
Senator Seeks Answers from Facebook on Political Censoring Allegations - cft
http://www.commerce.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2016/5/thune-seeks-answers-from-facebook-on-political-manipulation-allegations
======
zxcvvcxz
There's no legal precedent here. Tech can go like Hollywood and push whatever
political agenda they want.

That being said, this is the type of thing that makes 1984 look a lot less
like fiction. How many 13-18 year olds, who don't watch TV, are instead
experiencing intense indoctrination controlled by Facebook? No matter your
political leanings you must find this troublesome.

I remember when I was 18 I went to college, started working, started paying
taxes, and stopped watching TV. Suddenly I had space to question my political
views, which I realized on the whole had been implanted by the media. Facebook
could be even worse - how many people actually get away from their influence?

~~~
mmanfrin

      intense indoctrination
    

Where you seeing that? And if filtering a few news stories on a social
networking site is 'intense', then what are those private companies writing
specifically tilted views of history for school textbooks in Texas doing?

~~~
oxide
well, that's only mild indoctrination.

intense indoctrination requires that it be done through the internet, via an
optional social media service.

~~~
Nadya
_> via an optional social media service._

Owning a car is 'optional' in the same sense. In that in many places in the
U.S it _isn 't_ optional, unless you're self-employed. Otherwise, you're going
to be _unemployed_. There is a large trade off for making the choice.

Any people who willingly opt out of social media ( _especially_ Facebook) risk
alienating themselves from friends and family entirely. Seen as "weird" for
opting out of having a FB/refusing to use it entirely. Even weirder if you
cite "privacy concerns" as your reasoning for not having it.

There is far too much social pressure for most people to put up with not
having one. Unless they already lead healthy social lives or are socially
reclusive enough that social pressure is lost entirely on them.

Source: Living life without Facebook

~~~
linkregister
Yes, at your age it is isolating to avoid Facebook; yet 13-18 year olds are
already predominantly using other social networks already. Snapchat, Twitter,
and Instagram are dominating this segment [1]. I don't fear for the children
in this case.

[1] [http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/10/16/survey-finds-teens-
pr...](http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/10/16/survey-finds-teens-prefer-
instagram-snapchat-among-social-networks/)

~~~
Nadya
When I was in that age bracket it was not having a Myspace that was socially
isolating. A few years ago (I'd estimate 2009 to early 2013) it was Facebook
within the later half. Having just clicked the WSJ link. The graph shows "Fall
2012" is the fall off of Facebook which lines up with my memory.

Either way, my broader point was "social media being 'optional' doesn't really
mean it is 'optional'". You can opt out - but there is a tradeoff that not
everyone is willing to make.

As for indoctrination - I'm far more concerned with 18-25 year olds who have
the ability to vote being indoctrinated into a certain mindset than 13-17 year
olds. (E: You know what, on a second visit to my post both are equally bad as
the 13-17 will be able to vote "soon" too.)

ps: Twitter has a similar issue. They suppress and attempt to censor trending
hashtags (preventing them from autocompleting) that go against their political
standings.

------
jedberg
Facebook already responded:

[https://www.facebook.com/tstocky/posts/10100853082337958?pnr...](https://www.facebook.com/tstocky/posts/10100853082337958?pnref=story)

TL;DR: We don't manipulate the feed and we're pretty sure none of our
contractors have, and we've checked before, but we'll check again.

~~~
slackstation
Their use of contractors is subtle. I'm sure employees manipulated the feed.
The research they did in 2012 with Cornell had Facebook directly manipulating
feeds to illicit emotional outcomes and they measured how those emotions
propagated out to the rest of the subject's network.

Again, the question is not if but, how much they manipulate. Calling it an
"Algorithm" that is staffed by "Quality Editors" who can group tags and things
together to make trending topics bigger is just a defense mechanism. Facebook
can say or make anything they want to appear or disappear in your feed.

~~~
jonathankoren
No. That does not happen. I worked on it. If you read all the articles, all of
them tell the exact same story. Trends are detected, and then approved to go
into a candidate set to be algorithmically ranked for each person. As part of
approval, the curators write the headline, snippet, and choose the top article
on the results page according to a standard that insists on an unbiased widely
recognized news source. The accusation of bias boils down to, "I wanted to
link to Breitbart, but that's not unbiased source, so I had to link to the
AP." Well call the whambulance! You can't link to alternet either.

~~~
ikeyany
> the curators write the headline, snippet, and choose the top article on the
> results page according to a standard that insists on an unbiased widely
> recognized news source

An unbiased news source does not exist. The very fact that 'newsworthiness' is
subjective should be tipping you off.

~~~
jonathankoren
If you think topics such as #PoemYourLife and #1LineWed are newsworthy, you're
welcome to it.

