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Most Americans Think Facebook and Twitter Censor Their Political Views

183 points by laurex 8y ago

bananas43332 8y ago
I just quit Facebook. Your own posts ought to show in your 'Most Recent' News Feed. One particular Share I tried posting over and over again with 'what I had to say about it' never showed up in News Feed. Facebook is Censoring. Anyway it's screwed-up when 'Most Recent' does not have in Chronological order yours and your Friends Post. Lots of Users messed up Facebook by accepting fake profiles from whomever into the thousandths, which no doubt are Foreign Hackers. Could be Facebook couldn't figure out which 'Political Box' to set me in. As I'm Social Conservative, but with the Democrats on economic issues. Populist so to say! I never tried to 'sort' my Friends. I enjoyed seeing the whole spectrum of Opinions, and never wished just to surround myself with those only thinking like me.
sensor_ship 8y ago
I mean, my views get censored here on HN all the time...
- dang 8y ago
  We don't "censor views". We do ban accounts that break the site guidelines, and if it's a serial troll, we usually don't bother to say so.
someguydave 8y ago
The interesting aspect is that conservatives think that it is very likely that social media sites censor their views at a rate double that of liberals. Even if the social media companies were strictly neutral in the matter, it's pretty common for conservatives to encounter left-wing hostility and censorship from other users of social media sites.
- ceejayoz 8y ago
  > it's pretty common for conservatives to encounter ... censorship from other users of social media sites How, exactly? Is Facebook doling out admin privileges to random users? Or are we confusing "receive criticism" with "censorship" here?
  - trisimix 8y ago
    They are confusing the two yes
  - frockington 8y ago
    Post an article in r/politics about anything positive Trump has done and you'll get a ban. On Facebook, a similar phenomenon might occur due to liberal users reporting conservative ideas they don't agree with as hate speech. Disclaimer: I'm not very familiar with how Facebook works so I could be way off
    - ebikelaw 8y ago
      Being banned by a user-moderated forum is not equivalent to being censored by a social media platform.
    - ceejayoz 8y ago
      > Post an article in r/politics about anything positive Trump has done and you'll get a ban. That's no more "censorship" than me unfriending you on Facebook would be. > On Facebook, a similar phenomenon might occur due to liberal users reporting conservative ideas they don't agree with as hate speech. That'll put it in a review queue, upon which Facebook employees make a decision. If it gets deleted, it's because you violated Facebook's rules.
      - frockington 8y ago
        If it is an actual Facebook employee, I can definitely see why conservatives would think that. The active encouragement of civil disobedience by liberal leaders is probably more than enough confirmation to conservatives of this behavior. I;m not saying this behavior is /is notoccurring, just why some people might think that it does
ebikelaw 8y ago
A bit of both-sides-ism here. The poll shows that Republicans almost universally believe that these companies censor their viewpoint, despite the fact that these companies have bent over backwards to accommodate those views and to give them platforms. Meanwhile only a small fraction of Democrats believe this is very likely, and they aren’t strongly sure about which side is benefiting from the supposed bias.
- minikites 8y ago
  There's also lots of evidence to the contrary: Twitter refuses to ban self-identified Nazis who incite violence but there are dozens of instances of people getting banned for saying mean insults to those same Nazis.
  - ebikelaw 8y ago
    Yes that’s what I mean by bending over backwards. Twitter is actually a “safe space” for Nazis.
  - praha14 8y ago
    Who’s an example?
  - jtbayly 8y ago
    Making Nazis out to be just a more extreme form of the Republican viewpoint is hardly a good way to engage in discussion about a politically sensitive topic.
    - minikites 8y ago
      I didn't do that, it was just a similar example.
    - kebman 8y ago
      But Nazis have more in common with Democrats anyway :D :D :D :D banning guns, wanting mass regulation /trolol
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patrickg_zill 8y ago
This article seems to be a smoking gun... https://medium.com/@garycoby/twitter-restricts-trump-eb7e48ccf5ff https://medium.com/@garycoby/twitter-restricts-trump-eb7e48c... Note that there are plenty of other custom icons that Twitter allows.
- geofft 8y ago
  I don't think refusal to allow a custom emoji with a hashtag is censorship - they didn't ban the hashtag. Custom emoji are a business/marketing/advertising thing, and if we want to restrict the ability of private businesses to decline advertising deals with other private businesses for any reason at all (including "we just don't like you"), that's a whole different conversation, and one I suspect many conservatives will not be pleased with the outcome of. As the article says, this move cost Twitter millions in revenue. If you don't have the ability to just choose not to make money because you're not interested in the transaction, you don't actually control the company, the public does.
  - dingo_bat 8y ago
    > I don't think refusal to allow a custom emoji with a hashtag is censorship It is if you allow the other side to do exactly the same, as noted in the linked article.
    - luddit3 8y ago
      Clinton campaign did not do the same thing. All they did was elephant and donkey for the conventions. Looks like it the rights victim complex again.
      - dingo_bat 8y ago
        They got a custom icon.
        wybiral 8y ago
        But not a custom icon as part of an attack ad calling one of the candidates a criminal. There is a subtle difference.
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JKCalhoun 8y ago
When a friend posts on Facebook and it doesn't show up in my feed that's FB making a call as to what to show me. Why? Because algorithms. Maybe "censorship" is a strong word in this instance — do we prefer "selective disclosure"? Regardless, not what I signed up for. Deleted FB.
- beavisthegenius 8y ago
  Censorship isnot too strong. It's exactly what's happening.
- nsxwolf 8y ago
  Once in awhile Facebook decides I shouldn't be friends with someone anymore and suppresses all of their posts from my feed. I start to wonder what's happened to them, so I make a point of searching for their page and find that they've been posting daily. Things I would have been interested to see and would have commented on.
  - Declanomous 8y ago
    It's entirely possible that Facebook found that your comments caused less engagement for other people on Facebook, and therefore doesn't want you to comment. It's also possible that Facebook determined that this person has substantially different politics than you, and has put you in different 'boxes'. You can actually check what groups Facebook thinks you belong in. For instance, Facebook thinks my peer group is 'Starting Adult Life', and my US Political Stance is 'very liberal'. (Facebook also thinks I work in a production occupation, like mining, or lumber, which couldn't be further from the truth, which explains all the ads for industrial equipment) I went to high school in a really conservative place, and I'm friends with a lot of people who have wildly different views on religion and politics. A few years ago I stopped seeing their posts, even if I added them to the group of people I see first on Facebook. Meanwhile, I started seeing a ton of posts from people who I barely knew in college, presumably because their 'beliefs' were much closer to mine. I'm extremely cynical, and I find dogmatic people of similar beliefs as annoying as people whose beliefs I disagree with, and my Facebook feed became a personal hell of dogmatism, especially leading up to the 2016 election. As a result I check Facebook at most once a week. It's entirely possible that leaving the platform improved the experience for some of my more conservative peers from high school, who no longer have to see my posts on the walls of mutual friends.
josteink 8y ago
I can fully believe that. Try for instance to have a discussion here on hacker news about the less fortunate sides of diversity initiatives. Then see how many minutes it takes before your entire thread is flagged and effectively censored.
- pavlov 8y ago
  HN is not owned by a social media giant, so this grievance doesn’t appear to have much to do with the article.
  - chillydawg 8y ago
    Sure it is, it's owned by the people who own (or initially funded) the social media giants.
  - ProAm 8y ago
    It is owned by a Silicon Valley VC giant, while not directly media it is steered by big money. However I think HN is moderated relatively well, but I can see how some people might think it's being gamed/controlled/censored by self interest (I don't)
  - bumblebritches5 8y ago
    Reddit is and it's even worse.
  - mc32 8y ago
    I think that’s the wrong question to imply. What it is is an illustration of how big media behaves due to its own implicit ad well as explicit biases. Of course HN isn’t mainstream, but it also experiences some of the same symptoms.
- cafard 8y ago
  HN is a social media giant?
  - josteink 8y ago
dingo_bat 8y ago
And it's true. Case in point: the gun emoticon.
- amelius 8y ago
  By the way, it's stupid that we still can't have user-defined emoticons. We could have enriched our online culture with a flourishing set of shared emoticons by now!
  - tivert 8y ago
    > By the way, it's stupid that we still can't have user-defined [emojis]. Emojis should have only been embedded user-defined pngs. I know I'm being cranky and old, but I feel our character sets shouldn't have been used to encode novel cute pictures.
    - amelius 8y ago
