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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.
res ipsa loquitur
Can't have the truth about Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and CPAC getting out.
Imagine if people heard about their lies? Their false narrative? Their outrageous bullshit?
Nope, better to suppress it.
good. facebook has a patriotic duty to keep the fascist republicans as far away from power as possible.
Conservatives at least claim to be for smaller government, which could be a direct threat to Facebook, since they are a CIA operation after all...
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
The GOP is not Conservative at all. They like to spend as much as the Democrats do. People need to find a better label for the Republicrats.
We're doing our best to harm the party of bigger and bigger government, in order to support the party of larger and larger government.
Conservatism is suppressed because it is a threat to the dominant paradigm. If it cannot be suppressed, terms are re-defined so that they exclude meanings which could be conservative. Most people go along with this, because actual conservative reasoning -- not the watered down liberal hybrid presented by characters such as disguised Zodiac Killer Ted Cruz -- does not flatter the human ego. It requires instead recognition of the smallness of the self, and this offends most people.
Of course, it would be easy to "blame the victim" here and say that, since at least the more libertarian and/or corporatist conservatives see nothing wrong with unregulated near-monopolies then they deserve whatever suppression of their ideology they get....
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
When Zuckerberg is running the show and agrees with your lefty political positions, all of the sudden Corporations have rights and should be allowed to run the elections as long as they support the "correct" positions.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
My politics usually fall on the liberal side, but this is really disgusts me.
"Trending News"?
Really? More like FB propaganda.
The sad thing are the millions who get their "news" from FB.
FB has the monopoly, and it using it well.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Conservative "curator" complains about "liberal" bias. The story is right, SNAFU
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I don't have a problem with them doing it. I DO have a problem with them lying about doing it.
We get enough lies and deceit from conservative sources as it is. It's basically par for the course, at this point. I have much higher expectation from supposedly left-leaning organizations.
Raymond in his declianed In market
the short lived conservative "alternative" to Facebook called "Reaganbook"? (I believe they're rebranded it as FreedomBook...)
All conservatives, all the time. Except, of course, they got trolled immediately, because they forgot to lock off screen names of "Ronald Reagan", "Ayn Rand" and so forth, not to mention zombie variants thereof.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
That's a contradiction in terms
Boom, done. Recommend it to your friends, get them to install it. It's the only thing that makes that godawful site even remotely usable anymore.
Any twitter user right of Stalin will have noticed thing selectively trending, selective auto-compete, and certain comments floating to the top of the list regardless of popularity. Id honestly be more surprised if any social media platform didn't prune it's news feed to fit it's preferred demographic.
So does google. Every day all the time. No one is surprised.
Honestly, we're past this. Facebook et al. provide the romper room world view preferred by the low information crowd and and the rest of us found suitable alternatives long ago.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Just give the news articles political score and balance the news section manually or in the today's world, automatically. Manipulating politically loaded subjects would be more understandable (but even more evil) if bias is the issue, but stories about people coming together to express their constitutional freedoms is not.
Hint: It involved a sniper rifle.
From a scientific viewpoint, isn't the most important thing the free exchange of ideas? The conservatives were right about one thing: communism, which was based on the premise that people's behavior would change, failed, precisely because people are selfish and self-centered, exactly as conservatives said. Is this the stuff that "does not flatter the human ego" that you are referring to? Modern neo-cons take it a step further, by publicly acting as selfish, greedy, and corrupt as possible, in an apparent attempt to teach us that is the way humans really are. But all they succeed in doing is teaching us that conservatives are selfish, greed, and corrupt.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
When Zuckerberg is running the show and disagrees with your righty political positions, all of the sudden corporations can be called out for their censorship despite the fact that the First Amendment only applies to the federal government and everyone else is free to do what they want.
Imagine that: Hypocrisy works both ways.
Everything is biased. An impartial news source does not exist, nor does an impartial news aggregator.
If you aren't interested in the service Facebook provides, or don't like it (for whatever reason), don't use it.
So Facebook is also behind IS? The world wide media was so happy with Facebook that could circumvent state controlled media to spread democracy and to start the Arab Spring. We now know that it was not really spring but the start of brutal civil wars.
