Hacker News Reader

Comment by pegasus | Hacker News Reader

The heuristic/algorithm is Facebook's creation, so they (including possibly you?) are to blame either way. I think GP is pointing out the fact that there being no clear rules or accountability on what gets surfaced on our timelines allows much more subtle and virtually undetectable ways to suppress information than previously. It all can be easily hidden behind the magic/complexity of the all-knowing "algorithm". I do find this to be a novel and very concerning vulnerability in our collective sense-making.

View on HN

What is the difference between this and a moderator on Reddit manually deleting a post?

If a moderator deletes a post someone else can post it again. If you create an automatic rule to prevent that then it's algorithmic.

And the you will get banned. The only difference is that facebook has real people as requirement while reddit allows sock puppetry.

All this talk is very funny to me because it shows that most people here are too young. The algorithm exists because the establishment demanded it. I say establishment because I remember what the old geek culture was and the demand didn't come from it. It came from outside of technical libertarian circle. Once social media companies said it is possible the demand became even more shrill and it culminated in 2016 when Trump won. The algorithm was created specifically to do what Zuckerberg made it do in 2020.

Sure I agree with that if we want to define "algorithm" in such a way that "if (url.contains('sex')) ban()" is "censorship by the algorithm"

I just don't think that's a useful definition. You should just say "Facebook is censoring the content".

This would be more like shadow banning but in a way that can never be proven, or even detected in the first place. The post would just be surfaced less. Since there's no visibility on what gets surfaced when, it's a way to nudge public opinion on different issues without any accountability.

You can do this on Reddit. People do it all the time

https://www.reddit.com/r/modhelp/comments/1px939/hiding_post...

It's not at all the same. The behavior you refer to can be checked and proved by anyone as long as they know what to look for. Whereas the FB "tweak to the algorithm" discussed here cannot. This is exactly what I was saying above, I don't see what's so hard to understand here. Maybe, since you admit to have worked on said algorithm, it's a case of Upton Sinclair's dictum "“It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it"?

No, it's that you haven't worked on ranking systems so you probably don't know that it's also easy to check and prove by anybody who "knows what to look for".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com