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.
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.
I love how you worded this and illustrated your point. I think you're exactly right. I joined Facebook to be connected to the people I wanted to see, not people they want me to see. I barely log in anymore for this reason.
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
Wow, the amount facebook knows about me is staggering little.
The four groups I’m in are
all related to using a mobile device or wi-fi.
I’m pleasantly surprised but it appears deleting all of my content, unfollowing every person on my feed, not logging in except on incognito windows and very infrequently at best, and using ad blockers has effectively stymied facebook’s ability to establish a good notion of who I am beyond the most extreme basics.
I still use messenger although I try to use encrypted messages when I can, but they don’t mine that for advertising information according to their user policy. Not sure if they mine it for anything else.
Honestly though, as William Wrigley Jr once wrote, "When two men always agree, one of them is unnecessary." I have one friend that I disagree with about literally everything, and I respect him a lot because every discussion we have is thoughtful, and my ideas and beliefs are better for having discussed them with him.
Anyways, your political bent is probably based on what types of posts you've read or liked, or even who has liked your comments, even if they were apolitical.
Facebook randomly began notifying several friends every time I "liked" something they were opposed to -- finally addressed the resultant unfriending in person only to find out that the FB algorhythm decided to create its on brand of contentiousness among users. Does anyone think this was an accient?
I think the difference between this and censorship is in the case of censorship, even someone explicitly searching for the content won't find it. This is just a case of [a persons] posts not being "algorithmically tasty" enough.
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.
Twitter could have easily banned him, and others like him, if they had the will to. It’s their platform and they’re free to exclude anyone they like.
The fact that they don’t is, in my view, rooted simply in a desire to remain neutral in an attempt to prevent their MAU growth from declining and resulting in lower advertising income and less attractiveness to investors.
In other words, it’s a business decision. Twitter could choose to be more restrictive in favor of civility, but it would be bad for business.
It’s more in a desire to maintain some level plausible deniability that they’re not engaging in mass political censorship. Civility and their legal entitlement to run their platform as they see fit really have nothing to do with it. It’s more they’d like to have their cake and eat it too. They don’t want certain viewpoints on their platform, but they can’t just admit that they’re censoring them.
"In July 2016 he was permanently banned from Twitter for what the company cited as "inciting or engaging in the targeted abuse or harassment of others", referring to a harassment campaign against actor Leslie Jones and others."
The weird thing is Milo was apparently removed not for his own specific tweets being mean to Leslie Jones, but because he has lots of followers and he's apparently responsible for their actions. Which is bizarre: Beyoncé fans often harass Taylor Swift but that doesn't make Beyoncé responsible for the actions of others.
Meanwhile Peter Fonda has spent this week making death threats and still has an active account.
> Meanwhile Peter Fonda has spent this week making death threats and still has an active account.
He did a lot worse than that. He was very directly advocating for the kidnapping, harm and rape of a specific child.
You can't get any more open agenda than that as it pertains to the extreme bias in Silicon Valley. Their rules simply do not apply to their favored people. It will be necessary to regulate the tech platforms to stop it (and the Republicans will absolutely do just that, soon). I'm a socially liberal, political independent and the extreme SV bias has me cheering for aggressive regulation of the big platforms at this point.
It would be quite simple to implement: if they fail to consistently enforce their own terms, FCC fines that increase in scale with each subsequent violation. Something along the lines of a $10 million starter fine for allowing Peter Fonda to use the Twitter platform to directly threaten harm to a child and taking no action against the user. Ramp it up by $10m with each violation. Either Twitter stops selectively enforcing their own policies, or they get bankrupted (the fine stacking melts with good behavior over time). You'd either apply this regulation to only major platforms (based on users or revenue or both), or scale the fines / consequences to match the size of the service.
>The fact that they don’t is, in my view, rooted simply in a desire to remain neutral
Appear neutral. If they wanted to actually be neutral they wouldn't use shadowbans and other "hidden" mechanisms to silence and/or censor users whose agenda (political or otherwise) they didn't agree with.
What kind of person deliberately goes out of their way to discard that supposed intelligence and reasonability and replace it with such poisonous, hateful vitriol?
A person who enjoys attention, fame (whether it is fame or infamy), and the perks that go along with it. His antics certainly haven't had a negative effect on his finances and lifestyle from what I can tell.
I was watching his feed in real time the night he was banned. He wasn't directing people to do anything. He was trashing the Ghostbusters movie and called one of the female actresses a "black dude". It may have been tasteless but it wasn't brigading.
Your account of events are very different than reality. You're also ignoring him forging the tweets from her, and referring to a black woman as an "ape".
That's a massive bending of the truth. It was said as a private response to a journalist asking him for comment, and clearly in jest.
> The truth, as always, is the opposite of what the media tells you. I sent a troll about “vigilante death squads” as a private response to a few hostile journalists who were asking me for comment, basically as a way of saying, “Fuck off.” They then published it. Amazed they were pretending to take my joke as a “threat,” I reposted these stories on Instagram to mock them — and to make it clear that I wasn’t being serious.
Given his track record, I'm not going to believe a single word of his facebook post. Find another source that does not rely on that post to prove the point.
Perhaps I'm playing devils advocate by saying this, but: Isn't Milo one of the most well known cases of this? e.g. "Dealing" with him would help the twitter brand the most visibly.
I'm not left wing. I just think Twitter's unwillingness to enforce their terms of service and delete the accounts of those who call for violence has consequences. It's a reasonable opinion.
No, this is the danger to jumping to conclusions based on preconceptions. There are plenty of people whose minds were made up about the motives for this attack before being misled by false media accounts or 'fake news'.
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.
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.
> 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...
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... 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.
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.
> 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 ;-)
I want to begin by reiterating that the point of my original post was the adamently disagree with the asseriont that:
>> you don’t see conservatives going around trying to “no platform” people
I think this is false.
That said:
> I think you must live in a pretty opaque bubble. You might expect those things to happen, but they only do in your imagination.
Each of the things that I listed has actually happened in the past few years.
Consider reading, with an open mind, the link from my parent post. It's written by a former Cedarville student, which is about as far from a liberal bubble as you can possibly get.
There exist a contingent of conservatives who are extremely hostile to free speech, to the point where they create entire institutions dedicated to suppressing and blocking out any non-christian, non-conservative influence.