Also many critical post about Erdogan were blocked for a while in Western Europe because either Erdogan or Merkel asked to block critics on German/EU/Turkish politics. I don't have Facebook, so I don't know how long it lasted or if it is still the case. But what I do know is that the unpopular proposal of granting 74 million Muslim Turks free access to the EU is almost passed, but I still hope for a miracle that it will not happen (but that is probably a xenophobic, racist, islamphobic thought or like a left wing liberal media would call it: neonazi).
Zuckerberg is a leftist. He openly supports the Democrats. Now i don't have a problem with that but here's the problem: I think that a lot of people that get their news from Facebook truly believe it is unfiltered and crowd-sourced. If this allegation is true then it shows us that Facebook is no better or no worse than all the other news agencies.
Everyone - be it Fox News or the NY Times, or CNN - is selling an agenda. They choose the news they report and all of them put their own political spin on it to advance that agenda. The line between hard news and political commentary is blurred and has been for some time. I believe that the only way to get the real story is to view it from both a right wing and a left wing perspective. The truth usually lies somewhere in the middle.
Nothing that Facebook does surprises me in the least. It's one of the reasons I don't use it. I don't trust them. Not with my personal information and not with news feeds either.
Polarizing the news reporting the name of the game.
Facebook Google FoxNews CNN CNBC. All have news interpretation and filtration embedded in the pipeline.
Outside US the list continues BBC,Aljazeera,RT All in the name of "curating" news according to their requirements.
And this is since forever. But in past we couldn't verify that easy and quick the local bias. because the news used to be local first.
If so then, regardless of this case, you really have nobody to blame but yourself.
Seriously, FaceBook is not sending out reporters and makes no claim to be "fair" in its reporting.
They're a private corporation, I guess part of their function could be media amalgamation but AFAIK, there are no claims to being unbiased or presenting all viewpoints.
What if they said they were sick of the Kardashians and felt people saw enough of them already and decided to downplay news reports they were featured in? What about the KKK? I'm sure there are many mainstream media sites that ignore their press releases and articles written about them. Should there be an outrage over these cases?
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
it is discovered there are people who give a rat's ass about what it trending and, even more impressively, think that Facebook is a news platform.
morcego
Because the wheel turns.
and get your news from real sources: Drudgereport
baaaaah
This is the limit: FaceBook has proven to be a monopoly and should be broken up using gvmts anti-monopoly power + RICO.
No surprise. Since Zurkerberg has been working with the German government to censor Facebook posts there: http://louderwithcrowder.com/facebook-has-begun-censoring-germany/
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Did they suppress news about Bernie Sanders? Because he was ignored wholesale by the media.
Sanders won nearly every poll, and yet the media claims Hillary won, even when the poll on their own pages show Sanders winning by a mile.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Is there any other than hand wavy conjecture? I mean I know I'm crazy not jumping to conclusions right away, but my BS detector goes way off when my Trending topics seem to be nothing but Ted Cruz for Pres ads and conservative matter add to that my entire timeline was almost overflowing with images in support of conservatives. I find it relatively hard to believe anything without at least an attempt at empirical evidence.
So, think what you want about this BUT. Facebook is a social networking app, not a news network. When Bill O'Reilly criticized Jon Stewart for reporting with a liberal bias, Stewart responded appropriately with the fact that he is a comedian, not a news anchor.
Is it ethical or "right" for Facebook to sensor things? That may be an argument to have, but for anyone to expect them to be unbiased is unrealistic. Probably the most unethical thing here is their lack of transparency about it.
Everyone outraged would be better served to have this discussion about news networks or someplace that's supposed to actually be unbiased.
You need news sources that actually pride themselves in their accuracy and thoroughness. Also The Economist is pretty good too.
Neo-con is itself a term that has been popularized and defined by conservatism's opponents. It is intended to demean and diminish an entire group/culture by conflating them with a tiny minority of vocally similar scalawags... kind of like folks who try to define all African Americans by urban gangsters and murderers. There is no moral difference between those mischaracterizations.
the argument is not that they cant or shouldnt do what they are doing but that they should simply be honest about it. if they are messing with trends, its not simply trends and they need to say so
If I understand you correctly, you are claiming that the "real danger" comes from the "socialist" left wing of politics. You curiously attached the adjective "historically", even though, in the history of democracy, not one single time has any established democracy ever been replaced by a repressive Soviet-style stalinist regime. Not. Once. Ever. The closest you get is when the USSR invaded the baltic states early in WW2, but that's more like a country-to-country invasion that would have happened no matter what the regime in Russia was.
