Bingo. You can make an argument that your posts are your free speech. But "What Facebook chooses to put on your feed" is Facebook's speech.

Agree completely.

Of course this is exactly how Facebook want it. To appear as the light touch impartial platform where "everyone is free" to communicate. Except in the background they play with who sees what to increase engagement and run experiments.

With the black-box of algorithms used to target content we can only guess what is really happening. But as every media company knows, controversy sells. So I'll need a lot of proof that generating controversy isn't exactly what Facebook is doing on their platform.

How does this argument apply to Google? When you search something e.g. is climate change real, Google ranks the results algorithmically. If Google doesn't do fact checking, are they liable for false statements?

> When you search something e.g. is climate change real, Google ranks the results algorithmically.

On hot-button topics, that's simply not true. Google maintains manual rankings for all sorts of things, and especially manually maintains search suggestions so as to not lead people down the "wrong" path.

It applies just as much because it is a fundamentally technically illiterate argument. It already ignores that the whole point of the algorithim is to prioritize. In this case just as much means "none" for both because it is asking for an outright contradiction to - provide prioritization without any bias. Or bias without bias. Nonsensical stupidity. The mobster with a cudgel making vague threats rhetoric is just another form of the stupid and wrong meme of service and platform being mutually excluse.

I personally try to do my part by stomping on this dumb sentiment like a cockroach whenever it pops up.

I disagree. The "algorithm" is fundamentally an optimization problem and companies get to choose what the fitness function for each algorithm is. Facebook chooses "engagement". This is not an accident nor some fundamental property of math. It's a product decision made by a human. One that can be changed.

And there is a fundamental difference between Google's algorithm and Facebook's: control. Google requires user input through search, Facebook decides what shows up when you open the app/site based on an algorithmic feed. In one case the user has some idea that what they're doing is interacting with an algorithm and they can change their search terms if they're not satisfied with the results, in the other the algorithm is in the background making decisions without making itself obvious.

There is an implicit search on Facebook though, namely the personal information you’ve entered into your profile and your relationships.

You may be misunderstanding. In this case, I think people conceive of an "obvious" baseline to compare to - presenting posts of your friends in a chronological order.

There's no inherent contradiction when people say "this simple, transparent, obvious algorithm is better". Even if implementing it would in fact result in forgoing billions of dollars.

well said