They are right there in plain sight. They do things like publicly threaten to have campus speakers arrested and fire faculty for opposing Republican presidential nominees [3].
Do you disagree these people exist?
> Most Christian colleges are actually pretty accepting of LGBT.
I agree! [1]
In my post, I referred specifically to conservative Christian colleges, not all Christian colleges. And I even named particular colleges that fit the mold.
And, btw, those very institutions agree with the facts I asserted (if not the way I phrased them). Cedarville, Wheaton, Liberty -- the presidents of these colleges will be the very first ones to tell you that you should not expect freedom of expression as a student or employee at their college!
FIRE, a free expression advocacy organization focused college campuses, even creates a separate category for these institutions (and their illiberal [2] peers on the left): "Warning Schools". The meaning is literally what I say: you should expect to be censored and this fact is very explicitly written in their codes of conduct and staff manuals.
> 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.
Wait, have you actually scheduled a conservative speaker on a college campus?
I have.
No mob.
Actually, of all the speeches I organized, only one speaker was heckled. (And the speech/speaker wasn't even remotely political. And the heckler was a conservative, not a student, and I think the heckling that was entirely unrelated to either of those facts. He was just a rude nutjob.)
Just as most Christian colleges are very accepting of a wide variety of viewpoints, most other colleges are very accepting of a wide variety of viewpoints.
You don't hear about the countless of uneventful Young Republican/Libertarian speeches. Or the countless weekly bible study groups that happen without incident.
You hear about the tiny handful that go awry. And then a narrative is crafted.
But the point of my post was not that liberal institutions are a bastion of free speech. Just like the point of my post was not to assert that all conservatives are illiberal re: free expression.
The central thesis of my post was just a refutation of assertion that:
>> you don’t see conservatives going around trying to “no platform” people
by pointing out the very real existence of places like Cedarville/Wheaton/et al. that very much do "no platform" any not-sufficiently-conservative-in-just-the-right-way speech.
And additionally to point out that illiberal conservatives (again, to be clear, a subset of all conservatives) are not new in this country. We are not surprised when a conservative expresses illiberal views (which, again, is not meant to imply that all conservatives are illiberal). Whereas the (also real, also subset) illiberal leftists are a newer phenomenon. Maybe that's why we "see" illiberalism on the left but not on the right?
Because we are used to, we expect, a form of conservative illiberalism re: free expression.
> 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.
It's unfortunate that some conservatives are harassed in this fashion, but this is an anomaly, not a norm. This country has millions of conservatives who are open about their political beliefs (on Twitter, FB, etc.) and do not suffer retribution for expressing those beliefs. E.g., the majority of my friends and family.
And, this sort of harassment also happens to (an also small number of) leftists and even not-quite-conservative-enough conservatives. The one person I personally know who was fired for political speech was targeted by conservatives.
Again, consider reading with an open mind the link in my parent post.
People with illiberal views on free expression and with a vendetta and no decency exist on both the left and the right. Which is why, again, I disagree with the initial assertion that:
>> you don’t see conservatives going around trying to “no platform” people
It's just not true. Those people exist, in plain sight, and are very open about their beliefs. Falwell openly threatens to have people (not-conservative-enough conservatives, no less!) arrested for expressing views he disagrees with at the wrong place and time.
I do agree that we don't always see them clearly enough. I hypothesize it's because they are so overt about their repression of speech.
But you very much do "see conservatives going around trying to “no platform” people".
--
[1] For anyone following along, item #3 in this interview does a good job at distinguishing between the sort of conservative Christian colleges I'm referring to and the hundreds of less dogmatic Christian institutions that have much stronger free expression protections for faculty and students: https://www.thefire.org/is-speech-suppression-at-religious-c...
[2] To avoid confusion: I'm using "illiberal" to mean "illiberal specifically on the question of free expression", i.e., opposes free expression. I use "left" and "right" to refer to more general political affiliation. Hopefully that doesn't cause too much confusion...
I think you’ll find that most conservatives actually just want the NFL to enforce their rules, which already prohibit political speech on the pitch. Something the NFL has enforced in the past against conservative political expression.
So where do you think this no platforming of liberals is taking place?
It’s not happening in the media. It’s not happening on social media. It’s not happening on the campus. It’s not happening in the office.
All you’ve actually been able to identify if _some_ conservative Christian colleges (you haven’t substantiated that, but I’ll accepts it’s probably true to some extent), and the football pitch (which isn’t a political forum to begin with). As I said, you want to have your cake and eat it too.
Edit: it looks like you've been using HN primarily for political or ideological battle. The site guidelines explicitly ask you not to do that, and point out that we ban accounts that do. We have to, because flamewars consume everything if you let them. Please (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site as intended from now on.
I’d like you to elaborate on that, because I don’t think anything I’ve said would be considered flaming. This thread is about a political topic and I’ve simply presented my perspective on it, in what I think is a pretty level headed manner. I also don’t think I’ve been using this site for any sort of battle, I comment on any topic that interests me.
> 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.
That's the thing you don't understand about Republicans. They don't consider regulation on social media platforms as something in their interest.
The model, "IF you don't like something, then advocate making a law against it" is not how conservatives see the world. However, this is the model which liberals subscribe to. There is nothing which liberals don't like, which they don't advocate making a law against it.
Before you point out other things, their model is "Govt should only act against things which are objectively morally wrong, like violation of private property rights".
Keep in mind, they opposed Gay marriage for as long as they could, but at this point, 'reverting gay marriage' is a dying (or never was a) cause among conservatives, reverting 'Roe v Wade' is.
> That's the thing you don't understand about Republicans. They don't consider regulation on social media platforms as something in their interest.
There is a liberty-leaning wing of the Republican party, but it's not currently the dominant force in the party.
There's also a liberty-leaning wing of the Democratic party.
> However, this is the model which liberals subscribe to.
Well, that's just definitionally false... I think you meant "democrats" or "leftists" or something.
But just like the Republican party, the Democratic party has both liberal and illiberal contingents (and the illiberal democrats tend to be further to the left than the liberal democrats). It's hard to say which wing is ascendant because the party is in flux.
US party lines aren't really good predictors of whether someone will support free speech; a slim majority of Republicans support banning flag burning, while a slim majority of Democrats support banning hate speech.
Even "small government" Republicans are far more unified around tax policy and welfare while relatively split on questions of free expression.
