Isn't that what everyone wants? Except that they do that with all stories and have no algorithms at all?
It's not censorship though so I don't know what y'all talking about.
Facebook altered an algorithm to transmit a story to fewer people than it otherwise would have. It’s censorship.
If I refuse to tell a 3rd person (not present) something you tell me, that is not censorship.
I have no obligation to repeat your nonsense.
If someone or a group convince me to change my mind and no longer publish, that is me exercising my free speech right.
If I run an online forum and I start removing posts I don't like, that is censorship. I'm allowed to remove those posts because it's my website, but it's still censorship.
"to suppress or delete as objectionable" [1]
You can't just make up definitions of words. Suppression is censorship.
I think in some ways this is even more sinister than what Twitter did by blocking the article completely cause at least on Twitter you were told that you couldn’t retweet or share the link to the article.
On Facebook, anyone who shared it was under the impression that their friends were going to see it, but yet they most likely didn’t.
Facebook didn't disseminate it so you never got the chance to start discussing it.
Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information. This may be done on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient".[2][3][4] Censorship can be conducted by governments,[5] private institutions and other controlling bodies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship
What Facebook did fits the definition of censorship perfectly - they suppressed the story.
But censorship isn't about treating something differently.
Yes it is. Not just treating it differently, but treating it differently and negatively based on the content. Suppressing a story or speech based on the content.
They have no duty to be neutral.
Legally, no duty. Morally, I think most people would say Facebook has a duty to censor some things (child porn, live streams of killings, threats), and a duty to avoid censoring other things, like political speech, religious speech, etc.
Censorship is about preventing a certain kind of speech.
Yes. Preventing, suppressing, limiting, blocking. Any of those would be a form of censorship. It doesn't have to be 100% prevention, 100% blocked, or banned.
They did not do this.
They did. Mark Zuckerberg said the limited the distribution, that's suppression.
Do they have a duty to be neutral with the application of their algorithm? Obviously not: such an algorithm must discriminate on content in some manner. There is no such thing as "neutral amplification" in this context. Do they have a moral duty to not consider political content in the application of their algorithm? Obviously not, as a private company they are free to bias their algorithm in whatever manner they see fit.
Can we presume there is some kind of social contract that should constrain the manner in which they bias their amplification? Perhaps one could argue for this. But this social contract does not extend to foreign actors attempting to sway an election. If Facebook had reason to believe that this story was a part of an intelligence operation--and they did given the FBI warning--being neutral towards this story is not breaking any social contract. Facebook has no duty to allow their product to be the vehicle of a foreign psyops campaign (or a local one for that matter).
Also, Facebook has deleted things that are overtly sexual for as long as I can remember. I find it odd that all of the people complaining about “censorship” never complain about that or think through the implications of what their framework would mean when applied to that.
>Also, Facebook has deleted things that are overtly sexual for as long as I can remember. I find it odd that all of the people complaining about “censorship” never complain about that or think through the implications of what their framework would mean when applied to that.
That's just a cheap shot and a straw man, and I could say the same to you. You clearly haven't thought through the consequences of allowing the largest private communication network to block political communication of one side of an election. If it had been Facebook deciding to block anti-Trump stories you'd be crying twice is hard.
But ignoring the straw man, it is Facebook's prerogative to not have sexual content, or to say "no political content". And while they can, and did decide to block political content to benefit one side, it is valid to criticize that without suggesting that if they allow the NY Post article they also need to allow child port to be consistent.
FB distributes content, and they are always making an editorial judgement if they aren’t using a simple chronological order algorithm.
There is no official or single exhaustive definition to compare text strings with and glean meaningful information. The issue is what is meant when people use the word in typical contexts. Attempted or actual prevention of certain kinds of speech is the operative meaning in the context of censorship.
The issue is a supposedly neutral government agent very likely swayed a free election by "suggesting" to a private company it'd be a good idea to alter the information citizens are exposed to.
Of course things like youtube searches and related videos is less well defined.