~~~
ikeyany
It's more that a source like the NYTimes has biases of its own, that you seem
to think doesn't count as 'actual' bias.

------
taylodl
With the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine how can Facebook be held
accountable for anything? I'm not defending Facebook's alleged actions, I'm
asking how could those alleged actions be in violation of federal law?

~~~
legohead
Also, has this senator asked the same of CNN/MSNBC/Fox/etc?

~~~
cft
The expectation of FB is very different. A normal user would assume that the
ranking is based on a news link popularity: sharing, clicks or some other user
metric.

~~~
pj_mukh
Most Fox news viewers fervently believe Fox news is fair and balanced. FYI.
AFAIK, masquerading as bias-less is not illegal.

~~~
specialist
Both lying and obfuscation are completely legal.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Akre#Whistleblower_lawsui...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Akre#Whistleblower_lawsuit)

This article helped me to better understand some of what's going on:

 _" Agnotology ... is the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt..."_

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology)

------
billytetrud
Facebook can do whatever it wants to. Maybe most people on facebook have
liberal views and they're showing people what they are more likely to want to
read?

I don't agree with Facebook's actions in intentionally creating bias, but bias
is essentially a constitutionally protected right via free speech. I don't
have to agree with them for them to have a right to do it.

~~~
H0n3sty
_> Maybe most people on facebook have liberal views and they're showing people
what they are more likely to want to read? _

Trending happens regardless of political view. If they're manually suppressing
views which don't align with FB management then users should be made aware of
this.

~~~
ekips
Why should users be made aware of it?

~~~
H0n3sty
Because Facebook presents itself to users as a way _to share and express what
matters to them_. Not as a way _to share and express what matters to them so
long as it agrees with Facebook 's censors._

~~~
mikeyouse
Are they being prevented from sharing or expressing what matters to them in
any way? Because Facebook isn't amplifying their preferred sources via the
trending section?

~~~
H0n3sty
Yes, according to the allegations implied in the letter. If Facebook penalizes
topics which don't agree with Facebook's bias - that certainly would be
preventing some of their users from expressing what matters to them. I don't
follow your second question about amplifying.

~~~
mikeyouse
Basically, people are still free to post whatever they want and their friends
and families will still see it -- they were just restricting their "Trending"
section to non-conservative news sources. So their freedom of expression was
upheld but FB just wouldn't amplify certain sources.

------
snorkel
There's no specific law or regulation referenced in the complaint. This is
just grandstanding. Facebook PR flaks will gladly reply with a generic
corporate non-answer and that will be the end of it.

------
snowwrestler
For those not aware, Senators send letters to companies on a pretty regular
basis. It does not carry the weight of law, just the PR pressure of having a
Senator publicly questioning you. Companies usually take it seriously and
respond in some fashion.

More examples in an earlier comment:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8634332](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8634332)

~~~
r00fus
So how is this different from a shakedown? Get your PACs to fund me or I'll
make things uncomfortable...

~~~
snowwrestler
Well I don't think any of those letters mention PACs or campaign contributions
at all.

------
primitivesuave
There is nothing that the government can do to influence Facebook's news-
ranking algorithm (even if it is a human editorial process), just like there
is nothing it can do to influence Google's PageRank or CNN's coverage of
trivial and inconsequential events. Sending a letter accusing Facebook of
liberal bias is like accusing Fox News of conservative bias. It accomplishes
nothing, since any organization can easily justify its actions as free speech.

------
kevin_b_er
This senator may slowly be realizing how dangerous mass privatization is.
Facebook might look like a public gathering place, but it is not. It is a
corporate and private space, and rights such as free speech do not apply in a
private and corporate space. Too bad for senator Thune that a corporation is
using its power against political views he likes. The sword of privatization
and its erosion of public spaces where free speech is preserved cuts both
ways.

------
H0n3sty
I wonder if there is any truth to the story about Zuckerberg telling Merkel
that Facebook would censor anti-immigration posts in Germany.

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-26/merkel-
con...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-26/merkel-confronts-
facebook-s-zuckerberg-over-policing-hate-posts)

~~~
latenightcoding
Relevant:
[https://www.facebook.com/sheryl/posts/10156387360185177](https://www.facebook.com/sheryl/posts/10156387360185177)

~~~
H0n3sty
Thanks. That answers my question.

------
alexandrerond
I find always surprising that people and now politicians expect Facebook to
act like a public service and not like the private company it is.