In the 1990s, in the midst of the Culture War I, the thing Rs and Ds could really unite around was the illiberal policy of regulating speech in the music industry [1].
> Govt should only act against things which are objectively morally wrong
Ah yes, objective morality! Definitely a thing that exists and is never a source of contention! Now, if only everyone were as objective as me ;-)
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.
> 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.
However, that belief isn't totally without basis. Facebook fired its entire trending topics curation team [1], after allegations that its members suppressed conservative stories [2]. Even though Facebook denied that any ideological suppression took place, their actions in firing the team could be interpreted as confirming them, especially considering how badly their algorithm performed without human oversight afterwards.
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.
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.
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.
Restricting the platform is their right. But the issue is people believing they are being censored and by banning certain ads they reenforce that viewpoint.
> The poll shows that Republicans almost universally believe that these companies censor their viewpoint
To me it looks like the polls say that they believe these companies censor content, and that these companies also lean left. Nothing about their viewpoints.
There's also lots of evidence to the contrary: Twitter refuses to ban self-identified Nazis who incite violence but there are dozens of instances of people getting banned for saying mean insults to those same Nazis.
Making Nazis out to be just a more extreme form of the Republican viewpoint is hardly a good way to engage in discussion about a politically sensitive topic.
I have no problem sending arbitrary images to my friends on both iPhone and Android platforms, over a number of different protocols including SMS. What's the problem?
"Shared emoticons" sounds like what you really want is a way to channel community defined imagery into a palette of images. There are in fact ways to do that now, usually called "stickers".
I'd never want just anyone to be able to define new Unicode targets. We'd soon be overrun with Ricks because idiots.
> 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.
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.
Nope. You basically want inline emojis, in Whatsapp, because that's the most popular messaging service. And you want to be able to click other people's emojis and save them to your own emoji library.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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?
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 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..?
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.
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.
Never heard of Vero. It’s a mistake to think that sites/apps find success by having better features. Especially in social media, the network effect is the only thing that determines who lives and dies.
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 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?
> Is there any evidence to support this assertion and that Facebook isn't merely showing you information that is palatable to you?
I'm not sure why intent matters. The point is I can't turn it off and see all the information if I wanted to. My access to information is being artificially restricted.
> 2) If so, do you wish to impose this expectation on everyone else?
This is completely unnecessary. Just need an option in preferences: Use algorithmic feed [Yes] [No].
Edit: Like privacy, this is another case where the ad-driven business model is in conflict with the best interests of the user. Ad-supported algorithmic feeds optimize not for truth, educational value, or even user happiness, but for engagement. This often means eliciting a strong emotional reaction - positive or negative. In effect algorithmic feeds create the informational equivalent of how grocery stores put high-margin junk and processed foods in the high traffic areas. They want you to buy this stuff - your health be damned.
Of course there is a minimum standard - but the problem is to have effective censors you need to give them a degree of leeway/self-judgement and in a politically charged environment this will lead to bias.
>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.
I like how they justify it by claiming that the tweets were automated. How so? I saw lots of real humans complaining that their tweets were blocked.
I think the logic goes like this: "We wouldn't tweet that. Nobody we know would tweet anything like that. Therefore, this is not from real people." Maybe the Twitter employees need to get out a bit more, perhaps taking a lengthy visit to rural Oklahoma or West Virginia.
There may be some feelings of guilt here. To deal with that, just claim that the tweets aren't from real people.
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.
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.
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.
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:
>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.
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
>> 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.
You literally just said the same thing the GP did while ostensibly disagreeing with him: ML curated content caters to the lowest common denominator - i.e. the content that most people would be okay with.
>I don't think the problem is with ML. You could easily train a net to make boulder selections with an appropriate data set.
Ehhh... mathematically, most ML methods basically assume that the underlying data and label manifolds should be smooth (in the real analysis sense). Sharply peaked output distributions, small mountains of "loved it!" surrounded by valleys of "ugh", are hard to work with for many models, compared to a wavy surface between "ok" and "ok, I guess".
Whether product design or technical/mathematical, isn't that just saying that we have a problem of companies treating consumers as an aggregate userbase that they can train once against instead of everyone being a bit different?
Would that mean more rock and less bluegrass? (I'm kidding, of course)
In all seriousness though, the problem probably is the data set to a certain extent. I am pretty adventurous, true, but at the same time I think the problem is that regardless of what data we collect, we only have the ability to determine if something is inoffensive.
All you need to do is look at a site that aggregates reviews like Yelp or Amazon, and read some reviews. 95% of reviews are either 1 star or 5 stars, and it's obvious from reading the text that the rating is meaningless. "I ordered the wrong item by mistake, 1 star" "Food is overpriced, but the bathrooms are clean and wait staff is attractive, 5 stars."
I find star ratings most useful because people who rate things 2-4 stars generally have the most nuanced and productive things to say about the product, and actually rate things what they think they should be rated, rather than using the rating system as a vote for "rate this higher/lower."
I don't think it's possible to actually come up with good recommendations based on user-reported like/dislike rating. It's not wrong for a user to dislike a song because it reminds them of an ex, but using that as a basis for a recommendation to someone else is entirely useless.
Systems like Rotten Tomatoes works really well in this regard, but almost has the opposite problem, which is that it tends to underrate movies with broad appeal, but that's generally not a problem since users will be exposed to those movies anyways.
I am actually surprised by what appears to be HN's explicit censorship of this topic.
Just two days ago this NYT editorial [1] was on the front page of HN with 20+ upvotes IIRC, and before there were more than 1 or 2 comments the post was deleted and unviewable. (And didn't show up as flagged either -- just totally deleted.)
I'm not sure how many people on HN are aware of what appears to be admin censorship of this topic. And it's not like it's some incendiary blog post -- it's an Op-Ed from the nation's traditional "newspaper of record", part of the national conversation, and relevant to our industry.
I believe you're mistaken. Do you know that item ids are just incrementing integers? We're making it bloody hard on ourselves to get away with censorship that way.
I don't believe that it is hacker news admins that are doing the censorship. There is a flag feature and any post that is flagged is automatically hidden. There is a dedicated contingent of users that will flag anything that goes against their narrative.
This happens for articles that discuss China, diversity, etc.
It would be prudent to let "controversial" subjects stand before the court of public opinion rather than be automatically censored, regardless of how riled up the comments section can get.
