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Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News (gizmodo.com)
Michael Nunez, reporting for Gizmodo: Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network's influential "trending" news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site's users. In other words, Facebook's news section operates like a traditional newsroom, reflecting the biases of its workers and the institutional imperatives of the corporation. Imposing human editorial values onto the lists of topics an algorithm spits out is by no means a bad thing -- but it is in stark contrast to the company's claims that the trending module simply lists "topics that have recently become popular on Facebook." The revelation comes amid a report on the same publication which claimed that a small group of journalists controlled and decided what should trend on Facebook. Also recently, a leaked screenshot revealed Facebook employees asking whether they should do something to prevent Donald Trump from becoming the president.
Sure, that sounds appalling, but Facebook itself is disturbing when you realize it is intentionally structured as an "echo chamber" to reinforce people's existing beliefs. One can only "Like" posts, there is no mechanism for pointing out they are stupid, and one only receives updates about the posts from people one is friended with, which means you probably have conforming views to begin with!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
You mean mocking adversaries (calling someone a Rino) is the same thing as censorship to you?
Free Speech zones is a little more complicated. People going to an abortion clinic should not have to walk through a gauntlet of people shouting murderer at them, just as people going to a Trump speech shouldn't have to go through a gauntlet of people yelling racist at them. How do we draw the line between competing rights on public property? It's not cut and dried and and it certainly is not censorship. (Unless there is more to free speech zones than I'm aware of).
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Only because the left is incredibly happy to relay his insanity verbatim.
Just this week he has gone from repudiating the debt to inflating it away.
What's more, it's only Monday
"Another former curator agreed that the operation had an aversion to right-wing news sources. “It was absolutely bias. We were doing it subjectively. It just depends on who the curator is and what time of day it is,” said the former curator. “Every once in awhile a Red State or conservative news source would have a story. But we would have to go and find the same story from a more neutral outlet that wasn’t as biased.”"
Ah, so they were censoring sources that were known to be bastions of conservative misinformation. Ah yes, beat the drums.One guy said "THEY WUZ CENSORSING MURICAN PINIONS" and a moderate said "Eh, what we really did was remove sources that we thought were overly biased and replaced with a more neutral source."
Oh my god, my moral barometer is shifting with the moon phases and you can't explain that. I'm just OUTRAGED. Liburaldumcrats are RAPING my ECHO CHAMBER BY NOT SPREADING MISINFORMATION!
1) I don't think Trump is as conservative as his followers seem to think: I do think he's an isolationist, but I know plenty of liberals who would prefer isolationism over the current policy (for different reasons perhaps). In terms of the usual conservative trash (i.e. returning to the theocracy that never was), he's very weak and makes no attempt to hide it. The biggest fear that many of us have, is that he tells us what we want to hear, but we have absolutely no idea what his real agenda is. A lot like his competition...
2) I have not seen a shortage of conservative news on Facbeook. While it may be getting filtered by useless things like Facebooks recommendations and trending stories, the users of FB that i am connected with have been spamming me for years with Benghazi, email, religious shit, etc. such that I am inundated with conservative "news". I actually don't see much liberal news.
I think this is a story for the sake of story and does not reflect how people use or perceive Facebook. As far as I'm concerned is is a place where I get spammed with Faux News stories. But then I rarely read the trending bar because 9/10 it's celebrity "news". The other 1/10 is bombastic headline that always turns out to be unsubstantiated.
Proof you are wrong, sir: Hugo Chávez won all his elections fair and square, according not just to himself but to former US president Jimmy Carter, who was quoted saying "Venezuela probably has the most excellent voting system that I have ever known".
Chávez' opposition, instead, organised riots, a coup against him, and he was so magnanimous as not to have them sentenced to death (which is undoubtedly what would be done in case anything remotely similar were to occur in the US; it's called treason).
Just because you don't like his policies, his attitude or his inept successor does not make the man a dictator. And by the way there are still elections scheduled in Venezuela, and it is likely Maduro is going to lose.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
So, all that persecution of socialists and communists, all that Barbarossa business, all that money the Nazis got from Krupp and the German aristocrats and industrialists, and that little issue with racial purity—that was all a charade? The No True Scotsman brought to new heights...
I hope you are trolling, because the other diagnosis is that you are so retarded you could be a Trump voter.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Americans tend to get all high and mighty about their First Amendendment fetish. You guys tend to forget that censorship is huge in the US. Facebook and Apple censor all female breasts for example. Yet we now know that female breasts are as biologically sexual as male breasts. Muslims like to censor female hair, just like Americans like to censor female breasts. Showing them on American Facebook can be as political as lifting your veil and showing your hair on Iranian television. Who gets to decide what is political and what not? The most powerful censorship tool of all is the copyright. Because if an American media company sends out a copyright notice, Google, Facebook and Apple will block the content internationally. Censorship requests from Europe (such as the recent "right to be forgotten" legislation passing in European parliaments) will only be applied to visitors from the countries of origin. Thus censorship via American copyright trumps other forms of censorship.
