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> Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are the carrier, and should be treated as such. It's more nuanced than that because ATT doesn't repeat a pho

• HunOL 5y ago
  Would be good if social media stop promote some posts and order them in my feed. Make them all chronological. Too many posts? Unsubscribe.
  • mfer 5y ago
    This starts to get to the issue here. FB is not a carrier (like a telephone company). Their business model isn't built around carrying information or broadcasting it. FB is a content platform who is about making ad revenue. They are crafted around that and how to make that the most profitable possible.
• saurik 5y ago
  We need to differentiate the recommendation algorithm parts of these products from the communication parts. If Facebook is recommending something, that's on them, and if they want to not recommend my content to anyone, so be it; but I should be able to post something seen only by the people who opted in to following me without them getting in the way.
  • the-pigeon 5y ago
    I would take this a step further and say that all social media recommendation algorithms should be publicly reviewable. The claim is that this algorithms are neutral. But we know many contain ways for the owner to artificially boost preferred content. And algorithms tend to have the biases of their creators in them. Controlling what people see is an important power and one that should be regulated.
    • whakim 5y ago
      I agree that the algorithms should be publicly reviewable. But I'm not sure that solves the central issue which is that there's a tension between what's financially good for social networks (algorithms that increase engagement - which disproportionately favors echo chambers, controversial and shallow content, etc.) and what's good for the general public.
      • gunapologist99 5y ago
        > what's good for the general public. I personally don't really care what facebook (or anyone else) believes is good for me. I'll be the judge of that, thank you very much. And if I want to eat chocolate all day, I'll do that, too.
        • whakim 5y ago
          Social networks aren't in the business of showing you what's "good for you." They're in the business of showing you what's good for them (e.g. things that will increase your engagement).
          • deleted 5y ago
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    • lallysingh 5y ago
      I don't see how this will help. FB et. al. work by shoehorning complex nuances into intentionally crude metrics like "engagement.". If they show the engagement-focused algorithm, that shows they're "just trying to engage users." What would the algorithm show that isn't already apparent?
      • jrockway 5y ago
        Most people that want to see the algorithm want that knowledge to use it for their own ends. They are forgetting about the second-order effects where literally everyone will also be doing that, and then they are gaming each other instead of "The Algorithm".
  • gpm 5y ago
    That's how facebook works, no? There are two (or more) feeds of information on facebook: - The main one, which only shows posts sent to the "recommend this to people queue" based on facebooks recommendation algorithms. - Messenger, which directly sends messages to people in a FIFO fashion, which I assume facebook doesn't censor as heavily (though I can't say I've tested). The fact that the recommendation based stream is more popular is a reflection that facebooks curation is actually useful, but it doesn't mean messenger doesn't exist. Nor do I see that messenger must exist, facebook isn't morally obligated to provide a "non recommend feed" to you if that isn't the product they want to sell you. Perfectly good alternatives even exist, in the form of "blogs" (say, substack).
    • saurik 5y ago
      I assert that content I post to my timeline and which you see on your feed as my friend shouldn't be subject to Facebook's commentary or opinions. I take strong issue with the claim that to obtain that I have to use Messenger--which is an entirely different content paradigm--and I think it is outright dishonest to try to claim that people posting to timelines means that "the recommendation based stream is more popular". Facebook wants to recommend content to me from random people: that's their issue, and they should take responsibility for it--whether legally or simply morally--and thereby should have to be careful with what they show people (maybe to the point where they simply can't scale it to the scale they are at automatically! I will not cry over their loss). Facebook also shows me content from my "friends"... I opted in to the content from my friends: if I don't like my friends, I can and should unfriend them, as they were my responsibility, not Facebook's (in the same sense that if I call someone on the phone I don't whine to AT&T about how much they suck). I should not get labels from Facebook telling me my friends' content--content I explicitly wanted to see--is scary or wrong, and they certainly should not be banned from showing it to me. I think the most egregious category error you are making here is to equate messaging with communication... the entire mechanism of social media to followers is primarily direct communication! We can see how ridiculous this has become by looking at how, even if you have a private account--one random people aren't even allowed to see!--Facebook, Twitter, and Google currently consider it their business what we post there... an account you post things to and which other people follow is identical to a chat channel that happens to maintain a buffer. (FWIW, to steel man your argument as best I can, "yes": Facebook also applies recommendation algorithms to friend feeds. Twitter I believe still doesn't. Instagram didn't, but then started... AFAIK people don't like it that much, but it might be more profitable for Facebook? Either way: it is helping me reorder content I already curated, and so I don't feel a need to claim that this is something they published. There is simply still a fundamental difference from platforms surfacing "trending" content or suggesting new people or channels I might want to follow / posts I might want to see, and acting as an intermediary for content from people I was directly linked to from people I am communicating with. The former might as well be illegal as far as I am concerned, while the latter needs to be sacrosanct.)
