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Comment by travisoneill1 | Hacker News Reader

It really pisses me off when companies don't decide for me what information I am allowed to see. They are obviously smarter than me, and only acting in my best interest rather than their own, so it's best that they do this for me.

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Facebook decides what information you see every day. They decide to promote certain messages and suppress others, not editorially but with algorhythms.

True. It doesn't bother me that companies show me what they think I want to see based on a recommendation algorithm. It does bother me that they would decline to show me something that would otherwise be recommended because they, in their infinite wisdom, have deemed it bad.

I guess I don't see that much of a difference between someone picking what are the best articles, news and videos to show by hand and someone designing an algorithm to do the same function. Their organization still has responsibility every time they choose to show some content over others.

I don't believe that when an algorithm is used, the output is suddenly not a function of human nature or human design. That suddenly no human has any responsibility for it.

if facebook gave this post a score of -infinity, such that it is literally never recommended to anyone, doesn't show up on feeds, and you can only find it by typing in the URL, that would be fine with you?

If it was because they predicted that no one would be interested, then yes. If it was because they disagreed with it, then no.

> It doesn't bother me that companies show me what they think I want to see based on a recommendation algorithm.

It isn't a great choice for users to have to decide between debunking someone's Facebook thing in their post's comments and thereby boosting engagement and promoting it to all their friends, or just leaving it be unchallenged.

Or for Youtube, do you watch a youtube video of a demagogue to prepare arguments against them, knowing that Youtube will promote it more because you watched it?

We need some kind of way to interact with this stuff while getting the choice to not promote it as a result.

Facebook does not only moderate through algorithms. There was a documentary on UK Channel 4 where subcontracted moderators were instructed to allow controversial topics [1].

1: https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/17/17582152/facebook-channel...

I think that's too simplistic a take. But it's a fair point that we should be concerned about corporate censorship if people start to depend on private platforms for public speech.

But oft-repeated falsehoods are harmful even if we know they're not true.

No it's really not too simplistic. The only case where Facebook's censorship is a positive is if the following 2 statements are both true:

- FB's moderators posses better judgment than me as to what is and isn't true

- FB's moderators will always act in the best interest of the users and not the company when they come into conflict

I would say that the first point is very unlikely to be true, and the second is certain not to be true. I'm not sure how a lie can be harmful if it is know to be a lie.

I mostly agree with your point here. But a lie can be very harmful, even if it is known to be a lie, if enough people either don't know it's a lie, or don't care. See "Blood libel" for perhaps the most extreme example.

Maybe you should choose to use curated information services rather than ones that show you anything and everything people could think to post then.

Might I suggest moving to Facebook rather than complaining that Voat doesnt fit your needs when it doesn’t claim it does?

As an alternative, we could allow all threats of physical violence to be shared freely across all platforms.

Threats of violence are illegal. We could leave it to the police to handle this, as they always have until now.

Right, so we have a platform where tens of millions of posts are made every day, and we leave all of the threats of violence up for however long it takes the appropriate law enforcement agency to respond.

Why stop at companies? The government itself should decide everything for us. Can we really be trusted to think correct thoughts or do correct actions? Just look at covid - it's shown us that people don't voluntarily make the right choice at scale and that the government needs more power to force us to make correct choices so that lives can be saved.

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