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This is the great fear of many come to pass - censorship by algorithm. Facebook didn't outright ban sharing of the Hunter Biden laptop stories like Twitter did,
by spangry 4y ago
This is the great fear of many come to pass - censorship by algorithm. Facebook didn't outright ban sharing of the Hunter Biden laptop stories like Twitter did, they instead tweaked their algorithm to prevent the story from spreading. We found out about it this time because Zuckerberg owned up to it, but what about next time? For all we know, Facebook, Google and Twitter are doing this right now on a range of other subjects.
It's scary to think that just 2 to 3 corporations have the power to construct a false reality around us, in a way that's virtually impossible for us to detect.
- seydor 4y agonot really censorship, just a regression to the old norms. mainstream media are biased to the politics of their owners. Same with facebook, it s a mainstream medium now Zuck claims that he was duped , but lets take everything with a grain of salt
- colordrops 4y agoThe old norms were censorship too.
- papito 4y agoOh please. It's called "content curation". You want zero of that? There is always 8chan. If you enjoy seeing things that make you want to pour Clorox into your eyes.
- colordrops 4y agoThe television stations and newspapers back in the day absolutely maintained the Overton window and constructed narratives that supported the the ruling class. To call this "content curation" is ignorant at best.
- arinlen 4y ago> The television stations and newspapers back in the day absolutely maintained the Overton window and constructed narratives that supported the the ruling class. To call this "content curation" is ignorant at best. It's also ignorant at best to pass off "maintaining the Overton window" as being censorship. Whether you like it or not, there's a finite amount of airtime and an infinite amount of content that can be presented. Picking what goes in is not the same as picking what stays out. See as an example what's aired by some peculiar media companies.
- colordrops 4y agoYou are confused about what the Overton window describes. It's not "picking and choosing what to talk about due to limited airtime". Look it up.
- arinlen 4y ago> You are confused about what the Overton window describes. It's not "picking and choosing what to talk about due to limited airtime". Look it up. Not really. Before trying to accuse anyone of being confused, please try your best to read what those you're replying to did said. Otherwise you're just adding noise to discussions.
- papito 4y agoYou mean, like, not completely make up stuff about "stolen elections"?
- colordrops 4y agoWhy don't you just come out and say that you believe censorship is a good thing because it protects us from bad guys? Just because you believe it's a good thing doesn't mean it's not still censorship.
- papito 4y ago
- darepublic 4y agoBut then when say the government is lying about something and the curators keep curating out the pertinent details, suddenly you need to go to such a tough place to find the truth
- papito 4y agoI would like to hear one example. One. Which "truth" did you find out on 8chan that the government lied about?
- kofejnik 4y agoThat masks help prevent spread of Covid?
- cf141q5325 4y agoSeeing as it has been over two years now, here is Fauci on the topic to refresh peoples memories. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2MmX2U2V3c&t=18s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2MmX2U2V3c&t=18s
- yonaguska 4y agoNot just 8chan, but rumble, 4chan, substack, etc- anything counter to the accepted covid narratives, which changed several times, you pretty much had to go to alternative sites to even discuss such topics. And now the truth is finally being accepted, that the covid vaccines are potentially harmful for young people, or that covid doesn't actually cause myocarditis or a myriad of other vaccine side effects.
- darepublic 4y agoNot about 8chan I mean a place where there is no censorship. It is not a guarantee of truth but sometimes a prerequisite
- colordrops 4y agoWe found out many things from WikiLeaks, such as the government killing journalists to hide atrocities.
- selfhoster11 4y agoIs it censorship to only permit e. g. knitting content to be discussed on a knitting Discord server and to ban most other topics? There are only a handful of places where one can discuss narrow-appeal topics like knitting, and many more places to discuss anything else. If you didn’t ban other topics (i. e. curate content), the server would collapse thanks to narrow-interest content getting lost in the noise.
- andy_ppp 4y agoWe do know they are doing this otherwise hate speech, spam and disinformation would be most of their platforms.
- seattle_spring 4y agoI wish people would acknowledge this fact more often (and it is unquestionably a fact).
- andy_ppp 4y agoHaha, I literally got downvoted for stating this obvious fact… people find it really difficult to differentiate facts they don’t like from lies.
- naasking 4y agoSpam and disinformation are fake account/bot problems. Totally separate issue that can be solved by tying accounts to real people, without necessarily exposing their identity publicly. As for hate speech, that's not only somewhat subjective, but you can't solve that by banning people. Every instance of people turning away from bigotry was the result of conversation and engagement, like the black Panthers partnering with the KKK to fight a common cause, or the admirable Daryl Davis. Basically, the outcomes you describe are only inevitable if we make the exact same choices we've already made. Well duh. What's the definition of insanity again?
- bamboozled 4y agoThis is assuming there are no other ways for important things to be reported, such as media outlets, forums, 4chan, independent bloggers and pod casters IRC etc If some major conspiracy was under way, I'm not sure Facbook, Google, Twitter censorhip alone would be enough to stop it?
