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Comment by mhoad | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know how familiar you are with his more controversial things but he more than almost any billionaire I can think of from the top of my head is very much interested in controlling the little guy.

Admittedly not at all for their own good and purely in pursuit of his own goals.

He is widely acknowledged as a big part of the reason why Facebook is “the way it is” as this pipeline of radicalisation for a huge number of people.

He then repeatedly abused his access to that kind of thing by working with groups like Cambridge Analytica and Steve Bannon etc for explicitly partisan purposes to further fuck with vulnerable people.

I can’t ever forgive that.

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He pushed facebook to optimize for engagement, and used the tools facebook developed like every other propagandist.

Honestly, that's fine. The Obama campaign was lauded for similar social advertising, and had a direct relationship with facebook. That's how political campaigning works.

The converse is billionaires advocating for information control, and pushing to see that only those they endorse have a platform. So fat as I'm aware, Thiel hasn't done that. My position on him would change significantly if he had.

What a strange moral compass…

The key difference between suppressing information, and spreading misinformation is that someone exposed to misinformation can consciously choose to reject it, or find alternatives. If as a consequence of their conclusions they decide to cause harm, then you can always imprison or shoot them.

At its most extreme, suppressing information gives your subject no such freedom. You put them in an intellectual cage. You deny them the ability to choose their convictions.

The theoretical model you are talking about here sounds ok at first glance but bares no resemblance to how it has played out in reality the last ten years.

People are not rational actors no matter how much we want them to be.

Turns out it’s really simple to convince people to act against their own self interest on a mass scale with a few psychological tricks.

Someone who knowingly and repeatedly spent their time, money and resources doing that for their own personal gain when they were already at the top of society is worthy of contempt and maybe worse.

I never claimed they were purely rational actors. I beleieve it's an affront to their dignity to treat them otherwise, however.

Concealing dangerous information from them turns them into intellectual eunichs, and strip much of the vitality from the human experience.

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