Everyone at one point has made a comment that has been downvoted or moderated out of existence. The rejection sticks in your mind. Effectively, that is censorship.
Most Americans Think Facebook and Twitter Censor Their Political Views
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Re: Most Americans Think Facebook and Twitter Censor Their Political Views
#52Most Americans would be right.
There is great confusion on the scope and purpose of the First Amendment in play here.
Secondly, media is drilling down on two toxic ideas:
always two sides to every story
, and
objectivity, claim of no bias.
These things combine to present ordinary Americans with the expectation of objective media and free speech everywhere.
A side effect is a surrender of critical thought in return for unwarranted trust.
The remedy should be to evaluate all of this with a critical eye and help people understand there is always bias, and how they can and shoild be using diverse sources to stay informed.
Re: Most Americans Think Facebook and Twitter Censor Their Political Views
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think refusal to allow a custom emoji with a hashtag is censorship - they didn't ban the hashtag. Custom emoji are a business/marketing/advertising thing, and if we want to restrict the ability of private businesses to decline advertising deals with other private businesses for any reason at all (including "we just don't like you"), that's a whole different conversation, and one I suspect many conservatives w…
> I don't think refusal to allow a custom emoji with a hashtag is censorship It is if you allow the other side to do exactly the same, as noted in the linked article.
Not exactly the same. I don't think any Democratic organizations tried to associate some Donald Trump hashtag with a dumpster fire or anything like that.
Re: Most Americans Think Facebook and Twitter Censor Their Political Views
#54I can fully believe that. Try for instance to have a discussion here on hacker news about the less fortunate sides of diversity initiatives. Then see how many minutes it takes before your entire thread is flagged and effectively censored.
Lol. I think that has a little more to do with the topic riling up the angsty trolls who tend to turn otherwise normal conversations into internet dumpster-fires. Not to mention it's easier to blame some boogyman for ideas that challenge your own, rather than taking accountability for an unrealistic or dissonant worldview.
Re: Most Americans Think Facebook and Twitter Censor Their Political Views
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Post an article in r/politics about anything positive Trump has done and you'll get a ban. That's no more "censorship" than me unfriending you on Facebook would be. > On Facebook, a similar phenomenon might occur due to liberal users reporting conservative ideas they don't agree with as hate speech. That'll put it in a review queue, upon which Facebook employees make a decision. If it gets deleted, it's because you…
If it is an actual Facebook employee, I can definitely see why conservatives would think that. The active encouragement of civil disobedience by liberal leaders is probably more than enough confirmation to conservatives of this behavior. I;m not saying this behavior is /is notoccurring, just why some people might think that it does
> If it is an actual Facebook employee, I can definitely see why conservatives would think that.
It's more complicated than that, though. It takes more than just a report to get someone's content deleted.
Take a look at the examples from their moderator training:
https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-hate-speech-cens...
See, for example, the slide about "female drivers", "black children", and "white men" - Facebook's policies (via some pretty odd logic, IMO) protect posts about "white men", but not "black children". A liberal bastion, they're not.
> One document trains content reviewers on how to apply the company’s global hate speech algorithm. The slide identifies three groups: female drivers, black children and white men. It asks: Which group is protected from hate speech? The correct answer: white men.
> The reason is that Facebook deletes curses, slurs, calls for violence and several other types of attacks only when they are directed at “protected categories”—based on race, sex, gender identity, religious affiliation, national origin, ethnicity, sexual orientation and serious disability/disease. It gives users broader latitude when they write about “subsets” of protected categories. White men are considered a group because both traits are protected, while female drivers and black children, like radicalized Muslims, are subsets, because one of their characteristics is not protected. (The exact rules are in the slide show below.)
Re: Most Americans Think Facebook and Twitter Censor Their Political Views
#56I can fully believe that. Try for instance to have a discussion here on hacker news about the less fortunate sides of diversity initiatives. Then see how many minutes it takes before your entire thread is flagged and effectively censored.
HN is not owned by a social media giant, so this grievance doesn’t appear to have much to do with the article.
It is owned by a Silicon Valley VC giant, while not directly media it is steered by big money. However I think HN is moderated relatively well, but I can see how some people might think it's being gamed/controlled/censored by self interest (I don't)
Re: Most Americans Think Facebook and Twitter Censor Their Political Views
#57I can fully believe that. Try for instance to have a discussion here on hacker news about the less fortunate sides of diversity initiatives. Then see how many minutes it takes before your entire thread is flagged and effectively censored.
FB/Twitter and HN aren't really comparable here. HN does topic moderation; FB and Twitter do not. There's a lot of room for subtlety here -- you could argue that topic moderation is done in a biased way that ends up behaving like censorship, for example -- but the discussion definitely won't go anywhere if it doesn't make a good faith effort to avoid equating those two things.
Re: Most Americans Think Facebook and Twitter Censor Their Political Views
#58Everyone at one point has made a comment that has been downvoted or moderated out of existence. The rejection sticks in your mind. Effectively, that is censorship.
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Re: Most Americans Think Facebook and Twitter Censor Their Political Views
#59I lean conservative, but to be honest, I assign only a small portion of the blame to social media giants. Their office areas and leadership certainly lean left-wing, but I don't think that's the main issue.
I think the biggest contributor is just that left-leaning people are more likely to be offended by right-leaning views. As a result, even an entirely neutral algorithm focused on retention / user satisfaction will be more careful about showing right-leaning views to users who aren't obviously right-leaning. To me, it's tough to call that censorship.
As a result, I see the issue more as a symptom of the real problem, but that's a lot tougher to solve.
Re: Most Americans Think Facebook and Twitter Censor Their Political Views
#60I can fully believe that. Try for instance to have a discussion here on hacker news about the less fortunate sides of diversity initiatives. Then see how many minutes it takes before your entire thread is flagged and effectively censored.
But isn't this more that your peers are quick to react to that topic rather than the platform is censoring it?