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Frame from Facebook CIA Project: The Onion News Network Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

Facebook CIA Project: The Onion News Network

c0pyr1gh7
Comedy
YouTube
1 HN user recommended this comedy video1 month2012–2023 score 1
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN commenters post it whenever surveillance or social-media privacy stories seem to confirm the joke, noting how prescient it looks.

A short satirical Onion News Network segment presenting Facebook as a CIA project. It plays on surveillance and data-collection fears.

“I love this The Onion video” (HN, 2019)

1 recommendations · 3 citations · 2 jokes · Comedy

6 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

Citations, criticism and jokes

@ender7 Jan 2012 Cites it
on HN thread 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.
@nickpsecurity Jan 2017 Cites it
on HN thread Sergey Brin joins protest against immigration order at SFO
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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 be used to hurt unpopular groups all thanks to such people in the company.
@berkle4455 Jul 2023 Cites it
on HN thread 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]

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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