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Facebook’s Political Unit Enables Propaganda

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Re: Facebook’s Political Unit Enables Propaganda

#231

Post by slavik81 »

qubex wrote: post #222
slavik81 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From your description, it sounds like you abused the reporting tool by reporting content that you knew did not violate the stated guidelines. Their response was to temp-ban you. To me, that seems reasonable. It doesn't really matter that it was a shitty, gross joke. That's not the criteria for removal, and they told you that before you reported it again. Though, a temp-ban might be a little harsh. If the only problem…

I was unbanned within a couple of hours and the cartoon was nowhere to be found when I was allowed back in, probably because there was a deluge of coincident reports.

I see. So, the thrust of your complaint is not that moderation is too lax, but that it is capricious and arbitratry? I could definitely see consistent moderation being a weakness for Facebook.

Re: Facebook’s Political Unit Enables Propaganda

#232

Post by guelo »

raverbashing wrote: post #230
DigitalJack wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Honestly I think it makes him more "relateable" by making him not "the enemy" for viewers Does this mean you think all viewers are democrats (or even most) and that republicans are the enemy?

On the Netflix subscriber, likely to watch new shows demographic? I believe betting on "most side with Democrats" is a safe bet

Why? Half the country votes Republican.

Re: Facebook’s Political Unit Enables Propaganda

#233

Post by starik36 »

linkregister wrote: post #146
mistermann wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As does CNBC and CNN, admittedly to a far lesser degree, except theirs is the "correct" bias.

CNN has bias that fluctuates wildly toward the perceived flavor of the week; it operates for maximum sensationalism. It basically invented the 24-hour news cycle and hasn’t altered its formula for decades. CNBC is business news; did you mean MSNBC? MSNBC has the least viewership of the three and I would not consider it particularly influential. It is biased towards a minority ultra-Democrat position, hence its relati…

CNN's bias is firmly anti-Trump and it doesn't fluctuates in any way, shape or form. You can go to their home page and at any point, there will be some anti-Trump headlines.

Re: Facebook’s Political Unit Enables Propaganda

#234

Post by Sacho »

krapp wrote: post #201
tajen wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m outside USA and studied the election from a feminism axis. Geek as we all are here, I tracked the original studies and discovered that literally every statistics said by feminists, namely Hillary Clinton and Obama, is false. It’s mind blowing, they just misrepresent the studied group, or the hypothesis, they omit a whole part of the study, every-single-time, not a thing from feminists can be trusted. You will bel…

>I tracked the original studies and discovered that literally every statistics said by feminists, namely Hillary Clinton and Obama, is false. Nope. Whenever someone tries to imply that the "enemy" is perfectly evil or malicious, as you are attempting to do here, you can be certain that someone is trying to propagandize you. I'm going to be charitable per HN guidelines and assume you're not commenting in bad faith, bu…

I don't know about "every", but I know Obama(and probably Clinton) pushed the 77% wage gap statistic. Just googling "campus rape clinton" brings me to Clinton's website which proudly displays the "one in five is sexually assaulted" story. You can tell how illusory that statistic is because the site gets the narrative wrong - it says 1/5 report sexual assault, but you can count those reports and disprove it. The narrative that goes along with that "statistic" is that 1/5 get sexually assaulted and 90%+ don't report it.

(I don't think these "lies" really make Obama or Clinton stand out from the rest of the political flock, for what it's worth, I'm a fan of Obama).

Re: Facebook’s Political Unit Enables Propaganda

#235

Post by thg »

pwaai wrote: post #48
LeoJiWoo wrote: post #16

Its a time of political upheaval worldwide. Nationalists are rising or at least becoming more vocal in at least Britain, India, United States, Austria, Germany, Korea, and Japan. They are direct threats to the established status quo. Censoring their political speech will cause a "Streisand Effect" and only further galvanize a backlash against the establishment. Social Media will probably be broken up by country (Ex.…

Not all of these protests or nationalism were organic, they were engineered by Russia. ex) Brexit There is increasing number of evidence that points to the ex-KGB officer now leading a nuclear armed 2.5 world country. If they can pull one on the US, the rest of Eastern Europe, or frankly any country facing an authoritarian government will face this new 'hybrid war'--combining cyberattacks, psy-ops on social media and…

It's perfectly fine if the US does it, but if Russia does it they're the big, bad man in the room? All that blatant Pro-US Anti-Russia propaganda all over the western world must actually be efficient. Who would have thought.

Re: Facebook’s Political Unit Enables Propaganda

#236

Post by raverbashing »

guelo wrote: post #232
raverbashing wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the Netflix subscriber, likely to watch new shows demographic? I believe betting on "most side with Democrats" is a safe bet

Why? Half the country votes Republican.

Read it again, slowly:

> On the Netflix subscriber, likely to watch new shows demographic

- How many people don't have internet?

