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Comment by throwit992 | Hacker News Reader

I have no great love of conservative politics, but there's a convincing argument to be made that their ideas and views are routinely suppressed by media outside of explicitly partisan media outlets (i.e. Fox News or talk radio).

There are a number of studies that back up this claim. A 2008 study[0] found that 88% of journalists donate to the Democratic party. Jonathan Haidt has shown[1] that non-economics social sciences skew more than 14-1 liberal to conservative (and that universities have not always been so skewed).

For anyone who believes these statistics are not based on overt discrimination based on political viewpoint, a recent study[2] showed that discrimination by party is stronger than that of race. The study did so by reproducing a landmark study that demonstrated the existence of unconscious racial bias (the implicit association test), but instead using political indicators. They found that partisan political positions triggered implicit associations 50% stronger than that of racial biases. There is also a recent book called "Passing on the Right"[3] which provides some personal narratives of conservative academics.

If you're relying on academic knowledge to provide you a sense of reality, you're viewing reality through a lens that is biased to a 93% degree towards one political pole, and then receiving that knowledge through a media system which is biased to an 88% degree towards that same political pole.

Even if you, like me, generally believe that the liberal political position is correct, ideological conformity of this magnitude should frighten you.

[0] http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/130902

[1] http://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/09/14/bbs-paper-on-lack-of-...

[2] https://pcl.stanford.edu/research/2015/iyengar-ajps-group-po...

[3] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/03/30/new-book-deta...

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> Even if you, like me, generally believe that the liberal political position is correct, ideological conformity of this magnitude should frighten you.

What it does is make people whose views fall out of that bubble feel disenfranchised. This is no small part of the Trump phenomenon.

I was watching a documentary about South American politics yesterday and there was a globalist establishment candidate running against one that was a protectionist populist. It was strange to see that the globalist was on the right and the protectionist was on the left and that is exactly the opposite of what we are seeing in the US election this year. After decades of people on the left lamenting that working class Republicans don't vote in their own interest the left is in a panic now because they are.

No one saw this coming and the media lock down is the reason why. When it's easy to smear anyone who does not take a globalist position as a racist that part of political discourse goes underground until it pops up in the voting booth.

I think it also helps to have someone "legitimize" what are relatively to mainstream news "outcaste" views. It also helps when you have a charismatic person personifying those ideas.

Palin, for example may have had similar opinions but was not charismatic. Trump on the other hand sounds like your regular blue collar worker --I've known black as well as white blue collar workers and they speak just like that. When they make a mistake, they don't try to explain it away like a Clinton or a Bush. Nah, they just come out and say, yeah, I was probably wrong and this is why and offer some plausible support for the argument. Also, I think lots of working class people have felt funny about politicians tiptoeing around issues rather than just being a bit "vulgar" about things and that appeals to some people. If you ever listen to how people who take buses to the poorer areas of town talk, just sit at one of those stops long enough you'll know what I mean. They are unfiltered and speak as they feel without any affected tiptoeing.

Wow, I never noticed this until now! I come from those blue-collar places you talked about, and I can't stand people who try to run away from what they've done, as it feels like they're trying to dodge responsibility for what they've done! Better to screw up and apologize than screw up and deny screwing up!

This irritates me with corporate management types too, trying to tell you what to do without telling you, and therefore avoiding responsibility for their guidance.

I'll have to think about this more, thanks again!

It was strange to see that the globalist was on the right and the protectionist was on the left and that is exactly the opposite of what we are seeing in the US election this year.

Realistically, the terms "left" and "right" don't mean a damn thing in modern politics, at least not in the US. There's not really a cohesive ideology that you can say is "the left ideology", or one you can call "the right ideology". Both labels are, at times, attached to a smorgasbord of ideas, some related, some unrelated, and probably some that are diametrically opposed to each other.

Mostly those words exist simply as pejoratives now.

And to the extent that they have any meaning, the idea of one dimensional model of political orientation is brain-dead anyway. You can't actually reflect the variety of political belief like that. Take, for example, Libertarians, who are, as the old joke goes "left of left, AND right of right". That shouldn't be possible, and yet, here we are.

We really ought to quit talking in terms of "left" and "right" and find a richer and more consistent model to describe political orientation.

>We really ought to quit talking in terms of "left" and "right" and find a richer and more consistent model to describe political orientation.

We would need a higher dimensional political process to apply it to, first. A two party system can only describe one-dimensional politics.

I believe referring to our system as a "two party" system is mistake. In the United States there are far more than two political parties, although two specific parties dominate electoral politics. BUT, continuing to refer to the system as "two party" simply perpetuates this belief that there's no reason to vote for "third" parties, even though "3rd party" candidates DO get elected. Most of them are at the city council / county board of commissioners level, they they get elected and hold office.[1]

And as long as we stick to this incorrect single dimensional model, we make it even more difficult to talk about 3rd parties, exactly because some (many?|most??) of them don't fit the simplistic left/right continuum. To continue with an earlier example, American libertarians do not fit cleanly on either side of that model. I'm pretty sure there are other examples, but the Libertarian one is the one I'm most familiar with.

It's something of a chicken-or-the-egg problem, granted, but right now it's probably easier to start changing the language we use, than it is to overcome first-past-the-post single-member-district voting systems, etc. [2]

[1]: https://www.lp.org/candidates/elected-officials

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger's_law

Fair enough.

It's not a two party system, but it is a two-party dominant system.

Good observation but my point was that the Right in the US election is adopting a position with regard to trade that is people on the Left in the US advocate but only for other countries.

