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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

#241

Post by ceejayoz »

Mikhail_Edoshin wrote: post #150
erikpukinskis wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

I'd say that to be offended by something you have to believe that things ought not to be that way and the fact that they are can only be a personal attack on you carried out by some evil forces. This is not too rational, so yes, most conservatives do not get offended. (Another reason could be that idea of loving thy neighbor as he is, not as you believe he should be.)

[flagged]

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

#242

Post by gnicholas »

Interesting that although Republicans are more likely to think that social media platforms are biased against them, they are less likely to think that such platforms should be subject to increased government regulation.

As a cynic, I was expecting that Republicans might want more regulation here (in contravention of their general desire for less regulation) because it would be in their own interests.

Note: I'm not saying I expect Republicans to be more self-interested/hypocritical than Democrats. I would expect it of both parties, based on my experience in the field.

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

#243

Post by dahdum »

s73v3r_ wrote: post #222
saas_co_de wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But attacking people on the basis of their faith (which is not a protected status at all) is a perfectly logical and reasonable way to engage in public discourse.

I'm not attacking anyone. I'm calling out that faith based arguments are not made from a place of logic and reason.

Faith is like a blueprint, codifying rules in an effort to maintain a stable society.

Some of these rules, IMHO, are absurd, but many you'd come to the same conclusion without faith as with it.

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

#244

Post by s73v3r_ »

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #229
s73v3r_ wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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." All things are relative. Given that description of Obama or Clinton, what would you classify those who ran as Republicans in the last election?

By some measures, Clinton campaigned (slightly) to the right of Trump in the run-up to the general election: https://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2016 For the primaries, using similar measures at least, the Republicans all more or less clumped together to the right of Clinton.

That article makes claims that are just not true. "Trump supported a decent minimum wage from the start, wants free education in state universities, has supported universal health care, consistently opposed the Transpacific Partnership Agreement and wants more bank regulation."

He very clearly is not in favor of free education, he is very clearly not in favor of raising the minimum wage, he very clearly is not in favor of universal health care, and very clearly is not in favor of more bank regulation.

So I find the claims that Clinton was more to the right of Trump quite dubious.

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

#245

Post by mlindner »

erinaceousjones wrote: post #108
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 eve…

Yes but they could state those in the error message. They don't so people are left to their own conclusions on why things were blocked. Especially if you're not technically savvy, the reason why something isn't submitted is because someone physical human blocked you from submitting it. I can't count the number of times people hated on game servers being laggy simply blaming it as the company trying to save money by using cheap servers when the actual cause is likely any number of network congestion issues.

People will anthropomorphize any technical issue.

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

#246

Post by s73v3r_ »

dahdum wrote: post #243
s73v3r_ wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not attacking anyone. I'm calling out that faith based arguments are not made from a place of logic and reason.

Faith is like a blueprint, codifying rules in an effort to maintain a stable society. Some of these rules, IMHO, are absurd, but many you'd come to the same conclusion without faith as with it.

But again, to claim that "The Bible said so" is a logical argument is absurd on it's face. Yet, that's what you see many conservatives leaning on

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

#248

Post by prolikewhoa »

pmarreck wrote: post #128

Lack of trust is a bullshit argument. It's basically the Conspiracy Fallacy: https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla... Is there any evidence to support this assertion and that Facebook isn't merely showing you information that is palatable to you? (Note that this greatly expands the use of this fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_repugnance ) I think we all have to answer these ques…

>Before the election, we also detected and took action on activity relating to hashtags that have since been reported as manifestations of efforts to interfere with the 2016 election. For example, our automated spam detection systems helped mitigate the impact of automated Tweets promoting the #PodestaEmails hashtag, which originated with Wikileaks’ publication of thousands of emails from the Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s Gmail account. The core of the hashtag was propagated by Wikileaks, whose account sent out a series of 118 original Tweets containing variants on the hashtag #PodestaEmails referencing the daily installments of the emails released on the Wikileaks website. In the two months preceding the election, around 57,000 users posted approximately 426,000 unique Tweets containing variations of the #PodestaEmails hashtag. Approximately one quarter (25%) of those tweets received internal tags from our automation detection systems that hid them from searches. As described in greater detail below, our systems detected and hid just under half (48%) of the Tweets relating to variants of another notable hashtag, #DNCLeak, which concerned the disclosure of leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee.

Twitter openly admits to censorship. They censored legitimate journalism for political reasons.

Source: https://www.lgraham.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/4766f54d-...

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

#249

Post by moduspol »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #240
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…

>I think the biggest contributor is just that left-leaning people are more likely to be offended by right-leaning views. This theory only makes sense if there's an asymmetry between left offended at right and right offended at left. I don't think that's true. At least I don't think its true in the direction of left-more-offended-at-right. A large fraction of right-wing media seems built around selling a feeling of in…

Well, we can debate the meaning of "offended," but for the purposes of this discussion, I mean "causing the user to react in a way perceived as negative for the end user experience and reflecting poorly in engagement metrics."

As a conservative, it's tough to avoid seeing opposing points of view. You'd have to avoid all late night shows, nearly all TV stations and newspapers, and most social media. We're quite accustomed to seeing opposing views and if it actually bothered us seeing them, we'd be frustrated virtually all the time.

Left-leaning people can quite easily participate in society without seeing opposing views. You can openly discuss even political activism at work without issue. Avoid Fox News and Breitbart and you're unlikely to see anything much different than what you already believe.

Maybe "offended" isn't the right word, but I do think it's a contributing factor.

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