Most Americans Think Facebook and Twitter Censor Their Political Views • Hacker News Board

Re: Most Americans Think Facebook and Twitter Censor Their Political Views

#101

Post by erikpukinskis » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 4:03 PM UTC

wolco wrote: post #7

ebikelaw wrote: post #4

A bit of both-sides-ism here. The poll shows that Republicans almost universally believe that these companies censor their viewpoint, despite the fact that these companies have bent over backwards to accommodate those views and to give them platforms. Meanwhile only a small fraction of Democrats believe this is very likely, and they aren’t strongly sure about which side is benefiting from the supposed bias.

In fairness they ban gun related content like gun ads and the leaders of the giants have personally come out in favor of liberal ideals.

They ban gay content too.

Re: Most Americans Think Facebook and Twitter Censor Their Political Views

#102

Post by tomcatfish » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 4:05 PM UTC

tomcatfish wrote: post #100

wybiral wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there examples of Democrat-funded attack ads like this with hashtags that Twitter allowed icons for? EDIT: I ask because this is an example of an attack ad targeted to an individual candidate rather than a general promotion or political concept, which I can see why Twitter wouldn't necessarily want to promote.

There is one from Hillary's campaign showed as a picture in the article.

I take that back, it's actually still a Republican tweet

Re: Most Americans Think Facebook and Twitter Censor Their Political Views

#103

Post by glitchc » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 4:05 PM UTC

JackCh wrote: post #81

glitchc wrote: post #51

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.

Maybe you take internet points entirely too seriously. If you find that getting downvoted has emotionally wounded you, I recommend abandoning all your accounts and creating new ones with zero karma (presumably much less than your old ones.) This will teach you to disassociate internet points from your sense of self-worth.

It's funny how it's automatically about me when I was making a general statement :). Of course you feel self-righteous and above the fray, but really, you are human like the rest of us.

Most people are unable to decouple their sense of self-worth from the public perception of themselves. It takes a great deal of introspection and self-discipline to detach in the manner described, and even then, it stings at first before the brain kicks in to post-hoc rationalize the response. It's how human beings are wired and a few years of deep thought are not going to change millenia of evolutionary responses.

Re: Most Americans Think Facebook and Twitter Censor Their Political Views

#104

Post by dahdum » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 4:05 PM UTC

orbifold wrote: post #69

nascar_is_bad wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the biggest contributor is just that left-leaning people are more likely to be offended by right-leaning views. More likely to have empathy is another way to phrase that.

You can be super emphatic an right wing, how do you think someone becomes a populist nationalist. Besides from a European perspective even someone like Obama or even more obviously Hillary (based on the amount of war mongering she has done alone) is center or ultra right.

My example would be prolifers, that requires pretty deep empathy for the unborn to override the natural empathy for the mothers.

Re: Most Americans Think Facebook and Twitter Censor Their Political Views

#105

Post by yellow_postit » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 4:05 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #77

dingo_bat wrote: post #30

And it's true. Case in point: the gun emoticon.

By the way, it's stupid that we still can't have user-defined emoticons. We could have enriched our online culture with a flourishing set of shared emoticons by now!

You can change system emoji on windows as a font. If it’s a custom defined emoji meant for sharing isn’t that what gifs get used for most days?

Re: Most Americans Think Facebook and Twitter Censor Their Political Views

#106

Post by moduspol » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 4:05 PM UTC

erikpukinskis wrote: post #85

moduspol wrote: post #59

I 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…

Conservatives do seem to see themselves as people who don’t get offended. I wonder what causes that. There seems to be an idea that the things that offend them are, like, “naturally” abhorrent, so it’s not offense so much as, like... digust in satanic things, virtue in “common sense”, etc. There’s a whole language to talk about things that carefully avoids the concept of “being offended”.

As a conservative: What causes it is that you basically have to retreat completely from society to avoid seeing opposing views.

I'd have to avoid all the late night shows, most newspapers and TV news stations, and most social media. It doesn't take long to get inoculated. As a left-leaning person, it's much easier to see almost exclusively your own ideas being reinforced.

> There seems to be an idea that the things that offend them are, like, “naturally” abhorrent, so it’s not offense so much as, like... digust in satanic things, virtue in “common sense”, etc. There’s a whole language to talk about things that carefully avoids the concept of “being offended”.

I'm sure that's a debate to be had--but to apply most applicably to this discussion, I mean "sufficiently offended to leave a website, stop watching a video, block something, report something, or otherwise feel like you've had a negative experience." The kind of things social media algorithms will pick up on.

Re: Most Americans Think Facebook and Twitter Censor Their Political Views

#107

Post by hueving » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 4:06 PM UTC

moduspol wrote: post #74

nascar_is_bad wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the biggest contributor is just that left-leaning people are more likely to be offended by right-leaning views. More likely to have empathy is another way to phrase that.

“More capable of selective application of empathy” is how I’d describe it usually, but that’s neither here nor there.

Everyone applies "selective empathy". People on the left in the US care very little about employees of coal miners, oil companies, etc because of larger environmental concerns.

In every case, there is some "more important cause" that someone prioritizes that makes it look like they don't have empathy.

Re: Most Americans Think Facebook and Twitter Censor Their Political Views

#108

Post by erinaceousjones » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 4:07 PM UTC

throwaway69777 wrote: post #79

This 100% happens. https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/style/2014/11/26/how-miria... When this^ woman was murdered, I attempted to post on Facebook: "I bet this woman was not a terrorist." to which I was told the attempt failed. After troubleshooting, such as trying again or posting something else, I felt very deceived.

I mean.. that's an anecdote which could have a myriad of technical explanations. I wouldn't immediately jump to the assumption that facebook is blocking select users from sharing links from a respected newspaper because they don't like the content of the article for some reason (why would they even block this article in specific?)

* washingtonpost is behind a GDPR paywall (for me at least), it took a few attempts even for the link preview to load when I tried posting that

* 99.9999% uptime of web APIs is not 100%, fb servers really could have been having trouble reaching washingtonpost

* I was able to share that post fine (once the link preview finally loaded properly), so WFM..?

Re: Most Americans Think Facebook and Twitter Censor Their Political Views

#109

Post by yellow_postit » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 4:08 PM UTC

glitchc wrote: post #51

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.

The expectation that there is no moderation is what confuses me. FB and others don’t have any obligation to provide a soap box to users. Advertisers are usually a different story.

Re: Most Americans Think Facebook and Twitter Censor Their Political Views

#110

Post by sctb » Thu, Jun 28, 2018, 4:08 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #47

josteink wrote: post #27

I 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.

I am actually surprised by what appears to be HN's explicit censorship of this topic. Just two days ago this NYT editorial [1] was on the front page of HN with 20+ upvotes IIRC, and before there were more than 1 or 2 comments the post was deleted and unviewable. (And didn't show up as flagged either -- just totally deleted.) I'm not sure how many people on HN are aware of what appears to be admin censorship of this t…

I believe you're mistaken. Do you know that item ids are just incrementing integers? We're making it bloody hard on ourselves to get away with censorship that way.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17403488

Other recent threads on the subject:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16759138

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16250371

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17327774

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17320360

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17334733

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17325778