That is a puzzle that should be teased apart.

This "seems" like an American phenomenon. As a liberal, I can have a fully formed debate with a British Conservative, A Canadian conservative, a European conservative (sans latent Nazism), however the dominant American conservative seems to be operating on a completely different plain and set of assumptions. I find it extremely difficult to relate to and debate the American conservative. In general, if an american <insert institution here> (college, newspaper etc.) seems uber-liberal in America, it is just run-of-the-mill centrist in most other countries. Not because of any stated or unstated institutional biases, but simply because its been labelled so by a relentless, uncompromising, hyper-focussed and hugely disciplined conservative media looking for easy answers.

P.S: Also the predilection to openly say "Compromise is impossible", esp behind the scenes, also seems to be a unique attribute of the American Conservative.

>>> I find it extremely difficult to relate to and debate the American conservative

Yet, the topic here is that conservative-related news items appear to have been suppressed or down-scored on the influential Facebook trending box, presumably by liberal or liberal-leaning curators (or algorithms written by liberal leaning programmers).

How do you conclude that conservatives are uncompromising or closed minded when in fact it is the liberal side that is closing the door here?

Most of Facebook's users are international. There is a chance that what is "liberal" in America is simply something that runs counter to the American conservatives disciplined beliefs.

Example #1: When a prominent American conservative does something like shutdown the government instead of compromising (remember compromising gets you booted at the next elections see: Paul Ryan). To most of the world (liberal and conservative), this is nuts. Facebook bubbles news reports about how "crazy" this is to the top. American news media will most likely call this a liberal bias when really it's just an international one.

Example #2: If facebook, editorializes a giant Ice-sheet melting and how that is related to anthropogenic global warming (something most International conservatives have accepted), most American conservatives will call that to be liberal bias. Note that this is not about policy decisions, most international conservatives don't agree with Carbon Taxes for instance, but one of just straight facts and assumptions.

Your examples are not what happens though. What happens is promoting stories favorable to democrat politicians, hiding stories favorable to republican politicians, covering up "refugee" crimes, reporting completely made up "evil right wing death squad nazis" doing evil anti-refugee things that never happened, etc, etc.

> covering up "refugee” crimes

This. Facebook agreeing to work with German government to do something about “racism” comments in German version (read: FB users talking about Cologne attacks that weren’t covered by mainstream press at all for weeks). FB blocking links to a mainstream respectable media’s article about freedom of speech in Czech version.

I have no doubt that FB doesn’t consider it bias. They’re righteous and seeing that attitude all over the supposedly “liberal” sphere is frightening.

Because when has hyperbolic stories about immigrants ever gotten out of hand?

I don't know, when? And what exactly is "out of hand", and how out of hand does it need to be before censorship becomes good?

In Australia. You might want to search for "The Children Overboard Affair".

I don't follow. That story got out of hand? In what way? And again, how out of hand does a story need to get to make censorship good?

Try looking it up first.

I did. Now please explain what you mean. Acting as though anyone who can not read your mind is some sort of mentally defective reject not worth bothering with is in rather poor taste.

I would, but your response is so aggressive I think I'll pass this time.

If you would, then you would have. You didn't the first time I asked, or the second, why pretend you would the third time?

Please stop. Comments here need to be civil and substantive, and yours are crossing both lines.

Please don't perpetuate spats.

Sorry. It's just that a Google search would have taken him to this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_Overboard_affair

Which was a release of wrong information that demonised refugees for supposedly throwing their children into the water to blackmail the Howard government into letting them into Australia. This was released by Peter Reith, but it was subsequently revealed it was nothing of the sort, but it helped create a moral panic that boosted the electoral prospects of the Howard government, who subsequently won. It wasn't checked carefully by media organizations who ran the story - so it indeed got out of hand.

Which answered his question.

A google search did take me to that, which doesn't answer my question at all. A false story is not a story getting out of hand. It is a false story. And it doesn't address the main question of "how out of hand does a story need to be to make censorship good?".

Really, please stop, both of you.

Sure, however the issue is how does this news 'bubble up'?

Because the International Facebook community are sharing and commenting on it organically, or because a group of liberal curators decide that's what Facebook users will see in the trending column?

As far as I understand, it's not the news that's being promoted (let's display this article on global warming, for example) that's the issue here, it's the news that's being suppressed (this Donald Trump post is getting popular, but I don't like his views so let's not display it).

Isn't the newsfeed you see on Facebook specific to the country you're from?

Wow, a non-falsifiable argument about how another side is a priori wrong. I'm sure this is a reasonable point to make.

Many American liberals are just as hard-headed and difficult to debate with. The Overton Window has shifted in the past couple years and the original leftists are now centrists. America has become radically polarized and the radical liberals and just as dangerous and closed-minded as the radical conservatives.

You should also bear in mind that you're commenting on an article where liberals deliberately censored conservative news media. That doesn't do much to support your assertions.

The fact that the American leftist view would be considered centrist in most other countries (like, for example, the nordic countries) is essentially meaningless. Just because "left" takes on different meanings or extremes in different parts of the world doesn't mean that the US is behind or should become more left. To compare US politics to those of Finland, Switzerland, or even Canada is completely absurd. We are a fundamentally different people, system, land mass, you name it. Our political system must take that into account.

Point being, Facebook's audience is majority international and it most of all wants to make money. If you occam's razor this, Facebook is simply presenting people with what they want to hear (a well-proven phenomenon[1]). The report has shown nothing to prove that there is some sort of committee that decides which political stances facebook is going to shove down people's throats, but we know it has MULTIPLE groups trying to increase engagement. The international community believes that the American right is nuts, voila, Facebook selectively presents this as the dominant news. Click, click, click...PROFIT.

