Funnily enough, these flagged topics seem to spark a lot of conversation, and the voices of the government supporters are not heard here...So they just flag and move on, not even trying to defend their position
I comment a lot about these matters on Reddit, and I'm very much against all that's happening in the USA.
But the reality is that the discourse i see here in these types of political posts is the same as on Reddit and the like. (Whether For or against )
It would be great if somehow the discussion added something different. Like the post about Iran censorship and the suggestions on technology to bypass it (I learned about Snowflake) .
But the problem with US related politics is that HN people are very emotionally invested (being Americans most of them) and that makes the discussion become very visceral.
They offer a chance for awareness, which is literally step one. Americans are some of the most propagandized people on Earth, and most don't even know it.
It's crucial that the tech community develops more awareness around censorship - no small share of the responsibility is with us.
Censoring stories about censorship, on a premier tech community and investment forum, just because the discussion gets 'visceral' is simply capitulation to any entity willing to try and make a discussion toxic. We need to do a lot better than that.
This is sad to me because I really want to hear the other perspective, and there is no place that exists (that I know of) for people who disagree with each other to have a real conversation. Nothing left but echo chambers.
But I think HN falls into this trap because the down vote button is used when people disagree with the other person, which imo is a misappropriation and what prevents people from sharing unpopular opinions.
Hard to do when your position is essentially indefensible.
Altman and Thiel have long had YC connections (obv); and for the last year or so Garry Tan and PG have been full-throatedly cheerleading Musk and DOGE on their Twitter pages.
Then there's the many connections between YC and the 'defense' industry; you know, the one making billions of dollars from wars that people speak out about on social media.
It's very easy to explain why posts get flagged here. It's a lot harder to digest why they don't get unflagged. Especially when all the posts about it are quickly removed, every single one.
Only TikTok in the U.S., though; everywhere else it's Bytedance still.
Which is hilarious sentence now because this government so pro free speech!!! sarcasm*
But seriously this is something that if my main gig was to create music or some art form, I wouldn't want to be on a corp run platform. I would want to own it myself and the all that data.
Trump got empty hands, he got totally played by the nice words of Rutte.
Edit: Your conversation is really mind boggling:
"Trump got a great deal on Greenland!"
"What deal?"
"How would I know?!?!?!"
> Trump got a standing ovation at Davos and got a deal for Greenland
And you don't know what is the deal, at all, so how can you base your entire argument in something you simply do not know? You don't know, you simply do not know.
Greenland and Denmark weren't present to make a deal.
And to quote Trump: "Well, the deal is going to be put out pretty soon and we'll see. It's right now a little bit in progress, but pretty far along." (from https://www.youtube.com/shorts/W_UE7h3nTmQ)
The deal that is "now a little bit in progress", sounds to me like there is no deal.
It might be manipulating people at home, but you're closer (still not close, obviously) to Russia than Sweden as far as a trustworthy business partner or ally now. We're suddenly not making any long term plans that rely on America or American companies where it's avoidable, I don't know if you understand how big of a shift that is.
Sorry but you are suffering from some kind of delusion here. He's not manipulating public perception in any way that is beneficial to him or the US. He's crashing his own public perception (which was already in the gutter to all but the sycophants and blind loyalists) and taking the US' reputation with him
“There is no greater danger than underestimating your opponent.” ― Lao Tzu
Let's run the clap-o-meter.
- Trump: https://www.youtube.com/live/qo2-q4AFh_g?si=1dLbyqmpVH39KtY1...
- Carney: https://youtu.be/CQOr9FcSf-M?si=vb4Z9fSOewRyV_7S&t=1130
Edit: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm24vjvy3n1o
"I was in the room when President Donald Trump entered and it's fair to say he got a good welcome from the crowd, certainly at the beginning. A standing ovation."
Exactly like you'd do with a toddler :)
After the previous public execution by ICE, Stephen Miller said they have federal immunity (which is a lie), and it led us to where we are now.
Trump is responsible for hiring these idiots.
People were leaving and stopped paying attention during Trump speech. It was just ... bad.
When the reporter asks: "Does it still include US having ownership of Greenland?"
Trump: "Um....eh...."
All this posturing and he ended up with nothing.
But I'm leaning towards incompetence. Some US generated stuff was most likely moved to Oracle shitboxes, causing encoding issues and unreliable streaming.
...or it's malice and they're scanning the data and intentionally throttling traffic for unwanted content.
So the best we can do is anecdotal examples. And it’s also obvious that Trump avoided banning TikTok for months, illegally, because he wanted to have another platform serve as a mouthpiece. He now has that by forcing a sale of TikTok to his friend, Larry Ellison.
It should be fucking table stakes for being able to run a business with that much power and influence.
It’s really hard to say which video will work or not. What people react to and what not.
