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Zuckerberg says FBI warning prompted Biden laptop story censorship

bbc.com

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Re: Zuckerberg says FBI warning prompted Biden laptop story censorship

#261

Post by benreesman »

throwaway4good wrote: post #247
DubiousPusher wrote: post #196

The fact that they have this kind of credulous pull with the man who has his fingers on the controls of so much of our information plumbing is even more upsetting than what the right has been charging which is that Zuck is just a big ol lib, especially given some of the bigger screw ups of America's intelligence apparatus. Watching the Earth move beneath the feet of the gatekeepers in the 00s came with a lot of warra…

Didn’t Zuckerberg implicitly support trump at one point? (What he is doing here certainly supports trump.) In the hope trump would ban TikTok. I thought that was why the Biden admin put Facebook in the doghouse.

I think that it's worth keeping in mind that no matter what you think of their morals (that's a whole other debate for a whole other comment thread), people who have helmed sometime trillion-dollar companies for decades aren't in general stupid, and it would be fantastically stupid to make serious enemies of any candidate in any high-impact political race: if you load the boat on that and guess wrong you're going to have a bad time.

The last thing any of these people want is to be clearly partisan: it jeopardizes favorable regulation, it jeopardizes common-carrier type treatment, and it wins you roughly nothing. You want to sell software/ads/equipment/etc. to both sides obviously, but the Nash point is to get as much of that as possible without taking sides.

Re: Zuckerberg says FBI warning prompted Biden laptop story censorship

#262

Post by IntelMiner »

fareesh wrote: post #238

Is it possible to be an unabashed openly conservative / Republican in a company like Facebook or Twitter or Google? One gets the impression that it's a club for one kind of animal only.

I'm curious how, from a logically consistent conservative viewpoint this can be 'fixed'

The ideas that spring to mind fly smack in the face of conservative ideology

- Private companies are allowed to hire who they wish. In our capitalist world the free market would provide for "conservative alternatives" and it does ("truth social" versus twitter for instance)

- Mandating some kind of 'quota' for conservative employees to be hired seems to fly in the face of the premise of businesses being freed from regulation and intervention by the government

- Free speech protects against the government intruding on it, conservative speech included. Extending this to private companies would be a disastrous overreach of unchecked legal power

- Algorithmically "forcing" conservative views would be seen as censorship of otherwise organic views. Conservatives claim (rightly or wrongly) the opposite happens, so logically they would be upset if the opposite were to happen

It seems like the only truly reasonable path is to expect "conservatives" to build their own platforms. Cater to their own audiences. If they are as large a group as they say they are, then the people who execute on this would become the barons of conservative thought and economics

Re: Zuckerberg says FBI warning prompted Biden laptop story censorship

#263

Post by mgraczyk »

pegasus wrote: post #259
mgraczyk wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm saying is that this is a heuristic, not an algorithm, and that you should blame Facebook, not "the algorithm"

The heuristic/algorithm is Facebook's creation, so they (including possibly you?) are to blame either way. I think GP is pointing out the fact that there being no clear rules or accountability on what gets surfaced on our timelines allows much more subtle and virtually undetectable ways to suppress information than previously. It all can be easily hidden behind the magic/complexity of the all-knowing "algorithm". I d…

What is the difference between this and a moderator on Reddit manually deleting a post?

Re: Zuckerberg says FBI warning prompted Biden laptop story censorship

#264

Post by selfhoster11 »

keerthiko wrote: post #254
spangry wrote: post #12

This is the great fear of many come to pass - censorship by algorithm. Facebook didn't outright ban sharing of the Hunter Biden laptop stories like Twitter did, they instead tweaked their algorithm to prevent the story from spreading. We found out about it this time because Zuckerberg owned up to it, but what about next time? For all we know, Facebook, Google and Twitter are doing this right now on a range of other s…

I don't get it. Why did we ever consider the algorithms of private corporations as a fundamental or viable avenue for free speech to begin with? The owners and controllers of private algorithms will always have the ulterior motive(s) of protecting their interests. The fact that we (the software and information industry worldwide) have conditioned any society to think that algorithmic feeds are a representation of rea…

Because initially, there were no such algorithms in place (or at the very least, they had a much lighter touch). The Twitter and Facebook timelines used to be chronological by default. The whole idea of an algorithmic feed as an intermediary of what you see was missing.