[1]:https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_b...)

I totally see what you're saying, but that's not what happened here. This was deliberate and subjective curation by a group of similarly politically minded individuals, despite the fact that the feed appeared to be organic. They were pushing a political agenda in the US.

Yes, I can see how this can be interpreted as that but I don't see any evidence of this in the report. All it says is, some un-named higher up sometimes made the call of what to show and what to not? Based on what? Liberal talking points or carefully measured clickbait titles that had previously led to more user engagement. Given their recent earnings report, what is more likely?

The 2008 study did not find that "88% of journalists donate to the Democratic party."

It found that, of people who made a political donation and identified a journalism company as their employer, 88% donated to a Democratic candidate or cause.

It's not possible to take this study as evidence of an overall bias in journalism, because it is a very small, non-random sample of people. The total number of people included in the study is less than 1,500, and it was a self-selected group. In addition it includes non-journalist jobs like CFO and a "Saturday Night Live" producer.

About the only solid conclusion to draw from this study is that the vast majority of journalists do not contribute to political parties or candidates at all.

> Jonathan Haidt has shown[1] that non-economics social sciences skew more than 14-1 liberal to conservative (and that universities have not always been so skewed).

This seems to be measured by "Democrat" vs. "Republican". An alternative hypothesis is that mainstream American political views have skewed strongly towards the right in recent decades, but that shift did not touch the academy, and also that America became more prominent in research in recent decades (so more researchers labeled themselves by American political parties).

Anecdotally, it seems like there's a liberal/conservative split within the Democratic party, exemplified by Sanders/Hillary. I wonder what you get if you figure out some good way to quantify that, and then redo the statistics.

This is only frightening if you think that there's a lot of ideological conformity within the label "Democrat", or that the specific ideologies with the label "Republican" need representation. There are probably good arguments for those, but they're not completely obvious.

Completely agree. Though I think the issue here is bigger than that. Journalism by its nature is subjective. So it may be bias, and that's still crummy, but at least the people consuming it know what they're getting.

Facebook, on the other hand, portrays its "trending" news as being determined objectively based on what people are sharing. That goes beyond bias to manipulative. It would be the same if Google were filtering conservative news sites out of its results.

> the liberal political position is correct

Agree with everything you said up to this point.

Liberal politics is mostly correct on social matters and dead wrong on economics. And, of course, the GOP is dead wrong on social matters and mostly correct on economics.

And that's what sucks for a lot of us, no party with a shot at winning and setting us on the correct path is mostly correct across the board.

I have a feeling we are standing at a crossroad where the only option is to go for the economy. Why? Because if we deteriorate further we can kiss goodby to social and environmental responsibility. Just look at any country that's in the shits economically for examples of how well social and environmental programs work when you are broke.

Trump?

Barf.

Sadly.

> I have no great love of conservative politics, but there's a convincing argument to be made that their ideas and views are routinely suppressed by media outside of explicitly partisan media outlets (i.e. Fox News or talk radio).

Fox News is not "explicitly partisan", they are purportedly neutral ("Fair and Balanced").

They are widely recognized as extraordinarily partisan, but that's different than "explicitly partisan".

What's bad is that it doesn't help reinforce your feeling that your position is correct when the other side is being actively suppressed. I generally agree with many liberal positions, but when I hear about stuff like this it makes me want to reconsider my opinions of conservative positions. It's exactly like the Streisand Effect.

at the same time, how do you feel about creationism and intelligent design being suppressed instead of given equal airtime with competing theories.

what constitutes "fair?" if one group is twice as loud while delivering the same amount of content, is it unfair to turn their volume down by half?

how about something like snopes or myth debunking? does dr oz deserve equal placement to more credible nutrition science? what is worse, attempting to surface more legitimate sources, or letting your site turn into a free for all shouting match?

for anyone downvoting me because they think I approve of censorship if my side wins: quite the contrary. I think from a purely theoretical standpoint, signal to noise is a complicated problem, and the people who reject the idea of filtering or ranking in totality are being unrealistic. allowing the loudest speakers to unabatedly monopolize collective attention is a problem.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodet? (Who watches the watchers?)

To have some kind of filtering or curation, you necessarily have to put some people into a position of power where they have the ability to censor this noise. On a forum where it's explicitly known that such "moderators" are present, and even better if their biases are known, this is perfectly fine. If I'm on a science-oriented discussion forum and it's advertised that the moderators of this forum will ban anyone who attempts to spread pseudoscience or anti-science religious junk, that'll help attract me because I don't want waste my time looking at that crap.

There's also forums where there's very little such curation, and instead community moderation is mostly relied on: users are given moderation points to boost or suppress other posts. That's fine too: you know going in what the deal is, so you just have to see if you mesh with the other members or not.

However, if a forum claims to be "open" and "inclusive" but then censors people, that's just hypocritical and wrong. If you're going to push a bias, then you have to at least inform users of this.

As it relates to Facebook, which is supposed to be for everyone and not just people of a certain political persuasion, they shouldn't be censoring anything unless they're going to make this known up-front (which they haven't). "Trending topics" should be anything that's highly popular. If some completely wrong and debunked BS is the most popular new story among your site's users, then you need to show that at the top, or else you're not serving your users. If you don't like that, then you either need to inform them of how you're going to censor and slant things, or you need to get rid of users you don't like. Or maybe just get rid of the "trending topics" section, and replace it with something more fine-tuned so that one group of users doesn't get annoyed at seeing junk they disagree with that another group of users really likes.