All I’m saying is that this could also potentially be explained by "The Algorithm" per se.
Anyway, considering that the purchase of the American TikTok was done with a purpose and there is documented collusion between the involved tech Billionaires and the political class behind the street executions in American cities that drive those protests, I wouldn’t be surprised that they are actually throttling this time.
https://www.theverge.com/news/867625/tiktok-down-weekend-bro...
Also, do you mean minority of the total US population or minority of the voting population?
For one reference point I fully support ICE. And I think it's wild you have local and state politicians encouraging actions against federal agents who are enforcing federal law.
The Gestapo, too, was federal agents enforcing federal law.
https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/53939-more-americ...
Social media that actually have a large audience and that cannot be easily pressured by the US government?
https://www.npr.org/2026/01/27/nx-s1-5689104/tiktok-epstein-...
No one can know what TikTok censors or penalizes in its algorithms. All other social media platforms are equally intransparent, what is new is that TikTok is not American.
https://www.theverge.com/news/867625/tiktok-down-weekend-bro...
This is the problem with any kind of censoring media. The initial intentions of those policies might have been good, but these kind of policies can so easily be abused for malign intentions.
They raise alarms because they have low TikTok view counters. But mass killings of Iranian protesters is Iran's own business.
You may have gone onto the platform and seen nothing but the same sort of vapid memes as anywhere else, but you see that's just how insidious and clever those Chinese are.
We're not exerting control over the narrative, we're protecting the truth from foreign influence.
There is no genocide in ba sing se.
incredible beyond words that this was a unanimous decision by the supreme court. letting the us government set up whatever arraigned marriage it felt like for buying a social network is some wild meddling with businesses. and here we are, with the ultra capitalists doing exactly what they want to with one of the most popular social networks.
excellent write up for this absolute madness of a court decision, TikTok v. Garland and the First Amendment Anticanon by Evelyn Douek, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6118706
I've heard people say housing policy has failed because it's too neoliberal meaning too free market, and then other people say it's failed because it's too neoliberal i.e. too much government intervention.
Neoliberalism is basically just markets-by-default and evidence-based alternatives when they fail.
Whatever the rules are, people end up adapting to and gaming them to entrench and grow their own position, typically at the expense of everyone else.
That’s a contradiction.
"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"
"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
"I did," said Ford. "It is."
"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't people get rid of the lizards?"
"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"
- Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
It's a contradiction only if you understand democracy as a theoretical ideal. Practical democracies, as implemented in western countries, in recent decades proven themselves to be completely controllable by capital, both the democratic elites and democratic masses.
I think we should rather go with practical outcome not the stated theoretical ideas. It's also a good way of evaluating communism and probably other systems.
Although re your actual point: the current admin only gifts things like this to a chosen few; a small subset of those with extreme capital. So it seems much more appropriate to call it cronyism, or some such thing, rather than capitalism in the sense of merely controlling capital.
And if they wouldn’t, they would be blocked or prevented of doing business in the US.
Wasn't there something about an amendment to their constitution? I believe it might've even been the first? Something about freedom of speech?
Maybe I'm just misremembering, but I could've sworn conservatives kept harping on about it.
It only restricts the Federal government (later extended to state governments IIRC?)
This is one of many reasons Federal government is now partnered with private business.
https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/google-admi...
They got Paramount and CBS and TikTok, are allied with Twitter, and still have a chance of grabbing Warner.
I don’t think American billionaires ever particularly liked Murdoch, an Australian, controlling so much of the media environment in their country. Maybe they’ll make an offer for Fox News that the Murdoch heirs can’t refuse.
I mean, both are signals of celebrity - the presence of a Wikipedia page, and the awards.
It looks like you have paramilitaries roaming your streets - not wearing ID or proper uniforms, covering their faces to avoid identification, not answering to usual democratic controls - executing protestors.
In the latest incident, they seemed to be beating and spraying a woman with a chemical agent for filming them, and then executing a bystander who tried to help her. The regime then tried to deny reality and falsely claim that they'd attacked said paramilitary operatives.
In any Western democracy (and I'm not sure if the US is currently part of that category) there would be a public investigation, but they seem to have been squirrelled away and the politicians who have spoken out about it have been threatened.
This all seems to be fascistic by any reasonable standard.
Covering their faces to avoid doxing and being attacked at their homes.
Really? Is that why they have vests with labels that say "POLICE FEDERAL AGENT" front and back? Maybe literacy is an issue.
> covering their faces to avoid identification
Same reason SWAT and special forces covering their faces. Because just like them, ICE arrests and deports violent criminals, cartel members, human traffickers, etc. Dangerous people that could identify their faces and then track down and kill their families in retaliation, exactly what lib-dem ANTIFA & co anarchists would love to do to them if they could see their faces.