Hm, what if it was "anything goes" but buttons to hid things you personally find offensive? If you analysed enough hide-clicks you could perhaps start to softly predict what to hide automatically for that person. By softly I mean blurring it, and not hiding it outright. I actually kind of like the Fb filter allowing quite disturbing material, but blurring it and in effect telling you that, "Hey, you might not want to see this, but it's here if you change your mind." Oftentimes I just scroll past those, because - wow - I really don't need stuff like that in my life, and I'm grown up enough to make that decision for myself. On so select occasions I still look at them, for reasons. But then I at least had a reason! So it's beyond complaining, and I can really only thank myself for looking at it, if I didn't like it after all.
I’ve observed a similar phenomena on articles about the wrongdoings of the US government. Well cited high quality articles about historical or contemporary US aggression overseas disappear quickly even when they had been getting upvotes.
I noticed a similar trend on Facebook. My posts about the tragedy occurring right now in Yemen got almost no traffic on Facebook, despite being worded and cited similarly to my other popular posts.
Yes and that’s the rub. Previously a journalist decided what stories people should hear. Now an algorithm tuned to people’s engagement levels decides what we should see. It may have the effect of burying important stories that make people uncomfortable, which a journalist might not do. Just because people would rather not know about Yemen doesn’t mean we’re better off if people don’t know about Yemen.
I thought there's some pretty robust discussion about people who feel shafted by diversity initiatives. I do feel that anyone who speaks in a hot-headed way gets penalized on Hacker News, and I think that's great. There were a few big recent HN discussions on the matter -- are there clear instances of what you mean on the whole?
It seems to me that there’s some middle area where the person doesn’t understand Bay Area culture but they’re not being rude or hot headed, and yet their genuine questions get downvoted.
I do think there’s some kind of “you can’t discuss that” attitudes on here about certain topics. Diversity stuff is an area I can imagine reasonable and even good comments getting downvoted. Sadly I don’t have any sources, but this is my intuition after reading HN regularly.
> middle area where the person doesn’t understand Bay Area culture... > genuine questions get downvoted
The problem is these "genuine questions," for other people, are received as: bad faith questions, "sea lioning", poorly researched questions (e.g., simple query would find the answer), microagressions, dog whistles, sock puppet arguments, or other incendiary social media argument techniques.
Whether every instance of "hi, I'm new here, why is affirmative action a good thing?" is actually bad faith, etc. is irrelevant.
Diversity as a topic gets downvoted, flagged, and removed because the heat keeps happening on those threads. Regardless of which side you occupy or support or even if you claim to support no side at all, it consistently produces uncharitable and unproductive discussion.
There are a good amount of people who are "asking" those questions in bad faith. And, after a while, it gets exhausting to those who get bombarded with those questions. And those doing that in bad faith know it. It's kinda like a DDOS attack on them.
>> middle area where the person doesn’t understand Bay Area culture... genuine questions get downvoted
>The problem is these "genuine questions," for other people, are received as: bad faith questions, "sea lioning", poorly researched questions (e.g., simple query would find the answer), microagressions, dog whistles, sock puppet arguments, or other incendiary social media argument techniques.
Those things - I don't understand or currently agree with your view, so it's a "bad faith question" - are Bay Area culture.
In the rest of the adult world, it's OK to not share your opinion before asking questions.
Comments like this rightly get downvoted and flagged for being unsubstantive, flamebait, ideological battle, and going on about downvotes. Then of course people complain that it's their politics which are being censored.
I disagree. I think a lot of people not familiar with the term micro aggression think it’s all stupid. But I have been feeling as though I understand better what people mean when they use the term micro aggression. They’re talking about people being rude, inconsiderate, or mean and not even realizing it. And the term micro aggression is used to communicate that they feel uncomfortable and they want the other to recognize that and change their behavior.
I think if someone is making you feel uncomfortable you have every right to tell them. Now if they decide not to change that’s up to them, and you two may choose not to have a relationship moving forward, but it’s okay to share how you feel and ask for change.
However some people decide they are the victim of aggression and they then yell at the other person, and that’s obviously absurd. If you don’t want people to be aggressive at you, don’t be aggressive at them.
But what you’re proposing is that, when someone is feeling uncomfortable, we should make them more uncomfortable. I think that’s shitty behavior and I don’t believe it is helpful. Do you?
What should we do when someone is feeling uncomfortable simply because someone else is has an opposing political view?
Feeling disgust at an political view is a well established medical phenomenon. It trigger the same brain region as smelling rotten food, garbage and contaminated water. How would we go about to prevent triggering this reaction?
What I'm most excited about with Kennedy's replacement is seeing affirmative action finally get the axe. Many, many people think that the erosion of meritocracy is a bad thing even for the groups it's intended to benefit.
I really have a hard time coming up with a field outside of pro sports that is more meritocratic than tech. The assault on that in the name of "diversity" is morally repulsive, and I'll be very happy to see racial discrimination outlawed.
I recently wrote a comment in response to a post here with the title, "Why Women Don't Code?". The post itself was, I think, on the front page and received 104 upvotes. My comment was along the lines of, "we don't know why women don't code (preference vs culture) but [anecdote] and I personally lean towards the preference angle." My comment was down voted twice but afterwards appeared to gain traction with more than a dozen upvotes.
That topic in particular (gender in STEM, feminist topics, etc.) I find is usually a no-go zone anywhere else on the net unless you have a specific opinion abut it, but on HN it wasn't censored and I felt comfortable expressing an opinion.
It's sometimes hit and miss. I think sometimes posts on certain hot-topic political issues are downvoted because many people come here for tech related stuff and don't want to see anything else-- especially that which leads to an unwinable argument.
It's a common misconception, but HN users are overwhelmingly not in the Bay Area. When I looked at this a few months ago, the number was about 10%. (Actually between 5% and 14% depending on how you count.)
In and of themselves, no. However, I think an argument could be made for the visual suppression of posts, which occurs after too many downvotes have been given, being a form of soft censorship. The information is still broadcast but it's made impossible to read unless I copy/paste it or tilt my screen to an extreme angle.
Maybe it's indicative of which sort of conversations I choose to participate in, but I rarely see comment sections go beyond the page fold.
Supposing we take your argument seriously though, comments past the page fold which also have their contrast lowered to the point of illegibility are certainly censored even moreso.