  • deleted 5y ago
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• chmod600 5y ago
  If everyone involved in the conversation wants to be involved, and no laws are broken, and the platform interferes, then it's censorship. If there's some kind of algorithm putting the content in front of people who didn't ask for it (e.g. not followers/friends/subscribers/whatever), then you have a point.
  • kspacewalk2 5y ago
    Facebook is a private company that allows you to sign up to use its wholly-owned platform, and it's allowed to censor for whatever clever/asinine reasons it comes up with. Your only recourse is to disengage.
    • justanotherguy0 5y ago
      At&t is a private company, and it isn't allowed to censor your calls for whatever clever or asinine reasons it comes up with.
      • Retric 5y ago
        AT&T is highly regulated, what they can and can’t do has little to do with the average company. That said they are allowed to do quite a bit such as blocking calls between individuals.
        • justaguy88 5y ago
          and facebook could perhaps become highly regulated in the same way depending on how politics goes
        • justanotherguy0 5y ago
          Not being allowed to do things is called being regulated. So Facebook shouldn't be regulated in the same way that ATT is because they currently aren't being regulated in the same way that ATT is? That's a bit pedantic.
    • stale2002 5y ago
• TrevorJ 5y ago
  I'd prefer it if facebook didn't do this either.
• bmarquez 5y ago
  > millions of other people Another nuance is that due to Facebook post privacy settings, an individual post can be restricted to a limited friend list, and not viewable by the general public. However the "fact checking" appears to apply to both private and public posts.
  • Overton-Window 5y ago
    And private DMs in certain cases as well. The argument doesn't hold water.
    • Falling3 5y ago
      Messenger is being fact checked as well? I haven't seen or heard this.
      • fragmede 5y ago
        The fact checking aspect of it is new twist, but Facebook's servers already checks the contents of messages and will disappear messages if the content is deemed bad. It started off as protection against spreading viruses/malware which are unequivocally bad and has evolved from there to include urls to sites with extreme political views and other controversial content.
• Overton-Window 5y ago
  That's not argument for censorship, rather an argument for eschewing (or outlawing) algorithmic timelines.
• sam0x17 5y ago
  That said, SMS carriers filter and block TONS of messages and have been doing it for years. Our startup works in that space so we have to deal with this problem all the time and I can tell you last November if you tried to send a text message with the word "election" in it in an automated fashion, it was most likely getting blocked.
  • gunapologist99 5y ago
    Yes, and now the U.S. mobile telcos are applying a completely subjective "reputation" "brand trust score", which sounds a lot like the Chinese social credit score. Oh, and they're charging a ton more for the privilege of sending a small number of texts, too. I guess when you engage in price-fixing in the open and call it "setting a standard", then anti-trust rules don't apply..
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • travoc 5y ago
    Rate limiting is not the same as content filtering.
    • sam0x17 5y ago
      I promise you there is tons of actual keyword based content filtering going on. We had to build an AI just to detect which keywords different carriers block. Anything socially contentious, like "BLM", "election", "covid" increases the chances your message will get a 30008 error aka carrier-level content blocking. More disturbing is that plenty of carriers will also block messages but report them back to Twilio as delivered.
  • account42 5y ago
    Sounds like something that should be challenged in court.
  • mrobot 5y ago
    Does anyone know what year and date this started happening?
• Terretta 5y ago
  > ATT doesn't repeat a phone call it has deemed interesting to millions of other people True, it doesn't. Instead, AT&T repeats millions of phone calls it carries to a party deemed interested.
• chroem- 5y ago
  I didn't know freedom of speech had a cooldown timer. >but it's a private company! No, the executive branch has come out and said that they're the ones organizing this censorship.