As observed by Eric Hobsbawn in The Age of Extremes, real dangers to any established democracy have always, without exception come from the right wing of politics: fascism in Italy, nazism in Germany, Franco in Spain, Austro-fascism, Vichy France, various dictatorships in South America, the colonels' regime in Greece, Salazar in Portugal, the Shah in Persia, Suharto in Indonesia.
And the way dictatorships start is not by censoring news in a private media outlet, however despicable the practice may be; it is by instilling fear in the populace, identifying an enemy (real or imagined), and convincing the masses that they have to give up their rights and trust a heroic leader to gain security and maintain prosperity. Sounds like anyone you know?
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Even liberal wet dreams.
I don't see any right-wing-run social media kicking anyone off because they like marijuana, but a few months ago, Facebook kicked off hundreds of gun groups for vague reasons and banned the admins for 72 hours.
It put Mewe on the map though...
IF FB decided to do this with anyone mentioning pot or other left frequenting topics, they would be crucified in the press on a daily basis, but spitting on 2A rights is perfectly OK to them.
But that's *SO* conservative!
After all, a private company is simply exercising its free speech rights. And if Conservatives don't like that, they can certainly switch to another social network (MySpace, perhaps?). After all, if we require Facebook to be "neutral" then the next day somebody would try to force FoxNews or Breitbart to provide a fair and balanced account of news.
Jews control the media. Nothing new here.
They show you what they want you to see and hide what they don't want you to see. (That is why there are still people in the world who blame Arabs for 9/11, when it was really an Israeli Mossad operation.)
And for pointing out the obvious and telling the truth I will get (falsely) labeled as an anti-semite.
In order to appreciate a varied selection of news and opinions, it is necessary to look beyond what is deemed "trend" by certain groups, websites, services, or algorithms.
A "trend" is there to lead you and herd you. Look for actual news, and start actual conversations. Don't just accept whatever appears "trending." Think with your own head.
I mean, it's Facebook. Who goes there for news? For me, the "trending" crap just gets buried with ads, games, and other FB flotsam. I see what my friends are up to and I'm out. But maybe I'm just doing it wrong.
bravo Facebook.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
... ideas so good they have to be spread by misrepresentation and suppression of opposing viewpoints.
he is however, good at outing a lot of ignorant simpletons that were somehow able to pretend that they were respectable before he came along.
They made it so corporations are people(who never go to jail and can buy their way out of trouble(at a lesser amount than the rules they broke generated)).
Then they made it so "people" could support their candidates/positions using unlimited resources.
Then you look at the billionaires of the world control more wealth than the rest of the WORLD combined...
So they can control everything from candidate selection to presentation; add in meta data and user profiles and they can manipulate how information is presented/found to alter or solidify views desired by the corps.
I'm totally convinced. Fox News should be forced to run pro Obama stories. When exactly did the GOP want start interfering with private businesses?
This Pew Research poll of last summer shows 63% of FB users get their news there (up from 47% two years ago).
ANYBODY who gets their news from only one source simply doesn't care whether it's true.
And we all know what they say about news without truth, right?
It gets repeated...
"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!
FB is a private company. People are not forced to sign up, when signed up they are not forced to spend time. Facebook will use first amendment defense, saying that free speech is speaking freely.
If FB get's singled, why would huffington post, another low IQ and low energy place be any different?
Nobody believes your lies.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
To me, this smells like the manufactured planned Parenthood video that Carlie liked so much...
It is also a reminder of the necessity of ideological neutral aggregators like Newslookup.com and why they continue to exist.
1. that Donald trump is currently the candidate of one of the nation's two political parties and therefore (from the perspective of law enforcement) has a 50/50 chance of being POTUS in 7 months?