It only takes a dozen short comments or so even on a giant screen. And yes, almost everything is censorship if you redefine censorship to mean any random irksome thing.
Incidentally, I do think the way the comment fading works is pointedly user-hating and dumb (it's traditionally dumb, though!), but it's not really censorship. More generally, since we're talking about taking things seriously, framing forum irritants as some sort of oppression is a solid way to ensure few people take you seriously.
I don't think that describing a system which deliberately suppresses the legibility of posts you've already scrolled to see as 'soft censorship' is an unreasonable "redefinition" of censorship. If you disagree, I suppose I consider you unreasonable.
There's a 'showdead' flag you can turn on in the prefs, that will show you stuff that has been flagged to death. When in the very rare cases something gets moderated in a comment (like removing someone's private info), there's a moderator comment saying so.
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)
I think that’s the wrong question to imply. What it is is an illustration of how big media behaves due to its own implicit ad well as explicit biases. Of course HN isn’t mainstream, but it also experiences some of the same symptoms.
There's two angles to this: general crowd psychology, and how social media tailors the news feed in response to it.
In the old Internet (forums and Usenet), sure, there was crowd psychology too. There always is.
However, these social media designs were far less prone to hiding unpopular opinions. As a general rule, unless you had an overtly strict moderator or something, you could read posts with unpopular opinions, even if the "crowd" disagreed.
Big social media sites (Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/etc.) in contrast use algorithmic reordering, shuffling, and tweaking of your feeds / timelines / etc. Likes / retweets / etc. are one component to what gets displayed on your feed. The net result here is that unpopular opinions are often effectively "silenced". IMHO this leads to a negative and polarizing effect.
I can't call it 100% censorship though. It's different. On most social networks, you are free to, say, start your own little space (a subreddit or your own Twitter space and whatnot) where, say, the less fortunate sides of diversity initiatives are discussed. Unless the subject strays into TOS violation territory, you can probably say what you want. However, there's a good chance in said subreddit (in this polarized environment and considering crowd psychology) that it is the positive side of diversity initiatives that are downvoted to oblivion. And the reverse is true as well. Basically, crowd psychology and the binary like/retweet system ensures that no one hears what the "other side" has to say. Maybe it's a "dark pattern" of sort? Tweak the emotions of the user in the right way, not the wrong way, and they might spend a bit longer looking at that advertisement...
Hacker News doesn't feel as "bad" to me as the bigger social networks for some reason -- I'm not a big fan of upvote/downvote systems, obviously, but at least HN includes tools like the showdead option that's pretty easy to enable. There was a large discussion about diversity initiatives during relevant stories (the James Damore memo for instance), but for others, I know that some of the "crowd" here is wary of overtly political articles period, favoring only pure tech articles. So you are going to get some front page selection bias against articles of a "political" nature.
Usenet's classic problem was that it amplified the most extreme voices in any conversation. Extreme voices and unpopular opinions are different things. You can be extremely polite in expressing an unpopular opinion, and get upvoted on HN.
As I recall, Usenet took freedom of expression to the extreme and a few trolls ruined it. I remember one who referred to himself as Archimedes Plutonium and would spam the discussion of specific science and programming topics with wild discourses claiming the Plutonium atom was god. The turned whole newsfeeds into spam. I believe this is where the comment "Don't feed the trolls" came from. I am all for civil, productive discussion where ideas are refined. There is a time and a place to say, "This is off topic and not producing a productive dialog, so take it elsewhere."
HN and other "distributed moderation" sites tend to quell any discussion that a fraction of the userbase strongly dislikes. Most people don't vote on most comments, so highly motivated people have more say on a particular topic. In some cases, this is a correction mechanism, such as when people with physics education downvote the proponents of fringe theories; in other cases, it may hide useful information, such as in a debate about morality or a similar less certain topic that people acquire strong opinions about without having such high confidence.
However, I find it hard to justify calling this "censorship" because it is the site working as intended. Controversial topics are avoided because the goal of the site is ultimately recreational. There are many things you can't discuss on HN because the userbase just isn't interested, but nobody would argue that HN censors discussions of, say, the hardcore music scene in the Bay Area.
FB/Twitter and HN aren't really comparable here. HN does topic moderation; FB and Twitter do not. There's a lot of room for subtlety here -- you could argue that topic moderation is done in a biased way that ends up behaving like censorship, for example -- but the discussion definitely won't go anywhere if it doesn't make a good faith effort to avoid equating those two things.
That's about what I would expect. It's about the same as discussing the less fortunate side of vaccines, which I would hope is buried as quickly as possible for obvious reasons.
The benefits of vaccines overwhelm the problems, and yes, the anti-vaccine quackery of the last couple decades has made legitimate discussion impossible. It's a similar situation to states' rights, a term which 160 years ago the violent, racist yahoos of the confederacy and their supporters forever poisoned, despite it being a concise descriptive term for lots of legitimate issues.
Why? People on HN skew towards being young enough to be having babies. Why wouldn't you want them to know that it's OK to space out vaccines instead of conforming to the schedule that is pushed on them?
> Why wouldn't you want them to know that it's OK to space out vaccines...
Because it's not.
Spacing them out means they're getting some later, leaving them vulnerable longer. It also lends false credence to the idea that they're dangerous. In many cases, it may also mean kids miss out on the later doses, because repeated doctor visits to administer them may be unaffordable (copays) or difficult (scheduling, transportation, etc.). Multiple visits for shots also exposes them to germy pediatrician waiting rooms more frequently.
I do not agree with anything that you said. However, it is an argument and a basis for a discussion.
You state that such a discussion should not occur, and that those new parents should not have access to those (including our pediatrician, by the way) who state that the current schedule is much too aggressive and can safely be spaced out.
Denying new parents the opportunity for such a discussion is pure and simple arrogance and it does nobody any good except the egos of those who engage in that censorship.
---------------------
Whackadoodles. Nice. The arrogance is strong in this one.
Your own linked article (about not a study, but merely a survey whose demographics and actual questions are hidden from us) states that parents concerns should not be dismissed. This is a discussion about censorship, and you've shown yourself only too willing to engage in it.
Your anti-vax ideas are in the same neighborhood as flat earthers; yeah, we all get that you really really believe it, but that don't make it any more real than the pancake earth model.