And also then, why are the "protesters" assaulting them covering their faces as well if the good guys are supposed to show their faces and only bad guys cover their faces according to your logic?
>In any Western democracy (and I'm not sure if the US is currently part of that category) there would be a public investigation
Public investigations are meaningless now in this specific partisan case since the people have already made up their mind on who's guilty. So if the officer would be publicly investigated and then cleared, them dems would just say it was all rigged anyway.
The paramilitaries that executed Pretti are all wearing street clothing, and all wearing different clothing. They look like a mob.
> Dangerous people that could identify their faces and kill their families in retaliation.
Well that's convenient, because it also allows them to kill protestors or their families without any consequence.
> Why are the protesters assaulting them covering their faces
Pretti didn't assault them, and wasn't covering his face. He got executed anyway.
It's a fascist theme to have paramilitaries not wearing uniforms. See for example the mukhabarat in Syria. It makes them more intimidating, because they look undisciplined, and adds confusion to protestors as to whether they are dealing with someone who is part of the legal system. Why on earth would they not be issued with uniforms?
> Yes, accidents like this will happen when you shove law enforcement officers with a gun on you.
Pretti did not shove any "law enforcement officers". The first physical contact is a shove on Pretti by one of them.
BBC did a frame by frame analysis: the first shove happens at approx 1:00 in this video. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/l0057wmt/bbc-verify-an...
If you disagree, please provide a source.
The first time they seem to be aware that he has a firearm is when they disarm him, and the execution happens after that, so I don't see how that is relevant.
You're leaving the part out where a gunshot is heard right before they "execute" him. The officers with their fingers on the trigger pointed at him during detainment, got scared of that gunshot and jumped on the trigger by accident. It's an unfortunate accident but not an execution. Read up the legal definition of execution. This is not it.
Please stop making up stuff.
Feel free to look at the timeline here.
It just leaves me wondering - how do you look yourself in the mirror each day? I guess it must be super easy if you just look at what happened there and think shooting a guy 11 times from close distance is an "accident".
Pot calling the kettle black.
>the only hope I have is that you are an actual russian troll
Yes, you are not the minority opinion, you are 100% correct and everyone disagreeing with you is a russian troll.
You are literally insane if you think this is a matter of "etiquette" or that it was an accident.
Essex police haven't fired a single bullet in the last 10 years, and they are able to provide effective policing anyway. But in US a bunch of gestapo officers have a man pinned to the ground, with his gun taken away, and then they shoot him?
At least the real gestapo had the decency to ask you to stand against the wall looking away before they executed you.
As I asked you in another comment - do you want to live in a Judge Dredd universe where officers can just execute someone like this? And I repeat, it's not an accident. If it was, they would have shot him once.
Only if you misreport crime, ignore grooming gangs and arrest people for Tweets as "effective policing" in the UK.
>And I repeat, it's not an accident. If it was, they would have shot him once.
Police are trained to always fire multiple shots, as learned from firefight reports, people are left in capacity to fire back even when they have several rounds in them.
And when there are 8 people on top of them, they're facedown on the ground, their hands are stuck in front of their face with no way to get at the waistband in which they had a legally concealed firearm, which one ICE officer removes while another waits for him to be out of the way before another executes them?
People got shot from police mistakes like these all the time. It's an accident, a bad one, but not an execution, as everyone on the left calls it.
Citizens have no duty to cooperate with police in their investigations. Citizens have first, fourth, and fifth amendment rights. I suspect that your idea of "being uncooperative" includes "following unlawful orders."
Thanks, good to see great mental clarity and debate skills.
> includes "following unlawful orders."
Except the judge decides if the order was unlawful, not you.
You don't get to decide on the spot that the order you received was unlawful and can just resist arrest if you feel like it.
You cooperate with the orders, and then your lawyer will seek justice and compensation on your behalf is the way the officer handled himself was unlawful. That's the way it works.
This is... a pretty confused view of history, really. Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, and consolidated power over the next year. At this point there was a lot of criticism of the regime, both internal and external. Things got rapidly worse after, of course, but there certainly was a period where the Nazis were in power but that there was public criticism.
Even as late as 1938, there was significant public discontent RE Kristallnacht in particular.
Every political party had public criticism before they could gain absolute power to silence that criticism.
Thus, currently allowing some criticism is not enough to disprove the alleged march towards fascism. People with that viewpoint would argue that it's only allowed because power isn't consolidated enough yet.
Democrats/leftists/ANTIFA don't hate authoritarianism, They hate that they're not the ones in charge of dealing the authoritarianism on their opposition, as shown by the masked mob gestapo they set up in Minnesota doing "papers please, you're either with us or against us" on civilians passing by to confirm they hate ICE.
