“non-mainstream positions” is covering a lot in that statement. “provably false information that endangers the public” is a more accurate rephrasing.

In any case, the article doesn’t even come close to saying that. It details an internal discussion at Facebook about whether they should make data about the most popular posts public. Where is the word “ban” even mentioned?

Notice how whenever someone talks about holding Facebook for its algorithm spreading and promoting outright lies and falsehoods, e.g. active antivax propaganda, people start talking abstractly about “non-mainstream positions”?

To quote an all-time top tweet:

Conservative: I have been censored for my conservative views

Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting lower taxes?

Con: LOL no...no not those views

Me: So....deregulation?

Con: Haha no not those views either

Me: Which views, exactly?

Con: Oh, you know the ones

And what views would those be specifically?

Twitter suspended Jason Whitlock for tweeting "Black Lives Matter founder buys $1.4 million home in Topanga, which has a black population of 1.4%. She's with her people!"

They suspended the Chinese virologist Li-Meng Yan for supporting the COVID lab leak theory.

They blocked sharing the Hunter Biden story (for which they later apologized, after it blew up despite their efforts to suppress it).

So while the implication you're making is obvious, it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The evidence shows that social media companies censor people for political reasons.

I didn't say it was the case with every single twitter ban. Twitter has lots and lots of horrible bans.

I was responding to the idea of "people start talking abstractly about “non-mainstream positions”". Whenever anyone gets that generic about what the problem was, be suspicious.

There are multiple misconceptions and straw man arguments in your post.

First of all algorithmic censorship is real and has been exposed quite a few times with whistleblowers, undercover journalists and just banning people for things mainstream media organizations do routinely (like filming someone's house). The bar for repercussions is set lower for anti-establishment and "right-wing" content creators, although it is beginning to affect radical leftists too and they are beginning to wake up to this fact (https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/06/anti-corbyn-blair-censors...)

And your post only mentions one specific aspect of the libertarian / fiscal side of conservatism while conservatism is much more broad and now due to the polarization of society other non-related issues have gifted themselves along partisan lines (most of which used to be populist left wing causes): Vaccines, masks, lock downs, Israel, free speech, 2nd amendment rights, anti-establishment stances, free speech, section 230, big pharma, etc. And even then for fiscal conservatism, which is the more benign and popular aspect of it, it is hard to find on front pages and default news feed of the major platforms anything related to it.

Talking about cutting social programs, which is the counterpart of cutting taxes, will draw criticism, especially if it affects the favored minority of the time in some way in some percentage, will get you demonetized and demonized which usually means lynch mobs, mass reporting and worse.

Perhaps, yet the person who gets the most FB page views is apparently Ben Shapiro.

> And your post only mentions one specific aspect of the libertarian / fiscal side of conservatism while conservatism is much more broad and now due to the polarization of society other non-related issues have gifted themselves along partisan lines (most of which used to be populist left wing causes): Vaccines, masks, lock downs, Israel, free speech, 2nd amendment rights, anti-establishment stances, free speech, section 230, big pharma, etc. And even then for fiscal conservatism, which is the more benign and popular aspect of it, it is hard to find on front pages and default news feed of the major platforms anything related to it.

I see all those topics in my FB feed so at least from my perspective I have no idea what you're complaining about.

> Perhaps, yet the person who gets the most FB page views is apparently Ben Shapiro.

Shapiro, even if he is at the top, only represents a very small fraction of the overall attention space people see compared to everything else that's on Facebook. This is a cherry picked example at best. Also Shapiro is not anti-establishment by any definition of the word, see his stance on BlackRock buying up real estate as a recent example. Also outside debating naive socialist college students, he's not really an intellectual powerhouse outside variations of "it's a free market, they can do what they want and it will turn out fine; here's my cherry-picked facts", which is a narrative Facebook has a direct interest to promote. Anyway I digress.

> I see all those topics in my FB feed so at least from my perspective I have no idea what you're complaining about.

Your personal anecdotes are irrelevant. Also I never said they were outright banned, I said algorithmically manipulated. For instance Facebook is actively suppressing topics that are discussing vaccines in a negative light, such as discussion on long term effects which we obviously don't know since they just came out.

