Facebook Communications Chief: We are reducing distribution of anti-Biden posts | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Communications Chief: We are reducing distribution of anti-Biden posts

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35 pointskoolba21 comments

I think Facebook is in kind of a sticky situation since their recommendations algorithms function similarly to a newspaper picking which stories to run. So on the one hand, if this story turns out to be garbage, they don’t have any obligation to be promoting it to their 2 billion users. But also, I’m pretty sure that hasn’t been established yet—someone at Facebook merely thinks it might be garbage, possibly because of their pre-existing views of the people involved. I think their concern is that, if a story is possibly garbage but takes time to fact-check, then there’s no way to avoid promoting garbage stories to people while waiting for the fact-check to be completed (perhaps “fact-check” should be in quotes here, the fact-checkers also have opinions of their own).

The thing that bothers me is this doesn’t seem more obviously garbage or likely to be garbage than a lot of other stories that I don’t think got the same treatment, and they’re choosing a very partisan story to start applying this precedent to.

Also, disturbingly, looking at Andy Stone’s employment history:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/andy-stone-7575b34a

we see employers such as:

- John Kerry for President

- Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee

- U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer

- House Majority PAC (at a time when the House was controlled by Democrats); this was his job immediately prior to Facebook

Stone’s listed title at Facebook is “Policy Communications Director” so presumably he’s just communicating the policy rather than actually setting it, but not only does he have political opinions of his own (which is essentially impossible to avoid), he has an extensive history of engaging in partisan political activism for a living.

the top policy guy at Facebook is a lifelong Republican political operative

Mark Zuckerberg is a lifelong Republican political operative?

Facebook at this point is a publisher. If they want to avoid controversy: go back to ONLY having a chronological timeline and only limit posts using spam prevention tools.

They are guiding the narrative. People need to stop using this platform. There are tons of other platforms. Sure your friends aren't on it. Who gives a shit! The Internet was way better back when we just had random chatrooms and you talked to more random people.

Stop using Facebook. Stop using Twitter. There's Mastodon, Pleroma, or even tons of small walled gardened sites if you prefer. There needs to be a diaspora away from these big platforms that are increasingly turning to crap.

As a cynic, this feels like it may be underlying purpose of the walled garden. If a free and open Internet was a threat to media gatekeepers, the walls were necessary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Fence_Me_In_(song)

Full tweet:

> While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook's third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.

Hard to fit in the HN title length limits but my read is it's "guilty till proven innocent" for anything negative against Joe Biden.

Given the intense disinformation efforts coming from both the Trump campaign as well as third-party state actors is it any surprise that FB would aim to try to take itself out of the equation as much as possible? What is the upside for them here?

> ... is it any surprise that FB would aim to try to take itself out of the equation as much as possible? What is the upside for them here?

How is arbitrarily deciding what gets promoted or demoted "taking itself out of the equation"? It's literally the opposite. They're deliberately downplaying a story to prevent its spread. What's nuts is the Facebook communications director says so explicitly too!

They are constantly deciding what gets promoted and demoted. By taking themselves out of the equation I mean they are trying to not become the vector for additional disinformation campaigns when they have the opportunity to do so. Delaying the distribution of propaganda pending fact checking is not deliberately downplaying the story.

It’s not really possible for Facebook to take itself out of the equation—Facebook sets up its algorithms to encourage the spread of engaging content. So if a story spreads on Facebook, it’s because they designed their algorithms to make engaging content spread. But if Facebook goes and adds a special-case on top, “don’t spread this particular story,” then they’re obviously interfering at that point. So they sort of inherently have to take a position one way or the other. The only other option is to do something like always make the algorithms focus on engagement without any special-casing, possibly with a general rule to limit how fast any new story spreads, but presumably they have reasons for not wanting to do that.

There is a reason they engaged fact checking companies to do what they do when it comes to some stories on the site. If you are surprised that they are actually using them I have no idea what to say.

But this is not a decision they made based on anything their fact-checkers told them. This is a decision they’re making before they get the results of the fact check. Andy Stone did eventually follow up with a clarification:

> This is part of our standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation. We temporarily reduce distribution pending fact-checker review.

So apparently this is a standard process, but the process is kind of ironic in that it claims to farm out this decision to a neutral-as-possible third-party, when really they first have to make a preliminary decision internally.

Delaying the story in today's fast moving news environment is effectively censoring it. Who is fact checking this? Who fact checks the fact checkers? This is classic Orwellian bullshit and its getting worse by the day.

Stop calling them Fact Checkers and call them by what they are: The Ministers of Truth.

Have you even read the story? Really? It is so laughably false that the fact that Facebook does not instantly nuke references to the story as an obvious falsehood are themselves a thumb on the scale in favour of the current criminal administration and their enablers. The only bullshit here is what people like you are spreading.

The Republican House Judiciary Committee posted information on their website and their Twitter. Twitter is now listing it as an unsafe link:

https://twitter.com/SteveScalise/status/1316752470484410370

https://twitter.com/johncardillo/status/1316724949428600833

Rudy Giuliani has also come out and made the following statement about his involvement in the chain of evidence:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZasrHQeKiY

I did read the article. This isn't trivial. This is big, really big.

This is overt election interference

Unfortunately I flagged this as being deceptive: this is simply not an accurate summary of the tweets, or even good-faith attempt at one. This is about one intensely controversial story from the NY Post, and not about anti-Biden posts. In fact the overall distribution of Facebook post-sharing still leans dramatically to the right so it seems like this title will give people a very misleading idea of what Facebook's political biases are: https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10/status/131638341877556428...

Given how toxic the NY Post story has already become, it is difficult to regard your submission as anything more than dishonest flame-baiting.

I disagree. Despite what you may think about the NY Post, this is a big story about a current presidential candidate's son, in regards to major corruption that involves his father directly.

You can say they're lying, that's one thing. But to prevent the story from a major news publication from going out entirely .. that's narrative building. Big tech is shaping narrative. This story, even to refute it, is no where on CNN's front page.

This belongs on HackerNews because it's about big tech and big censorship. We are seeing unprecedented steps being taken to mark and judge stories by social media companies, and yet they're still trying to claim they're not publishers for the purposes of section 203.

My point is that the person who submitted this used a deeply misleading title.

It really has nothing to do with the NY Post story specifically, or about the overall "censorship or fact-checking?" story: if the only contribution to the overall story is a dishonest summary of some tweets, a summary that is designed to inflame rather than inform, then it deserves to be flagged on HN. This title only fans a flamewar.

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