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Facebook reportedly choked traffic for left-leaning news sites
- ipsocannibal 6y agoOne wonders what Trump and Zuckerberg talked about over their several dinners.
- heimatau 6y agoI'm not sure why this is downvoted (maybe a lot of FB employees are here). But this is a valid question. 'Deals' with politicians is how engaging with DC works (quid pro quo is the norm).
- annadane 6y agoIf you suggest this site has astroturfing you'll be chastised for not following the site guidelines even though it's perfectly possible that there is astroturfing
- bleepblorp 6y agoI think it's more likely to be downvoted by Trump supporters rather than Zucker---- supporters. Lots of Trump people here (startup culture people love low taxes and no annoying regulations to limit the impacts of their externalities) but not much love for Zucker----. I also suspect that the degree of 'respect freedom of speech' content would be far higher, and the degree of skepticism expressed in this thread would be far lower, if the article was accusing FB of reducing exposure to right-wing content. The degree of intellectual honesty around here is not as good as it should be.
- jahaja 6y ago> I also suspect that the degree of 'respect freedom of speech' content would be far higher, and the degree of skepticism expressed in this thread would be far lower, Certainly, I remember that "Rationalist" blogger thread, Scott something, that shut down his own blog for a while and that blew up here with over 1000 comments going as far as finding it appropriate the harass the journalist in question and demanding some sort of license that could be revoked (or similar) for journalists in general. Not to mention the recent thread about booting out holocaust denier's bullshit - also over 1000 comments.
- justiceforsaas 6y agoI honestly found it quite scary to leave comments on HN these days. You have no idea whether it's going to get upvotes or get downvoted to oblivion. It's one of these feelings when you're speaking to a small child who can get a tantrum any time of the day :)
- perl4ever 6y agoWhen you start thinking of everybody in a group of thousands as one person, it's a mental health red flag IMO. Quite common, but suggests taking a break.
- Ensorceled 6y agoI don’t think they actually believe that HN is a small child. Taking a break is a good idea.
- justiceforsaas 6y agoYou just provided one more reason why I'm afraid of commenting ;) P.S. Of course I didn't mean that HN is a small child.
- White_Wolf 6y agoYou shouldn't worry about votes. Those are irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. On another note, this is one of the places where things are still ok. Some media platforms I gave up on to keep my sanity.
- drewcoo 6y agoIf you're starting a pool, I'd like to put $20 on "Zuck tried to talk tech policy, but really they only talked about Trump." And how about $5 on "how to drink water in public" while we're at it? It's difficult to imagine conspiracy there, friend.
- waisbrot 6y agoYou imagine Zuckerberg as pretty incompetent, but I think he's got some brains. It's not hard to imagine how to talk policy to Trump. "Wow, you are the best president ever. So smart and strong. Also very good looking. I will hurt your enemies if you give me a tax break." Make sure you get paid in advance, of course.
- moksly 6y agoI always found it odd that people expect tech companies to be leaning either way. Their goal is to be as good friends with whoever has power as possible. If they cared about ethics they wouldn’t have the supply chains or be in the markets they are. Of course they cozied up to Trump, why wouldn’t they? The only reason Facebook is pretending to take democracy and truth seriously now, is because they have data that tells them they need new political friends post November.
- krapp 6y agoNot many people really did until the ousters of Brendan Eich and James Damore sort of kickstarted the narrative that tech companies are universally dominated by left-wing activists (despite the strong right-libertarian capitalist streak in startup culture.)
- im3w1l 6y agoThe cynic in my thinks that the previous libertarian policies were the bait needed to get people to hand over control over their lives and allow their friendships to be intermediated, and the new authoritarian policies are the hook.
- laurent92 6y agoStartups can be libertarian (small people believe in free market because it has been the source of their development) while superbig startups become left-wing: - Inside a company, comically the communist model prevails. Everything is shared, and decisions to produce for another department are not exchanged for money nor compared on the free market. Left-leaning employees fit the internal structure of large companies, where things are more managed by paperwork than talent. - A sufficiently large company has an interest in a heavy government, for example to prevent entry of competitors (that is an underestimated effect of GDPR), to control norms, or even simply to look good. A libertarian government is of no advantage to Google. The best demonstration is MS in 1998: A libertarian company is also of no advantage to a government. It’s a well-known fact in rightwing scene that SMBs and craftsmanship people are right-leaning, as free market is the process by which medium classes have a chance of becoming rich, whereas regulated market is the process by which the rich stay rich.
- mlindner 6y agoGiven that everyone is going crazy in the news recently about Facebook censoring a very major right wing news story and Facebook and Twitter are being subpoenaed over the actions to speak before congress about it, that seems unlikely.