If personal anecdotes are irrelevant, then what are you basing your opinions on?

Presumably, you work at FB otherwise you wouldn't know this ;)

> Shapiro... is a cherry picked example at best.

Hardly -- look at Roose's posts about CrowdTangle.* He is in the top 10 in every report, usually multiple times. Mostly the top 10 is Shapiro, Bigino, Fox etc.

* Good collection at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/14/technology/facebook-data.... But if you don't like the NYT you can simply read the daily reports on twitter yourself (up to the date when FB removed access to the tool). It reports the opposite of what you claim.

> He is in the top 10

You are conflating being at the top with having a majority of the attention volume.

And even if this kind of content had the majority of the volume, the presence of popularity doesn't negate efforts of suppression. If anything that proves that Facebook is more popular with Boomers as opposed to the younger audience, which is also the kind of demographic these talk heads attract.

The story at least proves that FB has a need to for certain content suppression and has failed doing so, at least in the eyes of the leftists public opinion.

There is a lot of space between “banned” and “not amplified for profit”.

The promotion of false things is very profitable; by contrast, true things are far less engaging. Worse, it is more expensive to dispel a mistruth than it is to create and spread misinformation.

How do we address this systems design challenge without censorship?

James Madison figured it was better to leave a few “noxious branches to their luxuriant growth” than to risk “[injuring] the vigor of those yielding the proper fruits.” What makes you think now, 250 years into the most prosperous society in human history, is the right time to revisit this position?

For one, now mistruths can be made much more quickly than truths - hello GPT-3 - and can be delivered in a far more convincing way than any other time. I have a hard time telling AI generated video apart sometimes, which will only improve as time goes on.

Nor was there an existence of platforms that not only enable but encourage the creation of echo chambers that reinforce preexisting views and actively attempt to intervene for our attention. There is no practical limit to mistruth "content" that can be made, whereas proper information takes time and effort; I think we're nearing a point where genuine information will simply be crowded out and buried.

Bullshit. If anything, widespread misinformed beliefs were ever more common and deeply rooted prior to the modern digital age. Today many people do indeed pick up stupid concepts and begin to believe them, but the very same system of rapid digital communication of ideas, and evidence, that you seem to think worthy of censorship today also rapidly allows people to convince others of how false their more foolish ideas are. Truthful information may indeed travel more slowly than misinformation (though I'd love to see a citation for this constantly repeated claim) but good, evidence based information is also now easier than ever to find. This is a direct result of open, free expression of ideas in the digital sphere with fewer restrictions than at any time in history. I can't think of an easier way to crush such a good basic thing than some idiotic, misguided and emotionally driven crusade against "misinformation", or fake news.

> but good, evidence based information is also now easier than ever to find.

This assumption does not really work when "the echo chamber" of algorithmic curation and optimization for attention does not expose you to ideas outside of your bubble. It's also true that access to evidence based research, say in open journals, is now easier than ever; that doesn't mean I have enough knowledge to properly understand their implications. That significantly limits the permeability of good, solid information compared to garbage.

It's not at all related to the topic at hand, but Japan recently liberalized their power plan so that consumers can choose who generates the power; a study on Japanese public perception of energy liberalization[0] found that over 30% of these that did not consider power plan switching and over 20% that seriously considered it decided to not go through with the provider switch because they couldn't find enough information or had a hard time understanding. It's just a singular data point, but I think the actual hurdle to absorbing the information as opposed to accessing it is a lot higher.

Things like COVID safety or the shape of the Earth is far more personal and complex (once you go down to quality, evidence based information) than power plans, and they lack the financial incentive that switching power plans have. What makes you think that these people in a bubble would venture out to find quality information or listen to an outsider pointing out just how wrong they are?

Unlike the GP, I'm not personally in favor of censorship, as you say, the freedom of expression and information has far too much benefit to restrict mindlessly. Rather, I want to go back to the pre-"algorithm" days where quality content was spread via word of mouth and not through some engagement metric.

[0] 10.1016/j.erss.2017.09.026 - It's just something tangentially related that I've read recently.

