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> But do we really want to force them to be "politically neutral?" Such a thing literally does not exist, for one thing; but who gets to define it? Just a naiv

by Youden 8y ago

> But do we really want to force them to be "politically neutral?" Such a thing literally does not exist, for one thing; but who gets to define it? Just a naive idea but personally, I'd say a platform is politically neutral if it takes no action to prioritise or remove content unless required by law. This puts what should and shouldn't be on the platform in the hands of lawmakers, who, theoretically at least, represent the will of the people. However that's bad for business so I'm under no illusions it'll ever become reality.

jchw 8y ago
It's worse than that. Let's say a far right conspiracy blog is posting a conspiracy about a school shooting before any information is really available. Suddenly, it's on top of Google and being surfaced prominently on Facebook. People don't like this because these neutral companies are now promoting fake, definitely potentially harmful stories. But if you penalize them for this, from one viewpoint, you are suppressing political opinion. That's with a conspiracy; but if you drag the slider backwards, you find that there's no actual tipping point where it's clear action should be taken. Further, what if the far right has more conspiracy theorist than the far left? It would be partisan to not run fake news! Going more subtle, bias in algorithms is a thing. Like PageRank is based on the number of high quality links to your page, right? What happens when rightwing views are underrepresented because their network of links is naturally considered less high quality due to being less linked around the web? And if you think people would never make arguments like this, try to remember how often people fight over the correlation of politics and population density. It's why the United States has a Senate and a House.
- Youden 8y ago
  Ideally in this case, legislators would introduce a change encouraging deprioritization of information that is provably not factual.

by Youden 8y ago

jchw 8y ago

It's worse than that. Let's say a far right conspiracy blog is posting a conspiracy about a school shooting before any information is really available. Suddenly, it's on top of Google and being surfaced prominently on Facebook. People don't like this because these neutral companies are now promoting fake, definitely potentially harmful stories. But if you penalize them for this, from one viewpoint, you are suppressing political opinion. That's with a conspiracy; but if you drag the slider backwards, you find that there's no actual tipping point where it's clear action should be taken. Further, what if the far right has more conspiracy theorist than the far left? It would be partisan to not run fake news! Going more subtle, bias in algorithms is a thing. Like PageRank is based on the number of high quality links to your page, right? What happens when rightwing views are underrepresented because their network of links is naturally considered less high quality due to being less linked around the web? And if you think people would never make arguments like this, try to remember how often people fight over the correlation of politics and population density. It's why the United States has a Senate and a House.

Youden 8y ago
Ideally in this case, legislators would introduce a change encouraging deprioritization of information that is provably not factual.