I'm sure at the time, the Church were confident they were right about the matter and therefore had no qualms in suppressing Galileo's claims.

Freedom of information and opinion is what drives progress. Should conservative opinions be wrong, then there is no fear in giving them a platform - they can be publicly debunked, to the downfall of their message.

Given that they are feared, suggests that the jury is still out on whether their opinions are categorically wrong, or even whether the opposing opinion is categorically right. In this case, it will be free discussion which will enable us as a society to converge on the correct path.

Spot on.

No one is stopping people from having these opinions, speaking about them, or teaching those perspectives. Claiming that this is a cause of freedom of information and somehow making this analogous to Galileo (it's not, not even in the slightest) is absurdly silly.

If you are looking to defend rational discourse and freedom of thought, well, you're not doing that -- leveling out everything on a no-questions-asked baseline is ignorant and becomes borderline satire of unbiased rational thought at that point.

You may not have been paying attention, but unfortunately that's not the case.

https://www.thefire.org/list-of-campus-disinvitations-2000-2...

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/whats-new-about...

http://www.mediaite.com/online/university-president-shuts-do...

And I can link to many more examples if you wish. It's moved from "your opinion is incorrect but I respect your right to speak it" to "I don't agree with what you say so I'm denying your right to express it".

Now do you understand the problem? It's quite incredible, actually.

Please do provide more examples.

thefire.org - An org dedicated to freedom of speech on campus, founded by University of Pennsylvania professor Alan Charles Kors and Boston civil liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate.

Spiked - a 15 year old UK publication with staff from the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator.

Mediaite - a popular and left-leaning online news source that aggregates mainstream news sources.

Come off it. A browse through the links above are ample for anyone concerned about the truth.

You linked to "credible" sources, with some weird standard of credibility which I'm not even sure you believe yourself.

From the story:

> Stories covered by conservative outlets (like Breitbart, Washington Examiner, and Newsmax) that were trending enough to be picked up by Facebook’s algorithm were excluded unless mainstream sites like the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN covered the same stories.

That doesn't seem too terrible to me. If something from a untrustworthy source known for political agitprop is trending, I wouldn't mind Facebook waiting to see if the mainstream press picks up on it.

If they were letting through stories from places like AlterNet through that would show bias, but being generally cautious with biased sites that have low journalistic standards isn't the worst thing in the world.

What biased information am I acting on exactly?

The point was understood, but differently than you intended.

These terms seem to be used to reference the folks that would claim to hold the conservative viewpoint, but the terms themselves only further evidence the misunderstood viewpoint non-conservatives may have of conservatives, and that misunderstanding may have been furthered by what is discussed in the article.

Here's an explanation of the study:

>One other point that I find really interesting and important about Haidt’s work is his findings on the ability of different groups to empathize across these ideological divides. So in his book (p. 287) Haidt reports on the following experiment: after determining whether someone is liberal or conservative, he then has each person answer the standard battery of questions as if he were the opposite ideology. So, he would ask a liberal to answer the questions as if he were a “typical conservative” and vice-versa. What he finds is quite striking: “The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who describe themselves as ‘very liberal.’ The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives.” In other words, moderates and conservatives can understand the liberal worldview and liberals are unable to relate to the conservative worldview, especially when it comes to questions of care and fairness.

From: http://volokh.com/2014/01/17/jonathan-haidt-psychology-polit...

I was taught to be able to argue the other sides opinion as well because then you truly understand what you believe.

Then why do only liberals have a problem understanding it? Why are moderates and conservatives able to understand without difficulty? Are they not "lay person"s?

EDIT: To add a little more substance. I think the incoherence stems from the fact that the current conservative alliance is formed from approximately 3 distinct groups, with different priorities. You have the religious folks who care about abortion, same-sex marriage, drug laws, etc... And then you have the blue collar group that cares more about immigration, guns, etc.. And then you have the pro-business group which mostly cares about taxes and deregulation. From the outside looking in, it shouldn't be surprising that it's hard to empathize with the 'conservative' world view, because the external manifestations of that worldview are often very contradictory (i.e. why would a group that supports small-government also support the drug war, etc...)