- Fellshard 6y agoAre they going to provide evidence, here? This is thin as water. Facebook has been making life miserable for everyone by being entirely unpredictable in its ad provision and targeting. The rules and algorithms change willy-nilly, and reliable engagement is nigh impossible, and even more so when the media landscape of the left is fragmented across many separate sources and the media of the right is very centralized. If we could see aggregate numbers for left/right, we'd get better answers. But somehow I doubt they can or will make those numbers known.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- r721 6y agoQuote from WSJ story: "In late 2017, when Facebook tweaked its newsfeed algorithm to minimize the presence of political news, policy executives were concerned about the outsize impact of the changes on the right, including the Daily Wire, people familiar with the matter said. Engineers redesigned their intended changes so that left-leaning sites like Mother Jones were affected more than previously planned, the people said. Mr. Zuckerberg approved the plans. “We did not make changes with the intent of impacting individual publishers,” a Facebook spokesman said." https://archive.md/uhZpP https://archive.md/uhZpP
- Fellshard 6y agoThat doesn't tell us it was targeted - perhaps that's not the explicit claim the article makes, but it is certainly implied. If Facebook can't control the impressions for each ad partner, it's likely more than just Mother Jones were affected. If their algorithms are bad enough, driving people off the platform, that might also contribute to declines. (This is one major reason I no longer use FB: it can no longer serve any of the baseline purposes it was intended for, because of how poorly its feed algorithms work.)
- _exnk 6y agoThe Verge is a Vox owned website. They do some good reporting but they’re not the most impartial.
- thelastname 6y agoConspiracy theory.
- lefrenchy 6y agoYou’re right, given the behavior we’ve seen from major tech platforms this week it is totally conspiratorial for a journalist to report on discoveries related to nefarious activity.
- bedhead 6y ago"Left-leaning news" - you mean every major news outlet not named Fox?
- syshum 6y agohmmm "news" what a funny way to spell propaganda
- LeoPanthera 6y agoAd Fontes is a trusted and reliable service that measures and publishes political skew and accuracy of almost every major news site, and there are plenty of right-wing and far-right news sources if that floats your boat. https://www.adfontesmedia.com https://www.adfontesmedia.com
- rvz 6y agoThere's also plenty of left-wing and far-left sources that are just as unreliable as the other side. Ignoring one-side over the other without evidence or on 'source says' claims will confirm your own bias. 'Fact-checkers' can be biased in 'selectively' fact-checking claims made by either person and not checking 'ALL' their claims. Look at all sides of the political spectrum, uncover the full context that some may deliberately omit and then come to your own conclusion of the actual picture. [0] [0] https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news
- trident1000 6y agoWritten by the verge lol. Thats going to be a hard pass for me.
- sieabahlpark 6y agoI love how all of the other comments are saying Facebook is in Trump's pocket. I'm sorry, did we already forget what Facebook censored this past week?
- johnyzee 6y ago'For left-leaning news sites'. Pretty rich considering that Facebook and Twitter in unison suppressed the story about evidence of corruption by Joe Biden[1]. Regardless of whether these platforms favor one side or another, I find it incredible that they have now become akin to public utilities for distribution of information, with Twitter and Facebook being de facto official channels for politicians and big public and private organisations. So we're now fine with private companies being the gatekeepers for information of public interest, with no obligation or intention, assumed or expressed, of being politically neutral. This is a dangerous path that we are blindly wandering down. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/16/twitter-backtracks-allows-sharing-of-new-york-post-biden-story.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/16/twitter-backtracks-allows-sh...
- smadge 6y agoYou are getting downvoted because logically (and evidently) they could be doing both.
- whateveracct 6y agoThat NY Post story isn't credible at all - if you think it is, you've been successfully duped (as designed.)
- mlindner 6y agoWhether it's credible or not isn't relevant here. The supposition by the original poster is that Facebook is anti-left, but their actions showing that they did something very anti-right recently flies in the face of that supposition. Perhaps there is misinformation on both the left and the right and Facebook's algorithms are acting correctly for once?
- TechBro8615 6y agoAnd yet the Biden campaign has not denied the authenticity of the email, nor that the laptop was owned by Hunter Biden. Weird!