2. that Donald Trump is currently protected by the US Secret Service, and that by suggesting his assassination, you are probably now going to be sought out for a friendly little chat? (it's actually a violation of federal law to call for the assassination of a protectee)
3. that this might be taken more seriously since all assassinations and nearly all attempted assassinations in US history have been carried out by left wingers with nearly all vicitims/planned victims being Republicans? (JFK. the exception, was a Democrat in 1963, but by today's policy statndards he would be a conservative. His assassin, typically, was a leftist)
I could go on, but you probably should not waste any time reading internet comments and should instead start looking for a good lawyer with experience dealing with the feds.
Very early in life I was taught: "put brain in gear, BEFORE engaging mouth."
It's amazing how much smoother life goes when following that simple bit of advice.
Slashdot is even more guilty of trying to brainwash their audience. They allow radical leftists to have an open soapbox
"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."
One person makes a claim so naturally, it just HAS TO BE TRUE!
If any kind of power exists, it will be used.
FB is not alone in using whatever it can to do things.... media has always done this, and social media is no different.
Most of it is a balance to the other sides views... evens out, as long as both sides of any thing have supporters...
Out of balance becomes a censorship/brainwashing party...
Your statement would be true if there was another team on the field, but I don't know any TV "news" which is Conservative/Libertarian. I know a few that claim they are, but a self appointed label does not change the ideology they press onto the public.
I know of a couple (2) radio shows, neither are nationally syndicated, who are truly Conservative/Libertarian. They won't be nationally syndicated because of their views. Generally these shows bounce station to station because maintaining a sole station is extremely problematic when you are anti-establishment.
Even the Jon Stewart version of The Daily Show, which everyone claimed disproved the liberal/progressive biased networks, blocked conservative and Libertarian speakers. Now we have the new and improved more progressive version of the show (which I stopped watching because it's just like FOX and MSNBC in peddling propaganda).
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
after all my mommie told me I was special.
Wait a damn minute here. Do you mean to tell me that Facebook is not a politically neutral company run by a centrist or apolitical leader? Are you trying to tell me that Mark Zuckerberg is a left-wing fascist?
Say it isn't so!
Facebook has around a billion users. The effect of a subtle shift in the Trending section, which is on by default and there is no easy way to turn off even if only a fraction of this population runs their eyes past it for a millisecond is absolutely staggering. This should be front page of all the websites and papers. I don't think people comprehend the significance of this.
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
Yes. Re-read that first sentence. Progressivism is the dominant paradigm because evolutionarily, it is a winning strategy. We see problems and say "Let's find a way to fix this." When we see problems that seem intractable for one, we build tools to increase our leverage and/or join together to fix them. This is a good thing, as without it, we never would have done anything.
Don't let this be taken as implying that our conservative brethren are evolutionary losers, and that women looking to improve the genetic outcome of offspring might be better off avoiding their "charms" - this being Slashdot, that would be redundant.
That is all.
They persecuted anyone who wasn't a Nazi (National Socialist) and went after the 1%ers of their day (Jews). Let's just ignore that the modern left does the same thing to anyone who isn't one of them. I mean, the bad blood between Hillary & Sanders supporters clearly means that neither of them are actually Left wing, no?
That these leaders turned into dictators hell-bent on securing their own power over the people should not surprise anyone familiar with how these things work. The same happened with Communists (assuming those don't count as "right wing" now?) wherein they promised the populace that they'd make everyone equal. But then they ran things so as to make the masses suffer while the Party leaders live large.
It's the same damned promises every time. But that wasn't true Communism! Next time they'll do it right! They'll look out for the people instead of their own self-interests! Knowing history, you'll fall for it.
Again.
Their unethical experimentation in 2012 to see what happens when you encourage one subgroup to vote and don't encourage another (hint: you increase turnout for that subgroup) has shown that they don't see a problem "being a force for Good" in the world. Here's them being called out by Mother Jones, of all sites:
The problem here, though, is that there's clear institutional and collective pressure (and group think) that suppressing conservative points of view, preventing conservatives from getting elected (not that Trump is a conservative, but that's a different debate...), etc are all things Facebook has a moral right and/or obligation to do so.
Hell, even if it's not so explicit as that, it's clear that one could up with plausible ways to achieve the results one wants while lying to yourself and others about the real reasons...
"Sure, let's encourage all the 18-24 year olds to vote if it looks like they're politically engaged with social justice groups! Voting is good!"
