Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News

To have some kind of filtering or curation, you necessarily have to put some people into a position of power where they have the ability to censor this noise. On a forum where it's explicitly known that such "moderators" are present, and even better if their biases are known, this is perfectly fine. If I'm on a science-oriented discussion forum and it's advertised that the moderators of this forum will ban anyone who attempts to spread pseudoscience or anti-science religious junk, that'll help attract me because I don't want waste my time looking at that crap.

There's also forums where there's very little such curation, and instead community moderation is mostly relied on: users are given moderation points to boost or suppress other posts. That's fine too: you know going in what the deal is, so you just have to see if you mesh with the other members or not.

However, if a forum claims to be "open" and "inclusive" but then censors people, that's just hypocritical and wrong. If you're going to push a bias, then you have to at least inform users of this.

As it relates to Facebook, which is supposed to be for everyone and not just people of a certain political persuasion, they shouldn't be censoring anything unless they're going to make this known up-front (which they haven't). "Trending topics" should be anything that's highly popular. If some completely wrong and debunked BS is the most popular new story among your site's users, then you need to show that at the top, or else you're not serving your users. If you don't like that, then you either need to inform them of how you're going to censor and slant things, or you need to get rid of users you don't like. Or maybe just get rid of the "trending topics" section, and replace it with something more fine-tuned so that one group of users doesn't get annoyed at seeing junk they disagree with that another group of users really likes.

The simple fact is that you can't please everyone. If you try, you're going to fail. Sites like Reddit avoid this by having tons of different sub-forums, each with their own rules and moderators. Some far-right conservative wackos can co-exist with far-left liberals there because they're on separate subreddits.

Is that actually true? The IRS' claim that every drive containing copies of the emails failed makes anything I hear from their side completely non-credible, in my opinion. Technically there is a chance of 100% drive failure, so I can't claim with complete certainty that they're full of it, but I think there were at least three 9s of the claim being bullshit the last time I ran through the numbers.

Censorship of any kind is inherently dangerous and detrimental to true progress. Aren't equality, open-mindedness, and freedom of expression paramount to liberal thought? Do you not see the hypocrisy here?

But shouldn't none of this matter? If we're right, should we really need to silence our opponents? If our ideas are fundamentally right, then they should win in a fair and open marketplace of ideas, without the unfair advantage of censorship.

The very fact that you want (or feel the need) to silence your opponent sheds a light on the quality and legitimacy of your ideas. I say this as someone who has always been classically liberal; we have abandoned our true ideals (the ideals which have usually placed us on the right side of history) for radicalism and new forms of bigotry and inequality. The Overton Window has radically shifted and those that were previously on the left are now falling closer to the center-right.

We are a polarized nation and this is reflected in the atrocious line-up of presidential candidates that we have right now.

Example #1: When a prominent American conservative does something like shutdown the government instead of compromising (remember compromising gets you booted at the next elections see: Paul Ryan). To most of the world (liberal and conservative), this is nuts. Facebook bubbles news reports about how "crazy" this is to the top. American news media will most likely call this a liberal bias when really it's just an international one.

Example #2: If facebook, editorializes a giant Ice-sheet melting and how that is related to anthropogenic global warming (something most International conservatives have accepted), most American conservatives will call that to be liberal bias. Note that this is not about policy decisions, most international conservatives don't agree with Carbon Taxes for instance, but one of just straight facts and assumptions.

I just dont think the trending stories ever made an emphatic claim to be open and inclusive, nor is promoting some stories artificially the equivalent to "censorship." Not allowing stories in the timeline is completely different than manually choosing the trending stories for a day.

Facebook has always been pro censorship. No nipples, no porn. I dont think of facebook as a place for free speech, and I never felt as if the trending stories was some organic popular list. I know everything on facebook is specifically chosen to get ME to click.

That said, watching the watchers is easy if sites publish transparency reports and publish "stories we didnt cover." Problem solved.