8 ms·

Facebook suppressed right wing stories

34 points by chris_wot 11y ago

jlangenauer 11y ago
What's this? Conservatives complaining that a business wants to pick and choose who it does business with? I thought they were in favour of that.
yAnonymous 11y ago
Very much related: I noticed that an increasing amount of people apparently automatically "like" left- and rightwing Facebook pages, depending on other pages they follow and news they like. This could possibly have legal consequences for the users and I'm looking for a way to legally pursue Facebook's auto-liking bullshit. They knowingly misrepresent people to increase their profits.
gormann2 11y ago
I would bet my left ball that the republicans employ astroturfing businesses to spam the social networks with their stories and form a narrative. They get people to control multiple personas on the same computer and post the same story from the point of view of those personas. If a person encounters the same story a couple of times, they tend to believe it.
meira 11y ago
Here in Brazil their "algorithms" do the opposite: suppress left-wing news. And that is, my friends, why you all are seeing the mess happening in my country.
meira 11y ago
Here in Brazil their "algorithms" do the opposite: suppress left-wing news. And that is, my friends, why you all are seeing the mess happening in my country.
manicdee 11y ago
… based on one statement by one person.
- chris_wot 11y ago
  I probably should have linked to this story: http://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-suppressed-conser-1775461006 http://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-supp... But not just one person - Facebook had to apologise to John Dickson for deleting his post. So I ask you - what were they doing fooling around with his posts?
  - jasonlotito 11y ago
    Read the story you linked to. Still only one person. "This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul..." You're confusing the multiple people who claimed they were asked to inject stories that weren't trending. In fact, you have multiple sources who contradict the opinion of your source: "Other former curators interviewed by Gizmodo denied consciously suppressing conservative news, and we were unable to determine if left-wing news topics or sources were similarly suppressed." Finally, underlying contention, that Facebook was at fault, is even denied by that same individual. "there is no evidence that Facebook management mandated or was even aware of any political bias at work." And finally, this is Gizmodo, so unless you have something from a trustworthy source, I would treat them as suspect at best.
    - chris_wot 11y ago
      Curious, then, that John Dicksons post was specifically removed. Why was someone reviewing it at all? Sure, they accidentally deleted it - they admitted as much when they officially apologised to John. But then again, why was a staffer looking at Dicksons post at all?
- emn13 11y ago
  ...and it sounds like they initially suppressed and injected a lot more stories, too, so it's conceivable that this person was pissed off about these suppressions, but not about others that happened to agree with their own prejudices. And then there's the issue that's these kind of algorithms need tuning - they're not intrinsically neutral. It's unlikely that conservative and liberal social networks/stories have the same kind of structures, and details of how the network is connected can influence what's trending. This makes the complaint a little absurd. Not only are algorithmic results also biased, these manual corrections might conceivably be useful to correct that bias. There's this naive assumption that there exists the One True Fair and Neutral ranking algorithm that's unbiased. But the whole notion is ridiculous: we want that bias, because we want to discriminate in favor of "trending" content - and "trending" isn't even rigorously defined. And even if we had a rigorous definition, that doesn't mean it'd be the most useful definition. Elections have strictly defined protocols, yet that doesn't mean an elected US president has the majority of votes. And lest you believe majority voting is the answer, a majority elected president might nevertheless be inferior to a competitor by majority opinion (i.e. it's not stable)... and of course regardless of election result there's no guarantee that current opinions are a good predictor of future opinions let alone achieved results. In short: not only is this just one person's opinion, the standard they hold Facebook to (no bias) is impossibly high. Perhaps there's some amount of unwanted (by whom) bias, but dealing with that isn't as black and white as the complainer suggests.
ManlyBread 11y ago
How come that the bigger the service becomes the more prone it is to manipulations like that? It's always the same story: the service is relatively new, it becomes big, then it starts introducing algorithms that mess with the natural order of the submissions (time added, votes etc.) and then it comes to light that someone was manipulating this system in order to push their agenda. The same applies to reddit and (I think?) twitter.
- ju3 11y ago
  Cause Engineers understand simple neat equations. They will happily tell you they can scale their system up to a billion people, but what happens when a billion people start interacting with each other they have no idea. In other words read Jurassic Park.
- mathattack 11y ago
  The more that algorithms get used, the harder it is to see when manipulation is occuring. This is especially true if there is confirmation bias. If I'm an exec that leans libertarian (or left, or right, or whatever) and those are the articles that I see, I assume it's working. Moreso, if I see what's getting posted elsewehre, I just assume the rest of the world is smart like me. You have to really dig in to see that something is going wrong. This involves setting up unbiased metrics that can't be gamed (hard) and listening to data that disagrees with your preconceptions (even harder).
