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Comment by Hokusai | Hacker News Reader

> You've probably noticed this if you've tried to search YouTube for videos which don't align with the official narratives of western governments and media lately.

You want your unpopular ideas to be promoted, and you think that it's your right. Everything cannot be promoted, what is there suggestion of the article? To promote the less popular ideas, the most extreme.

I see social problems there, but morality apart, it becomes a "Nazi Bar problem", you don't want to appeal mainly to niche audiences because money.

In the author's opinion. We should also remove HN voting system, as popular ideas to up and unpopular are hidden.

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> You want your unpopular ideas to be promoted

She didn't say "unpopular". She said those that go against the official narrative, regardless of popularity.

> and you think that it's your right.

She didn't say that either. She's merely drawing attention to how social media secretly manipulates what is allowed to become or remain popular.

> In the author's opinion. We should also remove HN voting system

I don't think she said anything of the sort? Her article is very short on solutions. But we should be able to admit a problem exists and discuss it even if we don't yet have a solution.

> She didn't say "unpopular". She said those that go against the official narrative, regardless of popularity.

Yes, she said that because it sounds more sympathetic than “I am owed an audience” or admitting that many of the people who saw their reach reduced were in fact trafficking in mistruths. The message that this is the “establishment” suppressing the truth is a very powerful one which inspires a strong emotional reaction from many of us, but it's also far too simplistic — for example, she scare-quotes “fake news” to dismiss it without acknowledging that there was in fact a ton of provably untrue material heavily promoted by the major social networks during the 2016 election cycle to the point where many poll respondents would express belief in falsehoods. Valuing free speech doesn't mean we should pretend that there aren't problems with real impacts.

> But we should be able to admit a problem exists and discuss it even if we don't yet have a solution.

I doubt there even is a solution. At no point in human history have things ever been different to the current situation - and for good reason.

Today it's SV tech bros, in the past it was priests, kings, bible translators, newspaper publishers, radio- and TV stations. This is nothing new and complaining about it is like complaining about the desert being dry.

It's especially amusing coming from a country were puritanical views are codified in media regulations such that nakedness and profanity is still taboo, whereas hate mongering, spreading misinformation and outright defamation and lies are promoted under the banner of "free speech". A tad hypocritical, but maybe that's just me.

Complaining is fine. No change ever started without complaining beforehand. If nobody complains, lots of people won't even notice the issue.

Wonder what will be next overlord though.

> She didn't say "unpopular". She said those that go against the official narrative, regardless of popularity.

That's always been a thing, though. The incentive for big platforms has never been to promote the most popular ideas, much less the most correct ones. It's to promote "engagement" to the greatest possible extent, while ensuring that they're showing advertiser-friendly content at least most of the tme. And big advertisers are easily swayed towards not letting their ads appear beside "misinformation" that contradicts official and quasi-official narratives. You can't get rid of this dynamic except by re-decentralizing search and curation of content.

But that's not what is actually happening on these platforms.

You can search for something like "is coronavirus dangerous to me" on YouTube and you'll get a list of specific banal videos, which don't actually answer your question from about 12 months ago. It almost looks hardcoded. You can tweak the search parameters and you'll get the same thing - videos which talk about coronavirus, but not the thing you searched for.

No other topic has this applied to it. If you search for e.g. "is the ryzen 7 worth it" the videos vary, they're not all adverts from AMD and they will answer your question.

We're not talking here about what's on the front page or marketed, we're talking about explicitly searching for material and having that be hidden from view i.e. censored.

If I go to the library and pick up a copy of the communist manifesto, or Mein Kampf, or a book on Stalin, or whatever, the library isn't _promoting_ those at all, they're not expressing an opinion. There's been a weird shift in discourse recently (see no-platforming) which implies that allowing something to exist is promoting it.

No one wants their unpopular ideas to be "promoted" she gives anecdotal accounts of popular creators being gradually shadowbanned.

It is the very point that propagation of speach is not dependent on popularity but increasingly on alignment with powerful interests and it does a lot of damage. How could you miss that?

> she gives anecdotal accounts of popular creators being gradually shadowbanned

How "popular" are we talking, though? Taking a big picture view, "official" narratives are pretty popular whilst "alternative" points of view are niche. And modern AI-powered algorithms don't do a great job of promoting niche, long-tail content in general. For all we know, this might be the outcome of a random AI tweak that results in burying some content because it gets predicted as "unpopular".

Anti-wokeness is very popular. Not trusting the presidential elections is very popular. Not trusting big pharma is very popular.

All of these are algorithmically suppressed.

If the definition of popular is what you see on twitter, etc, then nothing popular is being censored by definition.

Source? I've seen this claim many times but is it just a feeling or is there at least a whistleblower?

There are some whistleblowers indeed, but for the most part many dominant tech companies semiopenly proclaim these groups to be "dangers to society" and many admit to use "throttling", shadow-banning, and "machine learning fairness" to reduce the exposure to these thought crimes.

The only reason there are limited numbers of whistleblowers is that Tech companies actively brainwash their employees to think that the marginalized opinions are just some "small dangerous fringe nazi thing", similarly to how the commenters I replied to seem to think.

She's saying the opposite that algorithm discards what may be popular/trending. So she'd probably be for HN voting system.

Surely there's a difference between "promoting" something and showing me what I'm explicitly searching for.

Is a library promoting Critical Race Theory by keeping books about it on the shelves?

I think you're both right. I read the article and the author does seem to be suggesting what critics of cancel-culture critics always claim we're suggesting - that popular platforms must give "equal time" to all points of view. This bit of ongoing misdirection is doing a good job of muddying the definition of "censorship" to make it look like the actual memory-hole-ing that Twitter and Facebook and Google have been engaging in is somehow purely organic. So the person you're replying to is correct that the article is completely wrong - so wrong that I kind of wonder if the author isn't trying to pull some weird "false flag" pro-censorship move.

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