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What's bad is that it doesn't help reinforce your feeling that your position is correct when the other side is being actively suppressed. I generally agree wit

What's bad is that it doesn't help reinforce your feeling that your position is correct when the other side is being actively suppressed. I generally agree with many liberal positions, but when I hear about stuff like this it makes me want to reconsider my opinions of conservative positions. It's exactly like the Streisand Effect.

basch 10y ago
at the same time, how do you feel about creationism and intelligent design being suppressed instead of given equal airtime with competing theories. what constitutes "fair?" if one group is twice as loud while delivering the same amount of content, is it unfair to turn their volume down by half? how about something like snopes or myth debunking? does dr oz deserve equal placement to more credible nutrition science? what is worse, attempting to surface more legitimate sources, or letting your site turn into a free for all shouting match? for anyone downvoting me because they think I approve of censorship if my side wins: quite the contrary. I think from a purely theoretical standpoint, signal to noise is a complicated problem, and the people who reject the idea of filtering or ranking in totality are being unrealistic. allowing the loudest speakers to unabatedly monopolize collective attention is a problem.
- Grishnakh 10y ago
  Quis custodiet ipsos custodet? (Who watches the watchers?) To have some kind of filtering or curation, you necessarily have to put some people into a position of power where they have the ability to censor this noise. On a forum where it's explicitly known that such "moderators" are present, and even better if their biases are known, this is perfectly fine. If I'm on a science-oriented discussion forum and it's advertised that the moderators of this forum will ban anyone who attempts to spread pseudoscience or anti-science religious junk, that'll help attract me because I don't want waste my time looking at that crap. There's also forums where there's very little such curation, and instead community moderation is mostly relied on: users are given moderation points to boost or suppress other posts. That's fine too: you know going in what the deal is, so you just have to see if you mesh with the other members or not. However, if a forum claims to be "open" and "inclusive" but then censors people, that's just hypocritical and wrong. If you're going to push a bias, then you have to at least inform users of this. As it relates to Facebook, which is supposed to be for everyone and not just people of a certain political persuasion, they shouldn't be censoring anything unless they're going to make this known up-front (which they haven't). "Trending topics" should be anything that's highly popular. If some completely wrong and debunked BS is the most popular new story among your site's users, then you need to show that at the top, or else you're not serving your users. If you don't like that, then you either need to inform them of how you're going to censor and slant things, or you need to get rid of users you don't like. Or maybe just get rid of the "trending topics" section, and replace it with something more fine-tuned so that one group of users doesn't get annoyed at seeing junk they disagree with that another group of users really likes. The simple fact is that you can't please everyone. If you try, you're going to fail. Sites like Reddit avoid this by having tons of different sub-forums, each with their own rules and moderators. Some far-right conservative wackos can co-exist with far-left liberals there because they're on separate subreddits.
  - basch 10y ago
    >However, if a forum claims to be "open" and "inclusive" but then censors people, that's just hypocritical and wrong. I just dont think the trending stories ever made an emphatic claim to be open and inclusive, nor is promoting some stories artificially the equivalent to "censorship." Not allowing stories in the timeline is completely different than manually choosing the trending stories for a day. Facebook has always been pro censorship. No nipples, no porn. I dont think of facebook as a place for free speech, and I never felt as if the trending stories was some organic popular list. I know everything on facebook is specifically chosen to get ME to click. That said, watching the watchers is easy if sites publish transparency reports and publish "stories we didnt cover." Problem solved.
    - Grishnakh 10y ago
      Oh please. When I see "trending stories", that implies that the stories are popular, not that they've been manually selected or filtered by some unelected group with an obvious bias and agenda. As for porn, if the site clearly states that that's something they censor, that's fine. Lots of sites do that. But yes, the whole name "trending stories" absolutely does imply an "organic popular list". If you "know" that this isn't really what it is, that's great for your insight, but it's still lying on the part of Facebook.
      - basch 10y ago
        i see no implication of interventionless "most popular." especially on facebook. each person's trending stories could be different and be presented based on what it thinks is popular AND applicable to you. all i see is "here is a subsample of some of our most popular stories." do you and your friends have the same trending stories at the same time? cuz i get regional stories. im sure my friends in other regions dont get those stories. it is quite obviously targeting me based on something besides a global trending list. nothing on facebook is ever organic. and ive never seen facebook claim anything was.
        Grishnakh 10y ago