- nailer 11y ago
  > (I think?) twitter Twitter definitely: they removed Milo Yiannopolis' identity verification tick without citing a specific reason. You might not like what he has to say (I frequently don't) but there have been much worse things Twitter doesn't seem to care about at all (someone threatening to murder Donald Trump). I don't want Twitter or any other media to become an echo chamber.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- matt4077 11y ago
MatekCopatek 11y ago
"It was absolutely bias, we were doing it subjectively," I think it would be equally interesting to discuss the biases of algorithmic solutions. It's a bit naive to think people selecting news is subjective while a computer selecting news (based on an algorithm written by people that relies on data created by measuring people) is somehow objective.
dantillberg 11y ago
Regardless of whether this story is true or not, how do we know whether and/or to what extent new media backhandedly affects political outcomes? Facebook (if/when it wants to) could wield tremendous power in swaying politics throughout the world by adjusting which stories/posts people see and which they tend not to. How are people to know that they're not being intentionally manipulated? (and if that seems like Conspiracy Theory talk, perhaps first consider that Old Media -- TV, newspapers, radio, etc -- throughout the world very often do exactly this.)
- pigpaws 11y ago
  very true. in fact, the Washington Post has a 'hit piece' out on Trump today. Yet, the WaPo has clearly delineated that they slant 'left', and don't think that it sways their reporting. Whats the psychology there? While I have no problem with 'hit pieces', I do have a problem when candidates are not treated or investigated with the same vigor. The 'MSM' has failed all of us, and the online companies are going down the same 'memory hole', trying to force people to one side or the other.
- meira 11y ago
  Brazil is the biggest facebook lab. It's happening right now.
  - meira 11y ago
    And it's ugly.
- ju3 11y ago
  In my experience most of the time people are unintentionally manipulated. It's not just that they don't know, its that the "manipulator" has no idea what they are doing either. When someone at Facebook asked Zuckerberg recently, if they should be doing something about Trump, it shows they are just waking up to what their platform is already being used for. They don't seem to have any awareness, that there are numerous other ideologues, megalomaniacs, demagogues, they unintentionally support in countries across the world. That's when they run and hide behind free speech, cause facing the truth about what they have created is too complicated.
f_allwein 11y ago
Good example of what happens as the (formerly open) Internet becomes closed. I guess many people already equate "Facebook" to "the Internet", unaware of the processes running there. What if a future president bans left wing stories/ stories about Islam etc? Sadly, it looks like we will continue to move away from the open Internet. "In the near future - _corporate_ networks reach out to the stars." (Ghost in the Shell)
- lostmsu 11y ago
  Ideally, Islam should be banned, because https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostasy_in_Islam#Punishment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostasy_in_Islam#Punishment + the fact, that children of muslims are considered muslims is quite incompatible with modern humanity.
  - dang 11y ago
    > Islam should be banned Religious flamewars are not welcome on Hacker News. Please don't post anything like this again.
f_allwein 11y ago
Good example of what happens as the (formerly open) Internet becomes closed. I guess many people already equate "Facebook" to "the Internet", unaware of the processes running there. What if a future president bans left wing stories/ stories about Islam etc? Sadly, it looks like we will continue to move away from the open Internet. "In the near future - _corporate_ networks reach out to the stars." (Ghost in the Shell)
tomp 11y ago
Facebook has already denied this. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/10/facebook-denies-censoring-conservative-trending-news https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/10/facebook-... Although I don't see any signal in this, it seems like the obvious course of action both if they are and if they aren't supressing conservative articles.
- chris_wot 11y ago
  Well, they seem to have been happy to delete at least one person's post. I know John Dickson and while I disagree with his comment, I wonder how it was that their staff member "accidentally" deleted his post. There is no transparency at all. The only way that post was restored was because someone in the Australian government, at avert high level, got in contact with someone else in Facebook who had the decision reversed and apologised to John Dickson.
- awqrre 11y ago
  Facebook was also denying that it was trying to influence election results, a few weeks ago: http://thehill.com/policy/technology/276503-facebook-employee-said-to-pose-question-about-stopping-trump-to-ceo http://thehill.com/policy/technology/276503-facebook-employe... ...
1337biz 11y ago
Very loaded wording. Since when became "conservative" a synonym for "right wing".
- cabalamat 11y ago
  Probably since 1834, when the Conservative Party was founded.
dang 11y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11659565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11659565
- chris_wot 11y ago
  Thank you :-) sorry about that, I posted because my friend John Dickson was mentioned, and then realised I hadn't read carefully enough and the better link is the Gizmodo article, which wasn't linked to...

