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Comment by powertower | Hacker News Reader

> There is no political bias that I know of and we were never told to suppress conservative news. There is an extraordinary amount of talent on the team...

I don't use Facebook, but over the last several years I kept hearing from a number of non-PC type news outlets (that I subscribe to) that even as their media platform grew and doubled and tripled, at the same time their Facebook engagement became a small fraction of what it used to be.

I've also heard that one of the quickest ways to get your Facebook account terminated in Germany is to say anything negative about the current migration situation that becomes popular or starts to get views.

This article IMO is a way to hide the real story with another story.

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Do you have any evidence of this beyond what you have heard? I believe the down votes are a result of your lack of evidence.

I'm not defending Facebook but I have yet to see any substance to the argument that they are manipulating the conversation on their platform.

Only anecdotal. And you can see some of it if you google 'facebook censorship'.

But here is one about Germany - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/26/mark-zuck...

Though to understand what it is really talking about, you have to understand the redefinition of "hate speech" that has happened through-out the EU.

Can you elaborate on the redefinition of "hate-speech"? How was it previously defined and how has that definition changed? Who changed it?

As an American this is especially interesting to me because we place such value on our freedom of speech but also pay a high price in the hate speech that is viewed as a necessary evil. It seems that the EU has made an attempt to manage this hateful speech but I'm not familiar with the specifics.

AFAIK there has been no "redefinition of hate speech" throughout the EU. It's just that in Germany, Facebook started removing posts that are illegal under German law (libel, incitement of violence...) after they were reminded that they were legally required to do so.

German blog post about it: http://www.internet-law.de/2015/09/muss-facebook-staerker-ge...

> I've also heard that one of the quickest ways to get your Facebook account terminated in Germany is to say anything negative about the current migration situation that becomes popular or starts to get views.

This is just not true. There a lot of pages and groups that basically do hate speech and most of them are still there. E.g. there is a page called Anonymous that is not connected to the movement that spreads often false conspiracy prone right wring talking points and quack. It's still there (all through posting was disabled? by facebook).

If you post or comment something illegal under german law you can be fined by the police.

I don't know of any immigration critical pages that are civil that got permanently disabled. I reported a page for holocaust denial (illegal in Germany) that got removed after a short period of time but as long as you are civil you are fine. Right wing publication and parties still have their pages.

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