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Facebook is removing content because that is ground they want to stand on. Removing content feels like censorship, so it lends itself to political grandstanding

Facebook is removing content because that is ground they want to stand on. Removing content feels like censorship, so it lends itself to political grandstanding in their favor. Millions of people get upset and demand that Facebook handle all content neutrally, which is exactly what Facebook wanted everyone to think in the first place. The real issue with Facebook is the editorial decisions they make about promoting some content over others. It’s totally optional and is also a powerful form of censorship. A link that shows up in no one’s “algorithmic timeline” is worthless, even if it is not actually removed from the platform. The essential lie is that the algorithm is neutral. It’s not; it is intentionally biased to favor Facebook’s goals: increase ad inventory and the data used to target ads.

cududa 5y ago
I’m sorry but my profession is vaccine hesitancy and persuasion researcher and OP is just wrong. I have n=20,000 polls showing people get disinformation from Facebook that informs their decision to not get vaccinated and hours of focus group recordings also showing this.
- coryrc 5y ago
  Who is wrong?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - IfOnlyYouKnew 5y ago
    The 99.5% of dead people that weren’t vaccinated. This isn’t difficult.
- testernews 5y ago
  You forgot your /s there bud
- tasogare 5y ago
  > my profession is vaccine hesitancy and persuasion researcher Can't get if this is sarcasm or not. If true, it's scary how fast micro-fields are created and funded once there is a political purpose behind it, so that policies can be rubber-stamped as science. If false, nice troll.
  - p1necone 5y ago
    There's a global pandemic killing thousands of people and there's a sizeable portion of the American population spreading misinformation that's causing a significant number of people to not get the vaccine, in turn endangering both themselves and others. It seems obvious to me that there would be people researching how to either stop this misinformation being spread, or educate people enough to stop believing it. This isn't some conspiracy theory - this is just sane people doing sane things in response to a very real threat.
    - decremental 5y ago
      316 people have died of Covid in the last 7 days in the US, according to the CDC.
      - modriano 5y ago
        Actually that's average number of DAILY deaths from the past 7 days, not the number of deaths in the past 7 days. As a lot of people take the weekends off, reporting of new cases and deaths decreases sharply on weekends and increases on Mondays, but in reality people are not dying at a lower rate on weekends. That's why the stats are averaged over 7 days. For reference, there are about 15k homicides per year in the US, or about 41 per day, which is about 13% of the 316 daily COVID death rate reported by the CDC (and on the front page of the NYTimes site).
      - perl4ever 5y ago
        I believe the correct number is over 2100, and it's up nearly 15% week-over-week. Hopefully we are near a peak, but it never seems to register with some people that deaths lag cases by a few weeks, whatever the ratio may be.
- cat_plus_plus 5y ago
  How do you distinguish correlation and causation? People who are concerned about something are naturally going to search online and engage with content that confirms their biases. Do you have a robust evidence that vaccine hesitant go on Facebook and change their minds based on pro-vaccine content that is heavily promoted these days?
  - zdragnar 5y ago
    You give people too much credit. Tuskegee experiment cast a very long shadow and contributes a significant reason for the racial divide in vaccination rates for covid. No research needed, the bias is built into cultural memory.
    - cududa 5y ago
      No idea why you got downvoted so much. This is very much so a reason people are untrusting. One method a Black pastor and I came up with for our county and surrounding ones was to bring the parishioners to a county vax clinic with white folks also present, and let them point in the pan of pre-drawn needles for which one they wanted, so they didn’t have to fear they were getting a “Black” vaccine
      - zdragnar 5y ago
        Most likely, I presume, is that telling people whose livelihood depends on the internet that other people do not research on the internet everything they develop beliefs about is apparently not a great idea if you are concerned about fake internet points.
      - cat_plus_plus 5y ago
        That's an excuse, not a reason. The reason for both whites and blacks acting like idiots is lack of mastery of even kindergarden-level critical thinking among US adults.
  - cududa 5y ago
    No, most of the pro-vaccine content doesn’t persuade people because it’s not crafted right. There are some interesting efforts in the field now with promising effects. But being on the fence/ skeptical and seeing disinformation that aligns with your fears does move someone from the hesitant to resident category
- tekknik 5y ago
  What about those who have never stepped foot on the platform yet are still hesitant? Not everybody is on Facebook. Also while we're here, if you are what you say you are, add the military forcing vaccinations, people witnessing side effects while being forced to continue duty, and the network effects this has on them and their friends / family after leaving the service. Look at how many people try to go the route of court martial to avoid some vaccines only to change their mind later when they're literally sitting in jail and have no rights. Then think about how this plays out in a civilized society when you can't throw the person in jail.