34 points by chris_wot 11y ago

What's this? Conservatives complaining that a business wants to pick and choose who it does business with? I thought they were in favour of that.

yAnonymous 11y ago

Very much related: I noticed that an increasing amount of people apparently automatically "like" left- and rightwing Facebook pages, depending on other pages they follow and news they like. This could possibly have legal consequences for the users and I'm looking for a way to legally pursue Facebook's auto-liking bullshit. They knowingly misrepresent people to increase their profits.

gormann2 11y ago

I would bet my left ball that the republicans employ astroturfing businesses to spam the social networks with their stories and form a narrative. They get people to control multiple personas on the same computer and post the same story from the point of view of those personas. If a person encounters the same story a couple of times, they tend to believe it.

meira 11y ago

Here in Brazil their "algorithms" do the opposite: suppress left-wing news. And that is, my friends, why you all are seeing the mess happening in my country.

meira 11y ago

Here in Brazil their "algorithms" do the opposite: suppress left-wing news. And that is, my friends, why you all are seeing the mess happening in my country.

manicdee 11y ago

… based on one statement by one person.

chris_wot 11y ago
I probably should have linked to this story: http://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-suppressed-conser-1775461006 http://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-supp... But not just one person - Facebook had to apologise to John Dickson for deleting his post. So I ask you - what were they doing fooling around with his posts?
- jasonlotito 11y ago
  Read the story you linked to. Still only one person. "This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul..." You're confusing the multiple people who claimed they were asked to inject stories that weren't trending. In fact, you have multiple sources who contradict the opinion of your source: "Other former curators interviewed by Gizmodo denied consciously suppressing conservative news, and we were unable to determine if left-wing news topics or sources were similarly suppressed." Finally, underlying contention, that Facebook was at fault, is even denied by that same individual. "there is no evidence that Facebook management mandated or was even aware of any political bias at work." And finally, this is Gizmodo, so unless you have something from a trustworthy source, I would treat them as suspect at best.
  - chris_wot 11y ago
    Curious, then, that John Dicksons post was specifically removed. Why was someone reviewing it at all? Sure, they accidentally deleted it - they admitted as much when they officially apologised to John. But then again, why was a staffer looking at Dicksons post at all?
emn13 11y ago
...and it sounds like they initially suppressed and injected a lot more stories, too, so it's conceivable that this person was pissed off about these suppressions, but not about others that happened to agree with their own prejudices. And then there's the issue that's these kind of algorithms need tuning - they're not intrinsically neutral. It's unlikely that conservative and liberal social networks/stories have the same kind of structures, and details of how the network is connected can influence what's trending. This makes the complaint a little absurd. Not only are algorithmic results also biased, these manual corrections might conceivably be useful to correct that bias. There's this naive assumption that there exists the One True Fair and Neutral ranking algorithm that's unbiased. But the whole notion is ridiculous: we want that bias, because we want to discriminate in favor of "trending" content - and "trending" isn't even rigorously defined. And even if we had a rigorous definition, that doesn't mean it'd be the most useful definition. Elections have strictly defined protocols, yet that doesn't mean an elected US president has the majority of votes. And lest you believe majority voting is the answer, a majority elected president might nevertheless be inferior to a competitor by majority opinion (i.e. it's not stable)... and of course regardless of election result there's no guarantee that current opinions are a good predictor of future opinions let alone achieved results. In short: not only is this just one person's opinion, the standard they hold Facebook to (no bias) is impossibly high. Perhaps there's some amount of unwanted (by whom) bias, but dealing with that isn't as black and white as the complainer suggests.

ManlyBread 11y ago

How come that the bigger the service becomes the more prone it is to manipulations like that? It's always the same story: the service is relatively new, it becomes big, then it starts introducing algorithms that mess with the natural order of the submissions (time added, votes etc.) and then it comes to light that someone was manipulating this system in order to push their agenda. The same applies to reddit and (I think?) twitter.