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- AaronFriel 6y agoThis shouldn't be terribly surprising. CrowdTangle, an analytics tool by Facebook, regularly reports that all of the top ten stories and links in the US are right leaning. Take for example Facebook's top ten for the last ten days, per the New York Times' Kevin Roose's tracker. These are self reported by Facebook's CrowdTangle: Today, 10/16, most of the news is explicitly partisan and right leaning, one post by Dan Rather: https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10/status/1317512901683376129?s=19 https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10/status/131751290168337612... 10/15: similar mix, https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10/status/1317117597033267205?s=19 https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10/status/131711759703326720... 10/14: https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10/status/1316749969475268613?s=19 https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10/status/131674996947526861... It goes on and on. Scroll through the Facebook Top 10 account and you'll see right leaning, sometimes far right pundits, at greater volume and (if these links follow the typical power distribution) far, far greater attention and traffic than any even moderate or neutral news source, let alone anyone comparably left wing.
- rbecker 6y agoTop 10 lists can be misleading. If there are fewer popular right-leaning news sources, then all the right-leaning audience will be concentrated there, pushing them into the top 10, while the left's audience is diluted. Like splitting the vote, or how Muhammed (and alternative spellings) is the most popular baby name in the UK: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/muhammed-really-most-popular-baby-name-uk-mohammed-muhammad-9895605.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/muhammed-rea... You would have to look at the total story popularity, not just the top 10, to make any kind of conclusion.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sfashset 6y agoSorry but you’re spreading misinformation in this post. Beyond the fact that your interpretation doesn’t follow from the evidence you’ve provided, as pointed out by the neighbor post, you’ve misstated what CrowdTangle is measuring. All of the top 10 links shared on FB in a week typically consists of NPR/NYT/TMZ etc. Recently the left leaning website MoveOn was in the top 3 (source: https://twitter.com/tomgara/status/1310314212078620680?s=21 https://twitter.com/tomgara/status/1310314212078620680?s=21). Shapiro or Bongino are never near the top 10 in terms of link engagement - the metric they do well on is sum total page engagement. Which makes sense - anecdotally, most of me and my left leaning millennial peers are getting our online political engagement from Twitter and Instagram. AOC is a sensation on Insta, Bongino is not. I see you’re relying on Kevin Roose for your information - unfortunately he’s an absolute spigot of misinformation. I made the same mistake in the past, until I took a deeper look into these issues, and found most of what he says to be totally wrong. I hope you, and others, will reconsider taking him at face value in the future.
- humanfromearth 6y agoInstead of creating some sort of government/non-profit censorship API and giving up the controls to content censorship, they are playing this censor role that will never have an end. Nobody will ever be satisfied. If they were smart they would say something like the ISPs: Hey, we're just providing the infra, we don't control the content and point the finger at the government. Is it really profitable to have this information flow controller? Don't they just want to sell ads? Look, I know it's not that simple. But why not do this?
- inglor_cz 6y agoThey need to control the content at least in a rudimentary way, they would be swamped by waves of commercial spam otherwise. Ofc, once you can remove classic Viagra ads, you established your ability to control content to some degree. From that point on, you cannot really assert that you are a common carrier. You could assert your allegiance to the 1st amendment, though.
- free_rms 6y agoBecause then they get stuck defending scoundrels, and it's untenable. The ACLU has (had?) the guts to defend a nazi's right to free speech, a profit seeking corp is less likely. So they get pushed into this position where they're stuck at the border of acceptable where half the people think they're censoring and half think it's only right.
- rcoveson 6y agoWhat's happened in the past is the old media or social media or both will latch on to your most outrageous user. They'll make headlines about them, all the while including your company's name in the story. It will get bad enough that advertisers threaten to pull out to show their support for the cause of de-platforming evil. The platform that chooses not to de-platform its worst users has lower fitness than the platform that goes along with it. Would you rather your ad revenue look like that of Twitter or that of Gab?
- the-dude 6y agoBecause advertisers.
- deanCommie 6y agoLet's see if this gets the thousands of comments that show up when Facebook or Twitter censor just ONE right-leaning article. Oh wait, it won't, because HackerNews is overrun with people who THINK they are libertarian free thinkers, but are really just pedantic sociopaths detached from the lived reality of anyone who is not them.
- whateveracct 6y agoThe right-wing has rebranded to be pure contrarianism - I think that's why so many HNers are apologetic for the American right lately.
