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Comment by whywhywhywhy | Hacker News Reader

This is a good move but could go further, really wish FB and moreso Twitter would include a big switch in their settings that was just "Politics On/Off" hide all political ads, and tweets and retweets for people who just don't want to see that for mental health reasons or just because they're not there for that (e.g brand customer support workers) but they'd never do that because I suspect they ideologically think its more important to control the flow of political information that is broadcast to their users even if its at a great detriment to their users mental health.

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Political ads are explicitly marked, and can be turned off. On the other hand, to classify user generated content as political or not is non-trivial. More so, there is no clear universal definition of this. One man's politics is other man's "important announcement". With such ambiguous definitions it is hard to train a ML model for this purpose explicitly.

On the other hand, if you downvote and dismiss political posts regularly, the ML model can pick up signals and remove such content from your feed. This is feasible as it allows the algorithm to make mistakes and a room to learn. But this isn't an explicit remove all political posts and political posts only.

Out of curiosity I looked up what the definition of politics is and got something like:

"Politics is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations between individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status."

Based on a definition like that I'd be tempted to think that politics free social media is an oxymoron.

You could say the same of most of the web, from Github to HN...

And you would be correct. Apolitical media doesn't and can't exist. The existence of media is a political statement.

You can restrict partisan media, or identity politics media, or other subsets of politics. But politics as a whole is implicit in every action that involves the public.

You can say that about life

It is an exceptionally privileged situation to be in when you believe you can simply opt out of politics.

Everyone's life is affected by politics, but I'd contest that it's entirely possible to opt out of participating in the political process. Many people simply don't have the time in their life to take part.

I have a friend who works two jobs and has two kids, when they get home they make dinner, do homeworks and go to bed. For them politics is something abstract on the TV news.

It's much like art, where ever you go there's some form of art. But you don't need to lift a pencil and do art or even talk about it.

But you, largely, can! We're privileged not because of any actual individual privilege (though it does help quite a bit!) but because there are already a bunch of people who are fighting for your interests. You only really have to participate in a tiny tiny subset of issues where your position isn't being heard.

Although I do not disagree with that definition I think it is valuable to make a distinction between government politics and "every day" politics.

Just because something has a slightly vague definition and can touch upon most things in life doesn't mean its definition must be stretched to encompass literally everything.

> classify user generated content as political or not is non-trivial.

There's probably a set of 50 or so keyword combinations, plus the names of current and former politicians and common misspellings, that would cover 90% of cases.

If that's the route we want to take, I think a browser extension would work just fine. Loop over all divs that represent tweets, if contains any key words, delete div. Rise and repeat with other websites.

I wonder if a general black list exists for various websites already.

Won't work on iPhones.

- He was playing poker, with a pair on the table, but his trump card was an ace.

- I refuse to pay this "Bill".

- That looks like an Obama suit.

Are these political statements? It's naive to make such a claim that a whitelist of word is sufficient. The "facebook is censoring me" gang will eat you up in a jiffy.

Even extremely complex models will fail this test.

List A: support, vote, protest, defend, military, troops, economy, country, taxes, rights, government, children, child, responsibility, leader

List B: obama, pelosi, clinton, trump, pence, mitch, reagan, bush, maga, antifa, president, congress, representative, democrat, republican

If a comment has a word from list A and list B, it's political.

Using this simple scheme on Facebook would be something I would do if possible.

What difference is letting users turn off political ads going to make? This is only going to help people who do not care about these in the first place - they will turn it off and FB would be slightly better off for them. These people are not the problem. The people who ignorantly argue, share unvetted stories, propaganda etc will not turn this off.

FB likely crunched some numbers and decided the PR they will get from this is worth the small loss of revenue. I bet they will also monetize the data on the list of users who turn off political ads somehow. If they really wanted to make a change, they should ban political ads like Twitter plans to. At minimum, make it opt-in instead of opt-out.

People are not born “ignorantly arguing”, they get radicalized by repeated exposure to extreme viewpoints. This switch could help reduce that phenomenon a bit.

But I agree that it should be opt-in, rather than opt-out, and I say that as an extremely politically-aware individual. Politics is important but it doesn’t work well on Facebook and should be discouraged there.

> they get radicalized by repeated exposure to extreme viewpoints

I don't think this holds up to any scrutiny to be honest. There are certainly some cases where people are easily influenced, but I don't think it is that significant. Only from a worldview that puts you way above others. Aside from the problem of defining extremism, people do make choices.

I think what many people observe about conduct on social media is a form of desensitization for that matter and there are different reasons for that.

But this is actually testable, by identifying this propaganda and identifying people affected by it. We had that topic with Russians that supposedly influenced a massive amount of people with extremism for an election. But if propaganda is in place, you can identify it by words, images or statements. You can see this with ISIS. There were some poeple that indeed fell for it, but probably not by facebook adds. These people were actively groomed.

Wanting to control content by large ad corporations can also be seen as extremism, especially in the context of the free internet.

FB has flagged stories that are obviously false for awhile. I deliberately started posting outrageously false stories once Zuckergurg said they wouldn’t flag false posts by politicians.

