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Comment by adrianmonk | Hacker News Reader

I'd also love a feature that lets me block non-advertising political content.

A lot of people like to use Facebook as a political soapbox. That's not what I want out of it. I want to stay connected to people, hear updates, socialize, etc.

Some people push it so far that the solution of unfriending them is easy. But not everybody is so egregious that I want the nuclear option. (For example, relatives who are vocal about politics.)

Text classification is a thing, and there are many other techniques, so it seems possible to recognize political content with some reasonable level of accuracy and show me a lot less of that.

Maybe this would even go beyond making my own feed better. If enough people feel the same, maybe it would cut down on the audience size and reduce people's temptation to get on a soapbox.

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What is political content? Is news about the protests political? Is a statement by the president? Is a new law going in to effect political? Is someone commenting about wearing masks political?

> Text classification is a thing, and there are many other techniques, so it seems possible to recognize political content with some reasonable level of accuracy and show me a lot less of that.

I think you severely underestimate what constitutes classifying something as political.

Perhaps put a list of check boxes for political topics and let people choose. Labeling topics by activity in news sources (say, in combination with other known political terms or authors) can help discover the list mechanically.

> I think you severely underestimate what constitutes classifying something as political.

You are over-thinking this. Just filtering obvious political stuff would be a massive help:

- Mentions of politicians

- Key words: Liberal, Conservative, Right-wing, etc etc

- Material re-shared from political parties/ candidates/ movements.

Just that would be a giant help. Allowing users to set their own filters would be a massive help.

None of this makes Facebook money though so it won't happen.

Pretty much everything is politics these days. That's the unfortunate truth. We can't even distinguish personal and non-personal that easily any more. Even filtering by status updates and photos won't help. Status updates can be political speech (may or may not call out someone by name or ideology), photos could be your friend holding a placard or a meme. Things as simple as wearing/not-wearing a mask is political now. In an alternate world, that would be classified under health. At least for me, that's upsetting that we are debating this. And it doesn't end there - how many of us have felt a tinge of jealousy when a friend posts that beautiful picture of a barn in the middle of Montana while you're slugging away on your computer? That's not healthy either. I have come to peace that I'll text my friends directly and that's it. Once a month or so I log on to facebook and comment on personal updates. Instagram & Reddit is what I can't quit yet. Sometimes I do need that mind numbing feed scrolling time. Otherwise, I actually call/text and talk to friends and family. Granted who I call family and friends is very limited.

TBC, these are my personal opinions and how you view and use social media could be different. It's clearly not for me anymore.

> Pretty much everything is politics these days. That's the unfortunate truth.

- Me riding bikes with my friends - Not politics.

- My friend turning 50 - Not politics.

- Organizing a game night - Not politics.

- My buddy getting a new car - Not politics.

- A friend getting engaged - Not politics.

etc etc etc...

There are million things in the world which are not politics. The whole reason I used to go to Facebook was to hang out virtually with my friends and keep up with what they are doing. Unless they are actually going to a political rally, that's not politics. And if they are, I care about that too because they are doing it.

The big problem with Facebook is at some point everyone collectively decided it is their own personal soapbox so now it's filled with everyone standing on their little podiums shouting their opinions about everything from facemasks to whether it's ok to shoot people in the back.

> I have come to peace that I'll text my friends directly and that's it. Once a month or so I log on to facebook and comment on personal updates.

This is exactly what I do, because when you text people directly they are thinking of you as you, not as their own personal soapbox.

This has ethical reprecussions on the news ecosystem because whichever keywords/mentions that Facebook dictates as political will be targeted by news organizations to avoid.

These organizations will strip normal news of any political connotations which is frightening because the news, although mostly a pile of noise today, is supposed to have signals to keep democracies in line by design.

I would argue that stripping news of political connotations would be a plus. I wish all news was reported this way.

One of the suggested political connotations is "Mentions of politicians". You would argue that news should be reported without "Mentions of politicians"?

If you disagree with that definition of political connotation, how do you define political connotations?

Honestly, if you live and work and pay taxes in the US, you kind of have an obligation to keep an eye on your government. It's just basic citizenship. The events you see on the news cannot be divorced from politics. Not even the sports or weather segments.

If politicians are doing things that stress you out or make you angry, would you really be better off staying uninformed? I'm not saying that Facebook is a good way to accomplish that, just that it's worth considering before you ask for technology to seal yourself off from political news altogether.

News with no political connotations is fluff.

That's myopic. There is all sorts of news, local news in particular, that has clear utility but tenuous political implications. Traffic and weather reports come to mind as clear examples.

This website has a lot of non-political news itself, e.g. freebsd 11.4 is out etc

Pay more attention to local politics. Traffic is VERY political.

Almost as if objective reporting had some sort of value...

This is one potential outcome.

Another is organisations will keep the same content (as this is what drives clicks and profitability), however change the language used to describe it.

I would say this outcome is worse, as it leads to things like newspeak, muddying of definitions, and an increase in accusations of dogwhistling (accurate or otherwise). We may already be on this path, but it would be accelerated.

That's a cat an mouse game though - Facebook will react by also flagging the new definitions. The problem is the keywords themselves, but the act of Facebook banning them.

So any post that has "... a liberal amount..." or "... take the conservative approach ..." or "... replaced the right wing nut..." would be filtered.