Facebook answers to its interests as a company.

Since when are not newspapers curated, and leaning left or right? Did someone
go ask Fox News to explain manipulation to the Senate? Facebook may make
decisions that cost its credibility, but it's in its own right as a private
company to select the content they provide, just as it can skew your timelines
or suck every piece of data from your browsing habits and resell it to
advertisers ( you accepted their terms after all)

Facebook is not a public service nor an NGO nor a bunch of nuns doing charity
work.

------
seomint
How would this be different from the way Google's algorithm ranks news stories
or for that matter how the New York Times editors choose their stories?
Perhaps some transparency form FB on how they rank content would be useful.
Might also be nice to have a setting in FB for this sort of filtering.

------
Yetanfou
Here's an interesting experiment concerning Facebook censoring certain types
of 'hate', while leaving others alone:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3KfQoFHEDs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3KfQoFHEDs)

facit: two pages were opened on the same date, one inciting to violence
against 'jews' (the page was called 'Stop Israelis' but the message seems
clear), the other doing the same against 'palestinians'. After posting more
and more - and stronger and stronger - messages to both pages the makers
reported both pages to Facebook. Result? The page inciting to violence against
'palestinians' was closed the same day, with an explanation from Facebook that
said page was 'found to be in violation of their community standards'. The
other page, which was identical in most parts except for the fact that it was
'jews' which were targeted was not closed, with Facebook answering that 'it
was not found to violate any of their standards'.

When this brew up a bit of a storm on the 'net Facebook eventually rescinded
and closed the page, explaining it away as 'an error'.

What I suspect is that there is a large peer pressure inside the Facebook
censor team to align to a certain - and probably narrow - spectrum of
acceptable views, one which traditionally is called 'left-wing' or 'liberal'
even though both names don't seem to fit the ideas being espoused. Living in
Sweden I've seen the same concept at work in the traditional media, this has
gotten so strong that the word for it in Swedish - åsiktskorridor (literally
'view corridor', roughly 'acceptable views') - has become a mainstream word.
This has lead to an explosion in the number of 'alternative' media channels as
well as a record low level of trust in the 'traditional' media.

In other words, Facebook would do well to study the Swedish situation and
learn from the mistakes made here if they don't want to end up in the same
situation: mistrusted, deemed unreliable and outdated.

------
guelo
I'm looking forward to the senator's inquiry into Fox News.

"Congress shall make no law"

------
IronWolve
Seems like every government agency from city/state to federal is using twitter
and facebook to communicate to people. Facebook is monopoly in some areas. To
block/censor groups and people on any grounds other than criminal for a
personal agenda, is really causing a mix of issues.

------
adrianwaj
story blocked "Access Denied: You don't have permission to access
"serve-403-cf.www.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2016/5/thune-seeks-answers-from-
facebook-on-political-manipulation-allegations" on this server."

Any alternatives to FB out there worth using? There are 6 mentioned in this
comment:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10701871](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10701871)
and I've also heard of unseen.is as a messaging platform from Iceland.

------
thephyber
It's amazing how far (so far unfounded) allegations by "unnamed sources" go
these days. It's not like "former employees" ever have a desire to bad-mouth
their former employer, especially if they were social conservatives in the San
Francisco Bay Area.

We have become a nation that is willing to believe anything that agrees with
our confirmation bias, including outlandish and far-reaching conspiracy
theories.

Facebook has publicly stated they have done psychological A/B testing, so I
suppose they opened themselves up to this line of accusation.

~~~
dragonwriter
Politicians don't need to believe something to cynically exploit it.

------
spinlock
I'm confused. Are corporations only entitled to 2nd amendment protection when
we're conflating money with speech or does it also count when it's actually
speech?

