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Comment by hbn | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but think this "whistleblowing" is only good for Facebook's bottom line. I haven't seen anything pop up that's shocking or needed an internal person to be leaking it -- "it's bad for kids," "they don't censor enough hate speech," etc.

It just seems to me that it's setting up for a bunch of new legislation that only allows section 230 protection if platforms implement a ton of moderation that only the existing, big player platforms could possibly keep up with, ensuring that smaller platforms (or ones that don't want to censor as much) could never hope to exist. Facebook gets to censor more, keeping controversial stuff off their site, and they don't even take the blame because "it's the law," PLUS all potential competition is gone. Sounds great for Zuck!

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> new legislation that only allows section 230 protection if platforms implement a ton of moderation

The proposals I've seen also tie it to algorithmic content curation. The idea is that if a human is choosing what to put in front of my face (e.g. a newspaper editor), or an algorithm designed by a human (e.g. Facebook), then they should bear some responsibility for that content. If the New York Times publishes something illegal, they can be sued. If someone on Facebook posts something illegal, and Facebook chooses to amplify that content (via algorithm or otherwise), and Facebook hasn't made a good faith effort to moderate it, Facebook should probably be able to be sued as well.

Presumably, chronologically ordered content would be exempt from these new moderation guidelines, which gives the smaller platforms some space to play in. Personally, I'd love if our social media brought back dumb sorting and filtering: algorithmic recommendations are a new hell.

Define "algorithmic curation". It could mean any of:

- Chronological order

- Round-robin per subscription/friend (per sibling comment here)

- Upvote/downvote and vote weighting

- Brigading, sock puppets, etc

- Inlined advertisements - you may not like adtech but legality is a separate issue of debate

- Locality, proximity

- Content as it relates to time of day

Only some of these contribute to echo chambers and manipulation. I think it would be difficult to write a straight forward description that does what you would want and extremely difficult for doing what most people would want.

How will platforms based on chronological ordering handle accounts that post wildly different amounts of stuff? If I log in for the first time in three weeks, I want to see the post from someone who last logged on two weeks ago more than the spam of the daily users.

Each source of content gets one slot. Display most recent, but allow scrolling left right to see more from same source.

Or better yet - make the scoring algorithm something the user can customize themselves (ex. bestFriendUpvotes * 0.4 + otherFriendUpvotes * 0.2 + friendOfFriend upVotes * 0.2 + allSiteUpvote * 0.2), thus making it out of the site's control.

tags and other filters

…that get used by 1/1000 of the users, at most. Purely chronological isn’t a good experience unless you’re a power user who cares enough to manage those things.

I'm so happy to be seeing this. I've been saying for a couple years that "treat algorithmic feeds as editorial" and then all of the existing laws governing newspaper, TV, etc apply.

I think it would be so fun if Congress actually wrote the algorithm. Would the law be in Python, Java, BASIC...? Probably in pseudo-code.

For those humor-challenged among the readership, that was a joke.

Not quite a joke: it would at least show them that just saying "algorithm" doesn't remove human judgment.

Wouldn't that rule also effectively ban HN and Reddit?

It’s positive for their market position in that it raises the barrier of entry for new competitors, but it’s bad for them in terms of retention and time spent on site.

Outrage keeps people hooked and engaged. Misinformation is big business. They’ll lose ad revenue as well, both if there are stricter controls on/around having children on these sites and the ad revenue for the misinformation campaigns.

Not to mention that the crazy will move elsewhere. Maybe that’s fine, but those people both create and consumer a lot of content. We’ve seen this with YouTube. The reason the quickly recommend more intense, controversial, conspiratorial content is that people engage with more videos for longer.

The original whistleblower got propped up and enjoyed it way too much. To a point their congressional testimony included their take that FB is a threat to national security (I haven't seen anything in their history that would hint they are experts in national security)

They were a Product Manager, not an executive. Their testimony should have focused on 2 things:

* What orders were you given

* Who gave you said orders

Instead it just spread out to 1000 different non relevant areas. Bad/Evil lower and middle management does not make the senior executives guilty

You think zuck personally decided to let domestic terrorists plan a terrorist attack on his platform? Cool, show us the evidence

We're seeing a lot of bad middle management going on in these leaks, but thats far from something that will bring down the whole company

as a US citizen, both chambers of congress want to torpedo social media giants like Facebook and Twitter but for differing reasons. Democrats: because its tangibly harmful to children and spreads deleterious hatred. Republicans: because it has a well established anticonservative bias that in retrospect contributed measurably to their presidential loss in 2020.

