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Comment by enknamel | Hacker News Reader

Facebook, Google, Twitter and Reddit are probably the biggest threats to our democracy in the world. They are highly trafficked sites that huge populations get all of their information from. They are also staunchly only in favor of one political party and have been caught abusing their power to favor their political party of choice. Twitter suppresses hashtags, Facebook filters posts, Google only sends news notifications for news they approve of, Reddit openly suppresses subreddits with opposing views.

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> staunchly only in favor of one political party

This is empirically not true, especially if you look at the policies of and donations by Google, Twitter, and Facebook.

Google donates to both parties; Twitter obviously has a very laissez-faire to the Right's voices, including the POTUS, and its COO recently suggested that if Trump canceled briefings, he could take questions directly on Twitter. And the evidence and rumors continue to swirl about how multiple Republican Party candidates campaigns used Facebook's own incredibly specific ad targeting, which they did not revise until after the election. (cf. Cambridge Analytica, contracted by Cruz and then Trump to "manage" the election outcome.)

Your examples do not mean much when it comes to actual influence and its use. Google relies on blatantly left-leaning "fact checkers", Schmidt was very active in HRC's campaign, Twitter actively censors Right-leaning hashtags and users [1], Facebook censor(s/ed) conservatives [2]. Do you really think actual censorship and suppression (when claiming otherwise and pretending to be objective) is less important than letting Trump takes questions?

[1] http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/media/303295-how-faceb...

[2] http://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-supp...

>Google relies on blatantly left-leaning "fact checkers"

I'm curious, what in your opinion are some "right leaning" fact checkers or "agnotistic" fact checkers?

There's no such thing as agnostic fact checkers. Facts are complicated by context and anyone who claims to objectively "check" them is selling you snake oil. For example, the lead Snopes fact-checker was previously a liberal blogger. Guess which way their fact-checking skews?

We're all human and we have our biases, whether we like it or not. It doesn't take much effort to tweak an assertion to go from "Mostly false" to "mostly true" - it just depends on which one the writer favors. My BS detector goes haywire whenever someone claims to offer non-subjective anything. tl;dr investigate facts and claims yourself and never trust those who have power over you, even if you vote for them!

So your criticism that they're using fact-checkers in general? How else should they do third party fact checking?

Also, what are some "right-leaning" fact checkers then?

Donations do not imply liking a candidate or party. Large companies will always donate across the board to keep in favor with whoever wins. The government has a huge amount of control over the fate of these companies. That is partly why they have a vested interest in controlling elections and thought.

Twitter isn't laissez-faire with right leaning voices. They actively suppress them. They remove hashtags from trending daily. They mark posts as containing explicit content. It's getting ridiculous how much all of these companies are trying to silence the right.

Facebook will take almost anyone's money on their ads. But they were also caught this last election cycle actively suppressing conservatives. It got so bad Zuckerberg had to come out and do damage control by inviting conservative commentators to a sit-down or piss off half his US userbase.

I think you're, at best, cherry-picking examples if you think Twitter's explicit content marking is left-leaning bias.

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