      Yes. The problem is that it assumes that language is fixed. However, the correct way is to make emojis freely definable, so that the emoji language will continue to develop; of course, the unfortunate side-effect for character set maintainers would be that they have to expand the set in order to incorporate the new parts of the language. But that is their problem; you can't force a population to use a limited set of symbols.
      - thanatropism 8y ago
        > you can't force a population to use a limited set of symbols. It's called an "alphabet".
        AsyncAwait 8y ago
        I think the point was "you can't force a population to use a limited set of symbols [that can't be used to express an arbitrary idea]".
pressurefree 8y ago
sprewell chokes coach... used to be called a headlock... until sundar turned on Pakis
pjc50 8y ago
Could do with some examples of said views so we could see whether it's a false equivalence, or whether some of the "views" in fact comprise incitement to violence etc. Note that there is no "true neutral" in this world; neutrality itself is a political position that helps certain people and hinders others.
- wu-ikkyu 8y ago
  How many examples do you require? Conservative comedian Owen Benjamin being banned from Twitter for life is but one: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wehNVE7_G24 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wehNVE7_G24
  - pjc50 8y ago
    For being homophobic to one of the mass shooting victims? http://www.adirondackdailyenterprise.com/news/local-news/2018/04/twitter-blocks-owen-benjamin/ http://www.adirondackdailyenterprise.com/news/local-news/201...
    - wu-ikkyu 8y ago
      Like it or not (I don't), he was expressing his political opinions, albeit in a tactless way. Social media is overrun with much worse garbage and people are not banned for such.
protonimitate 8y ago
At the end of the day, is anyone really surprised that these platforms censor/filter content in any way? Where did the assumption of an un-biased platform come from? These companies are in the business of making money, as much as they preach about 'making a difference in the world', they will always default to whatever gains the most public favor and generates the most revenue. I am actually surprised by the statistics, I had assumed that less people thought they were being censored. Although this presents an opposite problem, if everyone thinks they are being censored then they can claim the real truth is being 'censored'. Biases will always exist when money is involved.
glitchc 8y ago
Everyone at one point has made a comment that has been downvoted or moderated out of existence. The rejection sticks in your mind. Effectively, that is censorship.
- stephengillie 8y ago
  You're submitting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks.
  - glitchc 8y ago
    Would you assume I'm right-wing if I do not use politically correct terminology? Will slowing down change my world-view or simply the language I use to express it?
    - stephengillie 8y ago
      It wasn't directed at your post, sorry. It's the rate-limit response HN gives - users who are "slow-banned" see it on posting more than 1 post every 5 minutes. Another form of censorship, as others can post when you cannot. As to your specific points: > Would you assume I'm right-wing if I do not use politically correct terminology? Frankly, yes. Politically correct speech appears to be today's shibboleth[0]. > Will slowing down change my world-view or simply the language I use to express it? Slowing down a poster will reduce their ability to express their viewpoint, diluting it among other posters. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth
    - JackCh 8y ago
      I think you misread that post. He was quoting HN's forced cooldown that's imposed if the system thinks you're in some sort of heated flamewar. I assume he means to suggest this is a form of soft censorship tied into the internet points system (which is to say, it seems like he's agreeing with you.)
      - glitchc 8y ago
ddingus 8y ago
Most Americans would be right. There is great confusion on the scope and purpose of the First Amendment in play here. Secondly, media is drilling down on two toxic ideas: always two sides to every story , and objectivity, claim of no bias. These things combine to present ordinary Americans with the expectation of objective media and free speech everywhere. A side effect is a surrender of critical thought in return for unwarranted trust. The remedy should be to evaluate all of this with a critical eye and help people understand there is always bias, and how they can and shoild be using diverse sources to stay informed.
moduspol 8y ago
I lean conservative, but to be honest, I assign only a small portion of the blame to social media giants. Their office areas and leadership certainly lean left-wing, but I don't think that's the main issue. I think the biggest contributor is just that left-leaning people are more likely to be offended by right-leaning views. As a result, even an entirely neutral algorithm focused on retention / user satisfaction will be more careful about showing right-leaning views to users who aren't obviously right-leaning. To me, it's tough to call that censorship. As a result, I see the issue more as a symptom of the real problem, but that's a lot tougher to solve.
- nascar_is_bad 8y ago
  > I think the biggest contributor is just that left-leaning people are more likely to be offended by right-leaning views. More likely to have empathy is another way to phrase that.
  - orbifold 8y ago
    You can be super emphatic an right wing, how do you think someone becomes a populist nationalist. Besides from a European perspective even someone like Obama or even more obviously Hillary (based on the amount of war mongering she has done alone) is center or ultra right.
    - eropple 8y ago
      > You can be super emphatic an right wing, how do you think someone becomes a populist nationalist. At the bottom? Fear of the other; in the United States, fear of the other rooted particularly in racism. Because it's not "nationalism" here--a disease by itself, but a controllable one. It's white supremacism, given nicer clothes by calling it "white nationalism" for some godforsaken reason, peddled by leaders who want the bottom to vote their way. It's not like it's news. Lee Atwater pegged this whole disgraceful thing decades ago. To legitimize and get boots on the ground for economically regressive policies, the right wing of the United States leveraged this racially-motivated insecurity; now the racist tiger has eaten them and they are so very surprised that the racist tiger was racist all along. At the top? They're the ones doing the peddling. Some is surely true-believer racism. Some is also surely cynicism--because the bottom will eat it up and there's your leash to drag them where you want. It isn't exactly complex. (And, no, Obama and Clinton are not "ultra right" from a European perspective; that's the sort of mendacious both-sidesing I expect out of actually far right speakers, though. Obama and Clinton would be generically center- to center-right politicians on a Europe-calibrated axis. The modern Republican Party is more like Ukip.)
throwaway69777 8y ago
This 100% happens. https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/style/2014/11/26/how-miriam-careys-u-turn-at-a-white-house-checkpoint-led-to-her-death/?noredirect=on https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/style/2014/11/26/how-miria... When this^ woman was murdered, I attempted to post on Facebook: "I bet this woman was not a terrorist." to which I was told the attempt failed. After troubleshooting, such as trying again or posting something else, I felt very deceived.
- erinaceousjones 8y ago
  I mean.. that's an anecdote which could have a myriad of technical explanations. I wouldn't immediately jump to the assumption that facebook is blocking select users from sharing links from a respected newspaper because they don't like the content of the article for some reason (why would they even block this article in specific?) * washingtonpost is behind a GDPR paywall (for me at least), it took a few attempts even for the link preview to load when I tried posting that * 99.9999% uptime of web APIs is not 100%, fb servers really could have been having trouble reaching washingtonpost * I was able to share that post fine (once the link preview finally loaded properly), so WFM..?
  - mlindner 8y ago
    Yes but they could state those in the error message. They don't so people are left to their own conclusions on why things were blocked. Especially if you're not technically savvy, the reason why something isn't submitted is because someone physical human blocked you from submitting it. I can't count the number of times people hated on game servers being laggy simply blaming it as the company trying to save money by using cheap servers when the actual cause is likely any number of network congestion issues. People will anthropomorphize any technical issue.
fortythirteen 8y ago
This isn't opinion, it's provable fact. Twitter and Facebook were on a tear last year, actively shutting down the accounts of conservative pundits, under the guise of rules violations, while turning a blind eye to the same actions from pundits and personalities on the left.
- cblades 8y ago
  Could you point out some of those examples?
  - fortythirteen 8y ago
    My favorite is when Sabo the conservative street artist got banned from Facebook right after his "Fuck Zuck 2020" posters appeared all over L.A. But hidden camera footage of a Twitter engineer openly admitting that they shadowbanned conservatives came out last year.
wrs 8y ago
Fantastic. So please stop using them, and maybe things will get a little less crazy!
s73v3r_ 8y ago
Unfortunately a lot of people conflate censorship with, "We're not shoving your uncle's conspiracy theories in everyone's face."
Declanomous 8y ago