The simple fact is that you can't please everyone. If you try, you're going to fail. Sites like Reddit avoid this by having tons of different sub-forums, each with their own rules and moderators. Some far-right conservative wackos can co-exist with far-left liberals there because they're on separate subreddits.

>However, if a forum claims to be "open" and "inclusive" but then censors people, that's just hypocritical and wrong.

I just dont think the trending stories ever made an emphatic claim to be open and inclusive, nor is promoting some stories artificially the equivalent to "censorship." Not allowing stories in the timeline is completely different than manually choosing the trending stories for a day.

Facebook has always been pro censorship. No nipples, no porn. I dont think of facebook as a place for free speech, and I never felt as if the trending stories was some organic popular list. I know everything on facebook is specifically chosen to get ME to click.

That said, watching the watchers is easy if sites publish transparency reports and publish "stories we didnt cover." Problem solved.

Oh please. When I see "trending stories", that implies that the stories are popular, not that they've been manually selected or filtered by some unelected group with an obvious bias and agenda.

As for porn, if the site clearly states that that's something they censor, that's fine. Lots of sites do that. But yes, the whole name "trending stories" absolutely does imply an "organic popular list". If you "know" that this isn't really what it is, that's great for your insight, but it's still lying on the part of Facebook.

i see no implication of interventionless "most popular."

especially on facebook. each person's trending stories could be different and be presented based on what it thinks is popular AND applicable to you. all i see is "here is a subsample of some of our most popular stories." do you and your friends have the same trending stories at the same time? cuz i get regional stories. im sure my friends in other regions dont get those stories. it is quite obviously targeting me based on something besides a global trending list.

nothing on facebook is ever organic. and ive never seen facebook claim anything was.

>especially on facebook. each person's trending stories could be different and be presented based on what it thinks is popular AND applicable to you.

I would agree that this is a fair assumption to make about how it should work.

>cuz i get regional stories. im sure my friends in other regions dont get those stories.

Yes, that's no different than Google News. That's an entirely fair thing to do: tailor a person's feed for their preferences and locality.

>it is quite obviously targeting me based on something besides a global trending list.

Yes, and as long as it's unbiased, there's no problem with that. Especially if users can configure it (maybe I'd really like to see local news items from my hometown, for instance).

However, if they're intentionally omitting news feed items because they don't like them, that's wrong. Omitting news feed items from your feed because you don't live in Laramie, Wyoming and these items are only of interest to locals there is one thing; omitting items because they're of interest to a political group that you don't care for is entirely another.

having humans tagging certain stories as "not news" is not evil agenda based bias, it is spam filtering.

just because a group of people start shouting about something loudly, and the shouting gets popular, doesnt mean facebook should choose to amplify it.

for example, think of mean girls. when gretchen is trying to make fetch happen, and regina says "Gretchen, stop trying to make fetch happen! It's not going to happen!" A group of likeminded people, say republicans in this example, could be trying to make someone appear popular by shouting their name a lot, ad nauseum. that doesnt make it newsworthy outside the echo chamber.

if the republican network is more coordinated and better at discussing one topic at at time than the democrats, they can push a story higher on the trending list. people being able to manipulate the trending list through coordination isnt ideal. if you want a gamified, competitive trending list, visit twitter. letting pure popularity and activity overrule common sense is foolhearted. i have never seen facebook claim their trending list behaved like twitter (which is where it seems you are getting your ideal trending behavior concept from.)

using humans to balance the trending stories, instead of letting one ideology take it over, is a good thing. but balance doesnt always mean fair or equal. myths dont deserve equal space to debunking. intelligent design doesnt automatically deserve equal placement to more accredited theories. if something is factually wrong, facebook can remove a story from trending to prevent its spread.

plus, algorithms are going to display some kind of bias. any sort of spam filter will disfavor certain noise. is blocking viagra ads bias? algorithms written by people will lean in SOME direction. believing in unbias is naive.

BS. "Spam" is advertising; news you don't agree with is not.

Yes, if Facebook users shout about something loudly and it gets popular, FB has no right to squelch that just because they disagree with it. That's censorship.

If Democrat voters don't like the Republican-aimed news, FB can and should make sure their news feeds are tailored for users so that people don't see stuff from sources they think are junk and so their feeds are more tailored for them and their preferences. I have no problem with that. That's how Google News works; I can tell it to not show me news from crappy sites like Breitbart or WND. But it doesn't censor those sources against my will; if for some crazy reason I really liked those site, I could tell GN to show them to me, and I can set my preference for those sites to a higher factor. The whole key here is user choice: having some fedora-wearing hipster at Facebook telling me what I should and shouldn't be reading is asinine and condescending. Having the ability to configure my news feeds to show me what I want, and hide things I think are garbage, is absolutely correct however.

It might be censorship if facebook were preventing people from posting the stories on each others walls. It might be suspicious if they were tuning the newsfeed algorithm to avoid the stories. But manipulating what stories make it to trending is not censorship. It seems like you are conflating the newsfeed and trending box. The newsfeed is neverending algorithmic magic, the trending box is an editorial masthead controlled "some popular things on our site", that appears in the sidebar. Facebook taking editorial control of the trending sidebar has nothing to do with your ability to configure your newsfeed to suit your desires.

Also, political avocation is marketing and can be spam. Unsolicited "Vote for Ted" emails are spam in my book.

> For anyone who believes these statistics are not based on overt discrimination based on political viewpoint, a recent study[2] showed that discrimination by party is stronger than that of race.