basch 10y ago

at the same time, how do you feel about creationism and intelligent design being suppressed instead of given equal airtime with competing theories. what constitutes "fair?" if one group is twice as loud while delivering the same amount of content, is it unfair to turn their volume down by half? how about something like snopes or myth debunking? does dr oz deserve equal placement to more credible nutrition science? what is worse, attempting to surface more legitimate sources, or letting your site turn into a free for all shouting match? for anyone downvoting me because they think I approve of censorship if my side wins: quite the contrary. I think from a purely theoretical standpoint, signal to noise is a complicated problem, and the people who reject the idea of filtering or ranking in totality are being unrealistic. allowing the loudest speakers to unabatedly monopolize collective attention is a problem.

Grishnakh 10y ago
Quis custodiet ipsos custodet? (Who watches the watchers?) To have some kind of filtering or curation, you necessarily have to put some people into a position of power where they have the ability to censor this noise. On a forum where it's explicitly known that such "moderators" are present, and even better if their biases are known, this is perfectly fine. If I'm on a science-oriented discussion forum and it's advertised that the moderators of this forum will ban anyone who attempts to spread pseudoscience or anti-science religious junk, that'll help attract me because I don't want waste my time looking at that crap. There's also forums where there's very little such curation, and instead community moderation is mostly relied on: users are given moderation points to boost or suppress other posts. That's fine too: you know going in what the deal is, so you just have to see if you mesh with the other members or not. However, if a forum claims to be "open" and "inclusive" but then censors people, that's just hypocritical and wrong. If you're going to push a bias, then you have to at least inform users of this. As it relates to Facebook, which is supposed to be for everyone and not just people of a certain political persuasion, they shouldn't be censoring anything unless they're going to make this known up-front (which they haven't). "Trending topics" should be anything that's highly popular. If some completely wrong and debunked BS is the most popular new story among your site's users, then you need to show that at the top, or else you're not serving your users. If you don't like that, then you either need to inform them of how you're going to censor and slant things, or you need to get rid of users you don't like. Or maybe just get rid of the "trending topics" section, and replace it with something more fine-tuned so that one group of users doesn't get annoyed at seeing junk they disagree with that another group of users really likes. The simple fact is that you can't please everyone. If you try, you're going to fail. Sites like Reddit avoid this by having tons of different sub-forums, each with their own rules and moderators. Some far-right conservative wackos can co-exist with far-left liberals there because they're on separate subreddits.
- basch 10y ago
  >However, if a forum claims to be "open" and "inclusive" but then censors people, that's just hypocritical and wrong. I just dont think the trending stories ever made an emphatic claim to be open and inclusive, nor is promoting some stories artificially the equivalent to "censorship." Not allowing stories in the timeline is completely different than manually choosing the trending stories for a day. Facebook has always been pro censorship. No nipples, no porn. I dont think of facebook as a place for free speech, and I never felt as if the trending stories was some organic popular list. I know everything on facebook is specifically chosen to get ME to click. That said, watching the watchers is easy if sites publish transparency reports and publish "stories we didnt cover." Problem solved.
  - Grishnakh 10y ago
    Oh please. When I see "trending stories", that implies that the stories are popular, not that they've been manually selected or filtered by some unelected group with an obvious bias and agenda. As for porn, if the site clearly states that that's something they censor, that's fine. Lots of sites do that. But yes, the whole name "trending stories" absolutely does imply an "organic popular list". If you "know" that this isn't really what it is, that's great for your insight, but it's still lying on the part of Facebook.
    - basch 10y ago
      i see no implication of interventionless "most popular." especially on facebook. each person's trending stories could be different and be presented based on what it thinks is popular AND applicable to you. all i see is "here is a subsample of some of our most popular stories." do you and your friends have the same trending stories at the same time? cuz i get regional stories. im sure my friends in other regions dont get those stories. it is quite obviously targeting me based on something besides a global trending list. nothing on facebook is ever organic. and ive never seen facebook claim anything was.
      - Grishnakh 10y ago