically shouldn't give it a way. But Zuck for example has been known to password scrape
The whole comment was about me not liking him
This is just one of countless obvious examples.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
For now. SC is becoming more partisan, which causes SC's credibility to decline. I assume there's a point where SC loses too much credibility and the existing system of balancing power breaks down.
In other news, Alito is claiming the Comstock Act is in full force, not the narrowed enforcement we’ve seen for the last, what 100 years?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_Act_of_1873
According to that theory, they can censor mail and any other common carrier (objects and information) on moral grounds. They want to apply it to abortion pills first, but the statements made by the court imply they’ll be clamping down on “obscenities”, sex ed, political speech etc.
Note that this court already overturned the right to privacy (and the 4th amendment) when they overturned Roe v Wade.
That, plus mandatory age checks, porn bans, vpn bans, etc are already happening in blue and red states throughout the US.
By the time 2028 rolls around, if we don’t elect a president willing to charge the current clown show with treason, we will not have a democracy in the US. Court packing would be a tragic under-reaction.
After all there was a constitutional amendment pass soon after to stop any president from doing what FDR did.
We don't think of him as a dictator, because a lot of what he did was ultimately reforms necessary to maintain America as a republic. The alternative would have been Nazi America. But he was still exercising dictatorial power, and he was responsible for massively increasing the power of the Presidency as a result. Hell, part of the reason why Trump is so dangerous is specifically because of the damage FDR did to the checks and balances on the Executive Branch.
The same Joel Kaplan who was involved in a coup?
which coup, you're gonna have to be more specific
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot
The rich man is also perceived by the lizard brain to be wise, intelligent, witty, and handsome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_fallacy
Well (allegedly) being a robot lizard would explain that. Neither are known for a lot of empathy towards human beings.
This did not happen and I’m not aware of any evidence or allegations that it did. Williams claims that Meta indicated they would accept China’s demand to give the Chinese government access to Chinese users’ data, as a condition of being allowed to operate in China. This is not the same as access to “all of Facebook”, and it didn’t happen at all because operating permission was never granted.
So, the author is a liar who distorts facts to make for a more interesting article. Don’t waste your time listening to people with no integrity.
What else that this article claims is distorted bullshit, I wonder?
Next time you read an article from “Pluralistic”, ask yourself, are they telling the truth or are they lying to push an agenda?
I have no particular connection to Zuck or Meta. I just find this behavior incredibly obnoxious and hypocritical.
Her main allegations (that Facebook/Meta optimizes for profit at the expense of everything else) seem pretty unsurprising. I mean, given what has been observed, is this in any way controversial?
Here’s an article from the Atlantic that was sponsored by the Koch Brothers (so, good luck arguing one sided political bias!) on Zuck’s strategy for whitewashing censorship of political speech:
https://web.archive.org/web/20191115132324/https://www.theat...
> What else that this article claims is distorted bullshit, I wonder?
E.g., "including its knowing encouragement of a genocide in Myanmar." You can certainly accuse Facebook of being incompetent at monitoring and moderating speech in Myanmar but calling it "knowing" or "encouraging" is just a lie. There's plenty to criticize without lying, but the lying ruins your case.
> Zuck is also revealed to have given the Chinese state access to all of Facebook
Tbf, the book actually makes the right claim that it's Chinese user data, not all of Facebook so the article is to blame.
His appearance on Ezra Klein's podcast a couple months ago surfaced a fabricated story about nurses being offered lower pay based on their credit report: https://www.reddit.com/r/ezraklein/comments/1qzp3sz/doctorow...
If we're going to have an effective movement checking bad behavior of big tech companies, we better start policing people like Doctorow who put themselves at the center of things with made-up shit and risk blowing the credibility of the whole movement.
Disgusting set of human beings Zuck and company.
Read the book and then decide if it's worth continuing on FB.
Unproductive schadenfreude aside, how does one get not punishing opinions—even those that would put the listener in danger if implemented—broadly accepted as a value? I hesitate to say “accepted again” because I’m getting the impression this was always a fringe position, it’s just that on occasion said fringe intersected with the similarly small circle of people whose opinions were broadly publicized.
Taking you literally, I don't think that's possible. Social punishment (in the form of shunning, boycotts, "cancelling", etc) has been around as long as human society has existed and is incredibly popular.
If someone figures out how to reliably solve that, a few nobel prizes are probably awaiting them.
If you want to take a subset of this problem, maybe it's possible: Like if you mean corporations specifically, not all private actors.
True. There’s a reasonable argument[1] that such things should continue to exist. The strongest way of phrasing it, I think, is that we do not want to have to pass a law against being an arsehole, nor do we actually want the letter of such a law enforced with the full might of the state, but there still needs to be some way of punishing it. The only counterpoint here is, I think, that the severity of such punishments seems to be vastly underestimated.