That makes sense. I will freely admit my opinion of a person changes if I find out that they are a republican or libertarian. Doesn't make them a bad person, but the ideas put out by the prominent members of those parties frequently range from from stupid to completely horrifying.

> non-economics social sciences skew more than 14-1 liberal to conservative

isn't it so for every science? I mean it is only natural that the conservative views are displaced by education and scientific knowledge. That is almost by definition.

One of the fascinating things about that article I linked to is that it shows that this extreme bias has only existed since the 1990's. Before that time academia was moderately slanted to the left (a ratio of 2-1 or 3-1), but not to the severe extent. It's important to note that while conservative positions on some issues are objectively at odds with science (global warming comes to mind), there are plenty of liberal viewpoints that are also at odds with mainstream scientific research (think research in genetically modified organisms, or mandatory vaccination policies).

This article is a good example of how liberal viewpoints can also conflict with science:

http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/12/when-liberals-attack-so...

It's hard to draw the line of causation though. Maybe the same kind of people have always gone into academia but the Overton Window has shifted.

I generally agree with older conservative agendas (smaller government, efficiency, equality of opportunity) but would never ever call myself a conservative today. Doing so risks lumping yourself in with an ideology which denies reality.

That being said, I'd also hesitate to label myself a liberal due to some of the less rational aspects of liberalism today (knee-jerk anti-capitalism, safe spaces, GMOs).

You may find it interesting that opposition to vaccines (to the degree that it exists) doesn't really have a left/right association outside of the states.

Can you really not see the extreme bias in that statement?

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/conservatism

: belief in the value of established and traditional practices in politics and society

: dislike of change or new ideas in a particular area

where is education - is learning of new by the ones being educated, and science is a discovery of new knowledge. Thus conservatism and education/science by definition can't occupy the same volume. Conservatism is compatible with only that education and knowledge which accidentally happen to confirm the established and traditional practices and beliefs which are already in place. ( in other words - they sometimes may agree on value, yet always differ on derivative, thus it is 2 completely different mental models)

In the specific case of conservative politics, why does it matter that it's so skewed? I have absolutely no issue with, in this specific case, conservative politics not receiving much attention. I would liken it to not giving "flat earthers", blatant racists, and charlatans air time (excuse the hyperbole, hopefully the point was understood).

While I agree that ideological conformity is a problem, I think it's a symptom rather than something that needs to be fixed itself at the moment. You would probably see more distributed alignment within certain communities if there wasn't so much "noise" elsewhere.

The concern is that you may be equating the conservative position to flat earthers bases on biased information. It's the classic epistomological dilemma, how do you know what you know? Maybe reality doesn't have a liberal bias. Maybe it's just the loudest people who have a liberal bias.

I am highly unconvinced that at this point there is some piece of information that will add credibility to conservative rhetoric, economic, or social beliefs. Sure it can happen, it's just unlikely to. Positions do not gain credibility by "what-ifs".

What biased information am I acting on exactly?

We might also be equating anti-vaccine individuals to flat-earthers based on biased information. This is pretty much true for just about anything we filter out. Sometimes the fringe stuff turns out to be correct, but often it's not. The National Enquirer broke the John Edwards scandal, yet most people don't take it as a reliable source since most of it's stories are still bogus.

From the story:

> 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.

That doesn't seem too terrible to me. If something from a untrustworthy source known for political agitprop is trending, I wouldn't mind Facebook waiting to see if the mainstream press picks up on it.

If they were letting through stories from places like AlterNet through that would show bias, but being generally cautious with biased sites that have low journalistic standards isn't the worst thing in the world.

> "flat earthers", blatant racists, and charlatans air time (excuse the hyperbole, hopefully the point was understood).

The point was understood, but differently than you intended.

These terms seem to be used to reference the folks that would claim to hold the conservative viewpoint, but the terms themselves only further evidence the misunderstood viewpoint non-conservatives may have of conservatives, and that misunderstanding may have been furthered by what is discussed in the article.

it's a lot easier exaggerating, belittling, and dismissing the "other" than it is challenging one's own positions.

Much like the majority of posts in your comment history?

To piggyback on this, one of the things Jonathan Haidt has shown in his work on ideological bias is that liberals are unable to accurately understand the conservative worldview, while both conservative and moderates are able to accurately explain liberal positions.

Here's an explanation of the study:

>One other point that I find really interesting and important about Haidt’s work is his findings on the ability of different groups to empathize across these ideological divides. So in his book (p. 287) Haidt reports on the following experiment: after determining whether someone is liberal or conservative, he then has each person answer the standard battery of questions as if he were the opposite ideology. So, he would ask a liberal to answer the questions as if he were a “typical conservative” and vice-versa. What he finds is quite striking: “The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who describe themselves as ‘very liberal.’ The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives.” In other words, moderates and conservatives can understand the liberal worldview and liberals are unable to relate to the conservative worldview, especially when it comes to questions of care and fairness.

From: http://volokh.com/2014/01/17/jonathan-haidt-psychology-polit...

Part of that might be that conservatives and moderates hear the liberal opinion expressed in so many out outlets that it is fairly easy to give an accurate answer where liberals hear what liberal outlets think conservatives think which is sensationalized to gain eyeballs.

I was taught to be able to argue the other sides opinion as well because then you truly understand what you believe.

Or it could be due to the fact that the current conservative movement relies on deception to push it's agenda, which makes it difficult for the average lay person to even understand what they stand for. Tax cuts marketed as economic stimulus, attacks on regulations and consumer/environmental protections marketed as 'making government more efficient', racial oppression disguised as drug/crime laws, universal health care spun as death panels, etc...

case in point.