One doesn’t need AI generated content for this to be true, just AI generated suggestions. The founding fathers almost certainly never anticipated that “newspapers” would have the capability and incentive to make every human being feel like the local conspiracy theorists down at the pub were actually representative of all of society. But here we are.

To be fair, James Madison didn't live in a time where someone could easily spread their beliefs to millions of people instantaneously. Historical comparisons have their place, but this probably isn't it.

It's easier to spread information, therefore the ability to spread information should be restricted?

By analogy, consider how frequent spam phone calls have become as a direct result of VoIP technology making it trivial to automate them.

Email has been in that position for a long time, so much so that the quality of censorship is frequently advertised as a feature by mail services.

You can mark things detected as spam as not spam though. Filtering is not censorship.

Sure, but filtering spam is different than the censorship being done by social media platforms. I can easily opt in to calls and messages from a person or group by adding them to my contacts. However, if my contact is deplatformed, then that removes my ability to opt in. So the locus of agency shifts from me to some corporate or governmental authority, which is what people actually have a problem with.

You're confusing a protocol (email) with a platform (e.g., Twitter).

You can still pretty easily "opt in" to receiving their communications. You just can't force someone else to be the middleman. If they set up their own blog or forum you're completely free to visit that.

This is similar to how you can't force [email protected] to forward you your friend's messages, but your friend can send them to you from their own personal email.

The locus of agency is on your friend to put in the effort themselves if they can't find anyone willing to help them spread their speech.

Doesn’t it boil down to the same problem, though?

Maybe [email protected] says something Google doesn’t like so gets blocked from sending to gmail.com or any other email server hosted by Google, which is a huge swath of people similar in scale to the YouTube audience.

Through either the accumulation of capital (e.g. computational power) or consolidation of political power, central authorities can police traffic to censor information on a massive scale, even on decentralized protocols like email.

So yes, at that point, you could argue that the locus of agency falls on Bob to start his own tech empire or whatever, but that becomes absurd. We’ve already seen censorship at the infrastructure level and even the domain registrar level, which is extreme.

There’s always a middle man on the Internet, or any peer to peer system with more than two edges for that matter. The problem arises when that middle man grows into a giant leviathan hell bent on manipulating the conversation of parties between itself.

> Maybe [email protected] says something Google doesn’t like so gets blocked from sending to gmail.com or any other email server hosted by Google, which is a huge swath of people similar in scale to the YouTube audience.

If these people continue to use Gmail rather than more open alternatives, does that not indicate that they don't want to hear what Bob has to say?

> We’ve already seen censorship at the infrastructure level and even the domain registrar level, which is extreme.

There is absolutely zero good-faith use of the internet that can result in you getting irreversibly banned by a significant number of domain registrars, therefore this example is completely unrelated to the original quote (replicated below for convenience):

> it is better to leave a few “noxious branches to their luxuriant growth” than to risk “[injuring] the vigor of those yielding the proper fruits.”

There is a lot of validity to the quote. I largely agree with it. But the second part is important - it cannot be interpreted as "we better make it illegal for Twitter to ban people calling for genocide".

> There is absolutely zero good-faith use of the internet that can result in you getting irreversibly banned by a significant number of domain registrars, therefore this example is completely unrelated to the original quote

How is it unrelated? A noxious branch is exactly something that many or most people would consider abhorrent and perceive as not in good faith.

There will always be some moral veil put forth by censors to justify their actions. A good example is banning discussion on Ivermectin as a treatment for COVID. Some consider that a noxious branch — quackery endangering public health — but if it’s immediately pruned we won’t be able to see if it yields proper fruits.

> How is it unrelated? A noxious branch is exactly something that many or most people would consider abhorrent and perceive as not in good faith.

Because that quote fundamentally discusses cases where pruning said noxious branch is a risk to non-noxious branches.

Sometimes you can just prune a noxious branch and that's that.

It sounds like you’re misreading the quote. He is not saying noxious branches should be pruned to protect non-noxious ones. He’s saying do not prune them, instead let them fight it out and see which one bears the best fruit.

