Dang and company are such a joke (yes, that's a direct violation of the rules, maybe it'll get their attention) for allowing these sorts of stories to be flagged.
The idea that this is only about "politics" or it's "controversial" and thus should be hidden from view is such a copout. These are the important stories that should absolutely be discussed in a place like this.
Save your breath in replying: "well, it might make people upset and we want to have nice conversations here." And whatever other platitudes arguing for censorship of obviously important topics that deal directly with the technology, companies and employess that frequent this site.
When people call it out they tend to quickly catch bans for minor slights (plausible deniability). Start working on some alts with a VPN now if you want to keep a voice here.
If you believe a story shouldn't have been flagged, email mods at hn@ycombinator.com.
(Mods also don't see mentions of their names, email is how you attract moderators' attention.)
Moderators are ultimately responsible for moderation. The moderation system is failing when it comes to technology issues with a political tint. (In contrast, it has been pretty good with rage bait foreign policy stuff. Genuinely good discussions around quality content.)
If folks are bandwagon flagging content with a consistent bias, the system should shadow ban their flags for a while.
I believe, from reading responses on other stories, that they need to manually do something to prevent a story being flagged. So there's no allowing, it just happens.
I don't disagree with you though. I haven't found "flagged" a good indicator on whether a story is interesting or has worthwhile discussion in it. It's just "some small number of people don't want this link here". It would be nice if instead people put their energy into upvoting the stories they do like.
Or add a downvote instead of flag so we actually have a consensus.
This. A thousand times this.
As in, there were loads of people in the DDR (East Germany, 1949-1989) whose job it was to read people's personal mail, along with the network of neighborhood snitches.
Looks like ICE should be abolished and its entire staff fired, just have INS take over all immigration issues.
https://chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/2025/10/01/massive-...
Now..
is any of that gonna stop John or Joan Q Public who has a running disagreement with their asian or hispanic neighbor from calling in a "tip"? Probably not.
Will that tip result in an automated digital proctology exam that may land them, or people they may have been communicating with (like grandma), in ICE custody?
I'm thinking probably so.
The danger here is not really technology. The danger here is people. They are essentially automating the "snitch-to-detainment" pipeline.
Gonna stop you right there and ask you to back that up. It's not plausible. Especially not if people are actively trying to mess up the "attribution".
People can always go mack to USENET and IRC if they want to make it hard to be tracked :)
Not sure if signal allows anonymous-ish personas for their groups but simplex definitely does but out of all the options given, maybe irc is the most well known :)
So irc it is lol
Some other people: "More fascism. This is Trump's version of the SS. It's absolutely horrible and we are doomed if this continues."
The world continues to spin.
But which one do you think is accurate? Here's an article to consider, where ICE broke into an apartment building without warrants to arrest citizens and children. Does this sound like Gestapo tactics or no?: https://chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/2025/10/01/massive-...
It kept spinning while millions were murdered during WWII as well. Did you have an actual point to make or did you just come here to be dismissive?
While we still have a free internet, it would be great to see efforts to create technology to replace centralized social media, cloud-tech, and businesses.
We need to make it so fucking hard for the gov, advertisers to get access to your data that it very expensive to maintain a system like this. And please please please do not work for or lend talent these jerks!
Any competitor will have to compete not on technical competence or privacy, but on "can I upload lots of HD video?" and "are my favorite celebrities there?"
Offramps to let people migrate easier, syndication to let people leave and still do POSSE, a solution to the problem that all free image hosting eventually attracts CSAM, those are difficult problems
https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/
Anyone who builds what they describe there can expect it to take off faster than ever.
In case you missed it, check out the movie _The Lives of Others_.
Oh, I should make such a website and sell it to the Stasi, I'm going to be rich!
Easier would be to hint at Zuck that Trump wants that feature built-in on Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, and the subservient billionaire will get right on it.
With the right sorts of access given by companies seeking to avoid the ire of the administration, I'm pretty sure even private profiles could be considered to be public.
Look to see them expand to general "counter-terrorism" enforcement in the near future, with only the barest veneer (if that) of its having anything to do with immigration enforcement. After all, if you can stop practically anyone on baseless suspicion of being in the country illegally (see: recent precedent that apparently "they looked foreign" is enough) then charge them with whatever after-the-fact even if they turned out to be legal residents or citizens, that sure looks like a neat little work-around for due process. Or you can just "accidentally" disappear them to El Salvador....
I think about the minor plot point of the President having dissolved the FBI, in the film Civil War, a lot more this year than I ever thought I would when I watched that movie the first time.
> Together, these teams would operate as intelligence arms of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division. They will receive tips and incoming cases, research individuals online, and package the results into dossiers that could be used by field offices to plan arrests. [...] The scope of information contractors are expected to collect is broad. Draft instructions specify open-source intelligence: public posts, photos, and messages on platforms from Facebook to Reddit to TikTok. [...]
