Oh wait, actually it was the same 6 years ago as well.
They are constantly mucking with what's presented. Not long ago, my feed was pretty well distributed across my few hundred friends. As of maybe a few months ago, it's the same circle of ~20 similar-minded friends. At the expense even of showing me the same post I've seen for 5 days straight.
The people that engage my posts are always a cohort, with 90% overlap with my feed.
I swear there are also things which boost/nerf exposure based on sentiment analysis.
I'm an infrequent user cause it's kinda addicting (infinite scroll) and also this echo chamber trash.
I found that LinkedIn is great at this, too. I regularly see posts from contacts in my feed that are three weeks old and that I've never seen before.
edit: LinkedIn will also shadowban your posts if they contain words from a blacklist. Just this morning a contact complained about that. He was very happy about being engaged as a speaker and wrote in a post "Das ist schon sehr geil [...]". While "geil" means "horny", especially younger Germans use that word without the sexual connotation but as a replacement for "great". His post reached only a few dozen people instead of hundreds, as normally.
edit: "Das ist schon sehr geil" could be translated as "That's really great indeed"
Most people won’t ever have any real idea of what, or how much, they are being prevented from seeing. You also can’t use these platforms to point out their own censorship. I imagine most people have no real idea that most of their feeds on all the platforms they use are heavily censored, or could be totally censored in an emergency.
This situation is a ticking time bomb. I hope it doesn’t go off this year.
Or few weeks ago, lasted maybe 2 weeks, they've run some experiment/had bug in their over-buggy web page, since literally nothing moved in the feed. I saw the same posts as week ago, nothing new, in same order.
Also, when covid started, the feed just exploded with ad posts, which were rare for me before.
FB is amoral, abhorrent company with consistently crappy buggy product, that I hope will disappear over time. I'm not naive enough to think their replacement will be better.
People don’t spend the whole day scrolling, and Facebook knows this. They know exactly how far down each and every person scrolls.
This means they know exactly how much other content they need to “promote” to totally and effectively censor content they don’t wish people to see.
Algorithmic “timelines” (which aren’t timelines at all) are nothing more than censorship: a remote organization deciding what you’re allowed to read.
Confused players look at each other, “Uh, you mean about the Facebook thing? Why would you do that? We would have been fine just betting a dollar or whatever...”
Then everyone folds and you collect the ante.
Who wants to bet there is some extrajudicial (ah, sorry, "secret court") system to force prominent online actors to perform acts of covert censorship, in the name of national security or whatever? This would be an easy logical step from PRISM.
Just seems to me that mostly-secret media interference is a less complex problem to solve than the type of pervasive surveillance that requires installing extra rooms of equipment at numerous telecommunications nodes around the world. And we have confirmation that the latter has happened, at least.
Granted, you would expect to hear rumors eventually, as lots of people would have to be involved and still manage to both keep their mouths shut and hide the activity from everyone else.
A set of random tosses of a coin (even if the coin is partially biased) is expected to produce a mix of heads and tails outcomes. The random toss here could be human error or undiscovered bugs.
On the other hand, the international order is relatively old. There is no ageism in geopolitics, just ask Henry Kissinger. Established social and political affinities exist, globally. No assumption whatsoever is made regarding an existing, international, and powerful network of individuals and organizations.
Given that such networks exist, and that the stakeholders are indeed powerful individuals and organizations, and further that this case is shining a spotlight on their manipulating social institutions under their control, in a case where an individual is being prosecuted for publishing material detrimental to these powerful interests, no assumption is required to consider the high probability of their use of their power (which is the entire purpose of gaining power, btw) to insure their position, their actions, and their criminal behavior, is kept hidden from the majority.
Occam's Razor.
We haven't had anything like a Marshall Plan or a Berlin Airlift for some time now.
If there was no such evidence, then concluding conspiracy based on what is happening with FB and Twitter would indeed be crazy.
https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Screen-Sho...
Dan Cohen, Max Blumenthal, Abby Martin, Jimmy Door, Mike Prysner, Aaron Mate, Chris Hedges, Ron Placone, Sarah Abdallah, and the Real News Network, along with several Assange supporters and related accounts.
I had to go and turn on explicit notifications for all of them to start seeing content. It's extremely obvious that this is not just one account getting accidentally flagged.
I think there might be something to it too.
/r/conspiracy has seen a takeover by the right wing equivalents over the last year or so, since the banning of /r/t_d
just cover something people don't like or not PC and it raises your chances.
https://www.projectveritas.com/video/hidden-camera-twitter-e...
This starts to be much worst than communistic censorship - in communistic Poland censorship office was obliged to mark places where the "offensive" content was removed. Facebook just erases that what is "offensive".
I hope that this will be the moment when people start to think if it is really so good that communication platforms keep censoring "improper content".
At first majority was happy that some of those they didn't like and didn't like their views were removed. Now people are learning a hard lesson - anyone views might suddenly become offensive and you will be done, gone, forgotten, fired (see what happen to J.K. Rowling or Bari Weiss).
sorry but how is this a new era? George Carlin caused a row with his Seven Dirty Words on national television because you couldn't swear. Everything that is mainstream is basically devoid of edgy or offensive content because advertisers want entertainment and nothing else.
When you wanted out of the mainstream commentary or scathing critiques you always had to go into subcultures, magazines, the arts, standup or whatever else.
Can't the EFF and ACLU team up on this?
Facebook has auto-throttle: if you post too many times within a span, it stops sending notifications about every post to your followers unless they interact with one or more of your posts during that span. This is desired behavior, by 99% of people, because we don't want our newsfeed flooded by that one annoying friend with no life, unless we choose to follow up.
So no, the EFF and ACLU can't team up on this because there's no active censorship, or even passive censorship.
[0] which let's be honest, is what happened when you casually say "auto-throttle"
That's the problem with putting in place censorship. Sometimes it affects people you like.
It’s more of an authoritarian-libertarian axis issue.
I think in terms of how restrictions on speech are implemented by Facebook/Twitter/YouTube it absolutely seems to be more used against right wing sources.
You can't even mention McInnes' new website censored.tv on Instagram, even in private messages.
You could argue, though, that Assange/WikiLeaks isn't very popular with the left due to how they helped torpedo Clinton's campaign.
Source: https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10
Those voices are hardly being silenced.
I mean if the right-wing feels attacked because their posts get banned so much, maybe they should take a closer look at themselves.
Yeah I'm being facetiously inflammatory there, but c'mon you can make a better argument than that?
*/s
The last sentence is what strikes me the most. Maybe he was being paranoid but if your own family is telling you they are not getting a notification then something is wrong.