> At the expense even of showing me the same post I've seen for 5 days straight.

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"

Sometimes-censorship of our basic communications in society (increasingly mediated by a small number of military-adjacent organizations like Microsoft and Amazon) is one of the biggest existential threats to a free society.

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.

https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/

FB feed has been crapfest for very long time. It keeps showing me stuff that is easily 1-2 weeks old and I've seen it 10x in the feed. New stuff buried deep.

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.

Yet you continue to use it. No reason for them to change. Anyway, I agree it's naive to think their replacement will be better if it's just another corporation behind it. The only real hope is a decentralized open source solution.

You can’t promote some posts algorithmically without demoting other posts (until they figure out how to bend spacetime). Putting some stuff at the top pushes other stuff down.

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.

(warning - joke ahead) I imagined that this conversation was a game of poker and everyone else was still anteing up and chatting / goofing off, and they all go silent as you push your entire pile of chips into the pot, “I have little evidence, but I’m willing to risk my life.”

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.