- inglor_cz 4y agoYou don't really have to stop it. American elections have become so polarized that 50 000 votes in strategically important states can swing them. It is definitely in capabilities of the tech giants to effect such a small change by putting their thumbs on the scales. Of course, this is a general problem with the "winner takes all" political principle, and already the ancient Greeks knew that problem, but given that you can't have two Presidents at the same time, it is hard to avoid. Even European countries where the President is usually just a figurehead suffer from bitter polarization when it comes to presidential elections.
- deepdriver 4y agoForums, 4chan and random blogs are the last-ditch avenue for information sharing among a small, extremely attentive, more-paranoid-than-average segment of the population. They are not an effective means for journalism or mass political speech, even when the facts of that speech are clearly established.
- bamboozled 4y agoI'm not arguing 4chan is good for that, I'm just saying social media is not the only way we find out about things either.
- selfhoster11 4y agoSocial media may not be the only way to access news, but most of the other ways are too obscure to spread information quickly.
- hotpotamus 4y agoSo what was up with Hunter Biden's laptop anyway? Was it full of state secrets or something?
- readthenotes1 4y agoAmong other things, it shows that his father did know about his shady deals (ukraine, china). Also had videos of various illegal activities that you and I would probably be thrown in jail for if the FBI found them on a laptop of ours
- tadfisher 4y agoIt shows nothing, because the story was a fabrication from the start.
- _-david-_ 4y agoAre the pictures/videos of Hunter smoking crack or whatever it was a deepfake or is that real?
- tadfisher 4y agoI wouldn't be surprised if they were real, but there is not a dispute that Hunter is a recovering drug addict. That doesn't mean that a laptop exists with incriminating evidence of illegal activity or the President's knowledge of it.
- defrost 4y agoThe flip side is propaganda by algorithm ... The pumping to top view of that story that elicits the greatest reaction and stokes the most base fears at the expense of truth and rationality. We've seen false realities, election fraud, bleach cures, pushed hard by algorithm to the detriment of many.
- remarkEon 4y agoThat’s not a “flip side”. That’s the same thing.
- ohiovr 4y ago
- mgraczyk 4y agoThis isn't "censorship by algorithm" though. This was a human being intentionally banning a specific thing. There was no algorithm in the loop. They didn't "tweak their algorithm" anymore than an antivirus tweaks its algorithm to detect a new virus, they specifically censored a specific piece of content.
- epgui 4y agoI suggest reading the articles before writing in the comments: > Facebook did not completely ban sharing of the article, but instead limited how much its algorithm automatically shared it to other people for a week, while third-party fact-checkers tried to verify the reporting. So while people could post the article and discuss it, it was less likely to spread organically to new users.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mgraczyk 4y ago"The algorithm" here refers to Facebook's backend. They are using that word carelessly. I know how it works, I worked on the actual "algorithms" at Facebook. This censorship wasn't done by an "algorithm" in any meaningful sense of the word. Somebody at Facebook coded a rule that showed this content to fewer people.
- Phlarp 4y ago>Facebook coded a rule that All algorithms are coded rules, the idea of using an algorithm to somehow launder responsibility in tech companies is ridiculous. Before companies had algorithms they had heuristics, nobody would (successfully) deflect blame for the actions of the organization by saying "the heuristic did this!"
- mgraczyk 4y agoWhat I'm saying is that this is a heuristic, not an algorithm, and that you should blame Facebook, not "the algorithm"
- bb88 4y ago> It's scary to think that just 2 to 3 corporations have the power to construct a false reality around us I do believe it's been this way for a while. Noam Chomsky wrote Manufacturing Consent in 1988. (There's a movie out there created in 1992 if you don't want to read the book). Basically the same factors at work then are the same factors at work today -- just escalated with an algorithm. There is an objective reality -- it's just that people are too lazy to go find it.
- wjnc 4y agoPretty near Chomsky in the realm of ontology are the thoughts that the objective reality isn’t findable by respectively the average person, people in general or at all. I wouldn’t call people lazy for being unable or unwilling to find out the objective reality. What domains offer enough rewards to do that for? A proper quest towards objective reality costs you from weeks to a lifetime. Humans are satisficers, not optimizers.
- arinlen 4y ago> I wouldn’t call people lazy for being unable or unwilling to find out the objective reality. I'd frame it differently. Everyone has their personal lives to deal with, as well as their personal interests. Everyone has their priority queue to deal with their daily life. If no one ever watch a specific newspice then that person will be completely oblivious to it, and if they watch it then they have far more important things to do than fact checking something that's not even in their priority queue. I feel that this problem is actually being presented backwards. People push stories because they want to force upon the public specific points of view over very specific topics. Call it editorialization, call it propaganda. It's the same thing. Failing to see a point of view pushed onto the public is not a problem from the individual's standpoint, nor something that affects people's lives. The only people that are impacted by this are those who stand to benefit from manipulating the public.
