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I have little evidence, but if someone asked me to risk my life on the existence of shadowbanning/post nerfing on facebook, yep I'd risk it.

They are constantly mucking with what's presented. Not long ago, my feed was pretty well distributed across my few hundred friends. As of maybe a few months ago, it's the same circle of ~20 similar-minded friends. At the expense even of showing me the same post I've seen for 5 days straight.

The people that engage my posts are always a cohort, with 90% overlap with my feed.

I swear there are also things which boost/nerf exposure based on sentiment analysis.

I'm an infrequent user cause it's kinda addicting (infinite scroll) and also this echo chamber trash.

> At the expense even of showing me the same post I've seen for 5 days straight.

I found that LinkedIn is great at this, too. I regularly see posts from contacts in my feed that are three weeks old and that I've never seen before.

edit: LinkedIn will also shadowban your posts if they contain words from a blacklist. Just this morning a contact complained about that. He was very happy about being engaged as a speaker and wrote in a post "Das ist schon sehr geil [...]". While "geil" means "horny", especially younger Germans use that word without the sexual connotation but as a replacement for "great". His post reached only a few dozen people instead of hundreds, as normally.

edit: "Das ist schon sehr geil" could be translated as "That's really great indeed"

Sometimes-censorship of our basic communications in society (increasingly mediated by a small number of military-adjacent organizations like Microsoft and Amazon) is one of the biggest existential threats to a free society.

Most people won’t ever have any real idea of what, or how much, they are being prevented from seeing. You also can’t use these platforms to point out their own censorship. I imagine most people have no real idea that most of their feeds on all the platforms they use are heavily censored, or could be totally censored in an emergency.

This situation is a ticking time bomb. I hope it doesn’t go off this year.

https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/

FB feed has been crapfest for very long time. It keeps showing me stuff that is easily 1-2 weeks old and I've seen it 10x in the feed. New stuff buried deep.

Or few weeks ago, lasted maybe 2 weeks, they've run some experiment/had bug in their over-buggy web page, since literally nothing moved in the feed. I saw the same posts as week ago, nothing new, in same order.

Also, when covid started, the feed just exploded with ad posts, which were rare for me before.

FB is amoral, abhorrent company with consistently crappy buggy product, that I hope will disappear over time. I'm not naive enough to think their replacement will be better.

Yet you continue to use it. No reason for them to change. Anyway, I agree it's naive to think their replacement will be better if it's just another corporation behind it. The only real hope is a decentralized open source solution.

You can’t promote some posts algorithmically without demoting other posts (until they figure out how to bend spacetime). Putting some stuff at the top pushes other stuff down.

People don’t spend the whole day scrolling, and Facebook knows this. They know exactly how far down each and every person scrolls.

This means they know exactly how much other content they need to “promote” to totally and effectively censor content they don’t wish people to see.

Algorithmic “timelines” (which aren’t timelines at all) are nothing more than censorship: a remote organization deciding what you’re allowed to read.

(warning - joke ahead) I imagined that this conversation was a game of poker and everyone else was still anteing up and chatting / goofing off, and they all go silent as you push your entire pile of chips into the pot, “I have little evidence, but I’m willing to risk my life.”

Confused players look at each other, “Uh, you mean about the Facebook thing? Why would you do that? We would have been fine just betting a dollar or whatever...”

Then everyone folds and you collect the ante.

Of course it isn't innocent. That doesn't even measure up to Occam's Razor, let alone some critical thought. There's political and intelligence participation clearly visible just beneath the surface every step of the way in this persecution. No reason to believe it stops here. I'll readily agree it's scary.

Who wants to bet there is some extrajudicial (ah, sorry, "secret court") system to force prominent online actors to perform acts of covert censorship, in the name of national security or whatever? This would be an easy logical step from PRISM.

It's nearly impossible to mention intelligence interference in the media without getting downvoted unless you are on a conspiracy forum. The sad thing is that there is a ton of evidence for it. A couple big examples are Operation Mockingbird and the Palantir / HB Gary slide deck for taking out Wikileaks, but there are countless others.

