
Most Americans Think Facebook and Twitter Censor Their Political Views - laurex
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-28/most-americans-think-social-media-giants-censor-their-views
======
JKCalhoun
When a friend posts on Facebook and it doesn't show up in my feed that's FB
making a call as to what to show me.

Why? Because algorithms.

Maybe "censorship" is a strong word in this instance — do we prefer "selective
disclosure"?

Regardless, not what I signed up for. Deleted FB.

~~~
nsxwolf
Once in awhile Facebook decides I shouldn't be friends with someone anymore
and suppresses all of their posts from my feed. I start to wonder what's
happened to them, so I make a point of searching for their page and find that
they've been posting daily. Things I would have been interested to see and
would have commented on.

~~~
Declanomous
It's entirely possible that Facebook found that your comments caused less
engagement for other people on Facebook, and therefore doesn't want you to
comment.

It's also possible that Facebook determined that this person has substantially
different politics than you, and has put you in different 'boxes'. You can
actually check what groups Facebook thinks you belong in. For instance,
Facebook thinks my peer group is 'Starting Adult Life', and my US Political
Stance is 'very liberal'.

(Facebook also thinks I work in a production occupation, like mining, or
lumber, which couldn't be further from the truth, which explains all the ads
for industrial equipment)

I went to high school in a really conservative place, and I'm friends with a
lot of people who have wildly different views on religion and politics. A few
years ago I stopped seeing their posts, even if I added them to the group of
people I see first on Facebook. Meanwhile, I started seeing a ton of posts
from people who I barely knew in college, presumably because their 'beliefs'
were much closer to mine.

I'm extremely cynical, and I find dogmatic people of similar beliefs as
annoying as people whose beliefs I disagree with, and my Facebook feed became
a personal hell of dogmatism, especially leading up to the 2016 election. As a
result I check Facebook at most once a week. It's entirely possible that
leaving the platform improved the experience for some of my more conservative
peers from high school, who no longer have to see my posts on the walls of
mutual friends.

~~~
satsuma
that concept of 'boxes' is pretty interesting -- is there a way for me to
check that for myself without handing them a wad of cash? i rarely use
facebook aside from messenger (because getting friends and family to use
something like telegram/signal/etc is a pain in the ass when fb just works)
but i've had it for about 8 years now so it'd be interesting to see how
accurate of a profile they've built on me

~~~
vzqx
[http://facebook.com/ads/preferences/behaviors](http://facebook.com/ads/preferences/behaviors)

Apparently I'm 'very conservative'... probably because of my friend group,
since I've never posted anything political on Facebook.

~~~
doubleunplussed
This link gives "Sorry, something went wrong" for me. Anyone know why? It is
only available in some countries?

~~~
lloyd-christmas
It's not a distinct page for me, but instead an accordion section. I had to go
to:

[https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences](https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences)

And then open _Your Information_ > _Your Categories_. I assume this is what
they are talking about.

------
rjkennedy98
I talked to an ex-twitter employee I met in Ireland at bar. He told me very
candidly that twitter employees loathed Milo Yiannopolous and were actively
trying to figure out any way to ban him. Not a fan of Milo, but there are
clearly agendas which can't be extricated from politics.

~~~
yosito
Well, the shooting he incited in Maryland today should be enough of a reason
to ban him.

~~~
sheepmullet
The fake news seems to be jumping on Milo when the shooters motives are
currently unknown.

~~~
sheepmullet
For anyone still following this discussion:

We now have evidence the shooting had nothing to do with Milos comments:

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5898141/At-four-
shot...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5898141/At-four-shot-gunman-
Marylands-Capital-Gazette-newspaper-building.html)

Yet at least two people on this thread are acting like there is credible
evidence his tweets caused the shooting.

This is the danger of fake news!

~~~
yosito
At least one person on this thread is acting like publicly calling for
violence is ok.

~~~
sheepmullet
Who?

You aren't content just to consume fake news - now you are trying to produce
your own fake narrative!

------
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.

