Some of filtering is based on what the user wants to see, some of it is based on some notion of how "good" a piece of content is (scored by likes and engagement numbers), some of it is from advertisers paying to have their content make it through the filter, and some of it is Facebook deciding what should be seen and what shouldn't (mostly driven by their desire to keep you on the platform). Every single thing you see on Facebook has made it through a huge filter that ultimately decides if it's something you should see or not. And the inevitable outcome of building a gigantic what-information-do-you-get-to-see machine is that there are many, many parties trying to influence the machine.

Phone lines don't have that problem.

If Facebook limits the filtering to engagement, then it isn't the fault of Facebook that political content is engaging. That's just human nature. Disasters, outrage, politics, polarizing topics - these are all popular topics both online and off-line, and apread quickly as town gossip well before Facebook.

It is only when Facebook steps in and says that particular topics need to be exceptions to the filtering rules that apply to everything else, that they make themselves into a political actor.

For instance, let's say that the news feed showed you content based purely on number of likes. If political posts get lots of likes that isn't Facebook's problem. If the same ranking rules apply to all posts (# of likes) then they would remain neutral. As soon as Facebook says "content from x person will have their ranking artificially changed to reduce/increase engagement with it" thereby making an exception to the rule that applies to everything else, they have now become a political actor.

If I build a bridge intending it to stay up and it happens to fall down 6 months later, I'm responsible for it. Facebook created an algorithm that divides people politically and that surfaces content that is provably fictional. So they should be held responsible for it regardless of their intent. They don't get to invoke "common carrier" status when they're writing software that makes decisions about what you do or don't see. What makes a telephone a "common carrier" is the fact that the telephone doesn't decide who you call.

It doesn't matter whether it's software or a human. What matters is that decisions are being made by Facebook about what you do or don't see.

Whether or not it is intentional is immaterial to the effect. The law doesn't care about your intent. I wouldn't intentionally dump toxic waste into a river but I'm liable for dumping whether I intended to or not. Mark Zuckerberg can't just throw up his hands and go "oops it's software I can't help it" when it's his company that made all of the decisions about how the software works.

This isn't correct. The law in most modern democracies, as far as I'm aware, is very concerned with intent.

This why we generally define murder and manslaughter as distinct.

Murder is the unlawful killing of another human without justification or valid excuse, especially the unlawful killing of another human with malice aforethought.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder

Manslaughter is a common law legal term for homicide considered by law as less culpable than murder

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manslaughter

Murder vs manslaughter is the extreme example, though you'll find courts are broadly quite concerned with intent.

The information is out there. There are reliable news sources. There are reliable databases and encyclopaedias and journalism. If people choose not to read them then that's on them.

The problem is, Facebook doesn’t show people content that they want to see. They show people content that they will engage with. That’s a very important distinction.

HN algorithm/moderators actually explicitly do the opposite: if a thread gets too many comments too quickly, it’s ranked downward. The assumption is too many comments too quickly indicates a flamewar and the HN moderators want to keep a civil discussion. The approach Facebook takes is to “foster active discussion” which on the Internet typically means a flamewar. Noting generates engagement like controversial political views. So that’s what Facebook’s algorithm/moderators show to their users.

Facebook absolutely is a social conditioning tool, it’s designed from the ground up to show people content that stirs their emotions enough to click “like” or the mad face icon or even leave a comment and wait around until someone replies back.

I think it is far worse to attempt to condition people by showing them things *they wouldn't otherwise engage with". What is scarier, showing somebody something they want to engage in based on their past behaviour, or showing somebody something they wouldn't have otherwise seen if you hadn't gone out of your way to shove it down their throat?

People seem to want Facebook to make people more placid. Oh you have extreme views? Here's, let's condition that out of you by only showing you more moderate stuff. Oh you think x is bad? Let's not show you anything to do with x so that you'll hopefully forget about it and not engage with that part of your brain any more.

Like I've already said, this alternative is far more Orwellian and far more of a tool for social control, than simply optimising for engagement.

I don't think that makes sense, and I don't think that's what anyone's advocating for.

If you friend someone, or follow a page, or whatever, you are explicitly saying "I want to hear what this person/group has to say". They aren't saying "I want FB to carefully curate what this person/group says in order to increase my engagement of FB". FB shouldn't promote, hide, or reorder anything coming from someone who I've explicitly chosen to follow. It should just show me all of it, and let me decide what I do and don't want to see.

  https://www.facebook.com/business/help/2593586717571940?id=673052479947730
  https://www.fastcompany.com/90538655/facebook-is-quietly-pressuring-its-independent-fact-checkers-to-change-their-rulings

Propaganda, misinformation and deception have always been human issue - mass media magnified them as it does everything else.

And I think we all have the right to critique social media, just like we can critique the news, books, movies, etc.

We don’t have to agree but the discussion is a valid one to have!

We get to help shape our society and world, after all :).

But... I think what we're seeing with political content is just a symptom of the real problem.

> Disasters, outrage, politics, polarizing topics - these are all popular topics both online and off-line, and spread quickly as town gossip well before Facebook.