Political candidates also share names with other people. Name based filtering can silence unrelated people. See how well our no fly lists are at targeting people who just happen to have the wrong name.

For every problem, there is a simple solution that is wrong. Getting things right is often not simple.

I'd be fine if any post with references to "liberal amounts", "conservative approaches", or "right wing nut" was excised because my friends don't talk that way when they are posting pictures of their kids or the bike they just bought.

> For every problem, there is a simple solution that is wrong.

As with most flippant axioms and generalities this catch-phrase is quite often just wrong. Often there are simple solutions that are just fine.

I used Facebook Purity for quite a while and set up simple keyword based filters and while they weren't perfect, it was a lot better than the default feed.

Honestly, sounds like social media just isn't for you or you have a friend's group that you need to curate.

I have mostly ditched Facebook (and don't miss it). Considering the piles of studies which suggest people are happier when they drop Facebook, it's hard to argue Facebook in its current state is right for anyone.

> So any post that has "... a liberal amount..." or "... take the conservative approach ..." or "... replaced the right wing nut..." would be filtered.

This is pretty much a solved problem, and it actually is pretty simple: http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html

None of this is as feasible as people think it is, because this is a deep problem.

What about new terms like kraken ?

In case of online content moderation think in terms of signal/noise and context.

The same thing is benign or malicious based on the context It finds itself in.

Your filter list assumes a static context - your particular imagining of context in this case.

Obviously What’s noise for you is signal/hurtful to someone else.

Run this over N sub groups of subscribers and you have an impossible problem.

There are a ton of browser extensions that do all this already

Browser plug ins only go so far, they can't add back in content which Facebook filters out of your feed using its own profit seeking logic.

I have done exactly this with Twitter's "mute words" feature, and let me tell you it is incredibly great. I would have abandoned Twitter long ago without it.

Honestly, it would be fine to just block re-shares of posts from politicians and the sorts of account that literally only talk politics.

Social Fixer is a browser extension that provides filters for Facebook. I used it during elections period and it’s great. My current solution is to not use Facebook at all, and I got say it’s pretty neat :P

What is political itself is political.

Is LGBT political? Is support for immigration political. Is climate change political? Is COVID-19 political?

Trying to be impartial here is a fool's game.

Believe it or not, there are times in my life where I'm not interested in hearing more about LGBT rights, immigration, covid-19, or climate change.

Absolutely, I want to know what people I care about are up to. I don't want my entire social world to turn into hot takes.

There are important issues, absolutely. But my personal relationships with other humans are not based on their hot takes on those issues.

Maybe the best move is simply to not play the game. FB is clearly focusing on their customers, the ad-buyers and influencers.

I wholeheartedly agree with you. I've been thinking so often lately, that I'd really just like to know what's happening in my loved ones' lives, and not see everyone airing their amateur political opinions. But I think the reality is that these sorts of things are often a gray area. For example, I don't want to hear everyone's opinion about the riots in America. But my sister lives in Minneapolis and the building next to her house was burned down. I want to know about that. And while generally I don't want to hear heated debates about laws and court decisions, I've got LGBTQ family members and when SCOTUS makes decisions affecting their lives, I want to know about it. But what I do and don't want to know about is not an easy thing to filter. Even my closest friends probably wouldn't be able to accurately filter what I do and don't want to know about. I highly doubt that an algorithm tuned to optimize engagement and profit is really going to be able to accurately filter what I want to know about either. I've resorted to muting anyone who posts anything about politics, and doing things the old fashioned way and calling people to hear what's new in their lives.

> I'd also love a feature that lets me block non-advertising political content.

I would just prefer an option where I only saw content my friends actually took the time to post themselves. I don't want politics, memes, or other trendy bullshit, just their words, pictures, or even links they personally took the time to clip and paste. If I want news or entertainment, I can find that myself, but Facebook is currently the single best place for me to connect to a bunch of my friends and I'd love to see that without all the other bullshit.

Of course that's not what makes FB money so it'll never happen, which is why I just stopped using it entirely. (Well that plus the fact that it's run by a bunch of sociopaths)

I totally agree with you. I think what's killing Facebook are the endless reposts, just show me original content, please.

I was working on a script to hide shared posts, but it broke after the last update. Maybe I need to fix it and publish it as a browser extension?

> Maybe I need to fix it and publish it as a browser extension?

This sounds way to time consuming to me for way too little reward.

My approach has been to make a “politics” friend list, and put people on it when they post political things. Then I share political stuff with that list. So if I haven't seen political stuff from you, you shouldn't see it from me.

For people who just share too much, besides the nuclear option or unfriending or unfollowing, I like the 30 day mute.

A simple naive bayesian text classifier (e.g. A Plan for Spam) run client-side as a userscript should be more than capable of doing what you want. It would be nice if websites had this sort of client-side filtering feature built in, fully controlled by the user, for transparency reasons.

You can use an ad blocker to filter out html elements that contain keywords or hashtags that are often used in the types of posts you don't want to see. Not a perfect solution, but an ok solution.

Anecdotally, I was able to achieve this by _never_ interacting with political content on FB. That, or nobody in my network posts it (unlikely). But I never see political posts on my newsfeed.

I would pay money for a feature like this

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