- How many people won't/can't sign up for Netflix? (think also in Urban/Rural demographics)

- How many people have Netflix but are not interested in a new show?

I'm not saying no Republican watches House of Cards, I'm saying it is biased towards Democrats

Re: Facebook’s Political Unit Enables Propaganda

#237

Post by willyt »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #168
linkregister wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the Iraq WMD situation unfolded, it was met with plenty of skepticism. “MSM” gave it air time, but it was overcome by the deception of the administration at the time, e.g., Sec. Powell’s statements and the cherry-picked CIA assessment. Your example actually undermines your argument. If anything, we need honest actors around to poke holes in narratives produced by authorities, not ones with the goal of weakening…

It was "overcome" because the reporting had little backbone to begin with. Most of the rest of the world was demanding proof but the MSM did little to make the American public aware of that. Powell, the IC statements, etc. were just part of the theatre, part of the spin. The bottom line was, the MSM was on board and played a key roll in the WMDs snow job.

But no-one believed it. At the time there was a protest of well over 1M people in London against the war. Which is huge, between 1.5% and 3.3% of the entire population of Britain. My work actually gave us the day off to go to it.

Re: Facebook’s Political Unit Enables Propaganda

#238

Post by dang »

objectivetruth wrote: post #184
philwelch wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leslie Knope is a blond, Midwest-born woman who believes strongly in using government to improve people’s lives. Despite being stopped short from achieving her goals time and time again, she never loses her optimism or her determination. She prepares long, in-depth policy briefings that no one ever reads, comes under attack from ignorant yokels, and even makes understandable, innocent mistakes that get blown out of p…

You just described about half of the female civil servants that I've met in the Midwest. Wow, blond AND from the Midwest? A dedicated and caring public servant? Shit, I guess NBC is lucky that Hillary didn't sue them for such a blatant rip-off. Oh wait, one is a real person who served as Senator and Secretary of State and the other is a fictional bureaucrat who served 3 months on her small city's council and loves wa…

You've been using HN primarily for political battle. That's not what this site is for, and as the guidelines point out, we ban accounts that do this irrespective of which politics they're battling for or against. I've banned this one.

If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

Re: Facebook’s Political Unit Enables Propaganda

#239

Post by wwweston »

meri_dian wrote: post #82
JoshMnem wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that is what happened. The media didn't hold him accountable for what he said. They wanted viewers. Websites wanted clicks. There was disinformation everywhere. Even in discussions with people who could calmly talk about it, Trump supporters would cite obviously fake blog posts and other completely fake information that could easily be discredited with quick online searches. Even when shown that the inf…

Illegal immigration is a "wrong thing"? Bringing jobs back to blighted areas is a "wrong thing"? Trump talked about these things, that's real, not fake. Media talked about Trump being terrible all the time. He was bashed at every opportunity on many of the big networks. All the free publicity he got probably helped him, even if much of it was negative. Once Trump won the R nomination, media began to take him seriousl…

> Illegal immigration is a "wrong thing"?

It really depends on what problem you're trying to solve:

https://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2015/07/i... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/immigrants-do-not... http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/magazine/do-illegal-immigr...

If crime is your issue, illegal immigration is probably the wrong focus. If general health of the economy is the issue, probably also the wrong focus. If competition for manual labor is your issue, illegal immigration might be a cause for concern, though in order to be a good candidate/official, it's best if you've got a policy that's likely to actually help (building a wall might help the big construction companies who can land the contracts for it, but it's not likely to help anybody who isn't helping build the wall itself).

> Media talked about Trump being terrible all the time. He was bashed at every opportunity on many of the big networks.

Welcome to politics. You run for office, you're going to get criticized. Is there anything more boring at this point than a persecution complex over that fact? Particularly when (a) we're talking about Donald Trump, who isn't exactly a stranger to dishing it out himself, and (b) it comes from a side of the spectrum that also often seems to make a fuss about safe spaces and snowflakes vs robust free speech.

But even assuming Trump drew more criticism than usual -- why is it that so many Trump supporters assumed that was a matter of bias rather than a matter of professionals seeing genuinely troubling thing in Trump's character and policy? Particularly when so many of the newspaper outlets that refused to endorse him were traditionally backers of Republicans?

Re: Facebook’s Political Unit Enables Propaganda

#240

Post by qubex »

slavik81 wrote: post #231
qubex wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was unbanned within a couple of hours and the cartoon was nowhere to be found when I was allowed back in, probably because there was a deluge of coincident reports.

I see. So, the thrust of your complaint is not that moderation is too lax, but that it is capricious and arbitratry? I could definitely see consistent moderation being a weakness for Facebook.

Basically, yes. I wish I had summarised my point in those terms. I was just so incensed at that moment in time that I didn’t plan my post very carefully. Sorry and thanks.
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