Facebook however has done a masterful job resisting legislation through congressional dog and pony shows, social engineering, and slight of hand. Without tangible evidence, policy cant really be drafted and the playbook from big oil for climate change is exactly the kind of interference run Facebook is employing here. Make it difficult to discern what, if any 'harm' Facebook does that cannot be assigned to "personal responsibility."

The leaks however do irreparable damage to the thesis of the 'curiously confusing' good facebook by nailing down actual conditions in time.

> Republicans: because it has a well established anticonservative bias

Except, that's not reality: https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10

It doesn't need to be real to be somebody's motivation.

When you can show me internal discussions at FB where employees say things like:

"we should label stories about 'Russian collusion' as misinformation"

"we should censor stories celebrating the BLM riots"

"(April 2020) we should allow stories about the Wuhan Lab Leak theory"

Then you'll be correct. But when 100% of their executives' concern goes into monitoring only right-wing content and responding to left-wing employees, then the charge is justified.

Mark Zuckerberg opposed providing election information in Spanish would be seen as a partisan issue.

https://news.yahoo.com/mark-zuckerberg-opposed-pushing-spani...

Soo.... yeah.

republican party isn't really "conservative" anymore. I would say it tends to benefit the republican party more than it does the democrat party.

> Republicans: because it has a well established anticonservative bias

In re: Twitter, this is disputed by Twitter's own research finding a measurably significant pro-conservative bias: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/10/22/twitter-a...

Deeper reading: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/rml-polit...

I wouldn't consider Twitter to be an unbiased third party given their past performance and the CEO's public stance on these topics.

The claim that cigarettes cause cancer has been disputed by Marlboro's own research, finding that cigarettes prevent cancer.

If enough people believe there’s a bias against them, that’s enough for people (Republican Congress critters in this case) to turn on the site

..for the conservative views they allow on twitter.

> Republicans: because it has a well established anticonservative bias

We should not take this claim about Facebook at face value, since the opposite is often said, with some data to back it up:

> the top 10 posts shared on Facebook in the past 24 hours, which almost always come predominantly from conservative voices

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/06/how-facebook-became-...

> it is often conservatives who gain the most in terms of engagement and online attention

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/feb/01/facebook-youtu...

> Left-wing posts make the daily top-25 much less frequently

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/26/facebook-conservati...

etc

https://www.vox.com/recode/21419328/facebook-conservative-bi...

https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-crowdtangle-data-to...

> some data to back it up

https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10

This does not say anything about facebook the company and it's leadership and employee base yet, it just says something about the user base and who is most active and thus most influential to the automated algorithms on that platform.

It says enough about facebook the company after somebody makes an unsubstantiated claim like: "because it has a well established anticonservative bias".

Frankly it doesn't. That's just putting a correlation-is-causation lipstick on pig to counter another pig without lipstick.

IDK is nuance is still a thing, but I said that the claim of a specific "well established" bias in Facebook "should not be taken at face value" and I think that there is enough evidence that it really isn't that simple or well-established, at all. That's not the same as one team "countering" the other.

Then say that it's not well established (I agree with that, by the way), or ask to see the sources for this claim. But saying the top stories on fb actually prove anything in this regard is just not a sound argument to make.

You will notice that the person that said: "because it has a well established anticonservative bias", provided no source. Source was supplied that confirms that there is no anti conservative bias. Will you, maybe, provide us with that missing source? Maybe people claiming such things should first get some lipstick before making those claims..

>You will notice that the person that said: "because it has a well established anticonservative bias", provided no source.

Yes, I did notice that. That is an issue, but wasn't the issue I was talking about.

Maybe you should ask that author for evidence and/or sources for this claim?

>Will you, maybe, provide us with that missing source?

No, I didn't make the claim, and I do not want to make that claim either.

>Source was supplied that confirms that there is no anti conservative bias.

