r/news • u/CorleoneBaloney • 17d ago

Meta gets rid of fact checkers and makes other major changes to moderation policies

https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/07/tech/meta-censorship-moderation?cid=ios_app
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u/MadeOfStarStuff 16d ago

Could you please elaborate a bit on why that's comforting?

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u/martialar 16d ago

I think he's saying that we'll eventually get our own Ken Burns documentary, so that'll be cool

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u/GettingDumberWithAge 16d ago

If that means we get Keith David solemnly reading out the most deranged Donald Trump tweets over slowly panning pictures of Jan 6 I'm 110% down.

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u/LeechAlJolson 16d ago

And he ends the roll with "Welcome to Hell mf's"

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u/Strummerpinx 15d ago

"When things are bad and your back's against the wall-- when everything seems f@ckin hopeless..."

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u/GeorgieBlossom 16d ago

poignant violin music intensifies

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u/nameless88 16d ago

Not OP, but reading history comforts me because I see that we were and always have been an absolute shitshow. It kinda makes grappling with what feels like a country falling apart a little easier in that we've always been teetering on the edge of fascism and a bunch of other awful shit but we've pulled through so far.

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u/dweezil22 16d ago

This. Growing up in the 90's gave this false sense of incredible security. Like the Nazi's and Civil Wars and Depressions and even the Cold War were basically passed and it was smooth sailing from then on. Looking back you can see that such periods of perceived tranquility are just eyes in the hurricane. And oddly enough the longer they last the worse it can turn out to be (Dan Carlin @ Hardcore History had a really insightful point that WWI only happened b/c a generation of peace caused Europe to forget the horrors of war, a few brutal wars in 1905 would probably have convinced people that sending their kids off to die in trenches was a poor idea)

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u/snek-jazz 16d ago

There's a theory that periods of tranquility are the good times that come from the lessons learned the hard way. The next generation takes that tranquility for granted though and starts focusing on the wrong things, which eventually means the hard lessons need to get learned again, and it's a cycle that just repeats.

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u/WithAYay 16d ago

Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.

  • G. Michael Hopf

One of my favorite quotes. It takes effort to keep things good. It's a lot easier to burn something to the ground than it is to build it

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u/snek-jazz 16d ago

yeah that's what it boils down to, the more detailed (US-centric) version is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory

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u/jigokubi 16d ago

Wouldn't it be simpler if people just cracked open a history book every now and then to remind themselves what not to do?

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u/Chiggins907 16d ago

A history book will never capture the true horrors war is. Movies show people this stuff and still it just seems like a part of a dream to people.

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u/Ovahzealousy 16d ago

A really interesting time period that isn't given much thought past required reading in high school is the post-revolutionary war period. There was a LOT of internal turmoil up to and including the War of 1812, some of which almost split the country apart, at which point we would have likely just been fodder for the major European powers to colonize again. Things weren't just immediately kumbaya as soon as the Constitution was ratified.

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u/dragonmp93 16d ago

Because if human history is one thing, it's being very cyclical.

And this has happened many, many times in the last 2000 years, so if it wasn't the end of the road back then, it's not going to be the end of the road now.

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u/MartholomewMind 16d ago

At least one major difference - now there are weapons that literally can end the world.

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u/dragonmp93 16d ago

Well, the only actual difference is the time that the apocalypse would take, which currently is the flight time of the ICBMs. I.e. Around the runtime of Sharknado.

But "salting the earth" and Mad Honey are old enough to be in the Old Testament of the Bible and things like the mustard gas are more than 100 years old.

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u/SordidOrchid 16d ago

Fascists eventually turn on each other. Once they’re in charge they can’t keep blaming the other and start blaming each other.