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Comment by billytetrud | Hacker News Reader

Facebook can do whatever it wants to. Maybe most people on facebook have liberal views and they're showing people what they are more likely to want to read?

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.

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You're not wrong. But many see Facebook as a communication medium, rather than a company. They would think it's like a pen which refuses to write conservative viewpoints, just because the manufacturer has a liberal bias. Obviously, that's absurd. But it seems that many fail to realize how scary it is that we have relied so much on a single company's platform for communication, when they have already admitted to manipulating us. Maybe this censorship debacle will be a nudge in the right direction, if publicized clearly enough.

> Maybe most people on facebook have liberal views and they're showing people what they are more likely to want to read?

Trending happens regardless of political view. If they're manually suppressing views which don't align with FB management then users should be made aware of this.

Why should users be made aware of it?

Because Facebook presents itself to users as a way to share and express what matters to them. Not as a way to share and express what matters to them so long as it agrees with Facebook's censors.

Are they being prevented from sharing or expressing what matters to them in any way? Because Facebook isn't amplifying their preferred sources via the trending section?

Yes, according to the allegations implied in the letter. If Facebook penalizes topics which don't agree with Facebook's bias - that certainly would be preventing some of their users from expressing what matters to them. I don't follow your second question about amplifying.

Basically, people are still free to post whatever they want and their friends and families will still see it -- they were just restricting their "Trending" section to non-conservative news sources. So their freedom of expression was upheld but FB just wouldn't amplify certain sources.

Do they really present themselves as anything in particular, or does we as users just make up these ideas of what they are showing us?

I can't really seem to recall facebook making any promise about being a neutral party.

Well, to a certain extent, they do exactly agree to that. You cannot post objectionable content on Facebook.

Additionally, the Facebook feed is not a linear display of content. The feed has been manipulated for a while now. So users have known for a long time that Facebook changes what they view according to Facebook's whims.

Because intentionally misleading people is a problem.

I don't know enough about this particular issue to judge Facebook but I think it is pretty well established that preventing fraudulent communications is a legitimate role for government.

I think the complaint is that when conservative ideas "organically" trended, meaning were being actively discussed/traded/etc by many people, curators would substitute their favored stories as "trending", despite the fact they weren't or weren't to the same degree. The Senate letter suggests that by suppressing actually trending conservative news in favor of progressive news that was not trending and then calling it "trending" that something akin to false advertising fraud is in play.

In one sense, assuming this happened and is true, the Senate has a point. Having said that, even if the Senate does have a point, this doesn't rise to the level of being worth pursuing. In fact, I think as a society we're all too ready to try to invoke legal remedies for relative minor transgressions, including for claims of false advertising. Yes, Facebook should be able to do what ever they want on their service; including being a little fast and loose with the truth and still get away without legal sanction so long as no one was hurt as a result.

If they lied about what was trending or not or, shall we say, carefully defined what it means "to trend", I know about it now, I suffered no direct physical or financial harm, and can make the case Facebook isn't to be trusted in such matters. I'm not a conservative, but I am nearly wholly opposed to political progressivism and the political left's agenda. I can tell you I had already figured Facebook manipulated (manually or algorithmically) their news feed and trending news box to meet their own interests be that political or economic. Nonetheless, I think the First Amendment concerns are greater than the concerns of possible puffery about what is "trending" or not and that government force, or the threat thereof, is not the answer.

People's political views are not cookie-cutter copies. Maybe you think public policy should be guided primarily by what is just, and consequently your hope is that the censors' idea of justice is the same as yours. Or maybe you subscribe to the notion that politics ultimately is the competition of divergent private interests and shifting alliances, and in that case you should hope is that the censors have your best interest at heart (perhaps by virtue of being your employees). Even the former is exceedingly improbable if you go into the minute details of your personal politics. You are much more likely to be manipulated away from than reinforced in your current views.

This is incorrect: Facebook is not a media, but a distribution platform. A media, like, say, The New York Times, can have as much bias as it wants, but a platform that distributes media should treat all media equally, otherwise it becomes a media that promotes a certain viewpoint, and enters into competition with its own clients.

You've been downvoted but I think your assertion brings up a fascinating possibility which is to what extent should a syndication channel (for example) be considered a distribution platform and, so, any internal ranking algorithm considered network infrastructure facilitating or inhibiting traffic?

Taken along these lines, ranking algorithms which produce highly consistent and curated/biased results could be understood as more or less adhering or flouting Net Neutrality, depending.

I think the analogy is worth thinking about, even if we judge human-readable content (news stories) differently than machine-readble content (uninspected packets).

I don't like the idea of Facebook pushing a political agenda, but they're not infrastructure. Facebook's right to free speech and political expression should be sacrosanct, they have no obligation to put the public interest before their own, and they shouldn't be forced to do so.

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