>Or it could be due to the fact that the current conservative movement relies on deception to push it's agenda, which makes it difficult for the average lay person to even understand what they stand for.

Then why do only liberals have a problem understanding it? Why are moderates and conservatives able to understand without difficulty? Are they not "lay person"s?

Its nice to see throwit992 point proven in such close proximity to the comment. Your spin doesn't reflect the beliefs of any conservative I have met. We aren't twirling mustaches here.

Except for the fact that I would describe myself as a moderate. I can empathize with the desire and need for sensible tax cuts and smaller government, but I can't support a platform that is incoherent and hypocritical.

EDIT: To add a little more substance. I think the incoherence stems from the fact that the current conservative alliance is formed from approximately 3 distinct groups, with different priorities. You have the religious folks who care about abortion, same-sex marriage, drug laws, etc... And then you have the blue collar group that cares more about immigration, guns, etc.. And then you have the pro-business group which mostly cares about taxes and deregulation. From the outside looking in, it shouldn't be surprising that it's hard to empathize with the 'conservative' world view, because the external manifestations of that worldview are often very contradictory (i.e. why would a group that supports small-government also support the drug war, etc...)

It isn't "incoherent and hypocritical" but gets portrayed that way. Some of that is messaging as the GOP is not very media savvy, but by and large, its people who have no desire to understand before reporting.

[edit after the edit - please don't edit after someone has already replied - it makes the replier look bad]

From the outside, Democrats can be viewed as a bunch of special interests under one tent. I find much of these "group slicing" to be problematic when talking about the GOP as I don't think its really those groups or the ultimate belief is what is reported. Viewing a group through another group's lens is fraught with peril.

I would describe myself as liberal, even by the already relatively liberal standards of coastal California, but I'm not sure incoherence and hypocrisy are things only the Republican party is guilty of.

I see many of the same aspects of incoherence among Democrats and you don't exactly have to look for it in the hidden trenches of the Democratic party. I certainly don't think Sen. Feinstein's views on encryption are in line with those of an open progressive society.

I see the same hypocrisy in Democrats' views on gun control, and specifically the prohibition against convicted felons exercising their constitutional right to bear arms.

I'm generally of the opinion that the criminal justice system in the US is fundamentally broken and institutionally racist/discriminatory. Going by that premise, and seeing the specific hurdles that poor people, and specifically poor black men, face in terms of selective enforcement, likelihood of being offered pretrial plea bargains, chances of conviction, and length of sentencing, I find it hard to view any laws that hope to strip citizens of their rights based on a tainted justice system as anything other than racist. And yet, these laws are broadly supported by both Democrats and Republicans.

> I would describe myself as liberal, even by the already relatively liberal standards of coastal California, but I'm not sure incoherence and hypocrisy are things only the Republican party is guilty of.

An electoral system that can naturally support only two substantially competitive parties guarantees that parties that cannot maintain incoherence will also not be major parties. While the electoral system empirically does reduce the significant axes of variation of political vies in the population [1], it doesn't reduce it so far as to actually fit on the one-dimensional axis implied by a two-party system. So the major parties must be incoherent to be competitive.

[1] See, Arendt Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy for research on this.

It is pretty funny that in a thread about liberals not being able to accurately summarize conservative ideas you would ascribe to maliciousness a different opinion. You are behaving in the way that the study pointed out but you seem to be defending that position due to "deception" on the part of conservatives.

>Tax cuts marketed as economic stimulus, attacks on regulations and consumer/environmental protections marketed as 'making government more efficient', racial oppression disguised as drug/crime laws, universal health care spun as death panels, etc...

Kind of odd -- everyone immediately jumps down parent's throat, but it's not like tax cuts for 'job creators' and universal health care as 'death panels' aren't actual factual conservative talking points, part of an easily verifiable historical record (I'll concede the "attacks on regulations and consumer/environmental protections marketed as 'making government more efficient'"). I presume those that speak those views are No True Conservatives?

The quote "Conservatives think Liberals are stupid, Liberals think Conservatives are evil" seems to apply here.

> Jonathan Haidt has shown in his work on ideological bias is that liberals are unable to accurately understand the conservative worldview

Actually (without getting into methodological issues and whether he has actually shown anything), the conclusion would be more accurately stated as that liberal are unable to accurately predict the manner in which conservatives would prefer to express their worldview, whereas the reverse is not true.

I think that, to the extent this is accurate at all (and this type of research on broadly characterizing liberals and conservatives, from either side, is fraught with opportunities -- often realized -- to take broad fuzzy terms and operationalize them in ways which reinforces researchers' own ideological biases), what it really reflects is the fact that liberals in-group language is the same as the common language of the broader society and, particularly, entertainment media (to which, then, moderates and conservatives are still heavily exposed), whereas conservatives in-group language is something to which liberals are far less exposed (mainly propagated through conservative churches and similar institutions).

(This is also feeds -- though its not the sole source of -- the liberal view of conservative dishonesty, in that the main context in which liberals encounter conservative in-group language is in conservative advocacy of public policy positions, where the language used to articulate conservative values is used in a way which clashes with liberals expected use of language, and seems dishonest when it comes to values.)

I don't think it's a case of me misunderstanding, I could have easily provided other examples of view points that are largely not covered or ignored because they do not hold merit. Not that this really adds negates what you said, but I used to be a conservative (and not in the vein of the caricature I was employing), it'd be hard for me to misunderstand a position I once held some years ago.