~~~
AmericanChopper
As a Republican, and a conservative, freedom of expression is one of the
principles I hold most dear. It used to also be a principle embraced by
liberals, but they seem to have widely abandoned it, you don’t see
conservatives going around trying to “no platform” people (which is an
insidious euphemism). It is also one of the core principles the Internet was
founded on, or at least of the early internet subculture. Sadly, this has also
been widely abandoned by the organisations that have the most influence over
the internet. I don’t see how you could plan to fight censorship with more
censorship.

~~~
throwawayjava
_> you don’t see conservatives going around trying to “no platform” people_

This is an extremely odd statement and it took me a while to figure out why
you would think that. Because you absolutely do see conservatives shut down
speech. Systematically. For a good account of this on college campuses, see
[https://newrepublic.com/article/147908/invisible-free-
speech...](https://newrepublic.com/article/147908/invisible-free-speech-
crisis)

Perhaps we "don't see conservatives going around trying to 'no platform'
people" in the same way that fish don't see water.

We _expect_ conservatives to fire public school LGBT teachers who mention
their partners when told to talk about their personal lives on parent night.

We _expect_ Christian colleges to fire people for being not conservative
enough.

We _expect_ those colleges to expel students for supporting gay rights.

We _expect_ obscenity laws. (Aside: conservatives _strongly_ support obscenity
laws and _strongly_ oppose bans on hate speech. I can understand the worldview
that bans both, and I myself have a worldview that calls for banning neither.
But I will be forever perplexed over how anyone who doesn't themselves condone
hate speech could come to the conclusion that nakedness/lewdity poses a great
threat to society which justifies censorship, but that hate speech does not.
If anyone here does have that viewpoint, I'd be interested to hear their
reasoning.)

We _expect_ attempts to ban flag burning.

We _expect_ the Red Scare.

And it's true that we never hear about Richard Dawkins being uninvited from
Cedarville or Wheaton. But that's only because those students/faculty would be
expelled from the institution the moment the invitation was extended.

It's _normal_ for conservatives to be illiberal on speech. So normal that,
like fish in water, _we don 't even see it!_

So when people like Cedarville's president bemoan the suppression of speech on
college campuses while at same time firing his own faculty for publicly
criticizing Mitt Romney, expelling his students for their speech, and
routinely monitoring the social media accounts of his students, I think it's
fair to say (as [https://newrepublic.com/article/147908/invisible-free-
speech...](https://newrepublic.com/article/147908/invisible-free-speech-
crisis) puts it):

 _There are many who argue, in the pages of this country’s most respected
periodicals, that this power lies with the intolerant left. But the evidence
of real, widespread speech suppression shows it lies elsewhere, on the right.
This, in turn, suggests that the ostensible champions of free speech are more
interested in criticizing campus identity politics than in protecting speech._

Now, revisiting your quote once more:

 _> you don’t see conservatives going around trying to “no platform” people
(which is an insidious euphemism)_

Insidious. No-platforming is so thoroughly embedded in American conservativism
that _you don 't even see it_ even though it's pervasive. That's practically
the definition of insidious.

 _> I don’t see how you could plan to fight censorship with more censorship._

There is one famous example related to the heckler's veto. Rules against
heckling/shouting during a speech use censorship to shut down an attempt at
censorship. And even that only makes sense in some circumstances; e.g., in a
lecture hall but not at a large rally.

~~~
AmericanChopper
I think you must live in a pretty opaque bubble. You might expect those things
to happen, but they only do in your imagination. Most Christian colleges are
actually pretty accepting of LGBT. You might be able to find a couple examples
of some that haven’t been, but you barely have to open your eyes to see that
conservative voices have pretty much been prohibited from all of the country’s
other Colleges. Forget how intolerant the user base is, conservative voices
are very heavily suppressed on most social media platforms. If your
unfortunate enough to voice a conservative opinion in the wrong place at the
wrong time, you’ll get a Twitter brigade harassing your employer until they
fire you. Schedule a conservative speaker to talk at a College, at you won’t
be at all surprised when a gang of violent, intolerant liberals start a riot.