  - cududa 5y ago
    You can generally trace it back to someone they know on Facebook or Tucker Carlson. I’d say the side effects are real and they should be given adequate rest to recover.
    - tekknik 5y ago
      You can generally trace it back to someone they know on Facebook or Tucker Carlson. Dems would serve themselves better by not trying to point fingers on where to aim the ban cannon. This is only going to cause more mistrust. Actually visit the areas with hesitancy, then come back and see if you say the same. I know some 100 people that are hesitant. Not a one of them are on FB, nor listen to anything FOX puts out. It's gov mistrust fueling it. Not Tucker Carlson. That's the most ridiculous thing I've heard lately.
      - jkestner 5y ago
        What actions caused their mistrust of the government? Where did they learn about these actions?
        tekknik 5y ago
        CNN, the left, etc
      - cududa 5y ago
Dove 5y ago
Facebook is removing content because they wanted to make money with a website, and the job of statecraft fell in their laps in the process. They didn't volunteer, they aren't qualified, nobody told them they were signing up to run a kingdom, let alone the world. So they don't produce lofty, philosophical, well-thought-out positions on free speech and human rights. They don't carefully manage the public square with the long term good of humanity in mind. They make the same expedient, best-effort, unenlightened, sounds-good-to-me decisions that literally every poorly qualified there-for-the-wrong-reasons ruler in all of history has made. Your majesty, people are dying because cats are vessels of Satan! By royal decree, kill the cats. That's all this is. I think they are trying, and I wish they had a Thomas Jefferson on staff and saw themselves as needing one. But they don't.
- traek 5y ago
  All of this is also true for our actual government[0]. I have zero confidence that if our government were in charge of running Facebook/Twitter/any other social media app the results would be better. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/16/white-house-says-facebook-needs-to-do-more-to-fight-vaccine-misinformation.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/16/white-house-says-facebook-ne...
  - Dove 5y ago
    I agree. I don't think our government is qualified to make these sorts of decisions. I don't know who is. I am not advocating for nationalization of these services. I am only saying that these people never signed up to have to make decisions about such impactful matters. They are not political philosophers, and they are stuck making decisions of that gravity. I can be mad when they do it wrong, but I can also recognize how tragically outmatched they are. At least governments have judiciaries and cabinets and checks and balances and constitutions and stuff. These guys were just trying to make money on the internet, and suddenly human rights in China became their problem. Nobody seriously expects Twitter to have a full blown judiciary and legislature for processing bans. Nobody expects them to write a constitution which becomes a treasure of a historical document, on how to properly govern the flow of the world's conversation. But at this point, those things would actually be appropriate. It's not surprising they're struggling trying to solve the problem with algorithms. I don't think anyone could succeed at that, and they don't even realize they have the responsibility and opportunity -- they're just trying to do their best to be socially responsible and then get back to making money on the internet. The best suggestion I have for them is to hold out their hands to humanity and say -- "Look, we have a tremendous opportunity here, and it's bigger than just us. How should we use it?"
emodendroket 5y ago
Nobody actually wants an "uncensored" Facebook. If you went there and your feed were full of spam, porn, and shock videos, you'd stop going.
- b0tzzzzzzman 5y ago
  Alot of projection .. And not much 'me' only 'you'
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    Well, I could have written it as "one," but most people find that pretentious.
- zdragnar 5y ago
  There's a reasonable, substantial difference between not allowing material deemed indecent- porn and gore- and becoming an arbiter of "truth".
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    So you say, but is there really? What about hate speech? Should that go there? If not, now we need to decide what is and isn't hate speech, which is itself contentious. And material "deemed indecent" could also be newsworthy, so it's not really simple to apply even this standard. It's a pretty clear trend: every supposed "free speech platform" ends up having to have active content moderation to actually make it a site anybody would want to use, and many of them still languish in obscurity or eventually shut down because it turns out most people don't want to hang out with the people who were too unpleasant for the mainstream sites to want them. Actually, once you start to probe, I think you'll find people disagree in degrees, even though most people consider their lines in the sand clear and commonsensical.
    - rayiner 5y ago
      > So you say, but is there really? Yes. The US has managed fine with exactly such a dichotomy. The reason it’s easy to draw a bright line at obscenity/porn is because you know it when you see it. > What about hate speech? Should that go there? No, but speech inciting violence is pretty easy to recognize. Again, First Amendment jurisprudence has developed clear rules for this.