I can't stand the fact that organizations hide behind "algorithms" as an excuse for every unintended side-effect. It's no surprise that algorithms create an information bubble for us. I like to use music as an example: the best music recommendations I've ever received have been from friends. I'll describe music I'm listening to and like, and they'll recommend something for me. I'd say 50% of the time I find it unobjectionable, 30% of the time I hate it, and 20% of the time I love it. Sites have been trying to replicate this functionality using algorithms for a well over a decade. Last.fm used to be a great way for me find music. As far as I could tell, it would just pick music from people who listened to the same artists as you. I'd say I found 30% of the music unobjectionable, 50% of the music terrible, and 20% of the music great. Functionally, this was remarkably similar to my friends recommending me music, because I only care about the music I loved. Over time their algorithm got 'better' and nearly stopped recommending music I disliked, however I found that it mostly just recommended me music that was in the unobjectionable middle ground of 'meh'. I stopped looking for music on Last.fm because it stopped giving me music I loved. We've positioned machine learning as a replacement to curation, but what it really does is put forth the least objectionable content. Machine learning lacks the ability to deal with the nuances surrounding controversial or challenging content. It never takes the leap of faith that a person would when recommending you something. I am really interested to see how this all plays out over the next few years, because I think people are beginning to realize they are addicted to the perpetual stream of 'good enough' content. The network effect will probably protect Facebook for the time being, I assume the first sites affected will be content-driven, like YouTube. Of course, XKCD addressed the issues I have with algorithms far better than I could ever hope to: https://xkcd.com/1831/ https://xkcd.com/1831/
- allthenews 8y ago
  >We've positioned machine learning as a replacement to curation, but what it really does is put forth the least objectionable content. I don't think the problem is with ML. You could easily train a net to make boulder selections with an appropriate data set. I believe what you are seeing is an accommodation for the average person. Most people aren't adventurous, and it makes business sense to get algos working for the middle majority than to cater to tail ends. It also, IMO, makes content at places like youtube less technical and more clickbaity. But again I believe this is somewhat intentional.
pmarreck 8y ago
Lack of trust is a bullshit argument. It's basically the Conspiracy Fallacy: https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/74/Conspiracy_Theory https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla... Is there any evidence to support this assertion and that Facebook isn't merely showing you information that is palatable to you? (Note that this greatly expands the use of this fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_repugnance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_repugnance) I think we all have to answer these questions first: 1) Are you comfortable with receiving information that is true, or even mostly true, but that which is distasteful to you personally? 2) If so, do you wish to impose this expectation on everyone else?
- hedora 8y ago
  Search for “facebook hires censors” on the search engine of your choice. The story was broadly covered by sources across the political spectrum. And in answer to your two questions: Yes, I expect news sources to have journalisic integrity, even if the truth is not popular.
  - pmarreck 8y ago
    I can't find anything from a remotely unbiased source on "facebook hires censors" other than this: https://www.popsci.com/Facebook-hiring-3000-content-monitors https://www.popsci.com/Facebook-hiring-3000-content-monitors Which is basically just content monitoring that AI can't do... child exploitation, hate speech, gore, pornography, etc. I think it's a pretty damn right-wing slippery-slope you're traversing if you assume that's equivalent to "censorship of rogue ideas"
    - azborder 8y ago
      “Hate speech” seems to cover a pretty wide spectrum these days.
      - pmarreck 8y ago
        Fair enough because I agree, nevertheless it’s a stretch to accuse The Social-Network Powers That Be of essentially a left-wing conspiracy
dilap 8y ago
This is obviously true.
newswriter99 8y ago
Case in point is that consumers are more than happy to be given custom-tailored feeds that filter content they agree with (or that the provider's algorithm THINKS they agree with). If this was not true, Vero would have taken off instead of falling flat. Social media is pretty much broken at this point. The idea was to increase reach and communication. Instead we've got people grouped into thought bubbles and echo chambers. I'd argue that Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are causing more harm to society at this point than any potential benefit they provide.
- orev 8y ago
  Never heard of Vero. It’s a mistake to think that sites/apps find success by having better features. Especially in social media, the network effect is the only thing that determines who lives and dies.
- kebman 8y ago
  Consider this: There are other apps that you haven't heard of, with communities completely secluded from the Fb/twit/goog environment, and nobody's complaining that they are bubbleified.
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ast22989 8y ago
This is can be seen in any number of areas: - the Gun Emoji censorship was only the beginning but clearly intends to define the ideologically playing field by limiting the ideas people can express - Those who believe that "hate speech" should be censored will likely view the censorship in place as legitimate. However, "hate speech" is typically allowed against Whites (they are considered "oppressors" and because of power imbalances, it's different for them ... ). The phrase "Hate Speech" is used to ban speech that did not violate previous norms against violence / obscenity but is nonetheless considered subversive. - Facebook contracted with the "mainstream media" and recently eliminated its "trending" feature after left-wing criticism that they did not censor conservative so-called "fake news" that helped Trump win election. Apple is similarly contracting with predominantly left-wing "mainstream media" outlets to stock its human-curated i.e. censored News App. - Youtube and likely others work with ADL / SPLC to use ML to algorithmically flag and ban "hate speech" content. Here is a ranking of the subreddits ADL flagged in "Hate comments count by subreddit": - White rights - Mens rights - the Donald - Ask Trump Supporters - Republican - Conspiracy - Guns are Cool - New Right - 2016 Elections - Censorship - First Amendment - Nazi Hunting - 911 Truth - Good Cop Free Donut They appear to be very focused on right-wing "hate" and not much on the left. Source: page 10 of https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/Online%20Hate%20Index%20Innovation%20Brief_Digital_v2_0.pdf https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/Online%20H... - ADL is working with social media giants (notably Reddit) on automated "hate speech" censorship. https://www.adl.org/resources/reports/the-online-hate-index https://www.adl.org/resources/reports/the-online-hate-index ... the OHI model captures the experience of hate speech online – it does not define hate speech [it's based on subjective manual flaggers rather than explicit criteria] ...the D-Lab is identifying strategies to scale the process for labeling comments. While there is still a long way to go with artificial intelligence and machine learning-based solutions, ADL and the D-Lab believe these technologies can go a long way to curbing online hate speech. [i.e., we hope ML-automated censorship will be effective]. The ADL’s long standing mission has been to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and secure justice and fair treatment to all...the Online Hate Index will help us do just that. - ADL [of B'nai B'rith] was founded in 1913 by B'nai B'rith, a "force for Jewish unity, Jewish security, and Jewish continuity." (http://www.bnaibrith.org/giving.html http://www.bnaibrith.org/giving.html, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Defamation_League https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Defamation_League) - Youtube demonetized, suspended, and terminated numerous gun channels in recent months - Pervasive political censorship of controversial but nonviolent "alt-right" ideas, e.g. Twitter and Jared Taylor, Richard Spencer and crowdfunding. Certainly neither constitutes "incitement" under the first amendment standard of Brandenburg v. Ohio "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action." - While private organizations are not bound by the first amendment, one could reasonably consider their removal of political speech that in public is protected by first amendment to be censorship.
oblib 8y ago
Yesterday I tried to post a link on FB to an "Anonymous video maker" that I saw linked in an article shared here. It's just a web based video maker but when I tried to post it I got a message saying "Facebook thinks this is spam" and FB wouldn't let me share it. Since the page doesn't promote any political view at all we might hesitate to make the leap that they are censoring political views but because the entire purpose of that app is intended for exposing corporate/political/social issues it's a bit difficult to believe FB doesn't have that in mind when they block a link to it from being shared. I'd love to hear what other reasons they might have because I really cannot think of any that hold up. Here's the link: http://anonymous-video.com/index.html http://anonymous-video.com/index.html
- admax88q 8y ago
  The reason they have is when the spam filter is run against anonymous-video.com it returns positive. You're assigning far too much agency to the decision as if someone at FB reviewed anonymous-video.com specifically and decided to block it or not. Its just a machine learning model that has been trained on a bunch of existing spam finds signals in common with your link.
  - oblib 8y ago
    "The reason they have is when the spam filter is run against anonymous-video.com it returns positive." That's not a reason. It's an explanation that fails to provide cause.
  - evincarofautumn 8y ago