The word I like to describe all of this stuff is scientism -- it looks like science, feels like knowledge, but it's just well-formed nonsense.
> And while nearly 90% thought that such spacing out of the immunizations would put the children, and the community at risk of spreading infectious diseases like measles, 37% said they agreed to do so often or always.
(There are also a smattering of whackadoodles in any profession...)
I’m not sure which bias you specifically mean. But in case it’s a pro-diversity sentiment you believe to be seeing, let me assure you: HN is the only social circle where I can /still/ find people insisting “affirmative action is racism”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
As a conservative: What causes it is that you basically have to retreat completely from society to avoid seeing opposing views.
I'd have to avoid all the late night shows, most newspapers and TV news stations, and most social media. It doesn't take long to get inoculated. As a left-leaning person, it's much easier to see almost exclusively your own ideas being reinforced.
> 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'm sure that's a debate to be had--but to apply most applicably to this discussion, I mean "sufficiently offended to leave a website, stop watching a video, block something, report something, or otherwise feel like you've had a negative experience." The kind of things social media algorithms will pick up on.
I think you’re misunderstanding what it’s like to lean left.
You used the word “exclusively”... “As a left-leaning person, it's much easier to see almost exclusively your own ideas.”
I think you’re making a strange assumption here: some of my conservative ideas are almost universally rejected by the media around me, therefore many liberals must feel all of their ideas are universally accepted by the media.
That’s not true though. For example some liberals feel that capitalism is immoral. That idea is almost universally rejected in the media, and by most Americans.
I think your point—that some ideas which are important to you are being suppressed—is important to raise. I care about those ideas and seek them out. (Although I’m conservative in many ways)
But I think you really weaken your position in the debate by tacking on strong claims about how enfranchised leftists must feel in the media.
The people who feel comfortable with the media are really neither left or right. They are people who feel comfortable with the status quo, who feel most happy when everyone agrees and actively move away from discord. Non-ideologues. These people are neither left nor right.
Most parsimonious explanation; conservative adherence to old fashioned liberalism (aka "I disagree with what you say, but fight for your right to say it" kinds of sentiments), which is no longer really a part of the left.
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.)
Definitely. Generating outrage is the bread and butter of outlets like Fox News, talk radio, etc. Sadly many left-leaning outlets seem to be pursuing the same model, because clicks.
>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 indignation and contempt (Ann Coulter, Bill o', any Murdoch publication etc). I've seen "liberal" used as a sneer by conservatives, but never in the opposite direction.
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.
Then I guess you're choosing to watch Fox News, read Breitbart, avoid any political discussion on here or Reddit, watch no late night or comedy TV shows, and work at a remarkably conservative workplace (especially for tech). Maybe you're choosing to read a more conservative local newspaper?
Very little of this is regional because most media consumed is not regional, and most reporters and editors lean left.
Everyone applies "selective empathy". People on the left in the US care very little about employees of coal miners, oil companies, etc because of larger environmental concerns.
In every case, there is some "more important cause" that someone prioritizes that makes it look like they don't have empathy.
This is the same sort of confusion that leads to ideas like "Blue Lives Matter." A life isn't inherently blue. A person isn't inherently a coal miner.
I think you will find a lot of leftists caring deeply about the lives of people who are currently working in coal mines or in a police force, and concluding that the best answer for them is found in different employment.
It is no lack of empathy to the life of a coal miner to say that coal should stop being mined any more than it is a lack of empathy to the life of a soldier to say that a war should end.
It's a lack of empathy when they vote to end coal miner jobs without having job replacement though (which is exactly what Hillary promised for example).
It's the same with people on the right with this immigration issue. They care about immigrants, but they care about rigid immigration policies to prevent "free-riders" even more. That's why you will find very few right-leaning people against legal immigrants as opposed to the many against illegal immigrants.
> People on the left in the US care very little about employees of coal miners, oil companies, etc because of larger environmental concerns.
Or to be more honest, they think white rural Americans dying of drug overdoses is funny. I mean these stupid rednecks deserve it right? Fewer white births than deaths in many states? (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/us/white-minority-populat...)
It's about fucking time!
Now I'm being a bit unfair to the left here partly because I'm more pissed at them, as I'm a liberal who would have thought this was "my team" just a few years ago. Of course there are people that would say all that and probably worse regardless of their politics. But something seems very wrong. IMO it's been a long time since this large of a number of people on either side truly think their political opposition ought to be killed. I've seen people on the left say Trump voters should be shot, he should be assassinated, etc., and I've seen similar shit coming out of the right as well. Not even on the internet; I have heard this things IRL. Maybe modern society/technology has done something really fucked to our empathy? I have no idea, but I'm pretty sure it hasn't been like this as long as I've been alive.
Is that why Obama created a job retraining program for them? Because he cares very little for them? Or is it actually because he cares for them MORE than conservatives who want to lead them even further down the path of dependence on a dying industry.
>Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
I'm sure you meant to phrase it differently but in its current form, your comment comes across as more snarky than substantive or civil.
But now you're trying to make it seem like conservatives tend to more apply logic in their arguments. Considering a lot of their arguments come from religion, I can't agree with that.
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.
Yes, it's a bit of a mental shortcut that doesn't advance the argument much.
They mostly agree with their understanding of the Bible, so extend the benefit of the doubt to issues they don't yet understand.
Similar to supporting a policy because your favorite politician supports it.
Every time I've dug into some divisive issue I see core rational arguments on both sides along with these faith based cop outs or short sighted emotional appeals.
That's implying that conservative arguments are inherently more rational, which simply isn't the case. They have their own sources of argument that many would consider less rational. Religion, for one. Junk science, for another.
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.
Except prolifers don't care at all about the unborn; only about erroding the rights of women. This is why you don't see any of them campaigning to reduce miscarriages or enable better prenatal care.
41% of women are pro-life, to think they are only driven by the motivation to erode their own rights is far too simplistic.
Broad characterization of the opposing side as evil, morally bankrupt, racist, sexist, fascist, communist, or other negative traits is why our politics are so toxic.
> 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.)
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.
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.
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.
"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?
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.
I think Trump has taken almost every conceivable position on every issue, so the claims in the article were presumably true for some particular moment of time.
Could you please not do flamewars on HN? That commenter was way out of line to attack you based on nationality, and we've banned their account for trolling. But you also posted provocations in this thread, and we need people not to do that.