Your comment is completely disconnected from reality. If you look hard enough,
you’d probably be able to find a couple of minor examples to point at, but
intolerance and suppression of speech has become mainstream liberal politics.

I’ve been a liberal for most of my life, I voted for Obama’s twice. But it was
the grotesque intolerance for all non-confirming views that drove me away from
the left. Any form of individual thought is liable to be labeled as hate
speech, and possibly the worst element of it is the demand to have your cake
and eat it too. To go around literally violently suppressing freedom of
expression, and then attempt to claim some level of victimhood as if it was
actually your voice that was being suppressed.

~~~
throwawayjava
_> Your comment is completely disconnected from reality. If you look hard
enough, you’d probably be able to find a couple of minor examples to point at,
but intolerance and suppression of speech has become mainstream liberal
politics._

There was a recent CATO study on _exactly_ this question [1].

Nearly 2/3rds of Republican-identifying respondents believe NFL players should
be fired if they don't stand for the pledge.

Over half of the Republican-identifying respondents believe that burning flags
should be illegal, that an executive should be fired for flag burning, and
also that flag burner's citizenship should be revoked.

None of this is particularly surprising! You _expect_ to find that many
Republicans oppose flag burning.

However, you _don 't_ expect to hear that Democrats support rolling back free
speech protections. The data support this shift toward illiberalism on the
left. And you even point out that this shift happened in your original post!

The rise of illiberalism on the left is concerning, but again, _nowhere_ have
I claimed that the American left is a bastion of free speech warriors.

My claim is that we _do_ commonly see conservatives going after people for
expressing themselves.

And the empirical data demonstrate it's not just "a small minority" of
conservatives who feel that's justified. It's a majority. Sometimes a very
large one.

So. If you want to complain about illiberal leftists, I'll nod along all day.
And you'll notice that this claim was not the portion of your post I took
issue with, because I don't disagree. I took issue with your claim that:

 _> you don’t see conservatives going around trying to “no platform” people_

because they do, and the data very clearly indicates that the majority of
Republicans believe it's justified.

And, once again, to be _very_ clear, there is no implied assertion anywhere
that leftists do not do the same thing.

 _> I think you must live in a pretty opaque bubble_.

Either I'm not the one in a bubble or else someone should tell CATO their
methodology is flawed ;-)

[1] [https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/survey-
reports/...](https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/survey-
reports/pdf/the-state-of-free-speech-and-tolerance.pdf)

~~~
dang
Please don't do political flamewars on HN. That's just what we don't want
here.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
ebikelaw
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.

~~~
wolco
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.

~~~
geofft
I think there's a pretty clear distinction between advertising and organic
speech, and also a pretty clear distinction between wanting to restrict how
other people use your platform and simply having views of your own.

~~~
trisimix
Somewhat unrelated. Advertisers dont want their to be a clear distinction
anymore. Hell pretty soon the most effective marketing strategy wont be
shameless plugs but offhanded ones. Ones that sneak in like oh hey yeah I was
using x the other day and it helped me with y. Once gun manufactuers catch up
it might look something like: popular social media user offhandedly mentions
purchase of lgun, posts some pictures firing gun, learning gun safety, talks
about how much fun they had. Itll be hard to censor and I wouldnt be shocked.

~~~
germinalphrase
This is already similar to how a lot of gun culture videos on YouTube operate.
Go watch Hickhock45. Guy just shoots and chats about guns in a casual, mostly
non-political manner. He’s really popular and the whole shebang is one big
(indirect) advertisment for various firearms.

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

~~~
amelius
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!

~~~
tivert
> By the way, it's stupid that we still can't have user-defined [emojis].

Emojis should have _only_ been embedded user-defined pngs. I know I'm being
cranky and old, but I feel our character sets shouldn't have been used to
encode novel cute pictures.

~~~
amelius
Yes. The problem is that it assumes that language is fixed. However, the
correct way is to make emojis freely definable, so that the emoji language
will continue to develop; of course, the unfortunate side-effect for character
set maintainers would be that they have to expand the set in order to
incorporate the new parts of the language. But that is their problem; you
can't force a population to use a limited set of symbols.