There comes a time where experience and evidence will just not go your way, no matter how many what-ifs and "if you would just listen"'s you throw at opposing parties. You cannot add credibility to your position based on unknowns and chance.

Making sure there is an artificial level playing ground between two sides is pointless. I don't believe this is a case of people stifling view points, but rather the view point in question just not holding any merit.

Equating that to censorship is silly. Furthermore utilizing questionable sources to further a point isn't going to help your view point either.

Funny that you should mention flat earthers - when Galileo published his works proposed a heliocentric system, he was tried for heresy.

I'm sure at the time, the Church were confident they were right about the matter and therefore had no qualms in suppressing Galileo's claims.

Freedom of information and opinion is what drives progress. Should conservative opinions be wrong, then there is no fear in giving them a platform - they can be publicly debunked, to the downfall of their message.

Given that they are feared, suggests that the jury is still out on whether their opinions are categorically wrong, or even whether the opposing opinion is categorically right. In this case, it will be free discussion which will enable us as a society to converge on the correct path.

> Given that they are feared, suggests that the jury is still out on whether their opinions are categorically wrong, or even whether the opposing opinion is categorically right. In this case, it will be free discussion which will enable us as a society to converge on the correct path.

Spot on.

That's simply not how discourse works on a national scale. There are many things that can be given a platform but aren't because it'd be a waste of time. No one is afraid to give these things a platform, it's just pointless. Artificial platforming for the sake of having every imaginable view point with or without merit on the table would be a disaster.

No one is stopping people from having these opinions, speaking about them, or teaching those perspectives. Claiming that this is a cause of freedom of information and somehow making this analogous to Galileo (it's not, not even in the slightest) is absurdly silly.

If you are looking to defend rational discourse and freedom of thought, well, you're not doing that -- leveling out everything on a no-questions-asked baseline is ignorant and becomes borderline satire of unbiased rational thought at that point.

> No one is stopping people from having these opinions, speaking about them, or teaching those perspectives.

You may not have been paying attention, but unfortunately that's not the case.

https://www.thefire.org/list-of-campus-disinvitations-2000-2...

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/whats-new-about...

http://www.mediaite.com/online/university-president-shuts-do...

And I can link to many more examples if you wish. It's moved from "your opinion is incorrect but I respect your right to speak it" to "I don't agree with what you say so I'm denying your right to express it".

Now do you understand the problem? It's quite incredible, actually.

You linked to extremely far out there sites as your sources, and two of the stories were debunked the day they came out.

Please do provide more examples.

'extremely far out there'?

thefire.org - An org dedicated to freedom of speech on campus, founded by University of Pennsylvania professor Alan Charles Kors and Boston civil liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate.

Spiked - a 15 year old UK publication with staff from the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator.

Mediaite - a popular and left-leaning online news source that aggregates mainstream news sources.

Come off it. A browse through the links above are ample for anyone concerned about the truth.

Anyone concerned about the truth would have investigated those articles with recent information and found them to be thoroughly debunked as hyperbolic claims with a good bit of nuance to them. But you didn't, because you're not.

You linked to "credible" sources, with some weird standard of credibility which I'm not even sure you believe yourself.

Right. Link to where they're 'thoroughly debunked'.

This is a big problem that I've been seeing a lot lately: Liberals and Progressives thinking that they're absolutely right and just, and as such, they should censor those that they perceive as not being right or just. But who is the judge here? How do we really know what is absolutely right or just?

Censorship of any kind is inherently dangerous and detrimental to true progress. Aren't equality, open-mindedness, and freedom of expression paramount to liberal thought? Do you not see the hypocrisy here?

But shouldn't none of this matter? If we're right, should we really need to silence our opponents? If our ideas are fundamentally right, then they should win in a fair and open marketplace of ideas, without the unfair advantage of censorship.

The very fact that you want (or feel the need) to silence your opponent sheds a light on the quality and legitimacy of your ideas. I say this as someone who has always been classically liberal; we have abandoned our true ideals (the ideals which have usually placed us on the right side of history) for radicalism and new forms of bigotry and inequality. The Overton Window has radically shifted and those that were previously on the left are now falling closer to the center-right.

We are a polarized nation and this is reflected in the atrocious line-up of presidential candidates that we have right now.

Literally no one has suggested that we silence opponents. I am not sure how you are confusing me and facebook's curation system not giving attention to certain sources and positions based on their credibility and integrity with actively preventing people from speaking.

Whether your statement is based on disingenuous confusion or simple ignorance doesn't matter at this point because you've made your own post largely irrelevant and quite frankly it ticked me off a little bit that this string of non-sense keeps getting repeated as if it's some defense of rational, critical thought when it's the furthest thing from it at the moment.

All positions and view points cannot get equal play time in the larger conversation -- it would be noisy and a waste of time and ultimately be detrimental to progress. That is not censorship.

"Whether your statement is based on disingenuous confusion or simple ignorance doesn't matter at this point because you've made your own post largely irrelevant and quite frankly it ticked me off a little bit"

Your personal attacks on me are actually proving my point. In your original post, you said:

"In the specific case of conservative politics, why does it matter that it's so skewed? I have absolutely no issue with, in this specific case, conservative politics not receiving much attention."

That's a form of censorship and manipulation, especially because Facebook is not seen as an editorialized news source, but rather as a representation of one's community. You seem to think it isn't censorship though:

"I am not sure how you are confusing me and facebook's curation system not giving attention to certain sources and positions based on their credibility and integrity with actively preventing people from speaking."