    Can semi-confirm: I worked on Site Integrity (Infrastructure) at FB in 2013–2014, and iirc there were many instances where a benign URL was automatically flagged as spam, and someone had to explicitly go and whitelist it because we were getting complaints. Could be any number of things—I’d guess URLs containing things like “video” and “anonymous” are often sketchy pirate sites that try to install malware; or perhaps that URL was a malicious site in the past but isn’t anymore. The policies are explicitly written in code (Haxl) but a lot of them invoke machine learning models to do actual classification of stuff (URLs, images, comments, &c.)—although I’d imagine an increasing amount of the computation is being moved over to the Haxl side because it’s so much less resource-intensive than the FXL system it replaced. Where possible, SI usually errs on the side of “better safe than sorry” when it comes to spam, malware, fake accounts, &c.—hence users’ complaints of “getting zucc’d” when someone reports them, or their activity on the site triggers a filter.
trophycase 8y ago
Title is misleading. Most Americans think Facebook and Twitter censor some political views, not necessarily theirs.
rjkennedy98 8y ago
I talked to an ex-twitter employee I met in Ireland at bar. He told me very candidly that twitter employees loathed Milo Yiannopolous and were actively trying to figure out any way to ban him. Not a fan of Milo, but there are clearly agendas which can't be extricated from politics.
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  I imagine a good part of that is because he led a brigade of followers that would go out and harass other users.
  - fernandotakai 8y ago
    if that's true, that rule should be applied to everyone, not only milo. there are more right and left-wing fringe users that love to brigade other users.
    - mhh__ 8y ago
      Perhaps I'm playing devils advocate by saying this, but: Isn't Milo one of the most well known cases of this? e.g. "Dealing" with him would help the twitter brand the most visibly.
      - lainga 8y ago
        I'm not sure the average Twitter user wants Twitter to "deal" with him like they're Vito Corleone.
  - iosDrone 8y ago
    Can you clarify how he "led a brigade." Point me to an example where he encouraged his followers to say derogatory things?
    - s73v3r_ 8y ago
      How about when he said that people should, "Start killing journalists," and then the next day someone opened fire at a newsroom.
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OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago
*know
gnicholas 8y ago
Interesting that although Republicans are more likely to think that social media platforms are biased against them, they are less likely to think that such platforms should be subject to increased government regulation. As a cynic, I was expecting that Republicans might want more regulation here (in contravention of their general desire for less regulation) because it would be in their own interests. Note: I'm not saying I expect Republicans to be more self-interested/hypocritical than Democrats. I would expect it of both parties, based on my experience in the field.
- AmericanChopper 8y ago
  As a Republican, and a conservative, freedom of expression is one of the principles I hold most dear. It used to also be a principle embraced by liberals, but they seem to have widely abandoned it, you don’t see conservatives going around trying to “no platform” people (which is an insidious euphemism). It is also one of the core principles the Internet was founded on, or at least of the early internet subculture. Sadly, this has also been widely abandoned by the organisations that have the most influence over the internet. I don’t see how you could plan to fight censorship with more censorship.
  - throwawayjava 8y ago
    > you don’t see conservatives going around trying to “no platform” people This is an extremely odd statement and it took me a while to figure out why you would think that. Because you absolutely do see conservatives shut down speech. Systematically. For a good account of this on college campuses, see https://newrepublic.com/article/147908/invisible-free-speech-crisis https://newrepublic.com/article/147908/invisible-free-speech... Perhaps we "don't see conservatives going around trying to 'no platform' people" in the same way that fish don't see water. We expect conservatives to fire public school LGBT teachers who mention their partners when told to talk about their personal lives on parent night. We expect Christian colleges to fire people for being not conservative enough. We expect those colleges to expel students for supporting gay rights. We expect obscenity laws. (Aside: conservatives strongly support obscenity laws and strongly oppose bans on hate speech. I can understand the worldview that bans both, and I myself have a worldview that calls for banning neither. But I will be forever perplexed over how anyone who doesn't themselves condone hate speech could come to the conclusion that nakedness/lewdity poses a great threat to society which justifies censorship, but that hate speech does not. If anyone here does have that viewpoint, I'd be interested to hear their reasoning.) We expect attempts to ban flag burning. We expect the Red Scare. And it's true that we never hear about Richard Dawkins being uninvited from Cedarville or Wheaton. But that's only because those students/faculty would be expelled from the institution the moment the invitation was extended. It's normal for conservatives to be illiberal on speech. So normal that, like fish in water, we don't even see it! So when people like Cedarville's president bemoan the suppression of speech on college campuses while at same time firing his own faculty for publicly criticizing Mitt Romney, expelling his students for their speech, and routinely monitoring the social media accounts of his students, I think it's fair to say (as https://newrepublic.com/article/147908/invisible-free-speech-crisis https://newrepublic.com/article/147908/invisible-free-speech... puts it): There are many who argue, in the pages of this country’s most respected periodicals, that this power lies with the intolerant left. But the evidence of real, widespread speech suppression shows it lies elsewhere, on the right. This, in turn, suggests that the ostensible champions of free speech are more interested in criticizing campus identity politics than in protecting speech. Now, revisiting your quote once more: > you don’t see conservatives going around trying to “no platform” people (which is an insidious euphemism) Insidious. No-platforming is so thoroughly embedded in American conservativism that you don't even see it even though it's pervasive. That's practically the definition of insidious. > I don’t see how you could plan to fight censorship with more censorship. There is one famous example related to the heckler's veto. Rules against heckling/shouting during a speech use censorship to shut down an attempt at censorship. And even that only makes sense in some circumstances; e.g., in a lecture hall but not at a large rally.
ug02nice 8y ago
i've seen many cases how twitter silences and bans people speaking out against the democratic party
threatofrain 8y ago
Here's Axios's take on the issue: https://www.axios.com/conservatives-republicans-social-media-censorship-75db1560-4dd7-4d91-961b-5cf2d2b8c799.html https://www.axios.com/conservatives-republicans-social-media...
iosDrone 8y ago
Is this even up for discussion? Whatever you think of him, Milo Yiannopoulos got banned because HIS FOLLOWERS made derogatory statements about an actress. (edit: spelling)
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  Actually, Milo was banned because he already had been suspended several times, and then he decided to impersonate another user, which is blatantly against the ToS.
  - iosDrone 8y ago
    That's not what was widely reported.
fallingfrog 8y ago
Does that include the army of right wing trolls that appear out of nowhere to hurl racist invective or curse words at you every time you post something like "way to go"! on the page of a progressive candidate? I can't be only person who experiences this. A lot of times it's in all caps, and usually the person's Facebook profile features them holding an assault rifle. The insults range from "stupid mother fucker" to "you're a tool of the Jews" to just "retard". Am I to understand that conservatives want to be more free to post that kind of stuff?
protomyth 8y ago
I'm starting to think that the problem is Facebook sets the importance of politics much, much higher than the users of Facebook. It really seems like the folks doing the programming are political animals, and most of us are more concerned with the personal connections we have made. I think they are really bad at understanding our circle of people we deal with and are using a variety of factors that just aren't as important to us.
- wu-ikkyu 8y ago
  I recently noticed this with Google News in Chrome. The recommended stories in my feed were creepily relevant to my current location and interests. And yet, the top 2-3 results were not at all -- they were about some ridiculous political rumors/squabbles on CNN/Fox. I never visit those sites and also do my absolute best to be completely ignorant of such political "news". It was blantantly obvious they were forcing irrelevant political nonsense to the top of my queue.
0x00000000 8y ago
I have reported multiple facebook posts of friends making death threats against (conservative) politicians and every time it comes back "we reviewed the post and it is not in violation of community guidelines"
- rainonmoon 8y ago
  If it makes you feel any better, female friends have reported multiple Facebook posts from white nationalists sending them death and rape threats only to receive the same message. At least their policy is consistently bad?
skate22 8y ago
Ive conditioned my fb feed to be 95% memes. I go there every couple of days for some fresh memes
wu-ikkyu 8y ago
It seems most every discussion here on HN about political censorship devolves into flamewars, mass downvotes, and mass flagging. That in itself seems quite indicative.