This is true. But when information spreads through people's conversations with each other there's limits to how fast it spreads. There's also a lot of room for dialogue and different perspectives. If I have some silly conspiracy theory that I want to spread around, it's going to be pretty hard to convince the people around me that 5G is going to activate microchips that were injected into my bloodstream. They will likely point out that basic laws of physics don't really allow for that. But if I know how to game a social media algorithm[0] to connect me with millions of people that are susceptible to that kind of thinking, I could convince a shockingly huge number of them to believe it[1]. Especially if the social media platform isolates those people from opposing opinions and connects them with people that think similarly.

I think social media is like removing the control rods from a reactor. Those basic human flaws are now being amplified and capitalized on at a scale we can barely even grasp. And it really doesn't matter if Facebook, Twitter, etc. are "at fault" or not. It's a fundamental problem with this services and the problems will continue to get worse.

0. https://www.npr.org/2020/07/10/889037310/anatomy-of-a-covid-... 1. https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/13/us/coronavirus-made-in-lab-po...

Does any site actually do this successfully? It seems to me that even sites that lean heavily towards algorithmic curation (including HN) still have an element of human veto.

being political is not an incidental facet of facebook, it's a core intention.

2. Does it matter if it’s Facebooks “fault” or not? The issue is their power.

Imho ideally they would acknowledge and accept responsibility for their power and in the US at least there would also be some laws regulating them in this regard.

This is like saying discrimination that gets baked into an ML model isn't the creators' fault imo.

And the inevitable outcome of building a what-calls-go-through machine is that there are many parties trying to influence the machine. Eg. faking caller ID, evading blocks with throwaway numbers, spamming no-response calls to figure out which numbers are valid to target, faking a robot voice to pretend to be a real person.

Practically every modern platform uses centralized systems to filter the noisy world down to something fit for purpose, and sometimes this intersects with political issues. That's no reason to expect a platform like Facebook to become even more political in their stance than the existing level of politicization that is almost impossible to avoid.

Taking a stance to not control what communication is allowed is a very political stance. It just so happens that, I believe in those cases, it's also a legally mandated stance; but, if it weren't a legally mandated stance, it would absolutely be a political stance, whatever they ended up saying.

Where a private company decides to limit free speech (or not limit free speech) is, 100%, a political stance when the laws have not been written that make that decision for them.

Even if we maintain a law around protecting companies that just host other people's content vs curating and publishing content, it could be seen as a political decision whether a given website and company choose to be on the publisher vs public content stance.

I'm forgetting the word for publisher vs ... whatever it is where they take no responsibility for what people post on the site; but I hope my point is clear.

Then in your model of the world, how would one not take a political stance?

If everyone takes a political stance in your model by definition no matter what their intents or actions are then it's a rather useless definition.

A non-political stance would be one which has zero side effects on anybody other than yourself. As soon as the actions you make and the decisions you take have an effect on somebody who isn't you, it becomes political.

Actually _taking_ a non-political stance is an exercise left to the reader.

You don’t help, but you don’t report them to the secret police either.

That is a choice.

Is providing food in supermarkets without political background checks "a political choice"? If so, then everything, including picking your nose with your left or right hand, is a political choice and the term "political choice" becomes utterly meaningless.

A segment of social media company staff also don't like that reality and want their social to censor the political parties / discussions they don't like and thus they toe the line and give unsatisfying non-answers at all hands and to the media.

Publishers are liable for everything posted on their websites. Platforms are not - as long as they make good faith efforts to take down or prevent posting of illegal content.

Both are allowed to engage in moderation, curation or "censorship". Engaging in such does not make a website a publisher.

Not really, no. That is not usually what people mean, when they say "take a political stance".

We can extend this to other examples. Do you think that a grocery store should ban people from their stores, if the individual is wearing a pro Trump, or pro Biden Tshirt?

I think it would be pretty silly to condemn a grocery store, for refusing to ban people from their stores, if they were wearing a "Vote for Biden/Trump" shirt.

Most people would find it absolutely and completely ridiculous to ban people from stores for doing that.

So then you agree with the vast majority of people that it is not a "political" decision to refuse to ban someone for wearing a "vote for Biden/Trump" shirt?

Cool. That is my point. Basically everyone would not call it political to refuse to ban someone for that.

Imagine someone walks into a grocery store naked.

Or wearing a t-shirt with a explicit image of a man and a woman having sex. Or two men having sex.

Or a t-shirt which says / shows something extremely inflammatory yet not illegal.

I could imagine various stores making various decisions in all of these cases, all of which would be the folks working in that store expressing their beliefs!

Humans are inherently social and thus inherently political (politics in the sense of politics as the negotiation and management of a community).

Or imagine someone walks into a grocery store and doesn’t wear a mask! Lol :):/:(.

Or wearing a "vote for Trump/Biden" t shirt.

In that situation basically everyone would agree that it would be ridiculous to say that the grocery store should ban people for wearing that t-shirt.

I think that most people would not call refusing to ban someone for wearing this t-shirt as a "political" decision.

Most people would agree that it is not political to refuse to ban someone for wearing a "vote for Trump/Biden" shirt.