cududa 5y ago

I’m sorry but my profession is vaccine hesitancy and persuasion researcher and OP is just wrong. I have n=20,000 polls showing people get disinformation from Facebook that informs their decision to not get vaccinated and hours of focus group recordings also showing this.

coryrc 5y ago
Who is wrong?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- IfOnlyYouKnew 5y ago
  The 99.5% of dead people that weren’t vaccinated. This isn’t difficult.
testernews 5y ago
You forgot your /s there bud
tasogare 5y ago
> my profession is vaccine hesitancy and persuasion researcher Can't get if this is sarcasm or not. If true, it's scary how fast micro-fields are created and funded once there is a political purpose behind it, so that policies can be rubber-stamped as science. If false, nice troll.
- p1necone 5y ago
  There's a global pandemic killing thousands of people and there's a sizeable portion of the American population spreading misinformation that's causing a significant number of people to not get the vaccine, in turn endangering both themselves and others. It seems obvious to me that there would be people researching how to either stop this misinformation being spread, or educate people enough to stop believing it. This isn't some conspiracy theory - this is just sane people doing sane things in response to a very real threat.
  - decremental 5y ago
    316 people have died of Covid in the last 7 days in the US, according to the CDC.
    - modriano 5y ago
      Actually that's average number of DAILY deaths from the past 7 days, not the number of deaths in the past 7 days. As a lot of people take the weekends off, reporting of new cases and deaths decreases sharply on weekends and increases on Mondays, but in reality people are not dying at a lower rate on weekends. That's why the stats are averaged over 7 days. For reference, there are about 15k homicides per year in the US, or about 41 per day, which is about 13% of the 316 daily COVID death rate reported by the CDC (and on the front page of the NYTimes site).
    - perl4ever 5y ago
      I believe the correct number is over 2100, and it's up nearly 15% week-over-week. Hopefully we are near a peak, but it never seems to register with some people that deaths lag cases by a few weeks, whatever the ratio may be.
cat_plus_plus 5y ago
How do you distinguish correlation and causation? People who are concerned about something are naturally going to search online and engage with content that confirms their biases. Do you have a robust evidence that vaccine hesitant go on Facebook and change their minds based on pro-vaccine content that is heavily promoted these days?
- zdragnar 5y ago
  You give people too much credit. Tuskegee experiment cast a very long shadow and contributes a significant reason for the racial divide in vaccination rates for covid. No research needed, the bias is built into cultural memory.
  - cududa 5y ago
    No idea why you got downvoted so much. This is very much so a reason people are untrusting. One method a Black pastor and I came up with for our county and surrounding ones was to bring the parishioners to a county vax clinic with white folks also present, and let them point in the pan of pre-drawn needles for which one they wanted, so they didn’t have to fear they were getting a “Black” vaccine
    - zdragnar 5y ago
      Most likely, I presume, is that telling people whose livelihood depends on the internet that other people do not research on the internet everything they develop beliefs about is apparently not a great idea if you are concerned about fake internet points.
    - cat_plus_plus 5y ago
      That's an excuse, not a reason. The reason for both whites and blacks acting like idiots is lack of mastery of even kindergarden-level critical thinking among US adults.
- cududa 5y ago
  No, most of the pro-vaccine content doesn’t persuade people because it’s not crafted right. There are some interesting efforts in the field now with promising effects. But being on the fence/ skeptical and seeing disinformation that aligns with your fears does move someone from the hesitant to resident category
tekknik 5y ago
What about those who have never stepped foot on the platform yet are still hesitant? Not everybody is on Facebook. Also while we're here, if you are what you say you are, add the military forcing vaccinations, people witnessing side effects while being forced to continue duty, and the network effects this has on them and their friends / family after leaving the service. Look at how many people try to go the route of court martial to avoid some vaccines only to change their mind later when they're literally sitting in jail and have no rights. Then think about how this plays out in a civilized society when you can't throw the person in jail.
- cududa 5y ago
  You can generally trace it back to someone they know on Facebook or Tucker Carlson. I’d say the side effects are real and they should be given adequate rest to recover.
  - tekknik 5y ago
    You can generally trace it back to someone they know on Facebook or Tucker Carlson. Dems would serve themselves better by not trying to point fingers on where to aim the ban cannon. This is only going to cause more mistrust. Actually visit the areas with hesitancy, then come back and see if you say the same. I know some 100 people that are hesitant. Not a one of them are on FB, nor listen to anything FOX puts out. It's gov mistrust fueling it. Not Tucker Carlson. That's the most ridiculous thing I've heard lately.
    - jkestner 5y ago
      What actions caused their mistrust of the government? Where did they learn about these actions?
      - tekknik 5y ago
        CNN, the left, etc
    - cududa 5y ago

