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Mixed feelings on this. On the one hand, I'm against Facebook censorship, especially of academics. On the other hand, the researchers (and journalists) are goin
by macspoofing 6y ago
Mixed feelings on this. On the one hand, I'm against Facebook censorship, especially of academics. On the other hand, the researchers (and journalists) are going to use this research to browbeat Facebook into more censorship (and specifically censorship of the right, though some non-mainstream progressives will be caught up in the dragnet as well) as they have already done with a ton of hit pieces [1].
What to do, what to do.
[1] Brings to mind the hit-piece:
"The Making of a YouTube Radical - The New York Times" article. But there is an ongoing effort to continue pushing Facebook, Twitter and YouTube into more and more censorship of anyone deemed on the right and the Overton window keeps getting smaller and smaller. The situation with the Hunter Biden laptop story and NYPost is absolutely bonkers. Not only do journalists at mainstream center/center-left news outfits not care that Twitter and Facebook outright decided that the story is false and therefore shouldn't be shared by anyone and banned the account of their colleagues at NYPost .. but worse, actually applaud it and justify it.
- aluminum96 6y agoThe evidence just doesn't support your claim that Facebook predominantly censors content from the political right. Facebook produces disproportionately more engagements for right-wing sites[1]. This is reflected in the best performing content on the site -- after the first debate, 9 of the top 10 posts were right leaning [2], which is a regular occurrence. [1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/09/10/facebook-offers-a-distorted-view-of-american-news https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/09/10/facebook... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/elections/debate-facebook-sharing/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/elections/debat...
- macspoofing 6y ago>Facebook produces disproportionately more engagements for right-wing sites Bull. America is a country where any given election 50% vote Democrat and 50% vote Republican. Look at the chart. Look at the total number of left-wing vs right-wing sites. I bet if you add those up, total left-wing engagements will dwarf the number of total right-wing engagements. Looks to me that engagement is skewed towards left-wing, it's just that there are way more left-wing outfits so individual share is lower. Which makes sense, there is one major right-wing news network, Fox News, there's like 10 that are center-left/left wing which have to share the audience.
- drak0n1c 6y agoThe existence of popular engagement with a subset of allowed right-wing content does not mean there is no censorship of other right-wing content. If most of the political content on a platform by volume is right-wing, then it actually wouldn't be surprising if most of the censored political content would also be right-wing. The most engaged with articles on HN are technology-related. That fact does not magically prove that there is also zero moderation of technology-related articles.