Facebook CIA Project: The Onion News Network
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters post it whenever surveillance or social-media privacy stories seem to confirm the joke, noting how prescient it looks.
What it is
A short satirical Onion News Network segment presenting Facebook as a CIA project. It plays on surveillance and data-collection fears.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2012 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Recommends agota · 2019-10 · on “Eat, Drink and Be Wary: Ex-CIA Officer Reveals How Eateries Are Key to Spycraft”
I love this The Onion video that is a news report on the CIA's most successful project ever, Facebook: [this video]
Cites ender7 · 2012-01 · on “FBI to monitor Facebook, Twitter, Myspace”
Once again, the Onion got there first. [this video] I will start worrying when companies are legally required to let the FBI trawl through the databases without a warrant. It's hard to make a law against scraping public information.
Cites nickpsecurity · 2017-01 · on “Sergey Brin joins protest against immigration order at SFO”
My impression is that a Never Collect Data Usable Against Minorities Pledge shouldn't be signed by people supporting exactly that to tune of billions of dollars and nearly as many users under surveillance. Unless they're full of shit. Hell, even The Onion saw how helpful such companies are: [this video] I remember watching it knowing it was satire but most of the benefits were still true. I bet the people against discrimination and such at those locations are still coding away at the algorithms and data stores to make it happen. Easier to put your name on something than to make real sacrifices. Do email me, though, when a story pops up that Google or Facebook got rid of all saved data that could
Cites berkle4455 · 2023-07 · on “Twitter Is DDOSing Itself”
I agree, but there are hundreds if not thousands of AI startups trying to make their own relevant LLM, and they're going to be scraping Twitter. The Onion called it many years ago [1]: "400 billion tweets and not one useful bit of data was ever transmitted". [1] [this video]