This makes me feel very frustrated. Facebook logic seems "As we have to remove QAnnon posts, we will also remove Extinction Rebellion posts.
They are NOT equivalent! One is a cult that promotes terrorism the other one is a environmentalist group that calls for civil disobedience. One calls for the kidnapping and assassination of politicians, the other one for walk-ins on roads to get media attention. One calls for a war on race the other on improving the environment.
Both are in the "extremes" of some political compass but are not equivalent by any sane interpretation.
"Enlighted Centrism" is a recurring joke. Facebook is just punching down on the working class and the left because they do not respond to the citizens but to other mega-rich people and corporations.
I cannot wait for Facebook to be strongly regulated, and to be forbidded to run an advertisement company with data stolen from its users.
>Both are in the "extremes" of some political compass but are not equivalent by any sane interpretation.
This seems to have a pretty long tradition in the US, it seems like the political or ethical version of what often happens in science discourse, where creationism and evolution are treated as equally reasonable debate positions and so on.
The only yardstick seems to be "how many people are offended" rather than standing by scientific principle or the standards and rules of their platform. If 90% of misinformation and inhumane content comes out of one political camp it should make the people in that camp think, not Facebook.
What they're doing is censoring anything that upsets anyone (including themselves) because every mainstream political voice has been demanding that they censor people, and threatening to attack the company financially if they don't.
I don't want them censoring anyone if they're not then held liable for the content they do publish. If they're going to exercise editorial powers, let them take editorial responsibility. This is not an option they're being given. Instead they've been told that the biggest offense they can commit is failing to delete.
Are they going to provide evidence, here? This is thin as water.
Facebook has been making life miserable for everyone by being entirely unpredictable in its ad provision and targeting. The rules and algorithms change willy-nilly, and reliable engagement is nigh impossible, and even more so when the media landscape of the left is fragmented across many separate sources and the media of the right is very centralized.
If we could see aggregate numbers for left/right, we'd get better answers. But somehow I doubt they can or will make those numbers known.
"In late 2017, when Facebook tweaked its newsfeed algorithm to minimize the presence of political news, policy executives were concerned about the outsize impact of the changes on the right, including the Daily Wire, people familiar with the matter said. Engineers redesigned their intended changes so that left-leaning sites like Mother Jones were affected more than previously planned, the people said. Mr. Zuckerberg approved the plans. “We did not make changes with the intent of impacting individual publishers,” a Facebook spokesman said."
The fact that there's little evidence is itself the problem. Facebook is manipulating the reach of some news sources over others but their methodology is completely opaque. The choices about how the news feed works can't be entirely free of a subjective understanding of how the world works so the question isn't "is the new feed biased?", it's "how is it biased?". Without transparency, speculating is the only route we have to ask that question.
At this point we know that Facebook has the potential to significantly influence political discourse with the choices it makes. The fact that those choices are hidden is a problem but a bigger problem is the influence itself. No privately held company should ever be allowed this level of (potential/actual) influence on political discourse.
As a person interested in guns, media platforms have been nothing but killing access to them: deplatforming, hiding, unpublishing, fake strikes, whatnot.
Ie perhaps it's more that people are not that interested in the left (not surprising since it's not a centrist viewpoint) if they can't give the same kind of concrete proofs.
This shouldn't be terribly surprising. CrowdTangle, an analytics tool by Facebook, regularly reports that all of the top ten stories and links in the US are right leaning.
Take for example Facebook's top ten for the last ten days, per the New York Times' Kevin Roose's tracker. These are self reported by Facebook's CrowdTangle:
It goes on and on. Scroll through the Facebook Top 10 account and you'll see right leaning, sometimes far right pundits, at greater volume and (if these links follow the typical power distribution) far, far greater attention and traffic than any even moderate or neutral news source, let alone anyone comparably left wing.
Sorry but you’re spreading misinformation in this post. Beyond the fact that your interpretation doesn’t follow from the evidence you’ve provided, as pointed out by the neighbor post, you’ve misstated what CrowdTangle is measuring.
Shapiro or Bongino are never near the top 10 in terms of link engagement - the metric they do well on is sum total page engagement. Which makes sense - anecdotally, most of me and my left leaning millennial peers are getting our online political engagement from Twitter and Instagram. AOC is a sensation on Insta, Bongino is not.
I see you’re relying on Kevin Roose for your information - unfortunately he’s an absolute spigot of misinformation. I made the same mistake in the past, until I took a deeper look into these issues, and found most of what he says to be totally wrong. I hope you, and others, will reconsider taking him at face value in the future.
Top 10 lists can be misleading. If there are fewer popular right-leaning news sources, then all the right-leaning audience will be concentrated there, pushing them into the top 10, while the left's audience is diluted.
Here we are again, discussing politics in our tech forum. Why? Because we invented brain washing machines. Social media married w/ Algorithms and AI.
The bigger story here is that these brainwashing machines are susceptible to being manipulated by their owners to meet their own subjective needs.
It gets even worse, because these are for-profit companies, the brain washing machines are being rented out to the highest bidder.