183 points by laurex 8y ago

I just quit Facebook. Your own posts ought to show in your 'Most Recent' News Feed. One particular Share I tried posting over and over again with 'what I had to say about it' never showed up in News Feed. Facebook is Censoring. Anyway it's screwed-up when 'Most Recent' does not have in Chronological order yours and your Friends Post. Lots of Users messed up Facebook by accepting fake profiles from whomever into the thousandths, which no doubt are Foreign Hackers. Could be Facebook couldn't figure out which 'Political Box' to set me in. As I'm Social Conservative, but with the Democrats on economic issues. Populist so to say! I never tried to 'sort' my Friends. I enjoyed seeing the whole spectrum of Opinions, and never wished just to surround myself with those only thinking like me.

sensor_ship 8y ago

I mean, my views get censored here on HN all the time...

dang 8y ago
We don't "censor views". We do ban accounts that break the site guidelines, and if it's a serial troll, we usually don't bother to say so.

someguydave 8y ago

The interesting aspect is that conservatives think that it is very likely that social media sites censor their views at a rate double that of liberals. Even if the social media companies were strictly neutral in the matter, it's pretty common for conservatives to encounter left-wing hostility and censorship from other users of social media sites.

ceejayoz 8y ago
> it's pretty common for conservatives to encounter ... censorship from other users of social media sites How, exactly? Is Facebook doling out admin privileges to random users? Or are we confusing "receive criticism" with "censorship" here?
- trisimix 8y ago
  They are confusing the two yes
- frockington 8y ago
  Post an article in r/politics about anything positive Trump has done and you'll get a ban. On Facebook, a similar phenomenon might occur due to liberal users reporting conservative ideas they don't agree with as hate speech. Disclaimer: I'm not very familiar with how Facebook works so I could be way off
  - ebikelaw 8y ago
    Being banned by a user-moderated forum is not equivalent to being censored by a social media platform.
  - ceejayoz 8y ago
    > Post an article in r/politics about anything positive Trump has done and you'll get a ban. That's no more "censorship" than me unfriending you on Facebook would be. > On Facebook, a similar phenomenon might occur due to liberal users reporting conservative ideas they don't agree with as hate speech. That'll put it in a review queue, upon which Facebook employees make a decision. If it gets deleted, it's because you violated Facebook's rules.
    - frockington 8y ago
      If it is an actual Facebook employee, I can definitely see why conservatives would think that. The active encouragement of civil disobedience by liberal leaders is probably more than enough confirmation to conservatives of this behavior. I;m not saying this behavior is /is notoccurring, just why some people might think that it does

ebikelaw 8y ago

A bit of both-sides-ism here. The poll shows that Republicans almost universally believe that these companies censor their viewpoint, despite the fact that these companies have bent over backwards to accommodate those views and to give them platforms. Meanwhile only a small fraction of Democrats believe this is very likely, and they aren’t strongly sure about which side is benefiting from the supposed bias.

minikites 8y ago
There's also lots of evidence to the contrary: Twitter refuses to ban self-identified Nazis who incite violence but there are dozens of instances of people getting banned for saying mean insults to those same Nazis.
- ebikelaw 8y ago
  Yes that’s what I mean by bending over backwards. Twitter is actually a “safe space” for Nazis.
- praha14 8y ago
  Who’s an example?
- jtbayly 8y ago
  Making Nazis out to be just a more extreme form of the Republican viewpoint is hardly a good way to engage in discussion about a politically sensitive topic.
  - minikites 8y ago
    I didn't do that, it was just a similar example.
  - kebman 8y ago
    But Nazis have more in common with Democrats anyway :D :D :D :D banning guns, wanting mass regulation /trolol

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

patrickg_zill 8y ago

This article seems to be a smoking gun... https://medium.com/@garycoby/twitter-restricts-trump-eb7e48ccf5ff https://medium.com/@garycoby/twitter-restricts-trump-eb7e48c... Note that there are plenty of other custom icons that Twitter allows.

geofft 8y ago
I don't think refusal to allow a custom emoji with a hashtag is censorship - they didn't ban the hashtag. Custom emoji are a business/marketing/advertising thing, and if we want to restrict the ability of private businesses to decline advertising deals with other private businesses for any reason at all (including "we just don't like you"), that's a whole different conversation, and one I suspect many conservatives will not be pleased with the outcome of. As the article says, this move cost Twitter millions in revenue. If you don't have the ability to just choose not to make money because you're not interested in the transaction, you don't actually control the company, the public does.
- dingo_bat 8y ago
  > I don't think refusal to allow a custom emoji with a hashtag is censorship It is if you allow the other side to do exactly the same, as noted in the linked article.
  - luddit3 8y ago
    Clinton campaign did not do the same thing. All they did was elephant and donkey for the conventions. Looks like it the rights victim complex again.
    - dingo_bat 8y ago
      They got a custom icon.
      - wybiral 8y ago
        But not a custom icon as part of an attack ad calling one of the candidates a criminal. There is a subtle difference.

deleted 8y ago

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JKCalhoun 8y ago

When a friend posts on Facebook and it doesn't show up in my feed that's FB making a call as to what to show me. Why? Because algorithms. Maybe "censorship" is a strong word in this instance — do we prefer "selective disclosure"? Regardless, not what I signed up for. Deleted FB.

beavisthegenius 8y ago
Censorship isnot too strong. It's exactly what's happening.
nsxwolf 8y ago
Once in awhile Facebook decides I shouldn't be friends with someone anymore and suppresses all of their posts from my feed. I start to wonder what's happened to them, so I make a point of searching for their page and find that they've been posting daily. Things I would have been interested to see and would have commented on.
- Declanomous 8y ago
  It's entirely possible that Facebook found that your comments caused less engagement for other people on Facebook, and therefore doesn't want you to comment. It's also possible that Facebook determined that this person has substantially different politics than you, and has put you in different 'boxes'. You can actually check what groups Facebook thinks you belong in. For instance, Facebook thinks my peer group is 'Starting Adult Life', and my US Political Stance is 'very liberal'. (Facebook also thinks I work in a production occupation, like mining, or lumber, which couldn't be further from the truth, which explains all the ads for industrial equipment) I went to high school in a really conservative place, and I'm friends with a lot of people who have wildly different views on religion and politics. A few years ago I stopped seeing their posts, even if I added them to the group of people I see first on Facebook. Meanwhile, I started seeing a ton of posts from people who I barely knew in college, presumably because their 'beliefs' were much closer to mine. I'm extremely cynical, and I find dogmatic people of similar beliefs as annoying as people whose beliefs I disagree with, and my Facebook feed became a personal hell of dogmatism, especially leading up to the 2016 election. As a result I check Facebook at most once a week. It's entirely possible that leaving the platform improved the experience for some of my more conservative peers from high school, who no longer have to see my posts on the walls of mutual friends.

josteink 8y ago

I can fully believe that. Try for instance to have a discussion here on hacker news about the less fortunate sides of diversity initiatives. Then see how many minutes it takes before your entire thread is flagged and effectively censored.

pavlov 8y ago
HN is not owned by a social media giant, so this grievance doesn’t appear to have much to do with the article.
- chillydawg 8y ago
  Sure it is, it's owned by the people who own (or initially funded) the social media giants.
- ProAm 8y ago
  It is owned by a Silicon Valley VC giant, while not directly media it is steered by big money. However I think HN is moderated relatively well, but I can see how some people might think it's being gamed/controlled/censored by self interest (I don't)
- bumblebritches5 8y ago
  Reddit is and it's even worse.
- mc32 8y ago
  I think that’s the wrong question to imply. What it is is an illustration of how big media behaves due to its own implicit ad well as explicit biases. Of course HN isn’t mainstream, but it also experiences some of the same symptoms.
cafard 8y ago
HN is a social media giant?
- josteink 8y ago

dingo_bat 8y ago

And it's true. Case in point: the gun emoticon.

