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Comment by patrickg_zill | Hacker News Reader

The issue is that FB advertises itself as "conduit" or "network connection". You log in, communicate with people and the site tools, FB runs ads on your eyeballs, etc.

Similar to how I give my electricity provider money, and they give me electricity.

Now FB clearly sees themselves as (let's be honest) a "power broker" or "rain maker". Not the same as "utility" or "network connection" or "conduit".

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Right, and suppressing news that fits a certain criteria is a really obvious method of control — let's not forget that their algorithms suppress/highlight the people you interact with on their site.

I don't want to wander too far into conspiracy territory... but it's not completely unreasonable to suspect that a platform with such widespread and frequent use could knowingly make tiny adjustments to make a gentle push on society in one direction or another.

Also see previously: Facebook's study to see how content alters users' moods.

I don't think I've looked at Facebook like that at all since they started using an algorithmic newsfeed. I was under the impression that that confirmed them as a "power broker" to pretty much everyone. If you're looking for a "utility" or "network connection" I'd direct you to app.net if they're even still in business

Twitter even, for the most part as far as I understand gives you complete control over your feed, with the (minor?) exceptions of promoted tweets and suggested followers.

It's worth noting the candidate who has been most successful (or at least taken advantage of it) on that platform might fit the parent article's definition of conservative (or at least the sort of content they are suppressing).

Hasn't Twitter recently been tweaking user feeds based on algorithms? Pretty sure I've been seeing mine out of order, with all manner of "you might have missed" and "stuff we think is relevant to you" tweets injected at the top. I think I recently had to flip a setting to try turning off this "stuff we think is relevant to you" off. Maybe that's the promoted tweets, or are those the ads?

The problem is that this is how Facebook advertises themselves. I don't think the above poster was looking for something outside of what Facebook said they did as a business model. Zuckerberg literally said he wants to be "electricity"

I hadn't ever experienced Facebook as anything I felt control over until a few weeks back, when I started ruthlessly pruning stories from people who are serial clickbait sharers. Then I found a few pages (seal watching photos, small town news for my hometown, and urban development) that interested me and set them to always show at the top of my feed. Next I set five or so friends as my best friends. Now, when I log in I get updates about my close friends and my interests, as well as knowing whose birthday it is. If I want news, I can look at the trending news items, where they actually write headlines correctly.

And _that_ is the real value of media. Advertising always was a side business.

Agree. New Media would be a better classification.

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