Even worse than that the owners of these machines are being pressured and manipulated by others, in power, to affect outcomes that, as it turns out, are probably not in the best interest of the public at large.
+5 insightful. The fact that Facebook has a big "politicial bias" lever at all is bad news. And automated individualized targeted political advertising is a horrifying tool as well. "Brainwashing machines" is a nice way of putting it.
Instead of creating some sort of government/non-profit censorship API and giving up the controls to content censorship, they are playing this censor role that will never have an end. Nobody will ever be satisfied. If they were smart they would say something like the ISPs: Hey, we're just providing the infra, we don't control the content and point the finger at the government.
Is it really profitable to have this information flow controller? Don't they just want to sell ads?
Look, I know it's not that simple. But why not do this?
They need to control the content at least in a rudimentary way, they would be swamped by waves of commercial spam otherwise.
Ofc, once you can remove classic Viagra ads, you established your ability to control content to some degree. From that point on, you cannot really assert that you are a common carrier.
You could assert your allegiance to the 1st amendment, though.
What's happened in the past is the old media or social media or both will latch on to your most outrageous user. They'll make headlines about them, all the while including your company's name in the story. It will get bad enough that advertisers threaten to pull out to show their support for the cause of de-platforming evil.
The platform that chooses not to de-platform its worst users has lower fitness than the platform that goes along with it. Would you rather your ad revenue look like that of Twitter or that of Gab?
Because then they get stuck defending scoundrels, and it's untenable. The ACLU has (had?) the guts to defend a nazi's right to free speech, a profit seeking corp is less likely.
So they get pushed into this position where they're stuck at the border of acceptable where half the people think they're censoring and half think it's only right.
I call bs. I keep being bombarded with left wing ideology despite constantly clicking to remove it. It's the right wing stuff that's being removed. This kind of article tries to hide the truth by falsely claiming that the content that's being promoted is being removed. This is a distraction.
You’re right, given the behavior we’ve seen from major tech platforms this week it is totally conspiratorial for a journalist to report on discoveries related to nefarious activity.
You've been breaking the HN guidelines a lot lately. We ban accounts that do that, and we've had to ask you about this multiple times before. You've been doing it mostly for political battle but not only—for example, gratuitous nasty swipes like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24724475 are not ok either.
Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines? Note these ones:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
"Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."
"Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized."
"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."
Ad Fontes is a trusted and reliable service that measures and publishes political skew and accuracy of almost every major news site, and there are plenty of right-wing and far-right news sources if that floats your boat.
I always found it odd that people expect tech companies to be leaning either way. Their goal is to be as good friends with whoever has power as possible.
If they cared about ethics they wouldn’t have the supply chains or be in the markets they are.
Of course they cozied up to Trump, why wouldn’t they? The only reason Facebook is pretending to take democracy and truth seriously now, is because they have data that tells them they need new political friends post November.
Given that everyone is going crazy in the news recently about Facebook censoring a very major right wing news story and Facebook and Twitter are being subpoenaed over the actions to speak before congress about it, that seems unlikely.
I'm not sure why this is downvoted (maybe a lot of FB employees are here). But this is a valid question. 'Deals' with politicians is how engaging with DC works (quid pro quo is the norm).
[+] [-] Hokusai|5 years ago|reply
They are NOT equivalent! One is a cult that promotes terrorism the other one is a environmentalist group that calls for civil disobedience. One calls for the kidnapping and assassination of politicians, the other one for walk-ins on roads to get media attention. One calls for a war on race the other on improving the environment.
Both are in the "extremes" of some political compass but are not equivalent by any sane interpretation.
"Enlighted Centrism" is a recurring joke. Facebook is just punching down on the working class and the left because they do not respond to the citizens but to other mega-rich people and corporations.
I cannot wait for Facebook to be strongly regulated, and to be forbidded to run an advertisement company with data stolen from its users.
[+] [-] Barrin92|5 years ago|reply
This seems to have a pretty long tradition in the US, it seems like the political or ethical version of what often happens in science discourse, where creationism and evolution are treated as equally reasonable debate positions and so on.
The only yardstick seems to be "how many people are offended" rather than standing by scientific principle or the standards and rules of their platform. If 90% of misinformation and inhumane content comes out of one political camp it should make the people in that camp think, not Facebook.
[+] [-] pessimizer|5 years ago|reply
I don't want them censoring anyone if they're not then held liable for the content they do publish. If they're going to exercise editorial powers, let them take editorial responsibility. This is not an option they're being given. Instead they've been told that the biggest offense they can commit is failing to delete.
[+] [-] mirror-mirror|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Fellshard|5 years ago|reply
Facebook has been making life miserable for everyone by being entirely unpredictable in its ad provision and targeting. The rules and algorithms change willy-nilly, and reliable engagement is nigh impossible, and even more so when the media landscape of the left is fragmented across many separate sources and the media of the right is very centralized.
If we could see aggregate numbers for left/right, we'd get better answers. But somehow I doubt they can or will make those numbers known.