~~~
thanatropism
> you can't force a population to use a limited set of symbols.

It's called an "alphabet".

~~~
AsyncAwait
I think the point was "you can't force a population to use a limited set of
symbols [that can't be used to express an arbitrary idea]".

~~~
thanatropism
Well, not yet.

------
oblib
Yesterday I tried to post a link on FB to an "Anonymous video maker" that I
saw linked in an article shared here. It's just a web based video maker but
when I tried to post it I got a message saying "Facebook thinks this is spam"
and FB wouldn't let me share it.

Since the page doesn't promote any political view at all we might hesitate to
make the leap that they are censoring political views but because the entire
purpose of that app is intended for exposing corporate/political/social issues
it's a bit difficult to believe FB doesn't have that in mind when they block a
link to it from being shared.

I'd love to hear what other reasons they might have because I really cannot
think of any that hold up.

Here's the link: [http://anonymous-video.com/index.html](http://anonymous-
video.com/index.html)

~~~
admax88q
The reason they have is when the spam filter is run against anonymous-
video.com it returns positive.

You're assigning far too much agency to the decision as if someone at FB
reviewed anonymous-video.com specifically and decided to block it or not.

Its just a machine learning model that has been trained on a bunch of existing
spam finds signals in common with your link.

~~~
evincarofautumn
Can semi-confirm: I worked on Site Integrity (Infrastructure) at FB in
2013–2014, and iirc there were many instances where a benign URL was
automatically flagged as spam, and someone had to explicitly go and whitelist
it because we were getting complaints. Could be any number of things—I’d guess
URLs containing things like “video” and “anonymous” are often sketchy pirate
sites that try to install malware; or perhaps that URL was a malicious site in
the past but isn’t anymore.

The _policies_ are explicitly written in code (Haxl) but a lot of them
_invoke_ machine learning models to do actual classification of stuff (URLs,
images, comments, &c.)—although I’d imagine an increasing amount of the
computation is being moved over to the Haxl side because it’s so much less
resource-intensive than the FXL system it replaced. Where possible, SI usually
errs on the side of “better safe than sorry” when it comes to spam, malware,
fake accounts, &c.—hence users’ complaints of “getting zucc’d” when someone
reports them, or their activity on the site triggers a filter.

~~~
oblib
That site lets you make and download a video but they don't offer to host it.
They do host their own content there though.

Here's the link to the article that was shared here where I found the link to
the video that led me to the anonymous-video.com site.

[https://lmgsecurity.com/exposing-the-secret-
office-365-foren...](https://lmgsecurity.com/exposing-the-secret-
office-365-forensics-tool/)

I did a Google search on the anonymous-video.com domain name and nothing at
all came up about spam or malware or anything nefarious at all, unless you
consider the videos hosted there to be "spam", but that's a huge leap to make
because they're not selling anything there.

The entire site is blacklisted on FB, not just the video maker. This convinces
me even further that this is not a decision based on machine learning models.

I understand FB has the right to do this, and I'm not arguing here they
shouldn't. I do, however, think it's important that we know and understand
how, why, where, and to whom, when it is done.

And I do think that FB users should be concerned about this specific site
being blacklisted. I am.

------
0x00000000
I have reported multiple facebook posts of friends making death threats
against (conservative) politicians and every time it comes back "we reviewed
the post and it is not in violation of community guidelines"

~~~
rainonmoon
If it makes you feel any better, female friends have reported multiple
Facebook posts from white nationalists sending them death and rape threats
only to receive the same message. At least their policy is consistently bad?

------
throwaway69777
This 100% happens. [https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/style/2014/11/26/how-
miria...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/style/2014/11/26/how-miriam-
careys-u-turn-at-a-white-house-checkpoint-led-to-her-death/?noredirect=on)
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.

~~~
erinaceousjones
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..?

------
newswriter99
Case in point is that consumers are more than happy to be given custom-
tailored feeds that filter content they agree with (or that the provider's
algorithm THINKS they agree with).

If this was not true, Vero would have taken off instead of falling flat.

Social media is pretty much broken at this point. The idea was to increase
reach and communication. Instead we've got people grouped into thought bubbles
and echo chambers. I'd argue that Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are causing
more harm to society at this point than any potential benefit they provide.