- glogla 4y ago[flagged]
- keerthiko 4y agoI don't get it. Why did we ever consider the algorithms of private corporations as a fundamental or viable avenue for free speech to begin with? The owners and controllers of private algorithms will always have the ulterior motive(s) of protecting their interests. The fact that we (the software and information industry worldwide) have conditioned any society to think that algorithmic feeds are a representation of reality is the real problem here, regardless of how many or how few corporations are participating in that.
- selfhoster11 4y agoBecause initially, there were no such algorithms in place (or at the very least, they had a much lighter touch). The Twitter and Facebook timelines used to be chronological by default. The whole idea of an algorithmic feed as an intermediary of what you see was missing.
- xhxjcur 4y agoWe didn't. Facebook used to just be a timeline feed of all your friends interactions. The day they changed to an algorithm is the day I said this crap is the end result and closed my account. I guess y'all missed the message.
- ProjectArcturis 4y agoWe've had the same problem with literal printing presses and their owners for hundreds of years.
- roenxi 4y agoIt looks a lot like what newspapers have been doing forever. And other forms of media. The most novel part of this story is the existence of the Joe Rogan Experience which is broadcasting unvarnished opinions of the relevant CEO to explain what is happening (big improvement!). The 2nd most novel part is that this form of massaging the news happens by choosing what personal communication can pass unmolested through a local community.
- someguydave 4y agoYes newspapers suppress true stories that they don’t like. The difference is that small time media guys were trying to publish a true story that the government did not like and were suppressed at the Facebook layer.
- ekianjo 4y ago> scary to think that just 2 to 3 corporations have the power to construct a false reality around us whats truly scary is not just the limited number but the fact that these corps are always aligned in the same political direction.
- hoffs 4y agoYou know what is also scary, that most of higher education is also aligned in the same political direction. It's almost as if there is some correlation that comes with education
- tarakat 4y agoAre the higher educated from Brazil, Russia, China, Egypt, Japan, Poland, and Algeria also aligned in this same direction? And do you know what happens to the higher educated that don't toe the line? Here's a hint: James Watson's DNA Nobel Prize sells for $4.8m - https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-30346903 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-30346903 And here's more than a hint: unless you're publicly committed to this same political direction, 20% of all academic jobs in the US are officially closed to you [1]. The un-official denial rate is surely even higher. [1] https://freebeacon.com/campus/study-diversity-statements-required-for-one-fifth-of-academic-jobs/ https://freebeacon.com/campus/study-diversity-statements-req...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- evandale 4y agoThat correlation has to do more with self selection rather than some natural order.
- ekianjo 4y agoOr you know, brainwashing is prevalent in higher ed in case you have not noticed.
- cdnfren 4y agoWhat about the state-actors and other malicious entities that can drive large parts of the population to believe fake narratives, trough fabricating stories and taking advantage of the algorithms & platforms of the said 2-3 corporations? Could they have the power to construct a false reality?
- jongjong 4y agoTheir algorithms don't just target specific topics, they target specific individuals too. Certain individuals have their social media content promoted while others have their social media content suppressed. I suspect that people are promoted or suppressed based on their stance towards the current power structure. If you say positive things about people in power and corporate entities, your content will reach more people.
- hoffs 4y agoOr maybe people just don't care about some people and they aren't popular
- tarakat 4y agoIsn't plausible deniability great? They get the benefit of the doubt, while at the same time jealously guarding their secrets.
- tekknik 4y agoGiven the blatant corruption on display from one party on a near daily basis, buying votes with tax payer money and sicking the FBI on their political enemies? Yea sure, it’s got nothing to do with being on the wrong side. “we must win at any and all costs”
- myko 4y agoThis comment applies to the GOP but based on your other comments here it seems like you think it applies more to the Democratic party, am I understanding that correctly?
- tekknik 4y agoYes, the left. Yet I know the left will never admit to their problems. And for the record I’m a right leaning independent.
- whiddershins 4y ago> For all we know, Facebook, Google and Twitter are doing this right now on a range of other subjects. I thought that was a given.
- FowlSoft2013 4y agoSpeech is free. Reach isn't.
- starkd 4y agoI remember the laptop story being flagged right here on HN the day it came out. Before it was flagged, many insisted it was a BS story. Links to the Tucker Carlson interview of Tony Bobulinski's connection to the Biden family were also flagged. There's a serious problem with group-think in online communities.
- hef19898 4y agoAnd since those stories all utter BS, I'm ok with the flagging.
- starkd 4y agoThat's the point. Zuckerberg admits it was a mistake. Jack Dorsey admits it was a mistake. Be honest: you just favor the flagging because it upholds your opinion.
- ttyprintk 4y agoThe difference between flagging and suppressing is a banner above the Facebook post saying “this story depends on Rudy Giuliani”.
- hef19898 4y agoIt upholds my opinion that journalism should, wt its core, be fact based. Otherwise it would be pure fiction, meaning propaganda. At least we moved on from "Hillary's E-Mails", so some progress.
- starkd 4y agoIt was fact based. Tony Bobulinski WAS a business partner of the Biden family. He had emails that confirmed much of what was on the laptop. That's just facts. They should be at least investigated and are ripe for journalism.