There was an article recently where someone just copy and pasted posts made by Trump to make a point and their posts got flagged but not the original.

> If they really wanted to make a change, they should ban political ads like Twitter plans to.

Why would they do it? And why would it be better if they did it?

It is possible to individually block "activists" on FB.

How do you define where the boundary is for what is and isn't politics? Ads paid for by overtly political organisations may be easy to identify, but what about content from individuals?

Indeed. We tried the "politics ban" at HN and the result was every story had a top comment explaining why it was political and you should flag it. Completely unworkable.

I suspect that pretty much any discussion of politics is essentially political so under that ban this story probably shouldn't be discussed.

I feel like a good approximation would be to just turn Bayesian priors on or off (or whatever is their equivalent of "push this widely popular thing, even if it's not supported by this person's specific interests learned from their usage data").

My anecdote: I recently made a Twitter account specifically to follow some artists and share some art. There is nothing in what I wrote on Twitter, or in who I follow or tweets I liked or in fact my IP-based geolocation (I'm not from US) that would say to the Algorithm that I'm in any way interested in American politics. On the contrary, for a long time I tried clicking "not interested in this" for anything related to politics. And yet, the AI timeline in that account is regularly swamped by US political drama I'm not interested in, can't do anything about and generally just makes me miserable.

My only explanation is that these posts get pushed to me because they are overwhelmingly popular overall on Twitter, and the high prior swamps out the negative evidence specific to my account.

Of course, the other, more sinister explanation is that it's a (human) editorial decision from Twitter to actively push this kind of content to people, but I find the technical explanation easier to believe.

Maybe we should put some effort into making political discourse less damaging to your mental health instead of enabling large parts of a democratic country to just shut themselves off from politics.

It's my feed should I not get a say what I see in it and what I don't?

This is what mean by ideology, the idea that it's more important to make sure I see the right things so hopefully I think the right way takes precedent over how it makes me feel. This sort of thing seems to be all what modern journalism is too, it's all through the lens of editorial now.

I don't want to be on Twitter, I'm on Twitter because Google Reader killed RSS and all the bloggers said "What's the big deal? Just use Twitter" because their follower counts going up made them feel good and now I can't get what I used to get from RSS without the unwanted side serving of (mostly) American politics.

Why do you think it is ‘your’ feed?

Because I curated it, I'm the curator of the exhibition of tweets by artists which is being held within Twitters gallery.

That would be nice, but the number of toxic pundits that would need to be removed from major news organisations and political parties makes it infeasible.

Can that be done? The issue with politics is that the end result in enforce, often metaphorically but sometimes literally, at gunpoint. The real world implications are something that cannot be ignored, unlike a discussion of favorites teams or tv shows. Even coding standards discussions always have the realization that you can do what you want regardless of the standard and the worst case scenarios involve no longer contributing to a project or finding a different employer. Not always the nicest outcomes but still a world's away from being on the losing side of a political debate that makes it into law.

Do we consider controversial subjects to fall under politics? Where is the limit of political content? When I talk about a French company that builds missiles, maybe I’m promoting French soft power.

Talking about race, gender, immigration, sexuality, progressive or conservative subjects clearly falls under politics, because it is inherently connected to a political agenda. Is it really?

> really wish FB and moreso Twitter would include a big switch in their settings that was just "Politics On/Off" hide all political ads, and tweets and retweets for people who just don't want to see that

Twitter has mute filters that do this. Add the surnames of some political candidates to your mute filters, and that alone will improve your Twitter experience - moreso if you use a third party client (like Fenix on Android or Tweetbot on iOS) that doesn't also show likes or random tweet suggestions from people you don't follow.

The downside is you have to put in the filter creation work yourself, but on the plus-side you know exactly what you're filtering out and why. Don't leave it to Twitter to be the judge of what you should and shouldn't see. If you look in your settings, you'll find Twitter is absolutely horrible at determining what you're interested in: on the Twitter website, look at More -> Settings & Privacy -> Account -> Your Twitter Data -> Interests and Ads Data -> Interests From Twitter, and be amazed at all the topics you've never heard of and political candidates that Twitter thinks you are interested in, and is using to push ads and tweet suggestions in your face.

Bonus points for adding other clickbait words to your mute filters, like "outrage". Maybe consider various -isms, like "capitalism" and/or "socialism" if you want to avoid being drawn into decades long debates that won't be solved in 280 characters.

I have been asking for this for a long time. I am happy to see it is gaining traction in some form.

My question is “who is the person who will use this option”? The mild person or the people at the extremes who create these furores? I’m guessing it’ll mostly be used by people in the middle but agitators will keep agitating.

Me.

On Twitter you are able to mute words if that helps in your case

> ideologically think its more important to control the flow of political information that is broadcast to their users

Twitter don't so much "control" the flow of information as hand out firehoses and watch the spray. It's one of the more libertarian social networks left; they leave up known abusers and don't have an explicit ban on sex workers, to give two examples.

I'd love that too, but is it possible?

Would Susan Fowler's famous Uber sexism blog post be considered political? It clearly is a personal story about her year at Uber. It's about work, about tech, and, yes, about sexism. I think that a lot of actually relevant politically influential content is much more like that post than a Biden ad.

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