~~~
kebman
Consider this: There are other apps that you haven't heard of, with
communities completely secluded from the Fb/twit/goog environment, and
nobody's complaining that they are bubbleified.

------
pmarreck
Lack of trust is a bullshit argument. It's basically the Conspiracy Fallacy:
[https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla...](https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/74/Conspiracy_Theory)

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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_repugnance))

I think we all have to answer these questions first:

1) Are you comfortable with receiving information that is true, or even mostly
true, but that which is distasteful to you personally?

2) If so, do you wish to impose this expectation on everyone else?

~~~
prolikewhoa
>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-...](https://www.lgraham.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/4766f54d-d433-4055-9f3d-c94f97eeb1c0/testimony-
of-sean-edgett-acting-general-counsel-twitter.pdf)

~~~
pmarreck
Is censorship of argumentum-ad-nauseam bullshit really censorship, though?

~~~
prolikewhoa
Where is the "argumentum-ad-nauseam bullshit"? I'm didn't post this to argue
about politics or what your political beliefs are, just that they do in fact,
censor.

~~~
pmarreck
The thing about Hillary’s emails was COMPLETELY INFLATED by her opposition,
since she was not the first person by a long shot to use a private email
server. Inflation = distortion = bullshit.

~~~
prolikewhoa
Again, I wasn't here to debate your political opinions, I was just simply
pointing out that Twitter does censor, and providing a US .gov sourced
example.

Try Reddit for your garbage opinions.

~~~
dang
Personal attacks will get you banned here. Please don't post like this again.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
Declanomous
I can't stand the fact that organizations hide behind "algorithms" as an
excuse for every unintended side-effect.

It's no surprise that algorithms create an information bubble for us. I like
to use music as an example: the best music recommendations I've ever received
have been from friends. I'll describe music I'm listening to and like, and
they'll recommend something for me. I'd say 50% of the time I find it
unobjectionable, 30% of the time I hate it, and 20% of the time I love it.

Sites have been trying to replicate this functionality using algorithms for a
well over a decade. Last.fm used to be a great way for me find music. As far
as I could tell, it would just pick music from people who listened to the same
artists as you. I'd say I found 30% of the music unobjectionable, 50% of the
music terrible, and 20% of the music great. Functionally, this was remarkably
similar to my friends recommending me music, because I only care about the
music I loved.

Over time their algorithm got 'better' and nearly stopped recommending music I
disliked, however I found that it mostly just recommended me music that was in
the unobjectionable middle ground of 'meh'. I stopped looking for music on
Last.fm because it stopped giving me music I loved.

We've positioned machine learning as a replacement to curation, but what it
really does is put forth the least objectionable content. Machine learning
lacks the ability to deal with the nuances surrounding controversial or
challenging content. It never takes the leap of faith that a person would when
recommending you something.

I am really interested to see how this all plays out over the next few years,
because I think people are beginning to realize they are addicted to the
perpetual stream of 'good enough' content. The network effect will probably
protect Facebook for the time being, I assume the first sites affected will be
content-driven, like YouTube.

Of course, XKCD addressed the issues I have with algorithms far better than I
could ever hope to:

[https://xkcd.com/1831/](https://xkcd.com/1831/)

~~~
allthenews
>We've positioned machine learning as a replacement to curation, but what it
really does is put forth the least objectionable content.

I don't think the problem is with ML. You could easily train a net to make
boulder selections with an appropriate data set. I believe what you are seeing
is an accommodation for the average person. Most people aren't adventurous,
and it makes business sense to get algos working for the middle majority than
to cater to tail ends.

It also, IMO, makes content at places like youtube less technical and more
clickbaity. But again I believe this is somewhat intentional.

