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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
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.
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.
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.
Ummm, actually it's the left-wing "news curators" who are being the Fascists here...
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
Right because today's "safe space", "rape-culture", anti free-speech, socialist youth aren't anything to worry about?
The wealthy are always going to be a bunch of pricks. But nothing scares the bujeezus out of me more than the monolithic intolerance coming out of youth movements today.
We should all be deeply concerned by it. Historically speaking, that's where the real danger is. And it starts *exactly like this* every time.
Exactly.
Censorship is censorship. And one should note that FB is censoring news that's rising organically.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
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!
And another liberal demonstrates that it's just a short road from liberalism to fascism. No ideas allowed that don't resonate in the echo chamber.
Cause a conservative would never advocate for censorship when it served their purposes, would they?
Blocking opposing views is wrong.
If they are lies or dangerous, make sure you have a proper rebuttal ready but just don't block it.
Crazy Liberal Views are just as bad and dangerous. And if you stop and listen to even the Crazy views you find that both sides are feeling that there is some force that is disempowering them. The Conservatives thinks it is the government who are making laws that hinders our freedoms. The Liberals thinks it is the company's who combine low pay with expensive products that prevents us to get ahead.
Both sides see that there are people with power to control us and get the feeling the games is stacked against them.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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
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.
It's not censorship. Facebook is not restricting freedom of speech nor are they preventing anyone, anywhere from publishing content of any type in any manner of their choosing.
Facebook provides a service. Part of that service is providing you content THEY want to deliver. Don't like the content Facebook delivers? Don't use Facebook.
Is it censorship that Facebook doesn't provide me with my daily BBW jerk off material? Did Facebook shut down the BBW porn site I visit? Did the government, using force of law, manipulate hinder or block any of the stories provided by Facebook, or prevent me from obtaining BBW jerk of material on the internet or printed media?
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...
Also, Rupert Murdoch (of Fox News fame) purchased myspace.com, the forerunner of Facebook, in an effort to compete in the social media realm. But, it couldn't get traction.
It seems progressives fail in AM radio and conservatives fail in social media for some reason, despite repeated attempts.
Table-ized A.I.
Yes, relying on Facebook as a news outlet is not the best idea. But you know, people are doing it. They're also relying on outlets like The Daily Show - essentially a comedy that's also got a strong liberal bias. It seems anyone under 30 is relying on pretty bogus media for their news and dismissing this development as "nobody to blame but yourself" is missing the point. It's happening, it's strongly biased propaganda and if it was conservative biased the pundits and media would be going apeshit (remember the fairness doctrine and Air America?). The question is, should anything be done about it and if it should, what? Right now, about the best that can be done is to expose it and hope that people are willing to see the truth that's in front of them. If they're not, well, then let it burn.
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
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.
"Not a crime" doesn't make censorship acceptable. It's not a crime to produce shoddy merchandise or to be a patent troll either.
At least in the US, conservatives stand for small government. Except on the issue of abortion, and sex education, and recreational substances, and national security, and pornography, and broadcast indecency, and regulation of marriage. Oh, and they insist the government has a duty to issue non-binding religious proclamations telling the people who and how they are supposed to worship and erect tax-funded monuments to their deity. And regulate who is allowed to use which restroom. But aside from all that, they stand for small government.
NPR has, recently, shit the bed in terms of "thoroughness".
I'm thoroughly, pun intended, disappointed in NPR's coverage of the recent campaign cycle.
I would honestly rate Fox News and CNN, which is a very, very low bar, as being more "thorough" than NPR.
But remember, even though NPR is "public", NPR itself has its' own agenda which does get influenced by outside entities.
Right because today's "safe space", "rape-culture", anti free-speech, socialist youth aren't anything to worry about?
today doesn't worry me, it's tomorrow's "rape space" and "safe-culture" that have me truly concerned. one can only extrapolate that soon after, we'll have "space rape" and "culture safes". the future... so terrifying.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
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!
>>You're just old and confused by people not wanting to give a podium to nakedly racist sexist assholes.
Ageism. Not quite as trendy as "racism" and "sexism," as it's inherently a disease of the fashionably young. But you're an ageist.
>>we don't need to give them a space to talk
Yeah, son, actually you kinda do. And that space is called "everywhere in the U.S." You're just young, and confusing the rights you think you *should* have with the rights outlined in the Constitution that you actually, legally, *do* have.
Hold up a second. Media outlets in the U.S., despite not being an actual part of the government, can censor. And they have. And they do.
When they do it, however, it's not abridging your First Amendment rights.
It's when the government tells you "You can't write an article about this." that it's potentially abridging your First Amendment rights. (I say potentially, because it could involve national security, and that starts getting tricky.)
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Piling on with another example of "monolithic intolerance coming from youth movements" leading to mass murder for the historically undereducated.
Maoists rooting out capitalists killed millions during China's Cultural Revolution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution - also covered briefly in pop culture in "The Last Emperor")
Nobody believes your lies.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Actually, that you believe there is a SJW movement to be deplored speaks to the effectiveness of the extremists on the right to concoct a narrative.
I'm sure there are some nutjobs, but c'mon, there's no movement.
What people are upset about with Facebook is that they misrepresent their editorial choices as "trending topics"; that is, they are falsely saying that their editorial choices represent majority opinions.
When HuffPo journalists are frothing at the mouth, they put their byline on it.
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.
Yeah, son, actually you kinda do. And that space is called "everywhere in the U.S." You're just young, and confusing the rights you think you *should* have with the rights outlined in the Constitution that you actually, legally, *do* have.
Let's get this straight: telling you that your hate speech is unwelcome in no way infringes upon your first amendment rights. Conservatives seem to think that they ought to be able to say anything at all, no matter how offensive or misanthropic, without having anybody call them out on it. Freedom of speech doesn't protect you from disagreement, and it doesn't protect you from being publicly lambasted for your opinions - it merely means that you can't be thrown in jail or otherwise silenced by the government.
No, you get this straight, my Precious Little Snowflake: one cannot give offense, one can only take it. So un-bunch your panties and recognize that much of that "hate speech" your holding your hands over your ears to avoid hearing may just be another, considered, point of view.