"I think the biggest contributor is just that left-leaning people are more likely to be offended by right-leaning views"
Considering "right leaning views" includes things like women should not have reproductive control over their bodies, trans people should not be able to use the bathroom they feel comfortable with, and gay people shouldn't be married, and people should have their children yanked away from them at the border, yes, I can very much see why they would be offended by that.
You're not getting a lot of people being offended by the nuances of tax policy, for instance.
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.
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.
"If it feels bad it's censorship" is not a particularly useful definition of 'censorship'. It should give you pause that most messageboard complaints about 'censorship' revolve around it - you never see someone passionately argue how their top comment (with page-consuming thread hanging off it) is 'censoring' other viewpoints.
Downvoting and moderation are censorship though. If people dismiss your views out of hand without a rational response, such as a downvote or comment deleted by a moderator, the hurt feelings are natural because it's an action without a rationale (no mens rea).
Why would someone complain about their comment being the top comment? They are the most popular person at that point.
So if you're the most popular person thereby 'censoring' other comments, that's not censorship? It's only censorship if it feels bad? What about the people who feel bad their comment isn't the top comment? I'm in violent agreement that feeling bad feels... bad. It's just that's not what we normally call censorship, if the term is to have any semblance of an objective meaning.
"Downvoting and moderation are censorship though. If people dismiss your views out of hand without a rational response, such as a downvote or comment deleted by a moderator, the hurt feelings are natural because it's an action without a rationale (no mens rea)."
But doesn't that imply that you're entitled to a response? And why would you say there's no rationale? It might not be a rationale that you like, but there certainly is one; your post was either violating the guidelines or wasn't contributing to the conversation.
"Why would someone complain about their comment being the top comment? They are the most popular person at that point."
That viewpoint is part of the problem; votes aren't supposed to be about popularity.
Maybe you take internet points entirely too seriously. If you find that getting downvoted has emotionally wounded you, I recommend abandoning all your accounts and creating new ones with zero karma (presumably much less than your old ones.) This will teach you to disassociate internet points from your sense of self-worth.
It's funny how it's automatically about me when I was making a general statement :). Of course you feel self-righteous and above the fray, but really, you are human like the rest of us.
Most people are unable to decouple their sense of self-worth from the public perception of themselves. It takes a great deal of introspection and self-discipline to detach in the manner described, and even then, it stings at first before the brain kicks in to post-hoc rationalize the response. It's how human beings are wired and a few years of deep thought are not going to change millenia of evolutionary responses.
The expectation that there is no moderation is what confuses me. FB and others don’t have any obligation to provide a soap box to users. Advertisers are usually a different story.
Would you assume I'm right-wing if I do not use politically correct terminology? Will slowing down change my world-view or simply the language I use to express it?
It wasn't directed at your post, sorry. It's the rate-limit response HN gives - users who are "slow-banned" see it on posting more than 1 post every 5 minutes. Another form of censorship, as others can post when you cannot.
As to your specific points:
> Would you assume I'm right-wing if I do not use politically correct terminology?
Frankly, yes. Politically correct speech appears to be today's shibboleth[0].
> Will slowing down change my world-view or simply the language I use to express it?
Slowing down a poster will reduce their ability to express their viewpoint, diluting it among other posters.
I think you misread that post. He was quoting HN's forced cooldown that's imposed if the system thinks you're in some sort of heated flamewar. I assume he means to suggest this is a form of soft censorship tied into the internet points system (which is to say, it seems like he's agreeing with you.)
Oh I see. Did not realize, thank you for pointing that out. I was merely trying to have a philosophical discussion by taking a controversial viewpoint.
There's a ton of liberal west coast idealists on HN who pretty much hate anyone who isn't exactly like them or who they don't understand. They think they're better than everyone else with their Macs and their pure functional programming.
These people can only exist in a bubble though. Most people outside that bubble are laughing at them.
Censorship would be actions initiated by the mods/owners of the forum... it could be fake downvotes, but usually it is much worst then that (shadowban, etc...)
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.
The issue is more it being approved at lower levels, but CEO Jack Dorsey directly killing it: an example of bias at the very top.
Any ad that directly mentions the opposing candidate, no matter how polite, is an attack ad. And there is no guidance from ANY regulatory authority that I can see, that bans, discourages, or even regulates them.
It still isn't an example of bias. It's just an example of Twitter not having clear internal policies and coordination for dealing with sensitive issues.
Which, frankly, has been an issue that plagues them on both sides of the political divide.
That article isn't a "smoking gun", it's quite literally biased propaganda by a paid member of a campaign!
A blog post (not journalism!) by a paid member of a political campaign infamous for its loose relationship with fact and truth, quoting other paid members of the Campaign, to push a particular message that the campaign has been aggressively pushing...
I mean, dude, what the fuck. How can you call what is literally campaign propaganda produced by two members of a partisan campaign PR department a "smoking gun"?
I'm at a loss for words. What is happening to Hacker News?
I don't think refusal to allow a custom emoji with a hashtag is censorship - they didn't ban the hashtag. Custom emoji are a business/marketing/advertising thing, and if we want to restrict the ability of private businesses to decline advertising deals with other private businesses for any reason at all (including "we just don't like you"), that's a whole different conversation, and one I suspect many conservatives will not be pleased with the outcome of.
As the article says, this move cost Twitter millions in revenue. If you don't have the ability to just choose not to make money because you're not interested in the transaction, you don't actually control the company, the public does.
No, your point was, "It is if you allow the other side to do exactly the same, as noted in the linked article."
The other side is not doing exactly the same. The other side never intended to do exactly the same, and for good measure, the CEO promised that if they did, they would be prevented from doing so, too.
You are now making the claim that, if side X exhibits behavior A, and opposing side Y exhibits behavior B, it is no longer legitimate to compare behaviors A and B - whatever the behaviors are, they are exactly the same simply because they're held by opposing sides.
The other side wanted a custom icon. They got it. The content of the icon is irrelevant to the question "did twitter censor political views not shared by the CEO?" The answer is "yes", regardless of the content of the icon granted to the other side.
The content is important though because it's precisely why they weren't allowed the hashtag.
They were allowed other hashtags that didn't have the same negative "attack ad" approach so it doesn't look like politically motivated bias so much as them just not wanting to promote negative attack ads on their platform.
