Re:Conservatives flock to Parler, claiming censorship on Fac...
by disgruntledphd2 on Sunday November 15, 2020 @05:19AM
(#25099896)
Lets not forget that much of the 2016 fake news boom on Facebook was agitated for by US conservatives.
Facebook had a news team that hand-curated top stories (to stop obvious lies going viral). As was the nature of these young news teams, they were more liberal than the average viewer of Fox News. Prominent media personalities on Fox News, as well as US senators agitated that this was biased against conservatives.
Facebook then fired all the editors, and obvious fake news took over the site, with predictable results (who would have thought that the Pope would endorse Trump?).
This incident is important context. Also note that the most engaging content on FB is right-wing conservative content, not left-wing content.
Like, FB tried desperately hard to avoid regulating speech on their platform, but both sides demanded it, leaving them in a position where both groups of partisans think they are biased towards the other side.
> And even before all that crap below up, they had the gov't taking a long and hard look at the anti-trust problem. The platform censorship just threw gasoline on that smoldering fire.
The conflation of these two things makes me very said. There are 100% huge anti-trust concerns around Big Tech, but the censorship crap is a sideshow that will end up preventing any bi-partisan action on this (if I was a super-cynical policy exec at these companies I might even say, just as planned....).
Facebook had a news team that hand-curated top stories (to stop obvious lies going viral). As was the nature of these young news teams, they were more liberal than the average viewer of Fox News. Prominent media personalities on Fox News, as well as US senators agitated that this was biased against conservatives.
Facebook then fired all the editors, and obvious fake news took over the site, with predictable results (who would have thought that the Pope would endorse Trump?).
This incident is important context. Also note that the most engaging content on FB is right-wing conservative content, not left-wing content.
Like, FB tried desperately hard to avoid regulating speech on their platform, but both sides demanded it, leaving them in a position where both groups of partisans think they are biased towards the other side.
> And even before all that crap below up, they had the gov't taking a long and hard look at the anti-trust problem. The platform censorship just threw gasoline on that smoldering fire.
The conflation of these two things makes me very said. There are 100% huge anti-trust concerns around Big Tech, but the censorship crap is a sideshow that will end up preventing any bi-partisan action on this (if I was a super-cynical policy exec at these companies I might even say, just as planned....).