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Comment by sebow | Hacker News Reader

This would have been a mistake if it was facebook's first rodeo, it's not.

For the last couple of years anything that used to be "Merry Christmas" was actively suppresed on mainstream social networks.Replaced with Happy holidays, whatever.A company adjusting this is fine,obviously(you don't have to repeatedly wish happy X, you just do it one time), however in the case of individuals where it's more common that a person only says Merry Christmas/Happy hanukkah/etc, we've repeatedly seen that such messages get "lost".Again, it's not a mistake, but then again if you point out that facebook actively engages in this behavior through leaked documents, nobody bats an eye.

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It's possible that content-based suppression happens, but it's also possible that the genericized phrase organically generates more engagement by virtue of it being likeable to way more people. If all your followers celebrate the same holiday then it should be a wash but if huge chunks don't then it's purely the numbers doing their thing. Even some who celebrate the mentioned holiday might find the message exclusionary enough to not engage (a woke feedback loop, you could say), further burying it.

I don't think they're talking about just getting the most likes, or whatever but rather censorship via shadow-banning or outright deleting posts. I have seen it happen, and suspect there are those that work to "poison" the algorithms to get them to shadow ban the political side the hacker doesn't like.

> I have seen it happen

That's an extraordinary claim. Do you have evidence?

No it is not an extaordinary claim at all. Moderators on any random forum can set these tools up.

And yes I literally had my post shadowbanned for a benign statement that apparently had the wrong keywords in the wrong arrangement or something. So yes in that sense I have evidence.

I agree entirely with your point, but I'd take it one step further. Christmas for a lot of people (even those that do celebrate) can be a very depressing and lonely time of the year, even more so in these post covid times. I prefer a generic "happy holidays" as it applies to more people, though I've moved onto "happy solstice - the days are finally getting longer (or about to)". I think that's a little bit of positivity that it's actually worth reminding people of.

This year, Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah are almost a month apart (Hanukkah started on Nov 28th). So you'd have to either have Merry Christmas in November, or do it twice anyway :)

A Jewish couple that I'm friends with takes a pragmatic approach to this: they celebrate Hanukkah and Christmas!

Or you could say Happy Hanukkah at first and then switch to Merry Christmas once Hanukkah is over.

based on the dates that retailers put out all the christmas stuff immediately after halloween, it's apparent that christmas has already gone retrograde by date far into november already...

there's stores around here with their whole aisle of valentines day candy, gifts, red heart balloons etc already stocked.

There's a fairly rational psychological explanation to it. When people cannot achieve a certain goal for a while, they convince themselves that the goal is not worth it, or tainted in some way.

Christmas has been traditionally associated with family, kids, happiness, seeing retired grandparents, etc. All these things have been sliding out of reach for the middle class with no reversal in sight. So this creates tension against people that can still afford it, and a perception that these goals are unfair and should not be pursued.

This is to be expected - it's not like the journalists writing the politically correct articles, HR people defining acceptable language, or moderators deciding on what gets approved are paid enough to afford what used to be a regular middle-class life 2 decades ago. So they rebel against it by trying to stigmatize it in the way they can.

And it's not like you can blame them either - the human brain is very adaptive at picking goals and means. If you take personal prosperity through hard work out of question, people will find other goals to pursue, it's just they will be much more divisive...

This seems like an awfully abstract theory.

I think it's simpler to say that "Merry Christmas" vs "Happy Holidays" has become this point of contention because Merry Christmas only applies to Christians, whereas Happy Holidays does not.

The divisive, bi-partisan nature of American politics has just turned this small distinction into a fight.

> Merry Christmas only applies to Christians

Really it doesn’t. I’d bet that the majority, worldwide, of people celebrating Christmas this year are not practicing Christians. Most won’t go to church, even on Christmas Day.

Sure, but most of them are probably "culturally Christain" in a broad sense. For example, most of them would be able to explain in broad terms the religious significance of the festival and feel comfortable following a number of religiously tinged Christmas traditions. It's worth bearing in mind that most religious festivals are not celebrated only by devout followers of the relevant religion.

Oh, I think there's more than that. It's somehow not divisive for Jews to congratulate wide audiences with Hanukah. It's not divisive for Muslims to congratulate their audiences with Ramadan. It's not divisive for Chinese to wish others with happy Chinese New Year. But it's somehow "problematic" to say "Merry Christmas".

In all honesty, I can't imagine being offended if someone congratulated me with a holiday they celebrate and I don't. I would congratulate them back and maybe ask how they celebrate it to learn something new. On the other hand, if the Christmas experience was something the previous generation used to have, and I got priced out of it, "Merry Christmas" would sound like someone is rubbing it in...

This is right wing propaganda nonsense. Very few people are offended by someone wishing them a Merry Christmas. There is no war on Christmas.

Very few are actually offended, but tons of people know that there's a widespread discussion about not offending, and avoid poking the hornet's nest for that reason. Not quite analogous to, but eerily reminiscent of, the Latino/Latinx idea.

The alleged “War on Christmas” (and the idea associated idea that it is somehow no longer possible to say “merry Christmas”) are by no means a new phenomenon. They have long been favorite talking points of Ron Paul and the AFA, for example.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2003/12/ron-paul/the-war-on-reli...

If the President of the USA can say “merry Christmas” without anyone complaining, then I’d have to say that the scale of the issue is (and always has been) enormously exaggerated in the rough and tumble of American culture wars.

https://mobile.twitter.com/joebiden/status/13424900307874078...

No its not. I am at college and I have been this 2 times this year. 1 time I said "Merry Christmas" to a group and a girl found me later 1 on 1 and said that I should "think about being more inclusive" because different people celebrate different holidays in this season. Second time I said it to a different group when I arrived and a girl straight up interjected "And happy holidays!" Right after i said it, she wasn't arriving with me or anything.

As we all know: just because you havent personally experienced something doesnt mean it doesnt happen :)

Btw my college isnt even super leftie wing so I was surprised.

Is something wrong about thinking about being more inclusive?

No? Then why did a Merry Christmas by a right wing politician message get automatically flagged specifically for being "discriminatory"? Obviously someone somewhere thinks it's at best a gray area.

I think john_moscow's theory has a lot of merit, although I think it's more related to general D&I ideology than people being priced out of Christmas specifically. They're just desperate for ways to show how much they care about foreigners vs local people, and this is one more way.

[citation needed]

Do you have some sources for further reading? That sounds disturbingly Orwellian.

I don't like how those tin foil hats I used to laugh at were just ahead of their time. Your TV spying on you or your phone apps waging war against Christmas ...

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