amelius 8y ago
By the way, it's stupid that we still can't have user-defined emoticons. We could have enriched our online culture with a flourishing set of shared emoticons by now!
- tivert 8y ago
  > By the way, it's stupid that we still can't have user-defined [emojis]. Emojis should have only been embedded user-defined pngs. I know I'm being cranky and old, but I feel our character sets shouldn't have been used to encode novel cute pictures.
  - amelius 8y ago
    Yes. The problem is that it assumes that language is fixed. However, the correct way is to make emojis freely definable, so that the emoji language will continue to develop; of course, the unfortunate side-effect for character set maintainers would be that they have to expand the set in order to incorporate the new parts of the language. But that is their problem; you can't force a population to use a limited set of symbols.
    - thanatropism 8y ago
      > you can't force a population to use a limited set of symbols. It's called an "alphabet".
      - AsyncAwait 8y ago
        I think the point was "you can't force a population to use a limited set of symbols [that can't be used to express an arbitrary idea]".

pressurefree 8y ago

sprewell chokes coach... used to be called a headlock... until sundar turned on Pakis

pjc50 8y ago

Could do with some examples of said views so we could see whether it's a false equivalence, or whether some of the "views" in fact comprise incitement to violence etc. Note that there is no "true neutral" in this world; neutrality itself is a political position that helps certain people and hinders others.

wu-ikkyu 8y ago
How many examples do you require? Conservative comedian Owen Benjamin being banned from Twitter for life is but one: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wehNVE7_G24 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wehNVE7_G24
- pjc50 8y ago
  For being homophobic to one of the mass shooting victims? http://www.adirondackdailyenterprise.com/news/local-news/2018/04/twitter-blocks-owen-benjamin/ http://www.adirondackdailyenterprise.com/news/local-news/201...
  - wu-ikkyu 8y ago
    Like it or not (I don't), he was expressing his political opinions, albeit in a tactless way. Social media is overrun with much worse garbage and people are not banned for such.

protonimitate 8y ago

At the end of the day, is anyone really surprised that these platforms censor/filter content in any way? Where did the assumption of an un-biased platform come from? These companies are in the business of making money, as much as they preach about 'making a difference in the world', they will always default to whatever gains the most public favor and generates the most revenue. I am actually surprised by the statistics, I had assumed that less people thought they were being censored. Although this presents an opposite problem, if everyone thinks they are being censored then they can claim the real truth is being 'censored'. Biases will always exist when money is involved.

glitchc 8y ago

Everyone at one point has made a comment that has been downvoted or moderated out of existence. The rejection sticks in your mind. Effectively, that is censorship.

stephengillie 8y ago
You're submitting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks.
- glitchc 8y ago
  Would you assume I'm right-wing if I do not use politically correct terminology? Will slowing down change my world-view or simply the language I use to express it?
  - stephengillie 8y ago
    It wasn't directed at your post, sorry. It's the rate-limit response HN gives - users who are "slow-banned" see it on posting more than 1 post every 5 minutes. Another form of censorship, as others can post when you cannot. As to your specific points: > Would you assume I'm right-wing if I do not use politically correct terminology? Frankly, yes. Politically correct speech appears to be today's shibboleth[0]. > Will slowing down change my world-view or simply the language I use to express it? Slowing down a poster will reduce their ability to express their viewpoint, diluting it among other posters. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth
  - JackCh 8y ago
    I think you misread that post. He was quoting HN's forced cooldown that's imposed if the system thinks you're in some sort of heated flamewar. I assume he means to suggest this is a form of soft censorship tied into the internet points system (which is to say, it seems like he's agreeing with you.)
    - glitchc 8y ago

ddingus 8y ago

Most Americans would be right. There is great confusion on the scope and purpose of the First Amendment in play here. Secondly, media is drilling down on two toxic ideas: always two sides to every story , and objectivity, claim of no bias. These things combine to present ordinary Americans with the expectation of objective media and free speech everywhere. A side effect is a surrender of critical thought in return for unwarranted trust. The remedy should be to evaluate all of this with a critical eye and help people understand there is always bias, and how they can and shoild be using diverse sources to stay informed.

moduspol 8y ago

I lean conservative, but to be honest, I assign only a small portion of the blame to social media giants. Their office areas and leadership certainly lean left-wing, but I don't think that's the main issue. I think the biggest contributor is just that left-leaning people are more likely to be offended by right-leaning views. As a result, even an entirely neutral algorithm focused on retention / user satisfaction will be more careful about showing right-leaning views to users who aren't obviously right-leaning. To me, it's tough to call that censorship. As a result, I see the issue more as a symptom of the real problem, but that's a lot tougher to solve.

nascar_is_bad 8y ago
> I think the biggest contributor is just that left-leaning people are more likely to be offended by right-leaning views. More likely to have empathy is another way to phrase that.
- orbifold 8y ago
  You can be super emphatic an right wing, how do you think someone becomes a populist nationalist. Besides from a European perspective even someone like Obama or even more obviously Hillary (based on the amount of war mongering she has done alone) is center or ultra right.
  - eropple 8y ago
    > You can be super emphatic an right wing, how do you think someone becomes a populist nationalist. At the bottom? Fear of the other; in the United States, fear of the other rooted particularly in racism. Because it's not "nationalism" here--a disease by itself, but a controllable one. It's white supremacism, given nicer clothes by calling it "white nationalism" for some godforsaken reason, peddled by leaders who want the bottom to vote their way. It's not like it's news. Lee Atwater pegged this whole disgraceful thing decades ago. To legitimize and get boots on the ground for economically regressive policies, the right wing of the United States leveraged this racially-motivated insecurity; now the racist tiger has eaten them and they are so very surprised that the racist tiger was racist all along. At the top? They're the ones doing the peddling. Some is surely true-believer racism. Some is also surely cynicism--because the bottom will eat it up and there's your leash to drag them where you want. It isn't exactly complex. (And, no, Obama and Clinton are not "ultra right" from a European perspective; that's the sort of mendacious both-sidesing I expect out of actually far right speakers, though. Obama and Clinton would be generically center- to center-right politicians on a Europe-calibrated axis. The modern Republican Party is more like Ukip.)

throwaway69777 8y ago

This 100% happens. https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/style/2014/11/26/how-miriam-careys-u-turn-at-a-white-house-checkpoint-led-to-her-death/?noredirect=on https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/style/2014/11/26/how-miria... When this^ woman was murdered, I attempted to post on Facebook: "I bet this woman was not a terrorist." to which I was told the attempt failed. After troubleshooting, such as trying again or posting something else, I felt very deceived.

erinaceousjones 8y ago
I mean.. that's an anecdote which could have a myriad of technical explanations. I wouldn't immediately jump to the assumption that facebook is blocking select users from sharing links from a respected newspaper because they don't like the content of the article for some reason (why would they even block this article in specific?) * washingtonpost is behind a GDPR paywall (for me at least), it took a few attempts even for the link preview to load when I tried posting that * 99.9999% uptime of web APIs is not 100%, fb servers really could have been having trouble reaching washingtonpost * I was able to share that post fine (once the link preview finally loaded properly), so WFM..?
- mlindner 8y ago
  Yes but they could state those in the error message. They don't so people are left to their own conclusions on why things were blocked. Especially if you're not technically savvy, the reason why something isn't submitted is because someone physical human blocked you from submitting it. I can't count the number of times people hated on game servers being laggy simply blaming it as the company trying to save money by using cheap servers when the actual cause is likely any number of network congestion issues. People will anthropomorphize any technical issue.

fortythirteen 8y ago

This isn't opinion, it's provable fact. Twitter and Facebook were on a tear last year, actively shutting down the accounts of conservative pundits, under the guise of rules violations, while turning a blind eye to the same actions from pundits and personalities on the left.

cblades 8y ago
Could you point out some of those examples?
- fortythirteen 8y ago
  My favorite is when Sabo the conservative street artist got banned from Facebook right after his "Fuck Zuck 2020" posters appeared all over L.A. But hidden camera footage of a Twitter engineer openly admitting that they shadowbanned conservatives came out last year.

wrs 8y ago

Fantastic. So please stop using them, and maybe things will get a little less crazy!

s73v3r_ 8y ago

Unfortunately a lot of people conflate censorship with, "We're not shoving your uncle's conspiracy theories in everyone's face."