Now that was the issue here I was talking about: user-generated "top stories" on some platform do not confirm/prove anything about the company itself. If facebook actually asserted human editorial control over those top stories, maybe, but they say they don't (except to fight illegal content, and certain kinds of hate speech or misinformation) and so far I have yet to see any evidence they do. All they really have is algorithms boosting content that is already smaller-scale going viral on it's own. So it only tells you something about the users on facebook at best, not the company.

I'm not sure I'd say social media has a anti-conservative bias. Part of the issue with social media, especially Facebook, is that their algorithms were very self reinforcing of your own views.

It led to a lot of people forming echo chambers of their political beliefs if they were also unlikely to get news from outside their social media circles.

Social media also greatly helped get Trump elected, and is one of the greatest sources of politicized covid-19 misinformation, as well as qanon. I'm not sure how that squares up against having an anti-conservative bias.

Unless you're implying that the Republicans will peddle that line that they were treated unfairly, regardless of how things played out.

All the big social media sites explicitly tanked, censored, and otherwise buried what would otherwise have been the biggest story of the election, Hunter Biden's laptop scandal.

For comparison, imagine all the mainstream media and social media outlets doing that to the Trump Access Hollywood tape scandal late 2016.

What about the laptop has actually been proven to be true and relevant? Has any information been passed to prosecutors? Has any of this been tested in court?

What disingenuous nonsense. The press would have been ALL OVER this story if it was Don Jr.'s laptop. How much press did the Steele "dossier" get even though it was total fabrication?

If the establishment refuses to even look at evidence, then *of course" no evidence will be passed to them.

THERE. IS. NO. EVIDENCE.

Pack it up boys, we were wrong. Photographs, cryptographic verified messages, not a single denial from Dems, and a mass censorship campaign. But this guy forget he wasn't still on Twitter and posted caps with periods (you forgot the clapping emoji though).

There's literal photographs that show clear as day, from multiple angles in multiple situations, Biden's son abusing drugs and prostitutes. Some of the correspondence on the laptop has been cryptographicly verified. Most importantly, no one has denied any of it.

Similar with wikileaks; Dems don't deny, but they obfuscate by claiming "Russian interference", "misinformation" "Fact Check (tm)!" etc. while simultaneously banning and throttling anyone who calls out their shit.

But how much hand did that platforms themselves have in bolstering this bias? Couldn't it be that it was just that there were more influential channels (both on mainstream and social media) that were aligned to one side than those aligned to the other? How do we know how much the infrastructure itself is to blame?

No the leadership of all these platforms and media outlets were the ones making these decisions, explicitly so. Twitter suspended the New York Post's account because they posted the story. Nothing about tanking the Hunter Biden story was organic.

As someone who didn't follow any of this closely because I think it's mostly theater, I don't understand why a Donald Trump (a presidential candidate) scandal is comparable to a Hunter Biden (not a presidential candidate) scandal. Was there something there that implicated Joe Biden in a problematic way?

>>>Was there something there that implicated Joe Biden in a problematic way?

Yes. There were implications that Hunter Biden was essentially a conduit for political access to his father via bribes/business deals, and that some of that foreign bribe money (in particular from Chinese businessmen) was also finding its way into Joe Biden's hands.

The story wasn't just "poor distraught crackhead sexfiend has his laptop hacked by Russian spies". That's how the mainstream platforms tried to spin it in order to justify burying it. They had no response to the sworn statement from one of his business partners supporting the leaked laptop documents about their business, other than to completely memory-hole that as well.

> Hunter Biden's laptop scandal.

Everyone heard about Hunter Biden's laptop, but no one cared, because it was obvious bullshit, and there was literally no hard proof at all.

"A guy claims that Biden flew across country, left the laptop there, never came back for it, and it was full of information, but is unwilling to actually show us any concrete proof." Why would any sane person care?

What sort of person is so pathologically uninterested in human life that they think this is more important than the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands Americans due to the bungled response to COVID?

I'm just horrified.

Since you seem so engaged by that "scandal", please provide answers to the following:

What was the scandal and proof around this supposed laptop? What was on it? What proof tied it to Hunter? Why does Hunter matter at the same level as Trump?

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