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Comment by xphilter | Hacker News Reader

I honestly don’t understand how this ignorant of a comment still gets on HN. What y’all are talking about is “The Internet” where all the trash and racist are free to make whatever content they want. What everyone else is talking about is private companies that publish trash based on recommendation engines, timeline visibility algorithms, sharing functions, and whole other bunch of programmed ways to “increase engagement.” If Facebook just wants to be the internet where you publish trash then I have to go find it on my own accord then manually share it to a list of other people, or where I can make a page with no special boosting to parrot that trash, then go right ahead. But that’s not what FB is doing, so don’t pretend that is.

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I am well aware, see you are upset that facebook is not filtering "the correct way", and facebook is promoting "the bad things" from your POV, and not promoting the "good things" from your POV.

My statement is Facebook should not be doing any promotation at all, and people aurging over the level and type of filtering / promotion is the problem

Facebook painted themselves into this corner by choosing what people will see and not see instead of letting user choose this for themselves. That is what the GrandParent was saying.

See you desire them to censor and filter, you want that you just disagree with their choices

I do not want them picking anything at all for anyone.

not sure how that makes me "ignorant" on this topic, or how my comment is some how wrong or misunderstanding what it happening. It seems more likely you are misunderstanding my comment

Of source this is all really pointless because I have never, and will never have either a Facebook or Twitter account so...

You’re sidestepping the discussion though. It is “when you avail yourself to FB, do we want FB to use its algorithms to push certain content.” I see two options: stop any ranking/recommendations and make FB a dumb pipe with no restrictions, or put guard rails on the ranking/recommendations so we don’t end up with extremists.

>> I honestly don’t understand how this ignorant of a comment still gets on HN. What y’all are talking about is “The Internet” where all the trash and racist are free to make whatever content they want.

Oh, the irony.

Racism is protected speech. Hate is protected speech. You seem not to understand free speech so you want it suppressed - it sounds a lot like the Inquisition in good ol' times.

Where am I calling for suppression? I’m saying I don’t want it promoted via FB’s algorithms. The internet is open, just like the ol’ public square. As much as I hate 4chan, those idiots can still post. But FB is not the internet and never has been. It has been letting hate run amok and then promoting it. Imagine if every time I went online Comcast kept track of all the sites I went to then would recommend sites it thinks I would like. You get how that Comcast is different than the Comcast today? (Ignoring the fact that Comcast does keep track of what I visit).

That IS what it is doing. The content you see on FB is posted by other humans, not by some 'algo' on FB.

That’s not true at all. The content is filtered out according to their algorithms. They ditched the “see everything your friends are doing” feed a long time ago. Even the group and friend suggestions are tailored.

https://about.fb.com/news/2018/01/news-feed-fyi-bringing-peo...

Reranking content does not mean FB is the one producing it out of nothing.

Secondly what ranking you see is largely influenced by what you and your friends engage with.

Which is based on FB’s weighing of those factors...so either stop doing any ranking/recommendations and make FB a dumb pipe with no restrictions, or put guard rails on the ranking/recommendations so we don’t end up with extremists.

We are discussing Facebook censoring the POTUS.

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