331–340 of 903 posts
At the beginning of the conflict I noticed my feed was fully leaning towards supporting Israel, even if it was only the posts of 3 people. Somehow the 30+ people demanding the stop to the bombing of civilians didn't really start appearing until late November. They were posting the entire time, but Meta's algorithm decided not to show it to me.
Are you saying that changes on Israel's part could cause Hamas to stop their aggression? That seems very unlikely - Hamas doesn't even pretend to be open to peaceful coexistence with Israel. Their best offer was a 10-year ceasefire in exchange for 1967 borders. Or that it could lead to Gazans overthrowing Hamas? It's possible, but it would take a violent rebellion since Hamas doesn't hold elections, and realistically…
That was 2004. By 2017, their asks, for all intents and purposes, were the same as the PA: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/01/hamas-new-char...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> IMO you shouldn't censor anything. That's the only solution. Full disclosure: I work for Meta, but not on ranking, and my opinions are my own. Edit: this isn't specific to Meta; it's common to all content platforms. This is really hard. There's universally objectionable material like CSAM. That's (politically) easy to exclude. There are leaked state secrets the public should know. There's hate speech (laws vary by…
>People say "just show the posts in chronological order," but this doesn't scale for humans reading it, especially as you follow more people. I fail to see how this is a problem. Much less one that necessitates spending billions of dollars developing sorting and recommendation algorithms to solve. Unless your priority is not "show the user what they have explicitly requested to see". Users were perfectly happy when t…
People still use Facebook?
Eh this is really tricky, for exampe if I open instagram, Threads or tiktok 9/10 posts will be pro-palestinian with 1 being pro-israeli. Then some of the propalestinian post will be calling for genocide or celebrating the massacre of oct 7. IMO you shouldn't censor anything. That's the only solution. When something is propaganda or false just quickly tag it as such with why it is false like Xitter does.
> IMO you shouldn't censor anything. That's the only solution. Full disclosure: I work for Meta, but not on ranking, and my opinions are my own. Edit: this isn't specific to Meta; it's common to all content platforms. This is really hard. There's universally objectionable material like CSAM. That's (politically) easy to exclude. There are leaked state secrets the public should know. There's hate speech (laws vary by…
That's just rationalizing a business decision. Nobody is saying there should be no algorithmic timeline. If it "doesn't scale" for my own timeline, that's 100% on me. Why take away the decision or "nudge" into the other direction?
If the algorithmic timeline really were THAT better, there would be zero need to remove the chronological option or "forget" when the user sets it as an option. People would just use it.
For example, the phrase "from the river to the see" is considered hateful by many, so it was taken down. In other cases the content praised attacks by Hamas, which is designated as a terrorist organization by the US government.
From HRWs descriptions it sounds like the bulk of the "1049" content removals were clear violations of Meta's policies against support for violence.
Regardless of whether you agree, these don't seem surprising to me on light of Meta's own rules. There are of course a small number of exceptions listed.
Censorship has been done to both people with right-wing views and left-wing views. It's not a question of if it's been done. We need to stop censorship of people on both sides. Obviously, this is very hard (or it would have been done by now). My idealist brain wants some big, overarching solution but I don't think that's really possible.
I'm not sure it's correct to classify this particular instance as either left- or right-wing; additionally, misinformation should be censored. From the article: >Examples it cites include content originating from more than 60 countries, mostly in English, and all in “peaceful support of Palestine, expressed in diverse ways”. Even HRW’s own posts seeking examples of online censorship were flagged as spam This issue se…
So Meta is censoring a mostly left-wing viewpoint.
People still use Facebook?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>People say "just show the posts in chronological order," but this doesn't scale for humans reading it, especially as you follow more people. I fail to see how this is a problem. Much less one that necessitates spending billions of dollars developing sorting and recommendation algorithms to solve. Unless your priority is not "show the user what they have explicitly requested to see". Users were perfectly happy when t…
I did work on ranking at Meta. The vast majority of people really do not prefer the chronological feed. We validated this by extraordinarily high powered randomized trials, including with surveys. No more than 20% of people preferred a chronological feed in any experiment I saw.
It boils down to the algorithmic feed, where Zuckerberg decides what the users see and not the users. Old Facebook didn't have that problem, where there more or less was a chronological order of friends' post. That systems also did not have any problem with "troll farms" (do those even exist, anyway?) since those could not reach you in the first place. On places like Reddit, I get this feeling that some bot network c…
I think it’s identical here on HN. Upvoting, downvoting, and using flagging to suppress contrary opinions is rampant and has a huge negative impact toward discussion. I think it’s just the topic du jour on HN is less escalated (usually opinions of tech choices) so it doesn’t seem as extreme.