This had nothing to do with credibility or integrity. It was a group of people with a very specific political ideology that were subjectively picking news and having it appear in an organic feed, when it was really editorialized.

I'm not confusing you with Facebook's curation system. You're entitled to your opinion. I'm telling you why your opinion shouldn't be applied at scale (in this case, to a system that appears organic) and also why you should care about this not just for this one incident, but for the implications that this has on a larger scale.

So you don't care about conservative views getting silenced here. After all, conservatives are wrong, right? But what if the major media outlet changes it's mind and starts to think liberals are wrong, and thus silences liberal content? How will you feel then? This isn't about political ideologies. It's about the implications of an unprecedentedly large and trusted media outlet taking sides and deliberately influencing it's audience. Liberal or conservative, that's dangerous.

Pointing out that you are misrepresenting what we are talking about is a personal attack? How do personal attacks even lend support for an opposing view point?

I am not sure if you actually read what happened, but this was a case of certain sources being "ignored" because they are borderline tabloids that often push stories that aren't even remotely true. Waiting for another source to pick up the story and then publish it, isn't censorship. It's reasonable.

For this to be censorship based on a specific political ideology following along one side of the spectrum, you'd have to have an example where they let through other sources that are also tabloid-esque but happen to fall along within their opinions and views.

Did the standard for their sources remain relatively constant regardless of the material being discussed? There isn't a clear answer here, but that doesn't make it defacto censorship of one set of particular political opinions. The sources that were discussed aren't credible in any meaningful form. The fact that they happen to be largely conservative seems like a problem conservatives should address instead of calling it censorship.

A good number of posters in this thread seem fine with not bothering to really think of ways that the presented scenario doesn't hold up and completely accept what was stated is what was actually happening. It's a characteristically low standard of evidence and it just so happens that some of you have made it very clear that such a scenario also happens to align with your opinions. It's fantastically hypocritical.

>So you don't care about conservative views getting silenced here.

I am only going to clarify this once more and then I am no longer going to respond to you. I am not encouraging, advocating, enabling silencing of views here. I said I am okay such view points not getting a larger platform or attention, because it's a waste of time. Note that this is not the same as silencing, preventing discussion, outlawing, etc, etc. However, pretending that discussing all view points without considering whether they hold merit or not is somehow a path to better national dialogue is simply unfounded and doesn't make any sense. But that's my opinion, and really wasn't even what happened in the case above. That specific opinion of mine was brought up in response to someone claiming that we should defacto just give everything an equal voice in the national dialogue and somehow not doing so is censorship that will derail rational discourse on a national scale.

>But what if the major media outlet changes it's mind and starts to think liberals are wrong

You seem to misunderstand why this is happening. It's not a matter of opinions swaying. The sources discussed in the article have little to no credibility. The fact that they are all conservative is a problem conservatives might want to address.

But what is the conservative perspective? Have you checked out the party platforms for conservatives for major states like Texas? What are the most oft-used conservative, energy-tapping, get-out-to-vote talking points?

Conservatives are now the minority of this country, but due to bad districting, they have disproportionate electoral power.

And you know, it's not like the GOP needed to be enemies with the scientific community, but that's how they've positioned themselves. The conservative narrative is: scientists lie about global warming, fracking, coal, and other ecological points. Scientists lie about homosexuality. Scientists lie about the efficacy of abstinence, and they lie about condoms.

I think conservatives have been toyed with the GOP repeatedly, and I think it's no coincidence that the GOP is having a crisis, and I think it's both surprising and unsurprising that Donald Trump barely plays the Christian card. The top and only Christian consensus issues are (1) abortion, (2) homosexuality, and (3) sex education in schools. Distracting issues.

The party establishments play the Culture card, you can see Hillary Clinton playing the Culture card all the time. If you really observe, its the Rebels (Sanders and Trump) talking economics, and Establishment(Cruz/Clinton/Bush) talking about Gays, Guns and God.

I think Clinton's main social points in terms of get-out-to-vote issues are abortion and immigration. I don't think Gays, Guns, and God are get-out-to-vote issues for Sanders, Clinton, or Trump. Those votes aren't easy to secure for these candidates.

My point is not that Democrats or the GOP have social issues as part of get-out-to-vote drives. My point is to look at the content of the GOP points, whether on scientific policy or social issues.

Abortion is a cultural issue, and which ever politician talks about Abortion for or against, is playing the classic textbook cultural partisanship game. Immigration is a bit complicated, but can be boiled down to both culture and economics. Clinton talks about tolerance(cultural), Trump talks about jobs(economics) being lost to immigration and open borders.

In my opinion Trump is not about 2016, but we will likely have a President in 2028 who runs on the Trump agenda of Native Populism, in a world of automation and globalization, his message is only going to get popular.

Having a certain set of political views does not necessarily imply that one deliberately manipulates or corrupts information to support those views.

Who cares if journalists donate to the Democratic party? Does that mean that they are omitting information or lying? If they are, show evidence of that, not that they donated to a particular party.

Conservative sources like those mentioned in the article have been repeatedly shown to distort the truth or even outright lie when the facts don't fit their agenda. Facebook is right to omit them because they are not reliable sources of information.

The idea that we even need to know if something is "trending" is ridiculous to begin with. How many times has a celebrity been declared dead on Facebook only to find out that it was a hoax? How many times have we been told we have to declare our copyright in a Facebook status or Mark Zuckerburg will personally steal all our photos to reprint for profit? The fact that a bunch of people are sharing something is practically useless in determining whether it is a valuable or true piece of information.

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