Social Media Networks (and Google) should be held to a higher standard than regular private websites. Joe Blow's motorsports forum running PHPBB on his grandmother's ISP isn't going to sway the election if it moderates the posts and deletes stuff it doesn't like. Facebook very well could.
And the owners of the 5th estate have thus confessed that they are not only aspiring kingmakers, but practicing ones.
...to stay the hell off of Facebook.
My observation: this election cycle, the news has pushed for Clinton pretty hard. She's pretty center, and right of it if anything. Very corporate, very pro-war, very pro-PATRIOT act, very pro drugwar, etc.
Sanders was subjected to constant downplay and neg-speak. Everything from the NYT to the Guardian. Sanders is, in my view, actually a fairly liberal candidate.
To find media support of him (not voter support, there's plenty of that), you have to hit places like Salon, Huffington post, etc.
Just saying... I don't see the MSM as liberal. Now Fox News... I don't see them so much as conservative as batshit crazy, but that's just me. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
This has led to lower taxes without corresponding cuts in spending.
"Taxes" is a vague word. Please use the more precise terms "tax rates" and/or "tax revenue."
Your statement gives the impression that tax revenue is lower. No, revenue is at record-high levels. And that makes the size of our ongoing budget deficits all the more depressing; these deficits exist because the insatiable spending outpaces the record-high revenue.
Bush 43 reduced tax rates for all taxpayers, but those reductions had sunset provisions that made them expire at the end of 2010. Interestingly, the Democratic Congress of 2010 thought it unwise to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire during the weak economic recovery, and extended them to 2012 for all taxpayers via the "Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010," which President Obama signed. In 2012, he signed legislation making the Bush tax cuts permanent for anyone making under $400,000 per year. I'm glad a realization of economic reality made Democrats abandon their campaign promises to entirely roll back the Bush tax cuts.
spending = revenue + deficit
Now, just tackle the spending side of the equation, where the problem lies.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
No surprise.
The reason Nazis went after communists/socialists is because they wanted a DIFFERENT dictator. (i.e. NOT Hitler)
Totalitarians tend to go like that. Only one boss can be in charge, everyone else trying to be the boss gets killed.
The left lust after power. That's why they lub lub their big guvmint.
But hey, let's ignore what people actually say. Also let's ignore facts.
All totalitarians are the same. Communist/socialist/Nazi - same thing.
and only social issues. So is the rest of the "left wing" media. When it comes to money they keep their damn mouths shut and do what they're told by their corporate masters. Christ, even HuffPo is kinda quiet on money issues. So yeah, for gays and abortion we have a "liberal" media. For anything else that matters (including drug policy and war policy) they're right of center or just plain far right.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
it never starts like this. It always starts with a big economic collapse that takes food from peoples mouths and makes them desperate enough to kill. Everything else comes after that as an excuse for the killing. Food and work shortages have _always_ been the problem.
As for your little spat against Political Correctness (it's really what you're getting at) I'll just leave this here.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
the reason they're not conservative is they're not in favor of maintaining the status quo, which is the definition of "conservative". They support massive society sweeping change, which makes them very much _not_ conservative. I'd be more likely to call them Radical Regressives than anything else.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I didn't say he was a Democrat. I was indicating he is liberal. He's certainly the most liberal of the big three that remain. And I'm pretty sure he's never identified himself as a communist. His label for himself, which I'm inclined to think isn't too far off the mark, is "Democratic Socialist."
Me, I identify as a compassionate constitutionalist. I think we should be following the rules as originally intended by the authors, which I also think is pretty bloody obvious, but I think most of the rules suck. Everyone hates where I stand. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I sold all my facebook stock as I can only assume that many will follow suitas story gets out
tell you this.