~~~
tomatotomato37
>Most people aren't adventurous

I would say most people aren't adventurous in everything except their
interests, which they are very adventurous in. The problem is that there will
always be more people with a meh feeling toward a random subject than people
with a genuine intrest in it, and a brute force ML algorithem trained by just
throwing unholy amounts of generic personal data at it before being being
relased on the giant mashup of random subjects that make up something like
youtube won't catch that nuance

------
josteink
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.

~~~
pavlov
HN is not owned by a social media giant, so this grievance doesn’t appear to
have much to do with the article.

~~~
ProAm
It is owned by a Silicon Valley VC giant, while not directly media it is
steered by big money. However I think HN is moderated relatively well, but I
can see how some people might think it's being gamed/controlled/censored by
self interest (I don't)

------
protomyth
I'm starting to think that the problem is Facebook sets the importance of
politics much, much higher than the users of Facebook. It really seems like
the folks doing the programming are political animals, and most of us are more
concerned with the personal connections we have made. I think they are really
bad at understanding our circle of people we deal with and are using a variety
of factors that just aren't as important to us.

~~~
wu-ikkyu
I recently noticed this with Google News in Chrome. The recommended stories in
my feed were creepily relevant to my current location and interests. And yet,
the top 2-3 results were not at all -- they were about some ridiculous
political rumors/squabbles on CNN/Fox. I never visit those sites and also do
my absolute best to be completely ignorant of such political "news". It was
blantantly obvious they were forcing irrelevant political nonsense to the top
of my queue.

------
bananas43332
I just quit Facebook. Your own posts ought to show in your 'Most Recent' News
Feed. One particular Share I tried posting over and over again with 'what I
had to say about it' never showed up in News Feed. Facebook is Censoring.
Anyway it's screwed-up when 'Most Recent' does not have in Chronological order
yours and your Friends Post. Lots of Users messed up Facebook by accepting
fake profiles from whomever into the thousandths, which no doubt are Foreign
Hackers. Could be Facebook couldn't figure out which 'Political Box' to set me
in. As I'm Social Conservative, but with the Democrats on economic issues.
Populist so to say! I never tried to 'sort' my Friends. I enjoyed seeing the
whole spectrum of Opinions, and never wished just to surround myself with
those only thinking like me.

------
ddingus
Most Americans would be right.

There is great confusion on the scope and purpose of the First Amendment in
play here.

Secondly, media is drilling down on two toxic ideas:

always two sides to every story

, and

objectivity, claim of no bias.

These things combine to present ordinary Americans with the expectation of
objective media and free speech everywhere.

A side effect is a surrender of critical thought in return for unwarranted
trust.

The remedy should be to evaluate all of this with a critical eye and help
people understand there is always bias, and how they can and shoild be using
diverse sources to stay informed.

------
wrs
Fantastic. So please stop using them, and maybe things will get a little less
crazy!

------
ug02nice
i've seen many cases how twitter silences and bans people speaking out against
the democratic party

------
protonimitate
At the end of the day, is anyone really surprised that these platforms
censor/filter content in any way?

Where did the assumption of an un-biased platform come from? These companies
are in the business of making money, as much as they preach about 'making a
difference in the world', they will always default to whatever gains the most
public favor and generates the most revenue.

I am actually surprised by the statistics, I had assumed that less people
thought they were being censored. Although this presents an opposite problem,
if everyone thinks they are being censored then they can claim the real truth
is being 'censored'.

Biases will always exist when money is involved.

------
wu-ikkyu
It seems most every discussion here on HN about political censorship devolves
into flamewars, mass downvotes, and mass flagging. That in itself seems quite
indicative.

------
fallingfrog
Does that include the army of right wing trolls that appear out of nowhere to
hurl racist invective or curse words at you every time you post something like
"way to go"! on the page of a progressive candidate? I can't be only person
who experiences this. A lot of times it's in all caps, and usually the
person's Facebook profile features them holding an assault rifle. The insults
range from "stupid mother fucker" to "you're a tool of the Jews" to just
"retard". Am I to understand that conservatives want to be _more_ free to post
that kind of stuff?

------
skate22
Ive conditioned my fb feed to be 95% memes. I go there every couple of days
for some fresh memes

------
pjc50
Could do with some examples of said views so we could see whether it's a false
equivalence, or whether some of the "views" in fact comprise incitement to
violence etc.

Note that there is no "true neutral" in this world; neutrality itself is a
political position that helps certain people and hinders others.

