Is there any credible evidence of anti-conservative bias in FB or Twitter behavior? Can anyone point me at it?
From a political perspective, there are a billion stories about how FB leadership actively reaches out to conservative media to try and keep the platform friendly to them (including things like allowing the Daily Caller to be a “fact checker” on their platform). Many stories of “oh this feature to prevent trending of outright false shit would flag half of conservative media. Let’s not”
The naive reading is they are afraid of conservative backlash. But I’m personally a bit done with giving them the benefit of the doubt. I think they are actively courting conservatives (sacrificing only the tiniest slice of the far right on certain high profile bans)
My guess is that algorithmic checks are flagging posts and conservatives are interpreting that as censorship.
There are some people who think it's a useful heuristic for uncovering potential oddities. Academics may not think so, but perhaps people who are professional analysts do.
Ultimately it comes down to who's side you want to take, and whether that's going to result in something akin to censorship.
Also, part of the reason I don't like commenting on any remotely political HN posts is that you get downvotes for saying perfectly reasonable things.
If you've seen the handy little graph of the first digit statistics that each candidate got in big cities, I dug into this a bit but the basic summary is precinct sizes aren't random at all and that messes up the entire premise of that analysis. I made a quick repo that altered the initial repo to show things like how just getting 70% of the vote would screw up benfords law in most counties [0].