[+] [-] r721|5 years ago|reply
"In late 2017, when Facebook tweaked its newsfeed algorithm to minimize the presence of political news, policy executives were concerned about the outsize impact of the changes on the right, including the Daily Wire, people familiar with the matter said. Engineers redesigned their intended changes so that left-leaning sites like Mother Jones were affected more than previously planned, the people said. Mr. Zuckerberg approved the plans. “We did not make changes with the intent of impacting individual publishers,” a Facebook spokesman said."
https://archive.md/uhZpP
[+] [-] benjaminjosephw|5 years ago|reply
At this point we know that Facebook has the potential to significantly influence political discourse with the choices it makes. The fact that those choices are hidden is a problem but a bigger problem is the influence itself. No privately held company should ever be allowed this level of (potential/actual) influence on political discourse.
[+] [-] emilfihlman|5 years ago|reply
Ie perhaps it's more that people are not that interested in the left (not surprising since it's not a centrist viewpoint) if they can't give the same kind of concrete proofs.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] AaronFriel|5 years ago|reply
Take for example Facebook's top ten for the last ten days, per the New York Times' Kevin Roose's tracker. These are self reported by Facebook's CrowdTangle:
Today, 10/16, most of the news is explicitly partisan and right leaning, one post by Dan Rather: https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10/status/131751290168337612...
10/15: similar mix, https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10/status/131711759703326720...
10/14: https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10/status/131674996947526861...
It goes on and on. Scroll through the Facebook Top 10 account and you'll see right leaning, sometimes far right pundits, at greater volume and (if these links follow the typical power distribution) far, far greater attention and traffic than any even moderate or neutral news source, let alone anyone comparably left wing.
[+] [-] sfashset|5 years ago|reply
All of the top 10 links shared on FB in a week typically consists of NPR/NYT/TMZ etc. Recently the left leaning website MoveOn was in the top 3 (source: https://twitter.com/tomgara/status/1310314212078620680?s=21).
Shapiro or Bongino are never near the top 10 in terms of link engagement - the metric they do well on is sum total page engagement. Which makes sense - anecdotally, most of me and my left leaning millennial peers are getting our online political engagement from Twitter and Instagram. AOC is a sensation on Insta, Bongino is not.
I see you’re relying on Kevin Roose for your information - unfortunately he’s an absolute spigot of misinformation. I made the same mistake in the past, until I took a deeper look into these issues, and found most of what he says to be totally wrong. I hope you, and others, will reconsider taking him at face value in the future.
[+] [-] rbecker|5 years ago|reply
Like splitting the vote, or how Muhammed (and alternative spellings) is the most popular baby name in the UK: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/muhammed-rea...
You would have to look at the total story popularity, not just the top 10, to make any kind of conclusion.
[+] [-] Adutude|5 years ago|reply
The bigger story here is that these brainwashing machines are susceptible to being manipulated by their owners to meet their own subjective needs.
It gets even worse, because these are for-profit companies, the brain washing machines are being rented out to the highest bidder.
Even worse than that the owners of these machines are being pressured and manipulated by others, in power, to affect outcomes that, as it turns out, are probably not in the best interest of the public at large.
[+] [-] dTal|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] humanfromearth|5 years ago|reply
Is it really profitable to have this information flow controller? Don't they just want to sell ads?
Look, I know it's not that simple. But why not do this?
[+] [-] inglor_cz|5 years ago|reply
Ofc, once you can remove classic Viagra ads, you established your ability to control content to some degree. From that point on, you cannot really assert that you are a common carrier.
You could assert your allegiance to the 1st amendment, though.
[+] [-] rcoveson|5 years ago|reply
The platform that chooses not to de-platform its worst users has lower fitness than the platform that goes along with it. Would you rather your ad revenue look like that of Twitter or that of Gab?
[+] [-] free_rms|5 years ago|reply
So they get pushed into this position where they're stuck at the border of acceptable where half the people think they're censoring and half think it's only right.
[+] [-] the-dude|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Rick1|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IXxXI|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sieabahlpark|5 years ago|reply
I'm sorry, did we already forget what Facebook censored this past week?
[+] [-] ykevinator|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] thelastname|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] lefrenchy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnyzee|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] deanCommie|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] dang|5 years ago|reply
Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines? Note these ones:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
"Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."
"Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized."
"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[+] [-] whateveracct|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trident1000|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] bedhead|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] syshum|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] LeoPanthera|5 years ago|reply
https://www.adfontesmedia.com
[+] [-] ipsocannibal|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moksly|5 years ago|reply
If they cared about ethics they wouldn’t have the supply chains or be in the markets they are.
Of course they cozied up to Trump, why wouldn’t they? The only reason Facebook is pretending to take democracy and truth seriously now, is because they have data that tells them they need new political friends post November.
[+] [-] drewcoo|5 years ago|reply
And how about $5 on "how to drink water in public" while we're at it?
It's difficult to imagine conspiracy there, friend.
[+] [-] mlindner|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heimatau|5 years ago|reply