I’m wary of an angle here where the individual was hired by FB to set them up for a much bigger gambit down the road.
This individual can bring to light relatively trivial things and demonstrate that FB has put so-and-so measurements in place when they really go all in - think dissident/political enemy crackdown type of moves. Remember: the senate hearings are a farce because the senate is in bed with FB/NSA/CIA. But it looks good for them to seem tough and in turn it looks good for FB to say “We established a committee to oversee this X months ago. We absolutely care about Y.”
The individual looks like a hero and they get a big payout. Not a bad gig.
Unfortunately the concept of corporate plays like these are buried in William Gibson novels so people think they’re a fantasy, unaware of how the game works.
Regardless of studies and what they bring to light, always assume your phone has been compromised, assume others have intercepted your texts and have data mined them to determine not if you’re a nuisance (that’s a given), but how big of one. With that, assume most companies from there on out have access to how wealthy you are and how they can best sell products to you, use your data to sell your friends products, and so on.
Do not store anything on your phone that you wouldn’t want your worst enemy to see. Do not even say it while your phone is nearby. Put your phone in an acoustic proof container/soundproof box if you need to have a talk with anyone. Don’t bother with airplane mode, it’s a sinkhole waiting to be discovered so assume it’s compromised until given sufficient evidence to the contrary.
With this in mind, you can sleep soundly knowing that your phone is a monitoring device, and as such privacy-related studies that demonstrate (as they always do) that your phone isn’t as private as you think will not come as a surprise and you will have no bad habits to undo/change.
What’s the plan of attack? Feign outrage on the internet in hopes that someone else will do the hard work of holding these companies accountable? Have Greta stand another day in front of a building as a symbol of triumph of the youth in their struggle against these companies? Have BBC run a few more weeks of environmental destruction pieces saying how the damage is irreversible?
No wait, we got one - front page news: “N more species went extinct recently”. Yeah, that will show them.
Immigration policies are never mentioned because they are a taboo topic, which already means we are winking with one eye as we are giving Zizekesque reasonings and conclusions.
As of the last few years I’ve begun to replace instances of “white men”, “white people” and “white person” with “the Jews” to see if the statement in question is slanted towards a racist diatribe. Since most of us are programmed/conditioned to have a reflex about this topic from an early age, it has become useful more frequently.
The sooner we wake up to the fact that the world, collectively, has a one party system of people that own everything (including the presidents and prime ministers that run their day to day operations), the better.
Who you vote for has no bearing on who is elected. The runners are appointed, everything else is entertainment for the sake of introducing a new team member into an existing structure, not much different than your corporate job.
You are living in a world of misdirections and distractions. The news programme is chosen ahead of time, and very few things are accidental from there on out.
There’s nothing unique about clubhouse in this. Doctors have been chased off of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit and HN too - the ones who haven’t voluntarily left after seeing how ignorant confidence operates on these channels.
The Bourgeois use the Proletariat as a tool to overtake power from the owners and royal blood.
Labor unrest works the other way: the owners, comfortably tucked away in their mansions in places that are guarded and far away from prying eyes (think Zuckerberg, but multiplied further), are egging the proles on to riot and therefore to keep the opposition in check, while they, as always, are out of sight and out of mind. You would be laughed out of any discussion suggesting that this was all orchestrated by a group of people who own the world. Such a thing, as we all know, is unheard of.
The rioters are unaware of the owners, but they think that whoever they are aware of are the people to protest against, and that these people (the PMC+ class) are guilty for arranging the circumstances that has befallen the proles. As always, it’s a clever play of misdirection and it works wonders.
It’s a dark twisted game, but that’s how it works and that’s how it’s played.
You've eloquently buried in there a number of problems. But I would like to make one change to what you just mentioned: it's not that politicians only listen if you represent a group of people. Politicians listen to power and money, first and foremost (and not always in that order). Everything else is secondary.
That you're on a website that is designed against incentivizing collective action, and yet tries to pass itself off as a bastion of, well, let's call it practical and realistic rhetoric most of the time, is part of the problem. You're not going to find collective action anywhere because the moment you do, "they" are going to insert themselves into the collective to try to sabotage and break apart. "They" have decades worth of experience at it and don't mind killing people left and right, either.
The actionable advice, for this community, would be to put all that great intelligence together and try to come up with a way to subvert whatever opposition would stand in the way of a collective action. I don't know if there's money in it so sadly it probably couldn't be a YC backed start up. Quite the contrary - the money would most likely try to kill you, but nevermind that.
Today, it's less the "Boomers" or whatever pejorative you'd like to use, and more the younger generations that are online (including HN which comes out of the box with lovely vote and flag functionality - yours for 500 credits). Take a minute and ponder the implications of that one as you stack it next to other tidbits of information like the political alignments of certain demographics.
The greater issue we are facing is people unable to cope with "dissenting" (read: different) opinions because for whatever reason they think it's a personal affront on their identity for someone to disagree with something they've said online, under an anonymous (not for long!) moniker.
Facebook Isn't Other People. There is no 'democratization'. These platforms did not create anything. Facebook, Twitter, Gab, Parler, Win, Reddit, HN, Wikifarms, are fairly holistic in their representation of what people are actually like from the very beginning. You just don't want to admit you're as much of an asshole as the next poster, if you could get away with it.
It's only a matter of time before this is made illegal because it's intention is to purposely evade, distort, confuse or interfere, much like a radar detector would.
I have no idea why these one-off "hacks" are posted, or why anyone would think painting a bulls eye like this on yourself is somehow an intelligent solution. They will just attach a face reader along with an ALP reader and at that point good luck.
The more I look at this, the more it seems like apparel for people who don't know what controlled opposition is.
Since 2001, and through the other numerous times that this this argument(s?) has been posted on HN (thank you @dang for the links) - how have things changed for the better?
Its time to stop thinking that posting "arguments against" something is somehow equivalent to making a difference, and start making a difference for real.