Declanomous 8y ago

I can't stand the fact that organizations hide behind "algorithms" as an excuse for every unintended side-effect. It's no surprise that algorithms create an information bubble for us. I like to use music as an example: the best music recommendations I've ever received have been from friends. I'll describe music I'm listening to and like, and they'll recommend something for me. I'd say 50% of the time I find it unobjectionable, 30% of the time I hate it, and 20% of the time I love it. Sites have been trying to replicate this functionality using algorithms for a well over a decade. Last.fm used to be a great way for me find music. As far as I could tell, it would just pick music from people who listened to the same artists as you. I'd say I found 30% of the music unobjectionable, 50% of the music terrible, and 20% of the music great. Functionally, this was remarkably similar to my friends recommending me music, because I only care about the music I loved. Over time their algorithm got 'better' and nearly stopped recommending music I disliked, however I found that it mostly just recommended me music that was in the unobjectionable middle ground of 'meh'. I stopped looking for music on Last.fm because it stopped giving me music I loved. We've positioned machine learning as a replacement to curation, but what it really does is put forth the least objectionable content. Machine learning lacks the ability to deal with the nuances surrounding controversial or challenging content. It never takes the leap of faith that a person would when recommending you something. I am really interested to see how this all plays out over the next few years, because I think people are beginning to realize they are addicted to the perpetual stream of 'good enough' content. The network effect will probably protect Facebook for the time being, I assume the first sites affected will be content-driven, like YouTube. Of course, XKCD addressed the issues I have with algorithms far better than I could ever hope to: https://xkcd.com/1831/ https://xkcd.com/1831/

allthenews 8y ago
>We've positioned machine learning as a replacement to curation, but what it really does is put forth the least objectionable content. I don't think the problem is with ML. You could easily train a net to make boulder selections with an appropriate data set. I believe what you are seeing is an accommodation for the average person. Most people aren't adventurous, and it makes business sense to get algos working for the middle majority than to cater to tail ends. It also, IMO, makes content at places like youtube less technical and more clickbaity. But again I believe this is somewhat intentional.

pmarreck 8y ago

Lack of trust is a bullshit argument. It's basically the Conspiracy Fallacy: https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/74/Conspiracy_Theory https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla... Is there any evidence to support this assertion and that Facebook isn't merely showing you information that is palatable to you? (Note that this greatly expands the use of this fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_repugnance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_repugnance) I think we all have to answer these questions first: 1) Are you comfortable with receiving information that is true, or even mostly true, but that which is distasteful to you personally? 2) If so, do you wish to impose this expectation on everyone else?

hedora 8y ago
Search for “facebook hires censors” on the search engine of your choice. The story was broadly covered by sources across the political spectrum. And in answer to your two questions: Yes, I expect news sources to have journalisic integrity, even if the truth is not popular.
- pmarreck 8y ago
  I can't find anything from a remotely unbiased source on "facebook hires censors" other than this: https://www.popsci.com/Facebook-hiring-3000-content-monitors https://www.popsci.com/Facebook-hiring-3000-content-monitors Which is basically just content monitoring that AI can't do... child exploitation, hate speech, gore, pornography, etc. I think it's a pretty damn right-wing slippery-slope you're traversing if you assume that's equivalent to "censorship of rogue ideas"
  - azborder 8y ago
    “Hate speech” seems to cover a pretty wide spectrum these days.
    - pmarreck 8y ago
      Fair enough because I agree, nevertheless it’s a stretch to accuse The Social-Network Powers That Be of essentially a left-wing conspiracy

dilap 8y ago

This is obviously true.

newswriter99 8y ago

Case in point is that consumers are more than happy to be given custom-tailored feeds that filter content they agree with (or that the provider's algorithm THINKS they agree with). If this was not true, Vero would have taken off instead of falling flat. Social media is pretty much broken at this point. The idea was to increase reach and communication. Instead we've got people grouped into thought bubbles and echo chambers. I'd argue that Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are causing more harm to society at this point than any potential benefit they provide.

orev 8y ago
Never heard of Vero. It’s a mistake to think that sites/apps find success by having better features. Especially in social media, the network effect is the only thing that determines who lives and dies.
kebman 8y ago
Consider this: There are other apps that you haven't heard of, with communities completely secluded from the Fb/twit/goog environment, and nobody's complaining that they are bubbleified.

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ast22989 8y ago

This is can be seen in any number of areas: - the Gun Emoji censorship was only the beginning but clearly intends to define the ideologically playing field by limiting the ideas people can express - Those who believe that "hate speech" should be censored will likely view the censorship in place as legitimate. However, "hate speech" is typically allowed against Whites (they are considered "oppressors" and because of power imbalances, it's different for them ... ). The phrase "Hate Speech" is used to ban speech that did not violate previous norms against violence / obscenity but is nonetheless considered subversive. - Facebook contracted with the "mainstream media" and recently eliminated its "trending" feature after left-wing criticism that they did not censor conservative so-called "fake news" that helped Trump win election. Apple is similarly contracting with predominantly left-wing "mainstream media" outlets to stock its human-curated i.e. censored News App. - Youtube and likely others work with ADL / SPLC to use ML to algorithmically flag and ban "hate speech" content. Here is a ranking of the subreddits ADL flagged in "Hate comments count by subreddit": - White rights - Mens rights - the Donald - Ask Trump Supporters - Republican - Conspiracy - Guns are Cool - New Right - 2016 Elections - Censorship - First Amendment - Nazi Hunting - 911 Truth - Good Cop Free Donut They appear to be very focused on right-wing "hate" and not much on the left. Source: page 10 of https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/Online%20Hate%20Index%20Innovation%20Brief_Digital_v2_0.pdf https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/Online%20H... - ADL is working with social media giants (notably Reddit) on automated "hate speech" censorship. https://www.adl.org/resources/reports/the-online-hate-index https://www.adl.org/resources/reports/the-online-hate-index ... the OHI model captures the experience of hate speech online – it does not define hate speech [it's based on subjective manual flaggers rather than explicit criteria] ...the D-Lab is identifying strategies to scale the process for labeling comments. While there is still a long way to go with artificial intelligence and machine learning-based solutions, ADL and the D-Lab believe these technologies can go a long way to curbing online hate speech. [i.e., we hope ML-automated censorship will be effective]. The ADL’s long standing mission has been to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and secure justice and fair treatment to all...the Online Hate Index will help us do just that. - ADL [of B'nai B'rith] was founded in 1913 by B'nai B'rith, a "force for Jewish unity, Jewish security, and Jewish continuity." (http://www.bnaibrith.org/giving.html http://www.bnaibrith.org/giving.html, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Defamation_League https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Defamation_League) - Youtube demonetized, suspended, and terminated numerous gun channels in recent months - Pervasive political censorship of controversial but nonviolent "alt-right" ideas, e.g. Twitter and Jared Taylor, Richard Spencer and crowdfunding. Certainly neither constitutes "incitement" under the first amendment standard of Brandenburg v. Ohio "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action." - While private organizations are not bound by the first amendment, one could reasonably consider their removal of political speech that in public is protected by first amendment to be censorship.

oblib 8y ago

Yesterday I tried to post a link on FB to an "Anonymous video maker" that I saw linked in an article shared here. It's just a web based video maker but when I tried to post it I got a message saying "Facebook thinks this is spam" and FB wouldn't let me share it. Since the page doesn't promote any political view at all we might hesitate to make the leap that they are censoring political views but because the entire purpose of that app is intended for exposing corporate/political/social issues it's a bit difficult to believe FB doesn't have that in mind when they block a link to it from being shared. I'd love to hear what other reasons they might have because I really cannot think of any that hold up. Here's the link: http://anonymous-video.com/index.html http://anonymous-video.com/index.html

admax88q 8y ago
The reason they have is when the spam filter is run against anonymous-video.com it returns positive. You're assigning far too much agency to the decision as if someone at FB reviewed anonymous-video.com specifically and decided to block it or not. Its just a machine learning model that has been trained on a bunch of existing spam finds signals in common with your link.
- oblib 8y ago
  "The reason they have is when the spam filter is run against anonymous-video.com it returns positive." That's not a reason. It's an explanation that fails to provide cause.
- evincarofautumn 8y ago
  Can semi-confirm: I worked on Site Integrity (Infrastructure) at FB in 2013–2014, and iirc there were many instances where a benign URL was automatically flagged as spam, and someone had to explicitly go and whitelist it because we were getting complaints. Could be any number of things—I’d guess URLs containing things like “video” and “anonymous” are often sketchy pirate sites that try to install malware; or perhaps that URL was a malicious site in the past but isn’t anymore. The policies are explicitly written in code (Haxl) but a lot of them invoke machine learning models to do actual classification of stuff (URLs, images, comments, &c.)—although I’d imagine an increasing amount of the computation is being moved over to the Haxl side because it’s so much less resource-intensive than the FXL system it replaced. Where possible, SI usually errs on the side of “better safe than sorry” when it comes to spam, malware, fake accounts, &c.—hence users’ complaints of “getting zucc’d” when someone reports them, or their activity on the site triggers a filter.

