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Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News

gizmodo.com

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Re: Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News

#151

Post by gunshigh »

lazzlazzlazz wrote: post #140
gunshigh wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or Facebook has learned the art of Plausible Deniability. If the bias happens during hiring (by preferring candidates who naturally lean left), then Facebook merely needs to give them curation power without giving explicit instructions.

This sounds too much like a conspiracy theory to take very seriously. Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence.

> The Facebook CEO was overheard responding that "we need to do some work" on curtailing anti-immigrant posts about the refugee crisis. "Are you working on this?" Merkel asked in English, to which Zuckerberg replied in the affirmative before the transmission was disrupted.

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/27/angela-merkel-caught-on-hot-m...

Re: Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News

#152

Post by zepto »

Mendenhall wrote: post #143
zepto wrote: post #129

Note that the source for this is a single self-identified conservative ex-contractor.

That is not true. "Another former curator agreed that the operation had an aversion to right-wing news sources. “It was absolutely bias. We were doing it subjectively."

I missed that but then:

"Other former curators interviewed by Gizmodo denied consciously suppressing conservative news, and we were unable to determine if left-wing news topics or sources were similarly suppressed."

The fact that the allegation comes from a self-identified conservative and complains about extremist outlets like 'Breitbart' being suppressed, suggests that all they cared about was their own agenda being propagated.

They didn't make a list detailing the treatment of extreme left sites e.g. Daily Kos for comparison. It could be that all non-mainstream political sites received the same treatment.

Re: Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News

#153

Post by xenadu02 »

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #150
Mendenhall wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not true. "Another former curator agreed that the operation had an aversion to right-wing news sources. “It was absolutely bias. We were doing it subjectively."

Try posting a link to a Breitbart story here on HN. It's silently suppressed. Doesn't even appear in 'new'. Whereas links to rt.com are welcome. That's just how things are, comrade! :) My previous rant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11518592

Because Breitbart is one of the least trustworthy sensationalist sources of nonsense on the Internet, right up there with Infowars.

The fact is the truth isn't somewhere in the middle. We shouldn't be encouraging disingenuous assholes by giving them a platform to spread deliberate lies and mis-information, no matter whether that source is "conservative" or "liberal".

Re: Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News

#154

Post by gunshigh »

pklausler wrote: post #147
Grue3 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guess what, conservatives think "liberal news" are contradicted by empirical reality too. Nobody thinks they are in the wrong.

So everybody's right?

Practically nobody is right 100% of the time, which is why you shouldn't put people in charge of censoring information.

Re: Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News

#155

Post by maldusiecle »

rjeli wrote: post #139
maldusiecle wrote: post #64

I'd be interested to know a little bit more about how this relates to the news sites that are covering the story. Breitbart isn't much better than a tabloid--arguably worse, even. It's equivalent to leftwing sites like Alternet, which I also wouldn't expect Facebook to be comfortable linking to.

The article says they censor the Drudge Report, which is much more reliable than Breitbart.

I'm confused by this comment, because to my eyes the Drudge Report frontpage looks like it was consciously modeled on tabloids. Obviously for historical reasons they have some importance--but so do some tabloids.

To clarify, I think this an issue of respectability, not reliability.

Re: Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News

#157

Post by thrownaway2424 »

pgm8705 wrote: post #96
thrownaway2424 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course there is "conservative news" and "liberal news". Liberal news is things that happened, things that will happen, etc. Conservative news is a made up stories, things that never happened, etc. Example of trending "conservative news": Obama bans the phrase "Merry Christmas". E.g. http://www.redflagnews.com/headlines-2015/barack-obama-bans-...

Right. Certainly there aren't any liberal blogs or "news" organizations that sensationalize headlines or downright make things up... It happens both ways and is unfortunate.

Liberals do not maintain a cottage industry of complaining about the conservative conspiracy to suppress their viewpoints, whereas conservatives seemingly spend 100% of their time doing so. For example there are plenty of dead tree books like [1], extensive networks of people investigating Obama's place of birth, including the current American conservative leader and icon Donald Trump.

Meanwhile there is a real, concrete conspiracy by conservatives to actively suppress the truth, especially in the area of climate science. It would be hard to not notice that the conservative PM of Canada actually banned scientists from speaking to the public, or that Republicans in the USA are constantly trying to defund NOAA and NASA, or that the Republican-controlled 104th Congress of the US forbid the NIH from studying gun violence, among many other examples.

https://books.google.com/books?id=9iLHTFOQLGwC&pg=PA314&lpg=...

Re: Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News

#158

Post by bobwaycott »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #124
bobwaycott wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

For the past couple of decades, there's been some amount of affinity between Libertarians and conservatives. That's likely because the conservatives pay lip service to ideals of "smaller government", which is central to libertarianism. However, that really is just lip service, and so that alliance is a very [un]easy one. Even aside from that friction, there is some potential affinity between Libertarians and Liberals…

Really well-articulated points, thanks. It'd be great to see some less-partisan unifying around this central tenet and others.

Re: Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News

#159

Post by wmccullough »

cududa wrote: post #103
patrickg_zill wrote: post #61

The issue is that FB advertises itself as "conduit" or "network connection". You log in, communicate with people and the site tools, FB runs ads on your eyeballs, etc. Similar to how I give my electricity provider money, and they give me electricity. Now FB clearly sees themselves as (let's be honest) a "power broker" or "rain maker". Not the same as "utility" or "network connection" or "conduit".

I don't think I've looked at Facebook like that at all since they started using an algorithmic newsfeed. I was under the impression that that confirmed them as a "power broker" to pretty much everyone. If you're looking for a "utility" or "network connection" I'd direct you to app.net if they're even still in business

The problem is that this is how Facebook advertises themselves. I don't think the above poster was looking for something outside of what Facebook said they did as a business model. Zuckerberg literally said he wants to be "electricity"

Re: Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News

#160

Post by bobwaycott »

proksoup wrote: post #120
cududa wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I've looked at Facebook like that at all since they started using an algorithmic newsfeed. I was under the impression that that confirmed them as a "power broker" to pretty much everyone. If you're looking for a "utility" or "network connection" I'd direct you to app.net if they're even still in business

Twitter even, for the most part as far as I understand gives you complete control over your feed, with the (minor?) exceptions of promoted tweets and suggested followers. It's worth noting the candidate who has been most successful (or at least taken advantage of it) on that platform might fit the parent article's definition of conservative (or at least the sort of content they are suppressing).

Hasn't Twitter recently been tweaking user feeds based on algorithms? Pretty sure I've been seeing mine out of order, with all manner of "you might have missed" and "stuff we think is relevant to you" tweets injected at the top. I think I recently had to flip a setting to try turning off this "stuff we think is relevant to you" off. Maybe that's the promoted tweets, or are those the ads?
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