~~~
IIAOPSW
>Are corporations only entitled to 2nd amendment protection

Corporations are entitled to keep and bear arms?!

~~~
spinlock
Only as part of an organized millitia.

------
wewinintheend
I know that facebook censored/prevented me from posting "I bet this woman was
not a terrorist." when this occurred:
[http://www.nbcnews.com/news/other/woman-shot-killed-
capitol-...](http://www.nbcnews.com/news/other/woman-shot-killed-capitol-
police-after-chaotic-chase-white-house-f8C11331203)

------
kaishiro
Is there a specific reason why Senator Thune is going after Facebook for this
alleged bias? Why does there seem to be a separate standard of bias for
Facebook vs. CNN/MSNBC/Fox/etc? I'm not making a point with these questions,
I'm genuinely curious if there is something else going on under the hood that
I'm unaware of.

------
awinter-py
using the media to influence elections is what the media is for. That said,
two potential mines in this minefield can explode with some force:

1\. are there contractual obligations to republican orgs that purchased ad
space on FB that are breached if FB has a systematic internal bias against
their political position. I.e. can every conservative org band together in a
class action? They might not win but they have the political clout to run a
very damaging discovery process.

2\. using information to influence financial markets and benefiting from it is
very illegal and people go down for it all the time. If some third party made
a successful trading business using facebook information, I'm sure there's
someone at the DOJ who can turn that into a conspiracy to defraud markets
case.

------
emblem21
Is there a way to place a bet on the sentiment analysis rating of HN in the
event of Facebook being caught pushing Hilary to trending instead Sanders
and/or preventing Sanders from trending?

My gamble is that it would be the complete opposite of how this thread is
evolving.

------
pbarnes_1
Zzzzzzzzz. Where were these guys on Fox News? Or the last 8 years?

Please.

------
slackstation
It should be relatively easy to detect bias if Facebook is open with their
algorithm.

Facebook has conducted research on how even small changes to the overall
system can materially affect the mood and how that mood was contagious to a
given subject's social network. (“Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale
Emotional Contagion through Social Networks”)

The public was disturbed. The university partner in all of this had put out a
press-release saying that it passed their ethics board only because the
University researchers themselves weren't doing it directly but, merely helped
design the experiment.

This says that Facebook has people on staff that have been conducting this
sort of thing at scale since 2012. They have no one to answer to. They have
everything to gain. If they stay secret, they have nothing to lose.

An individual has no way to detect this because like the proverbial frog in
lukewarm water slowly brought to a boil, the filtering on our social network
never was so alarming that we jumped out en-masse.

Now Zuckerberg and company could be listening in and manipulating the social
discourse of almost all of the free world. We wouldn't know.

People highly suspect that Twitter has a leftist agenda with pushing certain
speech and suppressing other speech. Even if you completely agree with Twitter
or Facebook's political stance, it should disturb you.

It's like getting on a soapbox in the town square and the air only carrying
certain ideas to the town people's ears and refusing to vibrate for others
but, you hear all of them just as loud. Over time you'd think that people just
aren't responsive to your ideas, get down off your soap box and go home,
thinking that democracy was done and that people just didn't like your ideas.

So, Facebook has the means, has the technology, has the research to know how
effective it is, has had practice in (publicly) as far back as 2012.

The question isn't if they are going to manipulate the 2016 election, the
question is how and to what degree. Even if they deny it, there's really no
outside body to know at this point without any inside information.

Granted, Google also has this power to a certain degree and bears
responsibility for demonstrating that they aren't manipulating politics.
Google has more transparency and their products are to the end of being the
library of the world.

Facebook manipulates the messages sent between friends and family. They step
into trust relationships. There is a world of difference between the politics
of a site on the internet as a search result and an impassioned plea by one of
my friends or a family member. The idea that Facebook would suppress those
ideas from me is the most disgusting, despicable and detestable thing I can
think of. I hold Facebook to a much, much higher standard than Google. Their
transparency is much, much poorer.

Ultimately, Google indexes the open internet and I can test their results
against other search engines and research projects. Facebook owns both the
network and messages. It is impossible for an outside party to verify anything
that Facebook says about this at this point. We know that what they do can be
significant; that they have researched how effective it can be since 2012.

I don't think it's overly cautious nor paranoid to ask them for transparency
on this.

------
philliphaydon
Twitter is actually being censored and no one cares about that?

------
lu7
This was high time coming.

Few more sessions with senates, parliaments and assemblies of the world, and
Zuck will be off to go cure a African disease or something appointing a yes
woman like Sundar Pichai to clean up the mess.

And thats whats wrong with Silicon Valley.

------
JulianMorrison
What's probably happened is "conservative views" are hate screeds. They're
racist, they're sexist, they're homophobic or transphobic, they're advocating
violence. And so they've been blocked.

~~~
jauer
I don't think so. When I've seen conservative news being shared and bouncing
around to the point that it should be trending it's usually fairly benign
things like Clinton scandal pot stirring.

Try reporting something like a page post from Franklin Graham pointedly
referring to Caitlyn Jenner as "he" with associated condemnation (and
associated comments advocating violence) and watch it get bounced back as "not
violating community standards".

Seems like backwards priorities to me. Anyway, if you are trying to steer
discourse it's more subtle to suppress featured items than it is to ban
figures beloved by certain segments of the country. Also less risk of
offending people away from FB and risking ad revenue.

