Senator Seeks Answers from Facebook on Political Censoring Allegations

That being said, this is the type of thing that makes 1984 look a lot less like fiction. How many 13-18 year olds, who don't watch TV, are instead experiencing intense indoctrination controlled by Facebook? No matter your political leanings you must find this troublesome.

I remember when I was 18 I went to college, started working, started paying taxes, and stopped watching TV. Suddenly I had space to question my political views, which I realized on the whole had been implanted by the media. Facebook could be even worse - how many people actually get away from their influence?

https://www.facebook.com/tstocky/posts/10100853082337958?pnr...

TL;DR: We don't manipulate the feed and we're pretty sure none of our contractors have, and we've checked before, but we'll check again.

I don't agree with Facebook's actions in intentionally creating bias, but bias is essentially a constitutionally protected right via free speech. I don't have to agree with them for them to have a right to do it.

More examples in an earlier comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8634332

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-26/merkel-con...

Facebook answers to its interests as a company.

Since when are not newspapers curated, and leaning left or right? Did someone go ask Fox News to explain manipulation to the Senate? Facebook may make decisions that cost its credibility, but it's in its own right as a private company to select the content they provide, just as it can skew your timelines or suck every piece of data from your browsing habits and resell it to advertisers ( you accepted their terms after all)

Facebook is not a public service nor an NGO nor a bunch of nuns doing charity work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3KfQoFHEDs

facit: two pages were opened on the same date, one inciting to violence against 'jews' (the page was called 'Stop Israelis' but the message seems clear), the other doing the same against 'palestinians'. After posting more and more - and stronger and stronger - messages to both pages the makers reported both pages to Facebook. Result? The page inciting to violence against 'palestinians' was closed the same day, with an explanation from Facebook that said page was 'found to be in violation of their community standards'. The other page, which was identical in most parts except for the fact that it was 'jews' which were targeted was not closed, with Facebook answering that 'it was not found to violate any of their standards'.

When this brew up a bit of a storm on the 'net Facebook eventually rescinded and closed the page, explaining it away as 'an error'.

What I suspect is that there is a large peer pressure inside the Facebook censor team to align to a certain - and probably narrow - spectrum of acceptable views, one which traditionally is called 'left-wing' or 'liberal' even though both names don't seem to fit the ideas being espoused. Living in Sweden I've seen the same concept at work in the traditional media, this has gotten so strong that the word for it in Swedish - åsiktskorridor (literally 'view corridor', roughly 'acceptable views') - has become a mainstream word. This has lead to an explosion in the number of 'alternative' media channels as well as a record low level of trust in the 'traditional' media.

In other words, Facebook would do well to study the Swedish situation and learn from the mistakes made here if they don't want to end up in the same situation: mistrusted, deemed unreliable and outdated.

"Congress shall make no law"

Any alternatives to FB out there worth using? There are 6 mentioned in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10701871 and I've also heard of unseen.is as a messaging platform from Iceland.

We have become a nation that is willing to believe anything that agrees with our confirmation bias, including outlandish and far-reaching conspiracy theories.

Facebook has publicly stated they have done psychological A/B testing, so I suppose they opened themselves up to this line of accusation.

1. are there contractual obligations to republican orgs that purchased ad space on FB that are breached if FB has a systematic internal bias against their political position. I.e. can every conservative org band together in a class action? They might not win but they have the political clout to run a very damaging discovery process.

2. using information to influence financial markets and benefiting from it is very illegal and people go down for it all the time. If some third party made a successful trading business using facebook information, I'm sure there's someone at the DOJ who can turn that into a conspiracy to defraud markets case.

My gamble is that it would be the complete opposite of how this thread is evolving.

Please.

Facebook has conducted research on how even small changes to the overall system can materially affect the mood and how that mood was contagious to a given subject's social network. (“Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion through Social Networks”)

The public was disturbed. The university partner in all of this had put out a press-release saying that it passed their ethics board only because the University researchers themselves weren't doing it directly but, merely helped design the experiment.

This says that Facebook has people on staff that have been conducting this sort of thing at scale since 2012. They have no one to answer to. They have everything to gain. If they stay secret, they have nothing to lose.

An individual has no way to detect this because like the proverbial frog in lukewarm water slowly brought to a boil, the filtering on our social network never was so alarming that we jumped out en-masse.

Now Zuckerberg and company could be listening in and manipulating the social discourse of almost all of the free world. We wouldn't know.

People highly suspect that Twitter has a leftist agenda with pushing certain speech and suppressing other speech. Even if you completely agree with Twitter or Facebook's political stance, it should disturb you.

It's like getting on a soapbox in the town square and the air only carrying certain ideas to the town people's ears and refusing to vibrate for others but, you hear all of them just as loud. Over time you'd think that people just aren't responsive to your ideas, get down off your soap box and go home, thinking that democracy was done and that people just didn't like your ideas.

So, Facebook has the means, has the technology, has the research to know how effective it is, has had practice in (publicly) as far back as 2012.

The question isn't if they are going to manipulate the 2016 election, the question is how and to what degree. Even if they deny it, there's really no outside body to know at this point without any inside information.

Granted, Google also has this power to a certain degree and bears responsibility for demonstrating that they aren't manipulating politics. Google has more transparency and their products are to the end of being the library of the world.

Facebook manipulates the messages sent between friends and family. They step into trust relationships. There is a world of difference between the politics of a site on the internet as a search result and an impassioned plea by one of my friends or a family member. The idea that Facebook would suppress those ideas from me is the most disgusting, despicable and detestable thing I can think of. I hold Facebook to a much, much higher standard than Google. Their transparency is much, much poorer.

Ultimately, Google indexes the open internet and I can test their results against other search engines and research projects. Facebook owns both the network and messages. It is impossible for an outside party to verify anything that Facebook says about this at this point. We know that what they do can be significant; that they have researched how effective it can be since 2012.

I don't think it's overly cautious nor paranoid to ask them for transparency on this.

Few more sessions with senates, parliaments and assemblies of the world, and Zuck will be off to go cure a African disease or something appointing a yes woman like Sundar Pichai to clean up the mess.

And thats whats wrong with Silicon Valley.