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Comment by pyronik19 | Hacker News Reader

No fan of Russia, but to pretend that facebook is some neutral platform that isn't trying to push their own political agenda is naive.

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Russia isn't worried about Facebook's bias; Russia is worried that Facebook doesn't share Russia's own bias, at least not to the degree it would like. Russian citizens have relationships with Ukrainians, and Russia doesn't want its people to see their friends and family murdered by Russian soldiers.

Content moderation is hard and Facebook often makes mistakes and sometimes even intentionally does harmful stuff vs Russia invading its neighbor with no justification at all.

Yeah, that‘s a comparison that does make sense to make. I’m sarcastic here.

Are people deliberately missing the point or intentionally evil?

Moderating away rule breaking content that most people don't want to see is very much akin to disallowing state-sponsored war propaganda: a good thing.

Okay but we allow our state sponsored war propaganda on it.

At some point, many free speech maximalists get driven into an ethical corner. This is one of them, and we discover that all of a sudden, many of them only support propaganda that they like. (But they will bend over backwards trying to come up with weak reasons for why bullshit from RT is totally different from bullshit from Qanon.)

For like 10 years in every thread about social media someone brings up their “own political agenda” but never specifies what they mean. If the main objective is maximizing profits there can’t be a strong political agenda because with every shift in governance the way to maximize profit will also shift. This whole political debate about social networks is just stupid they are cooperations first and if there is profit to be made they will take it no matter if it’s left or right.

> If the main objective is maximizing profits there can’t be a strong political agenda because with every shift in governance the way to maximize profit will also shift

Even more simply, companies like Facebook and Twitter are stuck in the middle if for no other reason than they can't lose either half of their audience.

They're happy if a few extremists peel off to their "free speech" platforms, because it's less headache for them and they don't have to worry about those platforms appealing to the mainstream. They themselves will obviously never do anything to lose the mainstream on either side.

Not sure why this comment is being downvoted, there is credible evidences that support this view, if not obvious from the US elctions

Strangely, it was obvious to both sides in the US election that Facebook was pushing the agenda of the other side.

The parent poster never said their "side" was Democrat or Republican, only that it was Facebook's political agenda. Facebook's agenda is promoting the maximum amount of outrage so it can increase engagement. You can play all sides of the political spectrum to achieve that.

That's true. But that's not what people mean when they accuse Facebook or Twitter about having their political agenda.

I didn't and I am not going to be coy about it, I am right of center of most issues. It really annoys me to see Facebook shut down the "truckers convoy" facebook organization even but at the same time never shut anything down relating to BLM as just a recent and obvious example. That said I don't want either shut down. I think these platforms should seek to emulating the free speech *principles* of the first amendment even if they aren't bound legally by them (today) where anything up to incitement of violence is unacceptable. Today its just a disaster where they ban/deboost people for political views that aren't left wing, banning "misinformation" that is actually true, and are funneling dark money into elections, and god knows what the hell they are doing with all the data.

Could you please share them?

All I recall was accusations by political parties from both sides.

Just because some content got popular amongst some cohort, it doesn't mean it was being pushed as an agenda. That is a problem any platform that depends on user activity to surface content will have, that you might see whatever the other side wants to share too.

Because it is irrelevant to the issue at hand.

If you read HN comment threads you may come to the conclusion that tangential discussions are the norm.

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