The reason people claim there is a liberal bias is because there are more liberals in America and they make up a larger TV audience. That's why so much programming is liberal and have been for decades. Almost all the news stations have a liberal bias because liberals make up more of the population and have for decades and intelligent conservatives have long known that. That's why they don't want increased voting numbers. They would lose more elections. Even Fox has and started out with almost all liberal programming. The crazy conservative news thing only came later and Fox is the youngest of all the news stations. I think liberal shows with conservative news is a solid propaganda delivery model for mass changing people's minds, even if only a little, propaganda over time does work and often works surprisingly well. That is why trillions per year are globally spent on marketing, even when you can almost never quantify how much the advertising helped your revenue. Liberal news makes more money because it appeals to a larger audience, it's just supply and demand. Demographics are also all going more liberal.. are we supposed to give conservative equal air time just out of tradition now? It's not going to happen. Media is a for profit endeavour, they print what sells and liberal media contains to grow in popularity decade after decade. It's a clear sign of the long term trend of the country. There are no more accurate polls than what people are watching.. TV ratings and torrent downloads are quite accurate views of what people are thinking an interested in at any given time. In any case.. if there was a conservative majority in the US.. there would never have been a liberal media. The two ideas just don't go together at all. Media is controlled by mega corporations most often with conservative CEOs and board members. They want money, so they base their programming mostly off ratings, not political ideology. That may not translate to voting all that well, but if you think the media is liberal then you have to think most of the country is liberal and thus it's only fair that they get a larger chunk of media representation. That's democracy.
In the article in Gizmodo, it says:
"Stories covered by conservative outlets (like Breitbart, Washington Examiner, and Newsmax) that were trending enough to be picked up by Facebook’s algorithm were excluded unless mainstream sites like the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN covered the same stories."
One of issues in current political discourse is that many conservatives view Breitbart, for example, as a news source, as opposed to an opinion source, or maybe a whack-a-do outlet.
Slate and Salon on the other side, are tilted left, I would say less whack-a-do than Breitbart but at times equally passionate. Or strident.
So, some conservatives curators find that not allowing Breitbart or the Drudge Report* to be a sole source, and they cry bias. Were there left wing sources that were also not allowed to be the sole source? That isn't mentioned in the article. Maybe, maybe not. We need some fair and balanced reporting here!
On the simple quote I used above, does that mean bias or does it mean responsible journalism vs cheerleading.
More facts, please.
*The Drudge Report got the Monica giving Clinton BJs story, but it failed on asserting the major news outlets were suppressing the story. They were vetting it instead of rushing into print something that may or may be true. Since then the Drudge report has oft been fact checked, and has an abysmal record.
But conservative values are "hate speech".
The liberal media is going out of their way to try and provoke some mentally ill person into assassinating a candidate for the US presidency, and people don't see a problem with that?
I would love to see the secret service prosecute some of the fools making these editorial calls. You can, and in some cases should, be executed for that kind of shit.
Sadly, if anyone is using FB for its stream of "news" then I suppose this is relevant; however I have plenty of right wing nut "friends" posting anti-Mexican, anti-Muslim, anti-every other culture, pro-Trump-isms and bigot memes.
On the other hand, when presented with groups about literal neo nazis, white supremicists, hate groups of all kinds they claim those groups don't violate their terms of service.
Same thing for posts which espouse bigoted views. Nope, not a TOS violation. They won't take it down.
As noted by someone above, it goes both ways.
So pleased that someone somewhere is finally holding these rabble rousers at bay. A bit of their own medicine seems about right.
Isn't that what Faux News does? Who cares? Not like I'm a some online sheep. I can make my own decisions and nobody's censoring of the news is really going to change that.
Facebook should allow its users to suppress ALL that crap called a "News Feed".
Plus all those game notifications, and suggestions of this and that.
Or change its name from "Facebook" to "AnnoyingAss"
They were doing it for factual reasons and not political ones.
Just another second banana
I, too, remember when the WSJ was pretty much the Gold Standard of objectivity.
I have been a libertarian since the 70's, and the WSJ rarely offended my sensibilities - facts are facts.
I have been unable to stomach it since the flowering of the Murdoch era and its embrace of authoritarian mercantilism as the lens through which it filters reporting.
ONE PERSON makes a claim, one that conservatives want to believe is true anyway, all they all go apeshit.
On the other hand, over 90% of scientist publicly support the evidence that global warming is real and man-made.... but that's NOT ENOUGH for the Right, they need more proof and still believe it's all a hoax.
you are improving your own standard of living at the expense of future generations.
Yes, do you remember a scheme to spend borrowed money proposed by Gov. Schwarzenegger in 2008? He called it "a gift from the future."
Wrong -- future generations would more accurately call it "larceny from the past."
That that is is that that that that is not is not.