121–130 of 368 posts
It really bothers me that acceptable forms of protests are now: intimidation(1), harassment(2), and subversion(this). If your cause is just, isn't a non-violent protest enough? Speaking about it, voting with your dollar, etc? 1) http://gizmodo.com/okcupid-tells-users-not-to-use-firefox-be... 2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy
People are people. In a way this isn't news at all. The problem is that these companies are hiding behind the "But it's all just an algorithm" defense, when, in fact, as we all suspected, there are real people behind the scenes slanting things. My gut tells me that a lot of tech companies are subtly controlling the types of news their consumers get. Overall this is probably a good thing -- helps keep the quality high…
But that's not what the article said. They had a conservative on staff who was in charge of these feeds, and he wasn't cutting out conservative articles, he was cutting out articles that supported candidates he didn't like. As long as you choose to consume their product, you get the results of their work. Don't like it? Go somewhere else. You should appreciate that as a libertarian. I see no harm in excluding article…
Except when you don't know what you aren't seeing.
>Those aren't news organizations. Breitbart has teams of reporters and editors, so does Infowars. Breitbart has offices in different locations, such as London and the U.S. Breitbart has it's reporters following the campaign and they get many exclusives. If we all should agree they aren't news orgs, then the HuffPost isn't a news org.
It really bothers me that acceptable forms of protests are now: intimidation(1), harassment(2), and subversion(this). If your cause is just, isn't a non-violent protest enough? Speaking about it, voting with your dollar, etc? 1) http://gizmodo.com/okcupid-tells-users-not-to-use-firefox-be... 2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy
People are people. In a way this isn't news at all. The problem is that these companies are hiding behind the "But it's all just an algorithm" defense, when, in fact, as we all suspected, there are real people behind the scenes slanting things. My gut tells me that a lot of tech companies are subtly controlling the types of news their consumers get. Overall this is probably a good thing -- helps keep the quality high…
Genuinely curious: As a libertarian, are you equally pissed off when a bunch of right-leaning folks start controlling what you consume from a political, and not just quality, angle—and then lie about it?
Even aside from that friction, there is some potential affinity between Libertarians and Liberals, because Libertarians see no governmental role in issues like gay marriage and use of medication/drugs. Because both groups seek similar outcomes in those areas there would be room for cooperation. But (IMHO) the Liberals are too antagonistic of property rights and self defense rights for this potential to be realized.
Aside from political affinities, I think the real thrust of the parent post was that FB's actions are fraudulent: the product they're delivering to you differs in an important (to some people) way from what they claim they're delivering. In libertarian philosophy, fraud is just one form of force, which is the core evil: the central tenet of libertarianism is to not initiate force against another person.
So at the risk of putting words in someone else's mouth: yes, a libertarian would be equally pissed off if the issue were the mirror of what we see here.
EDIT: end of first para - omitted the "un", significantly changing meaning!
This is obviously very bad from the standpoint that the trending news section is ostensibly supposed to be organic, based on user behavior, and free of bias—except that which is inherent in the users themselves sharing things to be picked up as "trending". It appears that "trending news" has really been "curated news". Not cool at all. More concerning than trending news actually being curated news is learning that ne…
>> But we would have to go and find the same story from a more neutral outlet that wasn’t as biased. >This is delivered as if it is inherently a bad thing, when it most assuredly is not. Keep in mind this is a statement quoted by the curator summing up what s/he said they did over a long span of time. Their recollection of what they tended to do is not necessarily reality. They could be lying in that quote to try to…
The problem is, as a private company, should Facebook choose to manipulate it's news feed algorithm to promote one candidate or the other, or for whatever reason, this would be its prerogative under the First Amendment. I personally choose to not use Facebook specifically for these reasons. Even though I know many Facebook employees personally, I don't trust it's employees to divorce their own interests and their pow…
Any democratic country depends on the quality of public discourse for the effectiveness of its political system, and for this reason many countries have special rules for newspapers and TV. What's important here is that Facebook is not covered by those laws, simply because it did not exist when the laws were created. In my view it should be covered by those laws. One defence Facebook might consider is to say that it…
Is Fox "News" covered by these laws? Surely you're not suggesting with a straight face that Fox News is "fair and balanced" ?
The problem is, as a private company, should Facebook choose to manipulate it's news feed algorithm to promote one candidate or the other, or for whatever reason, this would be its prerogative under the First Amendment. I personally choose to not use Facebook specifically for these reasons. Even though I know many Facebook employees personally, I don't trust it's employees to divorce their own interests and their pow…
As long such practices are declared.
People tend to look at "what's trending" in an effort to optimize/manipulate their content so that users would "trend" on it. The fact that FB was artificially eliminating stories gave false results to observers.
Another way of looking at this is if Nielson were to lower the rankings of shows it disagrees with and affecting the duration of those shows.
This is obviously very bad from the standpoint that the trending news section is ostensibly supposed to be organic, based on user behavior, and free of bias—except that which is inherent in the users themselves sharing things to be picked up as "trending". It appears that "trending news" has really been "curated news". Not cool at all. More concerning than trending news actually being curated news is learning that ne…
Curators would find less biased (read: not as sympathetic to the conservative viewpoint) sources for trending conservative topics, but they would not do the same for liberal topics. So I agree that it's best to find balanced journalism, but that should happen on both sides (conservative and liberal). If they only find less biased sources for conservative media, then that is in itself even more biased toward the liberal agenda. They were censoring or watering down the conservative view point from multiple angles.