Then there is also censorship of images of the dead, child porn and other things also labled "offensive" in most countries (many more than just naked people, which are not deemed offensive in most of the US). Is an image of a dead Taliban or dead American soldier political? Who cares? You don't get to see it, because it will be censored. So there isn't even a discussion on that. Who does those? Fillipinos. There are legions of Fillipino clickworkers who decide what get's censored and what not on Google, Facebook, Apple and the like. They were chosen, because the Philippines are Christian, thus their value system is deemed close enough to our so that they have an idea what offends us and what not.
In Germany we get offended more by hate speech than by boobs. But I guess Fillipinos don't care.
Getting your panties in a bunch over this piece is laughable. Sorry. Media was always about gate keeping. It is always about censorship. About deciding what to report on. And, perhaps more important, what not to report on. Reporting on a rape by a Mexican immigrant is deciding not to report on hundreds or thousands of other rape cases. Showing a border crossing where refugees are rioting is deciding not show dozens of other border crossings where nothing is happening. Reporting on a murder in one town is deciding not to report on twenty other towns without a murder.
Your First Amendment religion kinds prevents you from seeing that censorship is everywhere. And because of American media dominance, this religion is spreading all over the globe.
The current biggest censor, is the Google algorithm, btw. It decides what to show you on the front page, when you search for something. And it is also one of Google's biggest secrets. By only relying on a handful of major operators to decide what we see and what not, we now trust a very limited number of gate keepers. Of censors. What happens when they don't decide to censor something? Europe's biggest story of 2015 was the refugee crisis. Those refugees organized over Facebook. They found their human trafficers over Facebook. Facebook and the smartphone were the single most influential tools that allowed the scale of the refugee crisis to emerge. Zuckerberg could have stopped or even prevented this from happening at a touch of a button (or a couple of clever algorithms, written by his engineers, or even a couple Fillipino clickworkers). Google can easily disrupt communications on GMail. We have already seen WhatsApp censor messages about rival messengers even after the Facebook takeover.
I am not against censorship. I think SJWs are onto something and I am personally quite offended at the things Trump is saying. And I think a lot of idiots dismiss SJWs, because they don't quite grasp the concept of why exactly we don't use the N-Word anymore.
I just think we should choose the censors more wisely. Those Fillipino clickworkers I mentioned need to be replaced after less than 24 month (most of them quit anyways) because of psychological issues stemming from looking at disturbing images a
Newspapers - holy god, have you never read the WSJ?
I know something about the WSJ. I read them for 30 years. I was a journalist, I ran into their reporters, and I used to pick up stories from the WSJ all the time, adding my own reporting, and frequently interviewed/fact checked the same sources they interviewed.
For all that time, the WSJ had an uncanny reputation among left and right for objective, accurate, unbiased reporting that was not influenced by their advertisers or publisher. That was unusual in the news business. One of their reporters, A. Kent MacDougal, wrote a great article for Monthly Review about how he, as a socialist, could write anything he wanted as long as he backed it up with facts.
The great moment that established the WSJ's credibility was when in the 1950s they got a leak of General Motors' new cars, and GM didn't want them printed. GM threatened to cancel all their advertising in the WSJ if they printed it. The WSJ printed it. GM cancelled their ads. GM needed the WSJ more than the WSJ needed GM. GM finally came crawling back, and it was a long time before the WSJ took them back. There really aren't too many newspapers or magazines that would stand up to a major advertiser like that. I used to read stories on auto safety and pollution in the New York Times that were effectively censored by their auto advertisers. Ms. magazine throughout its history published cigarette ads (which according to Ms. advertising policy, were a seal of approval), while running stories on every cancer except lung cancer.
The reason for that, I concluded, was that the WSJ was owned by a wealthy family, the Bancrofts, who were politically liberal but believed in free speech and balanced journalism, and weren't out to maximize their profits. If every wealthy corporate owner was like the old Bancrofts, America would be a better country. But the next generation of Bancrofts were more interested in money than principle, and sold out to Rupert Murdoch. That's my great man/woman theory of journalism.
Under Murdoch, the WSJ has indeed become a corporate whore. I tried to give him a chance, but stopped subscribing when they started writing about "death taxes." Great journalism was worth $250 a year. Murdoch propaganda is worth zero.