You can call it censorship. That's fair. But it's unfair to call it bias or politically motivated censorship.
You're saying that, because Twitter is not allowing a custom emoji who's entire reason for existing is to be a negative attack on someone, it's censorship?
"No attack ads" isn't the same thing as "no anti-Hillary attack ads". If you can cite the Hillary campaign getting a custom emoji for an anti-Trump hashtag, do so.
> "No attack ads" isn't the same thing as "no anti-Hillary attack ads".
Irrelevant. Twitter denied them a custom icon whereas allowed their opposition to have one. The content of the icon has no bearing on the matter. It's censorship. That is twitter's choice but it is still censorship, based on the CEO's politics.
You're going to have to explain far, far better than just saying, "censorship" over and over again. Especially when the RNC was able to get several custom emoji, and they didn't give out any negative or attack emoji.
The cited example in the linked article is the same side - it's a screenshot of the Republican National Convention hashtag.
I suspect it was approved because #RNCinCLE isn't an attack/allegation on someone else. I also believe it was a Twitter-initiated hashtag, not one bought by the RNC.
I similarly suspect the Hillary Campaign would've seen an application to add an emoji to #DumpTrump rejected. Hell, Pepsi probably can't sponsor a #CokeSucks one.
> However, both DNC and RNC conventions had custom emojis this cycle and they did not use disclaimers.
> But, the only other campaign large enough to have this type of deal would have been the Clinton campaign and my contacts inside TW informed me that they did not have one in place. So basically, “cancelling for all political campaigns” really meant cancelling ONLY for Donald J. Trump’s campaign.
The DNC and RNC both got custom mascot emojis for their hashtags, and the Trump campaign did not get a #CrookedHillary emoji, nor did the Clinton campaign get (or ask for) a similar anti-Trump emoji. So the other side was quite clearly not allowed to do the exact same, nor did they even ask to do the exact same.
Not exactly the same. I don't think any Democratic organizations tried to associate some Donald Trump hashtag with a dumpster fire or anything like that.
Just to be clear; members of the party controlling all 3 branches of government and putting children in internment camps is mad about not getting an icon from a website. Got it.
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.
Even if the social media companies were strictly neutral in the matter
That's probably a big contributor to the perception.
The leaders of many of the big tech companies are very public in their support of certain views, and steer their companies to publicly support those views, as well. So it makes sense for people with differing views to believe that that companies which don't share their views would be against them.
If the tech companies were to focus solely on being good technology companies and not trying to re-shape society, the public might have a different perception.
The exact same way it happens on this site: users flag, system automatically responds, moderators might also respond, and if they do, typically it is to confirm censorship that has already begun.
My understanding of Facebook flagging is that repeated flags move it up in the queue, but do not initiate automated removal. So, if 500 people flag your post about fluffy unicorns as a death threat, it'll be checked in a few minutes instead of a week from now, but it'll likely be reviewed as OK and remain up the entire time.
People feel entitled to be wrong. Like the vaccines thing.
Surely you have that one crazy person pm your facebook spouting crap about autism and the MRR and everyone flipping out at them.
That person is feeling 'censored'.
And now every other person is a 'bot' or a Russian troll.
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
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
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.)
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?
It may well be the case that one of the biggest practical problems with US politics is that large numbers of conservatives simply do not understand what censorship and robust debate look like, and think that deep disagreement from other people like themselves means their rights are being violated.
Sometimes there’s a bit more nuance, but it does tend to come down to this. Often flagging mechanics are pointed to as censorship, or anything which falls short of engaging with someone in debate is censorship. In most cases there’s a lack of understanding that just as they have a right to say something, other people have a right to respond with a flag, or not respond at all. Freedom of expression doesn’t imply an obligation to debate everyone on every point. I’m not censoring an anti-vaxxer by flagging and moving on, I don’t owe them a debate. The government isn’t allowed to interfere in the right of anti-vaxxers to spew, and also in my right to call them morons, or a social media site’s right shut the whole conversation down.
Too often “free speech” is a messy and conflated concept used to basically argue against anyone being told to shut up. Various arguments about the size or dominance of a social media platform are often used to try and get them covered like the government under the 1st amendment. Then if all that fails, the argument switches to free speech as a vague principle rather than a legal right.
To be fair, it isn’t just conservatives who seem to feel this way either. Americans in general just seem, on average, not to understand this issue as well as they think they do.
It is a core tenet of Liberalism (in the actual sense of the word) that yes, free speech does mean that you have a right for your ideas to be engaged.
Moreover people like Mill or Popper would argue people have a duty to engage every idea, because that's how the open society works.
The reduction of free speech to the first amendment and to State censorship is a modern american barbarism that is as absurd as it is baseless in either its historical roots or its application by any free judiciary, including the American one.
Telling people to shut up because their ideas are unpopular is and always will be illiberal.
People have a right to be illiberal, liberal, and everything in between. People have a right to hew to the thinking of Mill and Popper, or ignore it. That’s also an aspect of freedom of thought, and consequent expression. You’re also free not to like it, and I’m free not to care.
Certainly. But free speech is an inherently liberal position by definition, construction and history.
You're free to think that it's all bunk and tyranny of the majority is just fine. Many people do.
I'd just like it to be clear to everyone that such an opinion is being against free speech.
Because what greatly annoys me is when people try to claim that they advocate a "reasonable" version of free speech when they simply oppose it. Or indeed try to claim that their censorious position is a liberal one.
Which I am not at all accusing you of incidentally.
My perception (and apparently that of those asked in the survey) is that conservative opinion gets a disproportionate amount of "I just flag it and move on" treatment.
I would wager a large sum of money that if left-wing opinion were treated in the same way there would be much whining about minority rights and the importance of an individual's free speech from the left.
"it's pretty common for conservatives to encounter left-wing hostility and censorship from other users of social media sites."
Other users can't censor. That's not an ability they have.
And really, the only hostility I've seen targeted at conservative views are those viewpoints that decide that certain people shouldn't have the same rights as everyone else. And I can very much understand that, if you were told that you couldn't marry the person you loved, or even that you shouldn't be allowed to exist in public, you'd be quite hostile to the people who spout those viewpoints too.
Is this even up for discussion? Whatever you think of him, Milo Yiannopoulos got banned because HIS FOLLOWERS made derogatory statements about an actress.
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.
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.