I see many of the same aspects of incoherence among Democrats and you don't exactly have to look for it in the hidden trenches of the Democratic party. I certainly don't think Sen. Feinstein's views on encryption are in line with those of an open progressive society.

I see the same hypocrisy in Democrats' views on gun control, and specifically the prohibition against convicted felons exercising their constitutional right to bear arms.

I'm generally of the opinion that the criminal justice system in the US is fundamentally broken and institutionally racist/discriminatory. Going by that premise, and seeing the specific hurdles that poor people, and specifically poor black men, face in terms of selective enforcement, likelihood of being offered pretrial plea bargains, chances of conviction, and length of sentencing, I find it hard to view any laws that hope to strip citizens of their rights based on a tainted justice system as anything other than racist. And yet, these laws are broadly supported by both Democrats and Republicans.

An electoral system that can naturally support only two substantially competitive parties guarantees that parties that cannot maintain incoherence will also not be major parties. While the electoral system empirically does reduce the significant axes of variation of political vies in the population [1], it doesn't reduce it so far as to actually fit on the one-dimensional axis implied by a two-party system. So the major parties must be incoherent to be competitive.

[1] See, Arendt Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy for research on this.

[edit after the edit - please don't edit after someone has already replied - it makes the replier look bad]

From the outside, Democrats can be viewed as a bunch of special interests under one tent. I find much of these "group slicing" to be problematic when talking about the GOP as I don't think its really those groups or the ultimate belief is what is reported. Viewing a group through another group's lens is fraught with peril.

Kind of odd -- everyone immediately jumps down parent's throat, but it's not like tax cuts for 'job creators' and universal health care as 'death panels' aren't actual factual conservative talking points, part of an easily verifiable historical record (I'll concede the "attacks on regulations and consumer/environmental protections marketed as 'making government more efficient'"). I presume those that speak those views are No True Conservatives?

Actually (without getting into methodological issues and whether he has actually shown anything), the conclusion would be more accurately stated as that liberal are unable to accurately predict the manner in which conservatives would prefer to express their worldview, whereas the reverse is not true.

I think that, to the extent this is accurate at all (and this type of research on broadly characterizing liberals and conservatives, from either side, is fraught with opportunities -- often realized -- to take broad fuzzy terms and operationalize them in ways which reinforces researchers' own ideological biases), what it really reflects is the fact that liberals in-group language is the same as the common language of the broader society and, particularly, entertainment media (to which, then, moderates and conservatives are still heavily exposed), whereas conservatives in-group language is something to which liberals are far less exposed (mainly propagated through conservative churches and similar institutions).

(This is also feeds -- though its not the sole source of -- the liberal view of conservative dishonesty, in that the main context in which liberals encounter conservative in-group language is in conservative advocacy of public policy positions, where the language used to articulate conservative values is used in a way which clashes with liberals expected use of language, and seems dishonest when it comes to values.)

There comes a time where experience and evidence will just not go your way, no matter how many what-ifs and "if you would just listen"'s you throw at opposing parties. You cannot add credibility to your position based on unknowns and chance.

Making sure there is an artificial level playing ground between two sides is pointless. I don't believe this is a case of people stifling view points, but rather the view point in question just not holding any merit.

Equating that to censorship is silly. Furthermore utilizing questionable sources to further a point isn't going to help your view point either.

Censorship of any kind is inherently dangerous and detrimental to true progress. Aren't equality, open-mindedness, and freedom of expression paramount to liberal thought? Do you not see the hypocrisy here?

But shouldn't none of this matter? If we're right, should we really need to silence our opponents? If our ideas are fundamentally right, then they should win in a fair and open marketplace of ideas, without the unfair advantage of censorship.