> They would also be armed with powerful commercial databases such as LexisNexis Accurint and Thomson Reuters CLEAR, which knit together property records, phone bills, utilities, vehicle registrations, and other personal details into searchable files.
Nothing here is either surprising or unpredicted. It's just ugly because it's finally happening.
And if anyone is still under the illusion that this is about "law enforcement" or "immigration", this should be a giant waving red flag that it's about racism and authoritarian control.
I admire your optimism.
I thought there were like 1 million max.
You can't lay blame on the people doing this and feel like you're done. Unfortunately they're always going to exist. You have to lay blame on the people defending against them. They failed in their defense and here we are.
The difficulty in stopping it scales with how long you let it fester.
Last time it was a world war which could have threatened extinction.
We're still in the phase where people are hoping doing nothing will make it all better or denying outright the threat.
It's more like 20/20 and then that apathetic majority who can't be bothered to care enough to even vote is the rest. Given the nature of liberal and conservative policies, we can all probably see why many of them would be apathetic if we're being honest. But I'm sure those people aren't cheering. They're moreso saying, "See. I told ya so." To any friends and family who thought Trump would be any different. Probably gleefully pointing out to friends who are liberal or conservative that now things are worse.
For that "apathetic majority", they probably now feel vindicated in their decision not to vote and their sense of hopelessness.
And that's sad.
2025: Get downvoted on HN for comparing Charlie Kirk to Horst Wessel
2026: Get upvoted for it
2027: Get banned for it
2028: No voting allowed, here or anywhere else
ICE is scanning public info anyway, nothing they’re doing is illegal or even new. Many parts of the federal government are already scanning social media, like the CIA, FBI, and NSA.
The fact 2nd amendment crowd had a chance to prove their principles a few weeks ago and they did it with flying colors when the NRA came out against any restrictions for trans people.
But as a 2A supporter I don't feel any obligation to rage against ICE assembling a social media team. These seem to be completely disconnected concepts.
Is that true, or is there something more here?
Or were. They've been extremely quiet the last few months. Turns out tyranny isn't so bad when it's aimed at the people you already hate.
This is effectively a strawman argument.
We are not discussing their principles that pertain to whom should be allowed to own guns, nor is that question even relevant to the heart of this topic. We are discussing the core, underlying principle that has been used as the primary justification for WHY people should have a constitutionally-protected right to own mechanized, efficient killing machines. You of course already know: the rhetoric (for literal centuries) has been that the preservation of our system of democracy from hostile internal actors requires a citizenry that has the means to effectively fight back.
Without a noble-sounding pretense of existential importance for 2A defenders to shield themselves with, things start to look a lot more like weighing "guns are fun, plus think about hunters" vs "we should reduce our yearly slaughter rate for schoolchildren to match those of other 1st world countries" and choosing the former. So, when people see what they believe to be the increasingly-obvious beginnings of authoritarian overreach in this country, and at the same time seeing most of the 2A crowd saying absolutely nothing about it, it looks like a genuinely remarkable, thoroughly nauseating display of hypocrisy and selfishness.
> But as a 2A supporter I don't feel any obligation to rage against ICE assembling a social media team. These seem to be completely disconnected concepts.
Dishonest framing aside ("assembling a social media team", like how drug cartels simply assemble a team of chemists, semantics be damned!) and with full context considered, I assume you are stating here that you see no problem with the current actions of this administration, both ICE-related and not, and have caught no whiffs of authoritarian overreach. Otherwise, social media monitoring and tracking teams within an organization that does not have the rules, oversight, requirements, or legal vulnerability of existing (previously) non-partisan agencies with similar teams, would be extremely concerning.
Though after writing this out, I'm not even clear on how much of this is a matter of opinion versus a matter of awareness and understanding of current events. One needs to only look at the events of the last 7 days to find egregious evidence of authoritarian movement, things that would've sent recent Democratic presidents into political exile and impeachment. I just learned that my neighbors and I are enemies of the US last Tuesday - literally, verbatim, "enemies from within" with no additional qualification beyond living in a blue city - for example.
If I were a man given to being suspicious, I'd swear that the whole time using these technologies for "street criminals" and "gang members" was never about "pacifying inner-cities" at all. I'd be inclined to think that maybe it was just the equivalent of the beta test.
But I'm not given to being suspicious. So I know that whole way of thinking is just nutty. right?
All of what we're seeing is built on an electorate that was primed to elect Trump. The Republicans had been using them as a captured base to enable their neoliberal and imperialist policies, but they'd conditioned these folks to want Trumpism, not what they were actually delivering. The shit Trump says is largely the same shit you'd hear from Republican voters since at least the '90s, and what he does is largely shit they want done. They've been asking for e.g. authoritarian federal government crack-downs on cities since then, asking for reductions in law enforcement accountability, asking for no-due-process mass deportations, asking for pulling back from NATO, asking for a wall at the border and/or a militarized border, et c. Their media's been telling them all democratic organizations and the party itself are to-the-core rotten criminal enterprises and they believe that. They will cheer when ICE starts arresting members of congress and major democratic donors on dubious charges.