Huh. I wasn't aware of the conspiracy theory association around the idea of intelligence interference in media. I was just mentioning what appears to be the simplest explanation, in the light of Snowden's intelligence revelations.

Just seems to me that mostly-secret media interference is a less complex problem to solve than the type of pervasive surveillance that requires installing extra rooms of equipment at numerous telecommunications nodes around the world. And we have confirmation that the latter has happened, at least.

Granted, you would expect to hear rumors eventually, as lots of people would have to be involved and still manage to both keep their mouths shut and hide the activity from everyone else.

How does "massive international deep state conspiracy to censor reporting on a trial" vs "innocently/negligently flagged due to x" not hold up to Occam's Razor?

Good question. Note, however, that before Snowden we have also been saying - look on those idiots posting about mass surveillance by NSA on their conspiracy maniacs forums. So good FB/Google/Twitter are removing all those crap.

This is a fair question.

A set of random tosses of a coin (even if the coin is partially biased) is expected to produce a mix of heads and tails outcomes. The random toss here could be human error or undiscovered bugs.

On the other hand, the international order is relatively old. There is no ageism in geopolitics, just ask Henry Kissinger. Established social and political affinities exist, globally. No assumption whatsoever is made regarding an existing, international, and powerful network of individuals and organizations.

Given that such networks exist, and that the stakeholders are indeed powerful individuals and organizations, and further that this case is shining a spotlight on their manipulating social institutions under their control, in a case where an individual is being prosecuted for publishing material detrimental to these powerful interests, no assumption is required to consider the high probability of their use of their power (which is the entire purpose of gaining power, btw) to insure their position, their actions, and their criminal behavior, is kept hidden from the majority.

Occam's Razor.

These networks seem to have abandoned whatever sense of decency they had in the early years of the Georgetown set.

We haven't had anything like a Marshall Plan or a Berlin Airlift for some time now.

In this particular case there is no shortage of evidence that there is a massive international deep state conspiracy against Assange. Given that fact, the question is what measures this conspiracy is taking and not its existence.

If there was no such evidence, then concluding conspiracy based on what is happening with FB and Twitter would indeed be crazy.

Maybe I'm just cynical but there's not a shred of doubt in my mind these companies regularly engage in shadowbanning among many other nefarious activities. They're trying to make money and you are the product after all. They could care less about you or their impact to society.

The recent Twitter "hack" showed that the internal Twitter screens had options to ban users from Search or Trending. It's been widely complained about for years by people on the Right.

https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Screen-Sho...

I follow several dozen very left wing / progressive accounts on twitter and haven't seen any of them on my timeline for weeks. Examples:

Dan Cohen, Max Blumenthal, Abby Martin, Jimmy Door, Mike Prysner, Aaron Mate, Chris Hedges, Ron Placone, Sarah Abdallah, and the Real News Network, along with several Assange supporters and related accounts.

I had to go and turn on explicit notifications for all of them to start seeing content. It's extremely obvious that this is not just one account getting accidentally flagged.

There were also people banned on reddit r/politics for posting about various human rights abuses from the US and US police.

I think there might be something to it too.

/r/politics was taken over by David Brock and crew around 2016.

/r/conspiracy has seen a takeover by the right wing equivalents over the last year or so, since the banning of /r/t_d

It was taken over long before banning of t_d. It was sock puppet accounts and pizzagate stuff way before.

There are numerous accounts of this happening on most media oriented platforms. From simply removing followers to flagging your account as unsafe so it does not appear as a recommendation or public listing anymore.

just cover something people don't like or not PC and it raises your chances.

The real problem is the opacity of the algorithms. We can't generate evidences that they are censoring the debate. The lack of transparency is a menace for democracy.

Here's Twitter engineers admitting to it on hidden camera.

https://www.projectveritas.com/video/hidden-camera-twitter-e...