If Kamala-Walz would have won the election, they would have done the same to Trump and friends in republican states, and you would have called it "justice for Nazis", not fascism ,which is the justification ANTIFA use when they beat up innocent people.
[citation needed]
Also even if true, there's a vast difference between a rando on the street asking those questions vs a government agent. That's assuming the government agent isn't too much of a pussy to identify himself instead of hiding behind a mask.
If I show you camera footage on X of this happening will you accept it in good faith or nitpick it on why it's not valid?
>Also even if true, there's a vast difference between a rando on the street asking those questions vs a government agent.
Ah classic, so even if it's happening, it's not a bad thing because an unelected unaccountable mob is doing it, just like in third world countries.
It's in the name, antifascists. They rose from the fascism of the 20th century and have a proud history of fighting the original Nazis.
God bless them for carrying on the good fight!
Curious what if you were to get hit by the same type of vigilante justice you approve of, and someone dishes out this type of punishment on you for fitting their definition of a fascist in their now prevailing worldview. As they say, "Live by the sword, die by the sword".
Like I said before, you don't hate fascists, you want to be the fascist and use labels to justify literal crime, just like fascists did.
Right now, ICE goes out of their way to beat and arrest protestors and steal their cameras. They're not yet mowing them down but by that time it would be a little late to do something about their conduct. Remember that the current US president admires how the CCP crushed the student protestors in Tiananmen square with tanks and guns.
Sure, but if you use fascist tactics to fight fascism, are you not a fascist yourself?
And people conveniently focus only on the symptoms(rise of fascism) but not on the main cause that leads to it.
Like Hitler didn't just randomly get to power one day out of nowhere because the average German citizen was living such a good life. He was just one of the symptoms to a major problem that the Weimar republic didn't address and instead used fascist tactics to get rid of Hitler before he could gain power, and then guess what happened.
Similarly, Trump is also only but a symptom to a larger issue. Using fascist tactics to get him out of power, only makes the counter response greeter, and not make the core problem go away.
Beyond that, much of the establishment and industry tried to work with him using a softly, softly approach. They thought they could steer him, temper him, leverage his popularity for their own ends. Of course, that didn't work out for them
November 1921 (Munich): During a speech at an NSDAP rally in a beer hall, an unknown assailant fired shots at Hitler from the crowd amid a melee, but he escaped unharmed.
1923 (Thuringia): An unidentified person attempted to shoot Hitler during a rally, but Nazi supporters outnumbered opponents, forcing the attacker to flee.
1923 (Memmingen): Another unknown individual tried to assassinate Hitler with a rifle but retreated when confronted by his followers.
July 15, 1932 (Munich): An assailant fired shots at Hitler and SA leader Ernst Röhm while they dined at Cafe Heck, but both were unhurt.
1932 (Nuremberg): A bomb was planted in the lobby of Hitler's hotel, but it was discovered and removed before detonation.
1932 (Berlin and Munich): Two additional attempts occurred, one involving potential poisoning at the Hotel Kaiserhof in Berlin (where Hitler and staff fell ill after a meal, suspected to be deliberate contamination), though details are limited and perpetrators unidentified.You originally implied the Weimar Republic itself used fascistic tactics. But your examples show nothing of the sort (and are obviously just an LLM dump, which disinclines me to continue this conversation)
Yes, I'm sure they were lone wolves who happen to have massive resources for political assassinations, and not backed by hitler's political opposition. Please, let's end the conversation here since it's clearly not going anywhere.
Think about what you're saying. You're trying to defend the indefensible.
You have something that looks worryingly like the Ceaușescu's Securitate "disappearing" citizens - including a little 5-year-old boy - off the streets.
Justify that.
Justify kidnapping a terrified little boy who should be at school with his friends, and locking him up in prison.
Go on, justify those actions. Let's see if you can.
You have armed thugs abducting and murdering people on the streets of American cities.
"Stenvik said another adult living in the home was outside during the encounter and had pleaded to take care of Liam so the boy could avoid detention, but was denied. Liam’s older brother, a middle schooler, came home 20 minutes later to find his father and brother missing, Stenvik said. Two school principals from the district also arrived at the home to offer support."
" An agent had taken Liam out of the car, led the boy to his front door and directed him to knock on the door asking to be let in, “in order to see if anyone else was home – essentially using a five-year-old as bait”, the superintendent said in a statement."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/21/ice-arrests-...
Again, how do you look yourself in the mirror every morning?
This probably means everyone else is also getting their reach crippled.
Remember that even with clear video evidence, the administration lies about the events and tries to spin it as domestic terrorism.
So imagine what they are doing, and will do, without video evidence.
This is probably one of the darkest times in America... You have an administration that normalizes lying and violence, and a tens of millions of Americans that are choosing to close their eyes and suspend their morals because they're scared and confused.