ju3 11y ago
Cause Engineers understand simple neat equations. They will happily tell you they can scale their system up to a billion people, but what happens when a billion people start interacting with each other they have no idea. In other words read Jurassic Park.
mathattack 11y ago
The more that algorithms get used, the harder it is to see when manipulation is occuring. This is especially true if there is confirmation bias. If I'm an exec that leans libertarian (or left, or right, or whatever) and those are the articles that I see, I assume it's working. Moreso, if I see what's getting posted elsewehre, I just assume the rest of the world is smart like me. You have to really dig in to see that something is going wrong. This involves setting up unbiased metrics that can't be gamed (hard) and listening to data that disagrees with your preconceptions (even harder).
nailer 11y ago
> (I think?) twitter Twitter definitely: they removed Milo Yiannopolis' identity verification tick without citing a specific reason. You might not like what he has to say (I frequently don't) but there have been much worse things Twitter doesn't seem to care about at all (someone threatening to murder Donald Trump). I don't want Twitter or any other media to become an echo chamber.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
matt4077 11y ago

MatekCopatek 11y ago

"It was absolutely bias, we were doing it subjectively," I think it would be equally interesting to discuss the biases of algorithmic solutions. It's a bit naive to think people selecting news is subjective while a computer selecting news (based on an algorithm written by people that relies on data created by measuring people) is somehow objective.

dantillberg 11y ago

Regardless of whether this story is true or not, how do we know whether and/or to what extent new media backhandedly affects political outcomes? Facebook (if/when it wants to) could wield tremendous power in swaying politics throughout the world by adjusting which stories/posts people see and which they tend not to. How are people to know that they're not being intentionally manipulated? (and if that seems like Conspiracy Theory talk, perhaps first consider that Old Media -- TV, newspapers, radio, etc -- throughout the world very often do exactly this.)

pigpaws 11y ago
very true. in fact, the Washington Post has a 'hit piece' out on Trump today. Yet, the WaPo has clearly delineated that they slant 'left', and don't think that it sways their reporting. Whats the psychology there? While I have no problem with 'hit pieces', I do have a problem when candidates are not treated or investigated with the same vigor. The 'MSM' has failed all of us, and the online companies are going down the same 'memory hole', trying to force people to one side or the other.
meira 11y ago
Brazil is the biggest facebook lab. It's happening right now.
- meira 11y ago
  And it's ugly.
ju3 11y ago
In my experience most of the time people are unintentionally manipulated. It's not just that they don't know, its that the "manipulator" has no idea what they are doing either. When someone at Facebook asked Zuckerberg recently, if they should be doing something about Trump, it shows they are just waking up to what their platform is already being used for. They don't seem to have any awareness, that there are numerous other ideologues, megalomaniacs, demagogues, they unintentionally support in countries across the world. That's when they run and hide behind free speech, cause facing the truth about what they have created is too complicated.

f_allwein 11y ago

Good example of what happens as the (formerly open) Internet becomes closed. I guess many people already equate "Facebook" to "the Internet", unaware of the processes running there. What if a future president bans left wing stories/ stories about Islam etc? Sadly, it looks like we will continue to move away from the open Internet. "In the near future - _corporate_ networks reach out to the stars." (Ghost in the Shell)

lostmsu 11y ago
Ideally, Islam should be banned, because https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostasy_in_Islam#Punishment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostasy_in_Islam#Punishment + the fact, that children of muslims are considered muslims is quite incompatible with modern humanity.
- dang 11y ago
  > Islam should be banned Religious flamewars are not welcome on Hacker News. Please don't post anything like this again.

f_allwein 11y ago

tomp 11y ago

Facebook has already denied this. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/10/facebook-denies-censoring-conservative-trending-news https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/10/facebook-... Although I don't see any signal in this, it seems like the obvious course of action both if they are and if they aren't supressing conservative articles.

chris_wot 11y ago
Well, they seem to have been happy to delete at least one person's post. I know John Dickson and while I disagree with his comment, I wonder how it was that their staff member "accidentally" deleted his post. There is no transparency at all. The only way that post was restored was because someone in the Australian government, at avert high level, got in contact with someone else in Facebook who had the decision reversed and apologised to John Dickson.
awqrre 11y ago
Facebook was also denying that it was trying to influence election results, a few weeks ago: http://thehill.com/policy/technology/276503-facebook-employee-said-to-pose-question-about-stopping-trump-to-ceo http://thehill.com/policy/technology/276503-facebook-employe... ...

1337biz 11y ago

Very loaded wording. Since when became "conservative" a synonym for "right wing".

cabalamat 11y ago
Probably since 1834, when the Conservative Party was founded.

dang 11y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11659565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11659565

chris_wot 11y ago
Thank you :-) sorry about that, I posted because my friend John Dickson was mentioned, and then realised I hadn't read carefully enough and the better link is the Gizmodo article, which wasn't linked to...