The very fact that you want (or feel the need) to silence your opponent sheds a light on the quality and legitimacy of your ideas. I say this as someone who has always been classically liberal; we have abandoned our true ideals (the ideals which have usually placed us on the right side of history) for radicalism and new forms of bigotry and inequality. The Overton Window has radically shifted and those that were previously on the left are now falling closer to the center-right.

We are a polarized nation and this is reflected in the atrocious line-up of presidential candidates that we have right now.

Whether your statement is based on disingenuous confusion or simple ignorance doesn't matter at this point because you've made your own post largely irrelevant and quite frankly it ticked me off a little bit that this string of non-sense keeps getting repeated as if it's some defense of rational, critical thought when it's the furthest thing from it at the moment.

All positions and view points cannot get equal play time in the larger conversation -- it would be noisy and a waste of time and ultimately be detrimental to progress. That is not censorship.

Your personal attacks on me are actually proving my point. In your original post, you said:

"In the specific case of conservative politics, why does it matter that it's so skewed? I have absolutely no issue with, in this specific case, conservative politics not receiving much attention."

That's a form of censorship and manipulation, especially because Facebook is not seen as an editorialized news source, but rather as a representation of one's community. You seem to think it isn't censorship though:

"I am not sure how you are confusing me and facebook's curation system not giving attention to certain sources and positions based on their credibility and integrity with actively preventing people from speaking."

This had nothing to do with credibility or integrity. It was a group of people with a very specific political ideology that were subjectively picking news and having it appear in an organic feed, when it was really editorialized.

I'm not confusing you with Facebook's curation system. You're entitled to your opinion. I'm telling you why your opinion shouldn't be applied at scale (in this case, to a system that appears organic) and also why you should care about this not just for this one incident, but for the implications that this has on a larger scale.

So you don't care about conservative views getting silenced here. After all, conservatives are wrong, right? But what if the major media outlet changes it's mind and starts to think liberals are wrong, and thus silences liberal content? How will you feel then? This isn't about political ideologies. It's about the implications of an unprecedentedly large and trusted media outlet taking sides and deliberately influencing it's audience. Liberal or conservative, that's dangerous.

I am not sure if you actually read what happened, but this was a case of certain sources being "ignored" because they are borderline tabloids that often push stories that aren't even remotely true. Waiting for another source to pick up the story and then publish it, isn't censorship. It's reasonable.

For this to be censorship based on a specific political ideology following along one side of the spectrum, you'd have to have an example where they let through other sources that are also tabloid-esque but happen to fall along within their opinions and views.

Did the standard for their sources remain relatively constant regardless of the material being discussed? There isn't a clear answer here, but that doesn't make it defacto censorship of one set of particular political opinions. The sources that were discussed aren't credible in any meaningful form. The fact that they happen to be largely conservative seems like a problem conservatives should address instead of calling it censorship.

A good number of posters in this thread seem fine with not bothering to really think of ways that the presented scenario doesn't hold up and completely accept what was stated is what was actually happening. It's a characteristically low standard of evidence and it just so happens that some of you have made it very clear that such a scenario also happens to align with your opinions. It's fantastically hypocritical.

>So you don't care about conservative views getting silenced here.

I am only going to clarify this once more and then I am no longer going to respond to you. I am not encouraging, advocating, enabling silencing of views here. I said I am okay such view points not getting a larger platform or attention, because it's a waste of time. Note that this is not the same as silencing, preventing discussion, outlawing, etc, etc. However, pretending that discussing all view points without considering whether they hold merit or not is somehow a path to better national dialogue is simply unfounded and doesn't make any sense. But that's my opinion, and really wasn't even what happened in the case above. That specific opinion of mine was brought up in response to someone claiming that we should defacto just give everything an equal voice in the national dialogue and somehow not doing so is censorship that will derail rational discourse on a national scale.

>But what if the major media outlet changes it's mind and starts to think liberals are wrong

You seem to misunderstand why this is happening. It's not a matter of opinions swaying. The sources discussed in the article have little to no credibility. The fact that they are all conservative is a problem conservatives might want to address.