4 ms·

This is a good move but could go further, really wish FB and moreso Twitter would include a big switch in their settings that was just "Politics On/Off" hide al

• lovetocode 6y ago
  I have been asking for this for a long time. I am happy to see it is gaining traction in some form.
• adrianN 6y ago
  Maybe we should put some effort into making political discourse less damaging to your mental health instead of enabling large parts of a democratic country to just shut themselves off from politics.
  • whywhywhywhy 6y ago
    It's my feed should I not get a say what I see in it and what I don't? This is what mean by ideology, the idea that it's more important to make sure I see the right things so hopefully I think the right way takes precedent over how it makes me feel. This sort of thing seems to be all what modern journalism is too, it's all through the lens of editorial now. I don't want to be on Twitter, I'm on Twitter because Google Reader killed RSS and all the bloggers said "What's the big deal? Just use Twitter" because their follower counts going up made them feel good and now I can't get what I used to get from RSS without the unwanted side serving of (mostly) American politics.
    • dillonmckay 6y ago
      Why do you think it is ‘your’ feed?
      • whywhywhywhy 6y ago
        Because I curated it, I'm the curator of the exhibition of tweets by artists which is being held within Twitters gallery.
  • pjc50 6y ago
    That would be nice, but the number of toxic pundits that would need to be removed from major news organisations and political parties makes it infeasible.
  • SkyBelow 6y ago
    Can that be done? The issue with politics is that the end result in enforce, often metaphorically but sometimes literally, at gunpoint. The real world implications are something that cannot be ignored, unlike a discussion of favorites teams or tv shows. Even coding standards discussions always have the realization that you can do what you want regardless of the standard and the worst case scenarios involve no longer contributing to a project or finding a different employer. Not always the nicest outcomes but still a world's away from being on the losing side of a political debate that makes it into law.
• arethuza 6y ago
  How do you define where the boundary is for what is and isn't politics? Ads paid for by overtly political organisations may be easy to identify, but what about content from individuals?
  • pjc50 6y ago
    Indeed. We tried the "politics ban" at HN and the result was every story had a top comment explaining why it was political and you should flag it. Completely unworkable.
    • arethuza 6y ago
      I suspect that pretty much any discussion of politics is essentially political so under that ban this story probably shouldn't be discussed.
  • avian 6y ago
    I feel like a good approximation would be to just turn Bayesian priors on or off (or whatever is their equivalent of "push this widely popular thing, even if it's not supported by this person's specific interests learned from their usage data"). My anecdote: I recently made a Twitter account specifically to follow some artists and share some art. There is nothing in what I wrote on Twitter, or in who I follow or tweets I liked or in fact my IP-based geolocation (I'm not from US) that would say to the Algorithm that I'm in any way interested in American politics. On the contrary, for a long time I tried clicking "not interested in this" for anything related to politics. And yet, the AI timeline in that account is regularly swamped by US political drama I'm not interested in, can't do anything about and generally just makes me miserable. My only explanation is that these posts get pushed to me because they are overwhelmingly popular overall on Twitter, and the high prior swamps out the negative evidence specific to my account. Of course, the other, more sinister explanation is that it's a (human) editorial decision from Twitter to actively push this kind of content to people, but I find the technical explanation easier to believe.
• vianneychevalie 6y ago
  Do we consider controversial subjects to fall under politics? Where is the limit of political content? When I talk about a French company that builds missiles, maybe I’m promoting French soft power. Talking about race, gender, immigration, sexuality, progressive or conservative subjects clearly falls under politics, because it is inherently connected to a political agenda. Is it really?
• bhaavan 6y ago
  Political ads are explicitly marked, and can be turned off. On the other hand, to classify user generated content as political or not is non-trivial. More so, there is no clear universal definition of this. One man's politics is other man's "important announcement". With such ambiguous definitions it is hard to train a ML model for this purpose explicitly. On the other hand, if you downvote and dismiss political posts regularly, the ML model can pick up signals and remove such content from your feed. This is feasible as it allows the algorithm to make mistakes and a room to learn. But this isn't an explicit remove all political posts and political posts only.
  • arethuza 6y ago
    Out of curiosity I looked up what the definition of politics is and got something like: "Politics is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations between individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status." Based on a definition like that I'd be tempted to think that politics free social media is an oxymoron.
