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Comment by tormeh | Hacker News Reader

>Does anyone have an alternative argument as to why Facebook DOES NOT have the RIGHT to suppress and promote information based on it's own agenda?

The power Facebook has. Power needs to be controlled. As a lefty-ish person I'm not up in arms about this, but I see the problem.

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I think they do have that right, however, the issue is they SAY the stories are 'trending' when in fact they are simply curated by facebook. That needs to be made clear. Passing off curated content as 'trending' is like simply making up polling data and passing it off as public opinion when in fact it's not.

Who says algorithms are the only possible determinants of something which is trending?

The article specifically points out that human editors were introduced after Facebook failed to surface Ferguson protests—making it look bad because those protests were in fact trending on Twitter. Moreover, some theoretical perfect algorithm could have asserted that was a trending topic.

In fact, there is not perfect algorithm for determining what is "trending." Part of hiring human curators is to train an algorithm which can more effectively use judgement in figuring out topics which are truly trending/newsworthy/interesting instead of coincidentally used a lot without being valuable (ex. #FollowFriday).

Moreover, it seems clear that injecting stories is actually relatively rare. The primary reason to have human curators is to do filtering to prevent the junk from showing up in trending.

I think your argument is really grasping at straws and completely ignores the plain meaning of the words in question.

>Power needs to be controlled

By whom? I'm legitimately asking this as a lefty-ish person.

Whomever the viewer agrees with, presumably.

Im not answering for the OP, but given leftwing idiology presents a history founded on struggle among oppositional groups, the power of any given group should be controlled (as in mediated) by said struggle. For example, Facebook's power to disseminate reporting and propaganda should be mediated by an opposition from the sources and seekers of firsthand accounts.

Power needs to be controlled in a distributed way that doesn't put too much power in anyone's hands. Because power corrupts.

One could argue that the New York Times or the DrudgeReport also have power to control and persuade. It's an issue of free speech and if it applies here.

There is only one society, and its members ought to have freedom of speech and assembly amongst themselves. Facebook, just like the Internet, is a platform, and it should allow free speech, even if products that are built on top of that platform themselves don't. It seems to be in the nature of networks to be a monopoly; if Facebook or Internet weren't a monopoly, perhaps competing networks could provide free speech and Facebook and Internet could be fully censored. But as it is, censorship and bans diminish the freedoms of speech & assembly of the users.

> The power Facebook has. Power needs to be controlled.

It is controlled. You're suggesting that it should be controlled by different people.

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