~~~
wu-ikkyu
How many examples do you require?

Conservative comedian Owen Benjamin being banned from Twitter for life is but
one:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wehNVE7_G24](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wehNVE7_G24)

~~~
pjc50
For being homophobic to one of the mass shooting victims?
[http://www.adirondackdailyenterprise.com/news/local-
news/201...](http://www.adirondackdailyenterprise.com/news/local-
news/2018/04/twitter-blocks-owen-benjamin/)

~~~
wu-ikkyu
Like it or not (I don't), he was expressing his political opinions, albeit in
a tactless way. Social media is overrun with much worse garbage and people are
not banned for such.

------
fortythirteen
This isn't opinion, it's provable fact. Twitter and Facebook were on a tear
last year, actively shutting down the accounts of conservative pundits, under
the guise of rules violations, while turning a blind eye to the same actions
from pundits and personalities on the left.

~~~
cblades
Could you point out some of those examples?

~~~
fortythirteen
My favorite is when Sabo the conservative street artist got banned from
Facebook right after his "Fuck Zuck 2020" posters appeared all over L.A.

But hidden camera footage of a Twitter engineer openly admitting that they
shadowbanned conservatives came out last year.

------
moduspol
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 be more
careful about showing right-leaning views to users who aren't obviously right-
leaning. To me, it's tough to call that censorship.

As a result, I see the issue more as a symptom of the real problem, but that's
a lot tougher to solve.

~~~
nascar_is_bad
> 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.

~~~
orbifold
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.

~~~
eropple
_> You can be super emphatic an right wing, how do you think someone becomes a
populist nationalist._

At the bottom? Fear of the other; in the United States, fear of the other
rooted particularly in racism. Because it's not "nationalism" here--a disease
by itself, but a controllable one. It's _white supremacism_ , given nicer
clothes by calling it "white nationalism" for some godforsaken reason, peddled
by leaders who want the bottom to vote their way. It's not like it's news. Lee
Atwater pegged this whole disgraceful thing decades ago. To legitimize and get
boots on the ground for economically regressive policies, the right wing of
the United States leveraged this racially-motivated insecurity; now the racist
tiger has eaten them and they are so very surprised that the racist tiger was
racist all along.

At the top? They're the ones doing the peddling. Some is surely true-believer
racism. Some is also surely cynicism--because the bottom will eat it up and
there's your leash to drag them where you want. It isn't exactly complex.

(And, no, Obama and Clinton are not "ultra right" from a European perspective;
that's the sort of mendacious both-sidesing I expect out of _actually far
right_ speakers, though. Obama and Clinton would be generically center- to
center-right politicians on a Europe-calibrated axis. The modern Republican
Party is more like Ukip.)

~~~
hueving
Nationalism and white supremacism are not the same thing at all. Equating them
and needlessly injecting race into it is bog standard Russian divisive
propaganda.

~~~
eropple
In America, they are. Both are historical and current disasters; the icing on
the cake of American white supremacism _fueling_ American nationalism is extra
gross, though.

I do want to compliment you for the rhetorical twirl of trying to co-opt
reality with the Russian specter, though. It's bold. Projecting...but very
bold.

~~~
hueving
Please try to rephrase that by actually saying something. I'm genuinely
curious why you think that absurd equality is so obvious it requires no
evidence.

------
glitchc
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.

~~~
oconnor663
If we end up saying downvotes = censorship, then "censorship" is fine. The
natural reaction of "uh oh, censorship is bad, we should be careful about
that" only makes sense if we're careful about how we use the word.

------
dilap
This is obviously true.

------
threatofrain
Here's Axios's take on the issue:

[https://www.axios.com/conservatives-republicans-social-
media...](https://www.axios.com/conservatives-republicans-social-media-
censorship-75db1560-4dd7-4d91-961b-5cf2d2b8c799.html)

------
patrickg_zill
This article seems to be a smoking gun...
[https://medium.com/@garycoby/twitter-restricts-trump-
eb7e48c...](https://medium.com/@garycoby/twitter-restricts-trump-eb7e48ccf5ff)

Note that there are plenty of other custom icons that Twitter allows.