Distributed/P2P tech is essential because of the income from marketing maintains these systems, selling user data. P2P changes that by allowing people to own their data and share it their way. User-Hosting shouldn't be such a wild idea in 2025, especially if its like IPFS based which already has infrastructure for low-effort hosting such as a chrome plugin.
As long as transition is easy I dont see why change cant happen. A browser plugin to scrap your existing profiles and bring them to NEWSITE.com is all thats needed
There's No reason change cant happen especially when so many people see social media as despotic, and gov takeover of tiktok beckons. Be the motherfucking change yo!
int x = 1 — 2;
#define — -
Encouraging others to actually engage with politics instead of being dismissive, with the goal to build a coalition of people who want to protect our rights against this consolidating dictatorship.
You want to do something about it? Call your senator and voice your opinion.
Your senators and congress critters suck? Find a local challenger and work to build pressure against your sitting reps.
You think nothing can be done? Get out of the way.
I don’t think there’s any evidence that this is happening, the article itself talks about public posts.
It’s well established that if you post evidence of a crime publicly on social media the government will find it and use it. Illegal immigration is a crime by definition, using public information to find people who committed this crime is not the same as reading private mail.
The creators and defenders of the second amendment were and are smart people. They were skeptical of highly concentrated power, which is why we have a federalist system; they were also highly skeptical of large concentrations of militarized police power, which is why our police in general are run by states and municipalities. It is really quite difficult to reconcile support of a massive ICE apparatus with any sort of comprehension of the political philosophy of the US constitution.
1 - https://bsky.app/profile/dbernstein.bsky.social/post/3m2d7z7...
Probably time for somebody to revisit this topic with an actual model.
Because juries regularly convict people in courts based on such evidence.
Maybe a better question is, what is the level of "reliable and definitive" that evidence would need to reach for you to believe it should be admissible in court?
I suspect that maybe that's the misunderstanding. The level for you is much higher than maybe it is in the justice system. Which is fine. But that doesn't change the justice system. In court, the currently accepted levels are still enough.
People will be free to try to refute the attributions during the proceedings if they think it will do any good. I mean the adversarial system is also part of the justice system.
I no longer find these arguments convincing.
/s
Lives in American housing yet somehow doesn’t drive up the cost of housing.
Creates ethnic enclaves which mostly speak their own languages yet somehow assimilate into American culture.
The left has plenty of its own contradictory arguments.
Yeah, they obviously do. That's plain bullshit.
.... ooooon the other hand, we've never tried having an economy without them. We didn't meaningfully limit migration from elsewhere in the Americas until like the '50s, and at the time beginning such enforcement was controversial because we already used them for a ton of cheap farm labor and farmers' interest groups thought it'd ruin them if we significantly limited such migration. The reason their fears didn't manifest as reality is that we simply, and at least in part on purpose, never bothered to enforce those new laws as completely as we technically could, especially for farm labor.
So like they do lower wages (again: obviously) but also they always have, so removing them is a big change from the status quo of practically the entire history of the country's economy. I dunno, worth looking at I guess, but I personally would want to ease into it in case it turns out to be a bad idea.
> Lives in American housing yet somehow doesn’t drive up the cost of housing.
I think the cheap-labor effect on construction probably outweighs this by a good margin. But maybe not.
> Creates ethnic enclaves which mostly speak their own languages yet somehow assimilate into American culture.
Eh. That complaint has been leveled against every prior migrant group, and hasn't held up over the long haul. Even prior waves of hispanic immigrants. I'd need a reason to think it's different this time to give this any credence whatsoever.
Well heck, I see an awful lot of people on the internet trying to argue that they somehow don’t drive wages down for Americans. The number of foreign born people living in the USA is at an all time high, over 5 times larger than what it was in the middle of the last century. Being able to throw cheap labor at a problem is a crutch that keeps people from having to innovate or pay their own countrymen a decent wage. The same argument was used by pro-slavery folks back in the day. “Who will pick the cotton?” was seen as a compelling argument. But when your business is forced to deal with a problem instead of throwing cheap labor at it, you often come up with much better ways to do things and your own fellow citizens share the benefits as well.
>cheap-labor effect on construction probably outweighs this by a good margin
The data shows clearly that immigrants drive up the cost of housing by increasing demand. Americans built our own housing for most of our history, this trend of cheap immigrant labor working most of the construction jobs was not always the case. We could afford to pay construction workers a little bit more and the cost of housing would be more than offset by the reduced housing demand.
>hasn't held up over the long haul
It has absolutely held up, take a trip to any major US city and visit one of its many ethnic enclaves. Many areas of Los Angeles speak exclusively Spanish, you can visit neighborhoods that are indistinguishable from a city in Mexico. The problem is so glaring that the left has switched tactics and hardly even argues that assimilation occurs anymore, rather they argue that “multiculturalism” is the new thing we are supposed to support. Where ethnic enclaves live alongside each other.