Dove 5y ago

Facebook is removing content because they wanted to make money with a website, and the job of statecraft fell in their laps in the process. They didn't volunteer, they aren't qualified, nobody told them they were signing up to run a kingdom, let alone the world. So they don't produce lofty, philosophical, well-thought-out positions on free speech and human rights. They don't carefully manage the public square with the long term good of humanity in mind. They make the same expedient, best-effort, unenlightened, sounds-good-to-me decisions that literally every poorly qualified there-for-the-wrong-reasons ruler in all of history has made. Your majesty, people are dying because cats are vessels of Satan! By royal decree, kill the cats. That's all this is. I think they are trying, and I wish they had a Thomas Jefferson on staff and saw themselves as needing one. But they don't.

traek 5y ago
All of this is also true for our actual government[0]. I have zero confidence that if our government were in charge of running Facebook/Twitter/any other social media app the results would be better. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/16/white-house-says-facebook-needs-to-do-more-to-fight-vaccine-misinformation.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/16/white-house-says-facebook-ne...
- Dove 5y ago
  I agree. I don't think our government is qualified to make these sorts of decisions. I don't know who is. I am not advocating for nationalization of these services. I am only saying that these people never signed up to have to make decisions about such impactful matters. They are not political philosophers, and they are stuck making decisions of that gravity. I can be mad when they do it wrong, but I can also recognize how tragically outmatched they are. At least governments have judiciaries and cabinets and checks and balances and constitutions and stuff. These guys were just trying to make money on the internet, and suddenly human rights in China became their problem. Nobody seriously expects Twitter to have a full blown judiciary and legislature for processing bans. Nobody expects them to write a constitution which becomes a treasure of a historical document, on how to properly govern the flow of the world's conversation. But at this point, those things would actually be appropriate. It's not surprising they're struggling trying to solve the problem with algorithms. I don't think anyone could succeed at that, and they don't even realize they have the responsibility and opportunity -- they're just trying to do their best to be socially responsible and then get back to making money on the internet. The best suggestion I have for them is to hold out their hands to humanity and say -- "Look, we have a tremendous opportunity here, and it's bigger than just us. How should we use it?"

emodendroket 5y ago

Nobody actually wants an "uncensored" Facebook. If you went there and your feed were full of spam, porn, and shock videos, you'd stop going.

b0tzzzzzzman 5y ago
Alot of projection .. And not much 'me' only 'you'
- emodendroket 5y ago
  Well, I could have written it as "one," but most people find that pretentious.
zdragnar 5y ago
There's a reasonable, substantial difference between not allowing material deemed indecent- porn and gore- and becoming an arbiter of "truth".
- emodendroket 5y ago
  So you say, but is there really? What about hate speech? Should that go there? If not, now we need to decide what is and isn't hate speech, which is itself contentious. And material "deemed indecent" could also be newsworthy, so it's not really simple to apply even this standard. It's a pretty clear trend: every supposed "free speech platform" ends up having to have active content moderation to actually make it a site anybody would want to use, and many of them still languish in obscurity or eventually shut down because it turns out most people don't want to hang out with the people who were too unpleasant for the mainstream sites to want them. Actually, once you start to probe, I think you'll find people disagree in degrees, even though most people consider their lines in the sand clear and commonsensical.
  - rayiner 5y ago
    > So you say, but is there really? Yes. The US has managed fine with exactly such a dichotomy. The reason it’s easy to draw a bright line at obscenity/porn is because you know it when you see it. > What about hate speech? Should that go there? No, but speech inciting violence is pretty easy to recognize. Again, First Amendment jurisprudence has developed clear rules for this.