~~~
wybiral
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.

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

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

------
someguydave
The interesting aspect is that conservatives think that it is very likely that
social media sites censor their views at a rate double that of liberals. Even
if the social media companies were strictly neutral in the matter, it's pretty
common for conservatives to encounter left-wing hostility and censorship from
other users of social media sites.

~~~
ceejayoz
> it's pretty common for conservatives to encounter ... censorship from other
> users of social media sites

How, exactly? Is Facebook doling out admin privileges to random users? Or are
we confusing "receive criticism" with "censorship" here?

~~~
frockington
Post an article in r/politics about anything positive Trump has done and
you'll get a ban. On Facebook, a similar phenomenon might occur due to liberal
users reporting conservative ideas they don't agree with as hate speech.
Disclaimer: I'm not very familiar with how Facebook works so I could be way
off

~~~
ceejayoz
> Post an article in r/politics about anything positive Trump has done and
> you'll get a ban.

That's no more "censorship" than me unfriending you on Facebook would be.

> On Facebook, a similar phenomenon might occur due to liberal users reporting
> conservative ideas they don't agree with as hate speech.

That'll put it in a review queue, upon which Facebook employees make a
decision. If it gets deleted, it's because you violated Facebook's rules.

~~~
frockington
If it is an actual Facebook employee, I can definitely see why conservatives
would think that. The active encouragement of civil disobedience by liberal
leaders is probably more than enough confirmation to conservatives of this
behavior. I;m not saying this behavior is /is notoccurring, just why some
people might think that it does

~~~
ceejayoz
> If it is an actual Facebook employee, I can definitely see why conservatives
> would think that.

It's more complicated than that, though. It takes more than just a report to
get someone's content deleted.

Take a look at the examples from their moderator training:

[https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-hate-speech-
cens...](https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-hate-speech-censorship-
internal-documents-algorithms)

See, for example, the slide about "female drivers", "black children", and
"white men" \- Facebook's policies (via some pretty odd logic, IMO) protect
posts about "white men", but not "black children". A liberal bastion, they're
not.

> One document trains content reviewers on how to apply the company’s global
> hate speech algorithm. The slide identifies three groups: female drivers,
> black children and white men. It asks: Which group is protected from hate
> speech? The correct answer: white men.

> The reason is that Facebook deletes curses, slurs, calls for violence and
> several other types of attacks only when they are directed at “protected
> categories”—based on race, sex, gender identity, religious affiliation,
> national origin, ethnicity, sexual orientation and serious
> disability/disease. It gives users broader latitude when they write about
> “subsets” of protected categories. White men are considered a group because
> both traits are protected, while female drivers and black children, like
> radicalized Muslims, are subsets, because one of their characteristics is
> not protected. (The exact rules are in the slide show below.)

~~~
codetrotter
I don’t like Facebook and I rarely use it anymore but this set of examples
seems a bit contrived I think.

Would it not be the same the other way around because of the subset rule?
Black women would be protected whereas male drivers and white children would
not?

~~~
s73v3r_
In practice, no.

------
trophycase
Title is misleading. Most Americans think Facebook and Twitter censor _some_
political views, not necessarily theirs.

------
iosDrone
Is this even up for discussion? Whatever you think of him, Milo Yiannopoulos
got banned because HIS FOLLOWERS made derogatory statements about an actress.

(edit: spelling)

~~~
s73v3r_
Actually, Milo was banned because he already had been suspended several times,
and then he decided to impersonate another user, which is blatantly against
the ToS.

~~~
iosDrone
That's not what was widely reported.

------
s73v3r_
Unfortunately a lot of people conflate censorship with, "We're not shoving
your uncle's conspiracy theories in everyone's face."

------
sensor_ship
I mean, my views get censored here on HN all the time...

~~~
dang
We don't "censor views". We do ban accounts that break the site guidelines,
and if it's a serial troll, we usually don't bother to say so.