    • toyg 6y ago
      You could say the same of most of the web, from Github to HN...
      • Fargren 6y ago
        And you would be correct. Apolitical media doesn't and can't exist. The existence of media is a political statement. You can restrict partisan media, or identity politics media, or other subsets of politics. But politics as a whole is implicit in every action that involves the public.
      • madeofpalk 6y ago
        You can say that about life It is an exceptionally privileged situation to be in when you believe you can simply opt out of politics.
• mc32 6y ago
  My question is “who is the person who will use this option”? The mild person or the people at the extremes who create these furores? I’m guessing it’ll mostly be used by people in the middle but agitators will keep agitating.
  • garmaine 6y ago
    Me.
• skrebbel 6y ago
  I'd love that too, but is it possible? Would Susan Fowler's famous Uber sexism blog post be considered political? It clearly is a personal story about her year at Uber. It's about work, about tech, and, yes, about sexism. I think that a lot of actually relevant politically influential content is much more like that post than a Biden ad.
• pjc50 6y ago
  > ideologically think its more important to control the flow of political information that is broadcast to their users Twitter don't so much "control" the flow of information as hand out firehoses and watch the spray. It's one of the more libertarian social networks left; they leave up known abusers and don't have an explicit ban on sex workers, to give two examples.
• justaguyhere 6y ago
  What difference is letting users turn off political ads going to make? This is only going to help people who do not care about these in the first place - they will turn it off and FB would be slightly better off for them. These people are not the problem. The people who ignorantly argue, share unvetted stories, propaganda etc will not turn this off. FB likely crunched some numbers and decided the PR they will get from this is worth the small loss of revenue. I bet they will also monetize the data on the list of users who turn off political ads somehow. If they really wanted to make a change, they should ban political ads like Twitter plans to. At minimum, make it opt-in instead of opt-out.
  • toyg 6y ago
    People are not born “ignorantly arguing”, they get radicalized by repeated exposure to extreme viewpoints. This switch could help reduce that phenomenon a bit. But I agree that it should be opt-in, rather than opt-out, and I say that as an extremely politically-aware individual. Politics is important but it doesn’t work well on Facebook and should be discouraged there.
    • raxxorrax 6y ago
      > they get radicalized by repeated exposure to extreme viewpoints I don't think this holds up to any scrutiny to be honest. There are certainly some cases where people are easily influenced, but I don't think it is that significant. Only from a worldview that puts you way above others. Aside from the problem of defining extremism, people do make choices. I think what many people observe about conduct on social media is a form of desensitization for that matter and there are different reasons for that. But this is actually testable, by identifying this propaganda and identifying people affected by it. We had that topic with Russians that supposedly influenced a massive amount of people with extremism for an election. But if propaganda is in place, you can identify it by words, images or statements. You can see this with ISIS. There were some poeple that indeed fell for it, but probably not by facebook adds. These people were actively groomed. Wanting to control content by large ad corporations can also be seen as extremism, especially in the context of the free internet.
• FreeRadical 6y ago
  On Twitter you are able to mute words if that helps in your case
• SyneRyder 6y ago
  > really wish FB and moreso Twitter would include a big switch in their settings that was just "Politics On/Off" hide all political ads, and tweets and retweets for people who just don't want to see that Twitter has mute filters that do this. Add the surnames of some political candidates to your mute filters, and that alone will improve your Twitter experience - moreso if you use a third party client (like Fenix on Android or Tweetbot on iOS) that doesn't also show likes or random tweet suggestions from people you don't follow. The downside is you have to put in the filter creation work yourself, but on the plus-side you know exactly what you're filtering out and why. Don't leave it to Twitter to be the judge of what you should and shouldn't see. If you look in your settings, you'll find Twitter is absolutely horrible at determining what you're interested in: on the Twitter website, look at More -> Settings & Privacy -> Account -> Your Twitter Data -> Interests and Ads Data -> Interests From Twitter, and be amazed at all the topics you've never heard of and political candidates that Twitter thinks you are interested in, and is using to push ads and tweet suggestions in your face. Bonus points for adding other clickbait words to your mute filters, like "outrage". Maybe consider various -isms, like "capitalism" and/or "socialism" if you want to avoid being drawn into decades long debates that won't be solved in 280 characters.