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Comment by HeroOfAges | Hacker News Reader

One of the biggest reasons Section 230 is being threatened by Republicans in the senate is because they believe Facebook has a bias against conservative content and viewpoints on their platform. If it's up to Facebook to moderate content as they see fit, I find it very unlikely they would find a way to do so without appearing to be biased against someone or something.

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Of course Facebook has a bias against conservative viewpoints. You think the Facebook employees quoted in the article are referring to “misinformation” such as false assertions that our schools are “underfunded?”

That is not to detract from the crazy things the right has said. But it’s impossible to read the NYT or HuffPo or the like without cringing over misleading assertions. And it’s not just those organizations. As a card carrying ACLU member, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve worked up a froth reading some email to members describing a case, only to be distraught when the representation turned out to be gravely misleading when I researched the case. I’ve started to notice that on HN, even EFF articles get some comments these days asking “wait, is that characterization accurate?”

So biased that they team up with major conservative news outlets and regularly consult with high profile conservative politicians and lobbyists, you mean?

On an ongoing basis, conservative news sites tend to rank highly on FB's highest-traffic posts.

If you want to live in a fantasy world that's fine, but please don't spread nonsense. FB has teamed up with Breitbart - a news outlet explicitly described as a platform for the alt-right, with a Black Crime vertical - for their new Journalism work, and Zuckerberg sits down with conservatives on a constant basis: https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2019/10/14/deletefacebook-...

The fact that Zuckerberg is getting in trouble for having meetings in “his home over the summer with conservative figures, including talk show hosts, journalists and at least one Republican” proves the biased context within which Facebook and Zuckerberg must operate. Zuckerberg is surrounded by people who are so partisan that the fact that he had dinner with “at least one Republican” is casus belli.

Note that your own article discredits your premise that it is “nonsense” to suggest that Zuckerberg is in league with conservatives. Quoting a “normal“ Facebook user, it states:

> “I think that it would be leveling the playing field if he reaches out to Conservatives because he surely reached out to Liberals,” she said.

Fun how he "surely reached out" when news outlets tried to find a record of this and couldn't find anyone willing to confirm that he met with them, and his representatives refused to provide any examples.

I mean yes, in a sensible world, he would be reaching out to both groups - that'd be fine! He's not.

Also: if you want to give conservatives ideological representation, you can make better choices than Breitbart and Tucker Carlson.

Are you really calling letting a website be shown as “teaming up”? Breitbart isn’t even one of the 200 paid news websites and you're acting like they’re best buds with Zuckerberg. It’s this kind of foaming-at-the-mouth hyperbole that makes all of this so dangerous.

We're not talking about banning Breitbart, Facebook explicitly partnered with them in a new effort to promote "trustworthy" journalism: https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/10/facebook-launches-its-test... In my original post I clearly stated this, so I'm not sure why you're confused.

They can simply not partner with them and they will retain their existing access to the service. Partnering is an endorsement and adjacent to moderation.

Worth pointing out that there are other conservative outlets on their list, ones with a good reputation (at least compared to Breitbart).

I’m not confused at all. They partnered with hundreds of sites, and excluded Breitbart from getting paid. Some partnership.

“Schools are underfunded” is not a factual claim, so I don’t see how it could be “false”.

Trump’s ad claimed that Biden promised Ukraine $1 billion to fire a prosecutor looking into “his son’s company”. This is an outright lie on several levels.

In the abstract you’re correct. But as a practical matter, “underfunded” can be a fact or an opinion. If you say “schools are underfunded, and here is why” then that’s an opinion. If you say, “schools are underfunded, and that’s why we need to tax rich people more,” that’s mich closer to using it as a factual predicate. That implies that school funding has been measured against some standard (such as what other countries spend) and found deficient.

As to the Biden thing, according to fact-check.org the claim came from “a witness statement” filed in Austrian legal proceedings: https://www.factcheck.org/2019/10/fact-trump-tv-ad-misleads-.... Assertions in legal proceedings are routinely cited as “facts” in the US media.

The “witness statement” comes from disgraced former Ukranian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, and was made directly to Dmitry Firtash’s legal team. Firtash is a Ukranian oligarch linked to the Russian mafia. It’s not entirely clear to me yet what Shokin is getting out of it.

Firtash is trading his willingness to manufacture fake dirt on Biden in return for the Trump administration dropping his extradition to the US to stand trial for corruption. He has been stranded in Vienna for years, and wants to go back to running his mob-tied business empire.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/the-debunked-biden-a...

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/watch-this-closely-n...

https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/03/giuliani-claims-ukraine...

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/oligarch-used-giul...

etc.

Shokin’s affadavit is full of holes.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-07/timeline-...

I strongly suspect you are correct. But notice that you had to go to witness credibility. In an American court of law, that means the assertion would survive a motion to dismiss. A jury would have to decide whether the witness was telling the truth, or lying based on ulterior motivations.

Do you think the Facebook should be making calls on things that would be “jury questions” in a legal proceeding? And if so, do you think Facebook employees are an unbiased jury on that front?

When the truth is something like “A Russian-mob-tied Ukranian oligarch and his disgraced pet prosecutor is trying to make up dirt about Biden who was sent as the representative of the US/NATO countries to demand Ukraine fire that corrupt prosecutor standing in the way of corruption investigations, because the oligarch thinks he can trade manufactured dirt for political favors with the US president.”

Then restating that as “Biden promised Ukraine $1 billion to stop investigating his son’s crimes” is pretty much slander.

* * *

Personally I think that Facebook should not run political ads, period.

Your “truth” is an inference that you are drawing based on circumstantial evidence that contradicts the witness’s story. Even if I agree with you that conclusion is probably correct, in US law we would treat that as a “disputed fact” that would require a jury to resolve.

I think Facebook shouldn’t moderate political content, full stop, but if it did, surely the limit is things that provably false without making judgment calls or evaluating credibility. E.g. “Hilary Clinton was indicted for her emails but Obama pardoned her.” It’s shocking to me that anyone would espouse Facebook making editorial decisions on political ads based on inferences from the evidence that in a court of law a judge wouldn’t be empowered to make.

And if Facebook moderators should be able to make inferences and weigh credibility in deciding “truth” doesn’t that circle back to my point about education spending? The US spends more on education than all but 1-2 other OECD countries. Can’t a moderator infer from that the assertion that schools are underfunded is false?

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