trophycase 8y ago

Title is misleading. Most Americans think Facebook and Twitter censor some political views, not necessarily theirs.

rjkennedy98 8y ago

I talked to an ex-twitter employee I met in Ireland at bar. He told me very candidly that twitter employees loathed Milo Yiannopolous and were actively trying to figure out any way to ban him. Not a fan of Milo, but there are clearly agendas which can't be extricated from politics.

s73v3r_ 8y ago
I imagine a good part of that is because he led a brigade of followers that would go out and harass other users.
- fernandotakai 8y ago
  if that's true, that rule should be applied to everyone, not only milo. there are more right and left-wing fringe users that love to brigade other users.
  - mhh__ 8y ago
    Perhaps I'm playing devils advocate by saying this, but: Isn't Milo one of the most well known cases of this? e.g. "Dealing" with him would help the twitter brand the most visibly.
    - lainga 8y ago
      I'm not sure the average Twitter user wants Twitter to "deal" with him like they're Vito Corleone.
- iosDrone 8y ago
  Can you clarify how he "led a brigade." Point me to an example where he encouraged his followers to say derogatory things?
  - s73v3r_ 8y ago
    How about when he said that people should, "Start killing journalists," and then the next day someone opened fire at a newsroom.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago

*know

gnicholas 8y ago

Interesting that although Republicans are more likely to think that social media platforms are biased against them, they are less likely to think that such platforms should be subject to increased government regulation. As a cynic, I was expecting that Republicans might want more regulation here (in contravention of their general desire for less regulation) because it would be in their own interests. Note: I'm not saying I expect Republicans to be more self-interested/hypocritical than Democrats. I would expect it of both parties, based on my experience in the field.

AmericanChopper 8y ago
As a Republican, and a conservative, freedom of expression is one of the principles I hold most dear. It used to also be a principle embraced by liberals, but they seem to have widely abandoned it, you don’t see conservatives going around trying to “no platform” people (which is an insidious euphemism). It is also one of the core principles the Internet was founded on, or at least of the early internet subculture. Sadly, this has also been widely abandoned by the organisations that have the most influence over the internet. I don’t see how you could plan to fight censorship with more censorship.
- throwawayjava 8y ago
  > you don’t see conservatives going around trying to “no platform” people This is an extremely odd statement and it took me a while to figure out why you would think that. Because you absolutely do see conservatives shut down speech. Systematically. For a good account of this on college campuses, see https://newrepublic.com/article/147908/invisible-free-speech-crisis https://newrepublic.com/article/147908/invisible-free-speech... Perhaps we "don't see conservatives going around trying to 'no platform' people" in the same way that fish don't see water. We expect conservatives to fire public school LGBT teachers who mention their partners when told to talk about their personal lives on parent night. We expect Christian colleges to fire people for being not conservative enough. We expect those colleges to expel students for supporting gay rights. We expect obscenity laws. (Aside: conservatives strongly support obscenity laws and strongly oppose bans on hate speech. I can understand the worldview that bans both, and I myself have a worldview that calls for banning neither. But I will be forever perplexed over how anyone who doesn't themselves condone hate speech could come to the conclusion that nakedness/lewdity poses a great threat to society which justifies censorship, but that hate speech does not. If anyone here does have that viewpoint, I'd be interested to hear their reasoning.) We expect attempts to ban flag burning. We expect the Red Scare. And it's true that we never hear about Richard Dawkins being uninvited from Cedarville or Wheaton. But that's only because those students/faculty would be expelled from the institution the moment the invitation was extended. It's normal for conservatives to be illiberal on speech. So normal that, like fish in water, we don't even see it! So when people like Cedarville's president bemoan the suppression of speech on college campuses while at same time firing his own faculty for publicly criticizing Mitt Romney, expelling his students for their speech, and routinely monitoring the social media accounts of his students, I think it's fair to say (as https://newrepublic.com/article/147908/invisible-free-speech-crisis https://newrepublic.com/article/147908/invisible-free-speech... puts it): There are many who argue, in the pages of this country’s most respected periodicals, that this power lies with the intolerant left. But the evidence of real, widespread speech suppression shows it lies elsewhere, on the right. This, in turn, suggests that the ostensible champions of free speech are more interested in criticizing campus identity politics than in protecting speech. Now, revisiting your quote once more: > you don’t see conservatives going around trying to “no platform” people (which is an insidious euphemism) Insidious. No-platforming is so thoroughly embedded in American conservativism that you don't even see it even though it's pervasive. That's practically the definition of insidious. > I don’t see how you could plan to fight censorship with more censorship. There is one famous example related to the heckler's veto. Rules against heckling/shouting during a speech use censorship to shut down an attempt at censorship. And even that only makes sense in some circumstances; e.g., in a lecture hall but not at a large rally.

ug02nice 8y ago

i've seen many cases how twitter silences and bans people speaking out against the democratic party

threatofrain 8y ago

Here's Axios's take on the issue: https://www.axios.com/conservatives-republicans-social-media-censorship-75db1560-4dd7-4d91-961b-5cf2d2b8c799.html https://www.axios.com/conservatives-republicans-social-media...

iosDrone 8y ago

Is this even up for discussion? Whatever you think of him, Milo Yiannopoulos got banned because HIS FOLLOWERS made derogatory statements about an actress. (edit: spelling)

s73v3r_ 8y ago
Actually, Milo was banned because he already had been suspended several times, and then he decided to impersonate another user, which is blatantly against the ToS.
- iosDrone 8y ago
  That's not what was widely reported.

fallingfrog 8y ago

Does that include the army of right wing trolls that appear out of nowhere to hurl racist invective or curse words at you every time you post something like "way to go"! on the page of a progressive candidate? I can't be only person who experiences this. A lot of times it's in all caps, and usually the person's Facebook profile features them holding an assault rifle. The insults range from "stupid mother fucker" to "you're a tool of the Jews" to just "retard". Am I to understand that conservatives want to be more free to post that kind of stuff?

protomyth 8y ago

I'm starting to think that the problem is Facebook sets the importance of politics much, much higher than the users of Facebook. It really seems like the folks doing the programming are political animals, and most of us are more concerned with the personal connections we have made. I think they are really bad at understanding our circle of people we deal with and are using a variety of factors that just aren't as important to us.

wu-ikkyu 8y ago
I recently noticed this with Google News in Chrome. The recommended stories in my feed were creepily relevant to my current location and interests. And yet, the top 2-3 results were not at all -- they were about some ridiculous political rumors/squabbles on CNN/Fox. I never visit those sites and also do my absolute best to be completely ignorant of such political "news". It was blantantly obvious they were forcing irrelevant political nonsense to the top of my queue.

0x00000000 8y ago

I have reported multiple facebook posts of friends making death threats against (conservative) politicians and every time it comes back "we reviewed the post and it is not in violation of community guidelines"

rainonmoon 8y ago
If it makes you feel any better, female friends have reported multiple Facebook posts from white nationalists sending them death and rape threats only to receive the same message. At least their policy is consistently bad?

skate22 8y ago

Ive conditioned my fb feed to be 95% memes. I go there every couple of days for some fresh memes

wu-ikkyu 8y ago

It seems most every discussion here on HN about political censorship devolves into flamewars, mass downvotes, and mass flagging. That in itself seems quite indicative.