Re: Zuckerberg says FBI warning prompted Biden laptop story censorship

#265

Post by prof-dr-ir »

fareesh wrote: post #238

Is it possible to be an unabashed openly conservative / Republican in a company like Facebook or Twitter or Google? One gets the impression that it's a club for one kind of animal only.

I think it should be viewed like this: in the eyes of many, Trump is a man who boasted about sexual harassment. Continuing to support such a man is borderline incompatible with holding basic values that one might hope every employee has.

This viewpoint is really difficult to argue with. You can say that such transgressions are perhaps outweighed by any advantages of his presidency that you perceived, but that will not convince many on the left. Indeed, just look at the Cuomos and Franken to see that harassers are simply no longer tolerated on the left - these days such men are simply disqualified without pardon.

I think this fundamental incompatibility of basic values is an important reason why it is difficult to be a Trump supporter at many companies and universities nowadays.

(I conflated being "conservative / Republican" with being a Trump supporter. Feel free to ignore my comment if that is not what you intended.)

Re: Zuckerberg says FBI warning prompted Biden laptop story censorship

#266

Post by im3w1l »

mgraczyk wrote: post #263
pegasus wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The heuristic/algorithm is Facebook's creation, so they (including possibly you?) are to blame either way. I think GP is pointing out the fact that there being no clear rules or accountability on what gets surfaced on our timelines allows much more subtle and virtually undetectable ways to suppress information than previously. It all can be easily hidden behind the magic/complexity of the all-knowing "algorithm". I d…

What is the difference between this and a moderator on Reddit manually deleting a post?

If a moderator deletes a post someone else can post it again. If you create an automatic rule to prevent that then it's algorithmic.

Re: Zuckerberg says FBI warning prompted Biden laptop story censorship

#267

Post by andy_ppp »

seattle_spring wrote: post #193
andy_ppp wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do know they are doing this otherwise hate speech, spam and disinformation would be most of their platforms.

I wish people would acknowledge this fact more often (and it is unquestionably a fact).

Haha, I literally got downvoted for stating this obvious fact… people find it really difficult to differentiate facts they don’t like from lies.

Re: Zuckerberg says FBI warning prompted Biden laptop story censorship

#268

Post by selfhoster11 »

papito wrote: post #216
colordrops wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The old norms were censorship too.

Oh please. It's called "content curation". You want zero of that? There is always 8chan. If you enjoy seeing things that make you want to pour Clorox into your eyes.

Is it censorship to only permit e. g. knitting content to be discussed on a knitting Discord server and to ban most other topics? There are only a handful of places where one can discuss narrow-appeal topics like knitting, and many more places to discuss anything else. If you didn’t ban other topics (i. e. curate content), the server would collapse thanks to narrow-interest content getting lost in the noise.

Re: Zuckerberg says FBI warning prompted Biden laptop story censorship

#269

Post by selfhoster11 »

jablongo wrote: post #153
cf141q5325 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While its easy to talk from outside the US, I am honestly a lot less worried about the content and a lot more about the fact that it is a non trivial question whether or not the son of the leader of the free world is a crack user. Reality and all this fake news stuff got weird fast. Which wasnt really surprising if you look at the upcoming clusterfuck of cheap realistic video simulations. After getting there already…

Your comment is rambling and borderline incoherent but it also has moments of greatness.

How so? I found it all pretty clear.

Re: Zuckerberg says FBI warning prompted Biden laptop story censorship

#270

Post by tchalla »

glogla wrote: post #231
bb88 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's scary to think that just 2 to 3 corporations have the power to construct a false reality around us I do believe it's been this way for a while. Noam Chomsky wrote Manufacturing Consent in 1988. (There's a movie out there created in 1992 if you don't want to read the book). Basically the same factors at work then are the same factors at work today -- just escalated with an algorithm. There is an objective reali…

[flagged]

Even if what you wrote was true, what has it got to do with algorithmic content?
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