If you do call that political, to refuse to ban someone for that, basically everyone would disagree with you.

But, in general, businesses businesses should generally have a fairly wide latitude as to what the t-shirt slogans they allow customers to wear. (Though I think we can imagine various slogans a business might deem objectionable.)

At the same time, businesses can reasonably have a fairly narrow latitude as to what employees should wear, even barring an official dress code, with respect to even advocating for a specific candidate--and that may even get into matters of company campaigning.

But the point is that basically nobody would call it a "political" decision if a store allowed customers to wear "vote for Biden/Trump" shirts.

Nobody would call that political, if a store allowed customers to wear those shirts in their store.

In China, for example, while I don’t know for sure I would bet you could not wear a t shirt with the face of say, a former communist party member who had opposed current clique in power (Ie the closest thing to an “opposition” politician that China has).

Or a democracy activist t shirt.

Point is, in the US, though we are lucky in that we often don’t have to think about it, our politicial principles of free speech allow for a lot of behavior.

Stores are demonstrating their political belief in freedom of speech if a store manager doesn’t kick up a fuss when someone walks in wearing a t shirt for a politician the manager dislikes.

Of course there are probably also laws or the manager is savvy enough to know they could get the store sued, but, you get what I’m saying I think / hope :).

You don’t notice it until it’s not there.

And thus, what often appears to be not making a choice, really is making a choice, albeit the default choice :).

A lot of bars and clubs have dress codes. Many ban wearing clothes that could be perceived as "gang" colors. It would be a terrible business decision for a grocery store to do this, but I don't think it's wrong.

That's simply not true. One can verify the truth or falsehood of your statement by applying the knife of logic. Draw your statement to its logical conclusion in order to determine if it results in absurdity.

Let's do that.

A person who has had their brain surgically removed will (quite probably) never mention politics or attempt to control other's communications about politics. According to your statement, that person's actions are political. Sorry, but that's absurd.

2. You wrote: Your conflation of passive inaction with an active choice to refrain from certain action is absurd.

That is only meaningful as a circular definitio0n. Choosing not to act differs from an inability to act. Why? How would you define the difference between the action of not acting and the action of not acting, because of not making a choice to act?

I wouldn't, because not making a choice to act in a particular way is very different from making a choice to avoid as policy acting in that way, or, as was at issue upthread, “Taking a stance to not” act in a particular way. Taking a stance is (for this subject matter, at least) political. Inaction on its own is not.

These are key to the usability of any social network. And they are inherently biased. Any such organization also has to take money, so ads are also key to their operations, and they have taken political stands on ads too.

The attempted comparison to utility companies is not compelling.

* arguably they do now by limiting "scam calls"

Would you prefer it if social networks went straight to bans for rule infractions?

Facebook doesn't "facilitate" communication in the same way a computer "facilitates" communication. It facilitates communication in the same way that a forum or book club or group of people facilitates communication. Groups require some moderation to remain popular. Facebook is driven to moderate by the market.

The ethics of being a/the major institution of mass communication in large parts of the world may not force FB to act as language legislators, but these ethics certainly should compel them to do so.

Relevant points:

- If FB’s status as a mass comms source is threatened, then the company itself is threatened. This threat can be due to a lack in trust in the platform and/or legislation that effectively legislates them out of existence (see below re free speech). This existential issue should compel them to factor language legislation into their corporate policies.

- Stockholders certainly care about FB’s status as a mass comms source even if no one else does.

- Stakeholders obviously care about this, too.

- Relying on governments to regulate mass communications is a Pandora’s box for FB since FB is an international platform.

- In the US, in order to facilitate and encourage free speech, mass comms laws are not particularly restrictive, but they are built on an underlying assumption about social-based regulation that generally hold up but seem to be completely broken with platforms like FB. If FB doesn’t address this issue, then the laws that end up addressing this issue may end up legislating FB out of existence.

To close, whether playing the language legislator is part of FB’s nature, an emergent property, or something else, there are very real reasons that FB has policies on regulating language. Whether they do this well or not is a completely different issue, but putting the onus on government legislators to address the problem with formal laws seems, at best, overly dismissive.

Companies don't just have no reason to regulate language, they also have no serious authority to do so. The onus has always been and can only be on government legislators to address these issues in the most fundamental sense.

I'd like to see Facebook try to take on the Democrat/Republican eternal conflict in the US or the CCP in China on adopting a universal policy that they don't agree with, armed with powerful arguments like "the power of ethics compels me!" or "it's a Pandora's box because we're international!" or "stockholders care about our status!". Going above and beyond their most basic policy obligations has been a great way to attract the ire of political authorities who are now agitated over whether Facebook's policy is intentionally empowering or weakening their political enemies.

[1] https://www.getrevue.co/profile/themarkup/issues/probing-fac...

Because Facebook explicitly chooses how to construct the timeline it presents to its users, and becomes some of that timeline contains political content.

If Facebook were a dumb first-in-first-out aggregator, it wouldn't be political.

But it's not.

They were regulated as public utilities and common carriers. Facebook is not.