- dang 6y agoYou've been breaking the HN guidelines a lot lately. We ban accounts that do that, and we've had to ask you about this multiple times before. You've been doing it mostly for political battle but not only—for example, gratuitous nasty swipes like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24724475 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24724475 are not ok either. Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines? Note these ones: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." "Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." "Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized." "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deanCommie 6y agoThank you for the callout. I appreciate the warning, and the direct point to the guidelines. You're absolutely right, I have been tense and short-sighted, and have been in complete and blatant violation of each of the first 4 points you mentioned. I will take care to be more restrained with my emotion and contribute more productively and with substance. However I must say I do not know how to react to that last line, and I propose that this guideline is well-intentioned but too broad. I grew up (and I'm sure most HN posters did) at a time when we considered "politics" as something that is totally distinct from science and technology. What attracted us to tech was the meritocracy, the purity of ideas, the ability to pursue and explore that curiousity and creativity. Yet...the last decade has revealed at least some new truths that responsible technologists can ill-afford to ignore: 1) Technology cannot be disassociated from politics if it is wielded for political purpose. 2) Science has become politicized, and subjects like "climate change", "alternative energy", etc, are actively stifled for political reasons, so cannot be explored or developed without acknowledging their political counterarguments. 3) Ignoring political subjects that are independent of technology and therefore may seem frivolous or redundant to some people is itself a privilige. For example, US immigration or LGBT policies directly feed into the talent at US tech companies can hire, the culture they can sustain, and that manifests in the technological choices and outputs of these companies. This is why by and large, "diversity and inclusion" topics become such hotbeds of discussion on this site. So while I acknowledge your overall broad point and will strive to do better, I do think it is appropriate for me to comment or call out certain "political" or "idiological" points in the context of the discussion that is being had. For example, I do think there is evidence that the most highly-upvoted perspectives on the subject of Twitter/Facebook censorship are themselves political/idiological. The most heavily upvoted comments call out censorship of right-leaning news while not acknowledging the role of right-leaning misinformation under the guise of news. They claim to hold an absolutist position on free speech yet denigrate "cancel culture" (which is a form of free speech that has the potential to be harmful to societal majority in-groups vs protected hate speech that is only harmful to minority out-groups). I absolutely seek out those top-voted comments that are stating an idiological position and am looking to provide a counterargument. I have not done so with appropriate substance or care, and will do so from now on. But I cannot and will not in good conscience avoid those subjects as they are the most important issues of our time.
- Hokusai 6y agoThis makes me feel very frustrated. Facebook logic seems "As we have to remove QAnnon posts, we will also remove Extinction Rebellion posts. They are NOT equivalent! One is a cult that promotes terrorism the other one is a environmentalist group that calls for civil disobedience. One calls for the kidnapping and assassination of politicians, the other one for walk-ins on roads to get media attention. One calls for a war on race the other on improving the environment. Both are in the "extremes" of some political compass but are not equivalent by any sane interpretation. "Enlighted Centrism" is a recurring joke. Facebook is just punching down on the working class and the left because they do not respond to the citizens but to other mega-rich people and corporations. I cannot wait for Facebook to be strongly regulated, and to be forbidded to run an advertisement company with data stolen from its users.
- pessimizer 6y agoWhat they're doing is censoring anything that upsets anyone (including themselves) because every mainstream political voice has been demanding that they censor people, and threatening to attack the company financially if they don't. I don't want them censoring anyone if they're not then held liable for the content they do publish. If they're going to exercise editorial powers, let them take editorial responsibility. This is not an option they're being given. Instead they've been told that the biggest offense they can commit is failing to delete.
- Nasrudith 6y agoThat isn't how it works - the platform/publisher duality is a complete fiction. Or would you prefer that filtering spam and viruses makes your email provider a complicit party to any wirefraud conducted using it?
- Barrin92 6y ago>Both are in the "extremes" of some political compass but are not equivalent by any sane interpretation. This seems to have a pretty long tradition in the US, it seems like the political or ethical version of what often happens in science discourse, where creationism and evolution are treated as equally reasonable debate positions and so on. The only yardstick seems to be "how many people are offended" rather than standing by scientific principle or the standards and rules of their platform. If 90% of misinformation and inhumane content comes out of one political camp it should make the people in that camp think, not Facebook.
- Rick1 6y agoI call bs. I keep being bombarded with left wing ideology despite constantly clicking to remove it. It's the right wing stuff that's being removed. This kind of article tries to hide the truth by falsely claiming that the content that's being promoted is being removed. This is a distraction.
- IXxXI 6y agoExactly.
- ykevinator 6y agoFacebook can do what it wants, just like you and me and fox news and msnbc. It's not the government.
- Adutude 6y agoHere we are again, discussing politics in our tech forum. Why? Because we invented brain washing machines. Social media married w/ Algorithms and AI. The bigger story here is that these brainwashing machines are susceptible to being manipulated by their owners to meet their own subjective needs. It gets even worse, because these are for-profit companies, the brain washing machines are being rented out to the highest bidder. Even worse than that the owners of these machines are being pressured and manipulated by others, in power, to affect outcomes that, as it turns out, are probably not in the best interest of the public at large.
- dTal 6y ago+5 insightful. The fact that Facebook has a big "politicial bias" lever at all is bad news. And automated individualized targeted political advertising is a horrifying tool as well. "Brainwashing machines" is a nice way of putting it.