(If you’re going to refer to ancient societies, many of them used or accepted such a punishment as a substitute for the death penalty, as for instance with the Roman custom of permitting voluntary exile before conviction. And that still in a world where you could travel a few hundred kilometers in the right direction and reasonably expect nobody to ever learn of your sins.)
Also beside the point, however. The question is not whether we should shun people (we should, with a fair few qualifications), but whether such penalties should be levied for words. I posit that no, for an overwhelming majority of words they shouldn’t, where the possible exceptions are somewhere around ongoing mass murder and the Milles Collines[2]; and that letting your opponents speak and listening to them should by default be virtuous, socially rewarded behaviour.
[1] https://dynomight.net/bad/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_T%C3%A9l%C3%A9vision_Lib...
I suppose I disagree: Modern forms of this ("cancelling") are well-aware of the economic impact it can have on individuals, and indeed often this is the intended outcome. People on all sides of the political spectrum here understand the impact of impoverishment and homelessness (though they obviously disagree on what should be done about it).
> The question is not whether we should shun people (we should, with a fair few qualifications), but whether such penalties should be levied for words
I don't see how you ever disentangle these two. For a large part of the populace, there are some combinations of words they will find abhorrent and want to punish. The exact nature of that punishment is up for debate, but we've largely settled on the status quo here.
If you can find some way to keep people from wanting to punish some subset of words universally then congratulations, a few nobel prizes are indeed yours.
The reason why I assert this is because everyone who accepts a payoff from facebook also has to sign one. Like Facebook's employment contracts, which are essentially identical apart from the bonus, name, title and location, I strongly suspect the non-disparagement agreement is also largely the same.
They basically say that "Meta agrees to not call you a piece of shit, but you agree to never talk about facebook in public. if you do, we will ask for all that money back, as a debt"
Now, as its contract law, and depending on where the contract says its valid, there might be ways to allow what Wynn-Williams is doing. After all, you cant contract out of legal obligations.
If Cory spent more time actually doing research, rather than reeling off allegories like an LLM, we might have got some actual insight from him. Alas, its down to randoms on HN to do that.
How ... how is that legal? Why would that ever be made legal?
Apparently businesses can use contracts to opt out of regular public courts and agree on using a neutral decision-maker; an arbitrator.
But then the post says:
> Meta got its arbitrator – a lawyer who is paid by Meta to adjudicate contractual disputes instead of an actual judge
Huh? How's that legal?
Turns out, the law requires arbitrators to be neutral, but not the people choosing the arbitrators.
Arbitration services are businesses. So even though Meta doesn't directly pay the arbitrator, they pay the business picking the arbitrator.
Meaning, Meta has a long-term relationship with the arbitration service provider. They can choose to take their business elsewhere, if unhappy.
Imagine being Wynn-Williams, having a company of this size put a target on your head. I wonder how many live in silence because the paycheck is too good or the punishment too bad.
But an even larger point: most of HN is probably employed by a company that aspires to be Meta; HN is run by a VC fund that wants to make many Metas; and worse, unfortunately, I sometimes dream of being a Zuckerberg.
I am thoroughly seduced by a power I've never felt, even if I see it as poison.
Meditate on the idea of the negative sum game the people who seek power prefer, and then about what you'd rather see them, or yourself do with that power. Because of the things I actually care about, I find that random fantastical/idealistic desire for power to be hollow, something much easier to see in comparison. I don't care about power, for powers sake (the best way, perhaps only way, to obtain power itself). All my power fantasies involve some sort of stopping people from using their power to abuse and take from others.
There's nothing wrong being seduced by power, if you're worried about how it might corrupt your ethical principals, just don't be foolish enough to copy the small minded power seekers (humans do love to emulate the people the see around them). You can seek and hold power, and then use it to do good things. Is that harder? Probably, but I can't articulate a single reason it would be harder than doing good things without power, which most people already don't do. So don't be tricked into power being the thing that corrupts. Most people are just shitty, and very few have meaningful power; sample bias can be a bitch.
This is the only point from Meta that is legitimate. If she accepted payment in exchange for signing an NDA and then violated it, the appropriate remedy in this should be that she returns the money.
Which doesn't change the fact that Zuckerberg should be ashamed of using NDAs as a weapon like this. It's very small minded from a man who clearly wants to see himself as a great man of history.
This is standard in companies. I've seen companies give a pittance in exchange for a binding NDA and the person took it because they needed to pay rent that month. Meta is evil but in this case so is almost every other company and especially tech companies. Also, giving it back doesn't undo the contract, the deal was done.
A judge can decide to invalidate the contract entirely, which is what I'm suggesting would be the correct remedy in this case.