This quote is from the The Report of 1800 [1], where he goes on to say:

> Had “Sedition acts,” forbidding every publication that might bring the constituted agents into contempt or disrepute, or that might excite the hatred of the people against the authors of unjust or pernicious measures, been uniformly enforced against the press; might not the United States have been languishing at this day, under the infirmities of a sickly confederation? Might they not possibly be miserable colonies, groaning under a foreign yoke?

He’s crediting the formation of the United States to speech that was “noxious” to either the British parliament or the Confederate states in power at the time. This noxious speech was absolutely a risk to the extent that sedition acts were being threatened. He’s advocating freedom of the press even when their speech may excite hatred.

[1] https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-17-02-020...

Yes, logically: If it were becoming harder to spread harmful misinformation, then the need to restrict it would be less; if it's becoming easier, then the need to restrict it becomes more acute.

One would think that's fairly obvious. What did you think; that there would be more of a need to restrict it if it were becoming harder?

I'm certainly not advocating for restricting free spread of information. My point is just that opinions are informed by the historical context they came from, so the comparison isn't really relevant given the drastic differences between communication abilities in the relevant time periods. Making the point that we shouldn't revisit that opinion because we're in prosperous times without considering the differences in the context informing the opinion seems disingenuous to me.

s/information/misinformation, then yes, yes it should be

You are begging the question of how to differentiate information from misinformation. Truth cannot be decided by a central authority.

In his time, to send a letter from the US to the UK took 6-12 weeks. "Fruit" was relatively rare, whether noxious or proper. Too much of anything can be harmful.

Your appeal to authority could also be applied to suffrage or the abolishment of slavery. "What makes you think that now, xxx years into the most propsperous society in human history, is the right time to revisit the institution of slavery"? Times change.

That said, there's nothing in particular to stop a political party in the US from being completely anti democratic and bringing down the entire system of both government, elections and the constitution. It just hasn't really started happening since the civil war until now.

What makes you think that everyone who wrote the Constitution and relevant documents 250 years ago was infallible?

The founding fathers got plenty of things wrong, knowing they were designing an imperfect system.

For example, first past the post voting. Washington cautioned against the rise of political parties knowing full well that they were an inevitable consequence of the system he was complicit in engendering.

The noxious branches have mutated into kudzu- invasive, ever-spreading, and damaging to the vigor of those yielding the proper fruits. Madison's analogy imagines a world that was true up until 20-some years ago, where most people believed in a common view of the world, with different philosophies about that world.

Today, a significant percentage of the population believes that the election was stolen from donald trump due to extreme election fraud. Another, similar, significant percentage believes that vaccines are at best dangerous and at worst implanting microchips and turning people magnetic. That's people not operating under the same basis of facts as everyone else.

I am following some missinformation telegram groups for fun. And one thing I dont understand is that these people are actively going out of their way to blinden their eyes whenever someone says something that doesn't fit their narrative.

There is not one channel I am part of that does not constantly post contradicting information and yet the same people sit there to agree.

The admins only care about their herbal affiliate links, they rarely engage in discussions.

What I am saying is, it's the people that are to blame.

No one who is willing or able to do their own research, or who does not have some kind of brain damage hindering them should be very well able to fact check and realize what these groups actually are.

> true things are far less engaging

This is an over-generalization so I don't think your premise completely stands. Some truths are very engaging, and support large communities of people working together to explore them.

I would put forth that the systems design challenge has to start with the human mind. People need to be taught proper grammar, logic, and rhetoric to reason properly and be able to express and debate what is true and what is false. Getting to the truth is often difficult, but a critical thinker can quickly sort through bad information, because it's full of contradictions and fallacies.

However, the "system" doesn't seem to actually want too many critical thinkers, because that would make it more difficult to wield power over its population. Cognitive ability only needs to be trained up to a certain point where individuals become useful corporate inputs, so there's an incentive for conformity to outweigh critical thinking and even creativity. Therefore, I don't think a top-down approach e.g. federal education reform, etc. would actually work.

What might work is organizing a more bottom-up approach of building peer education systems. If you'll permit me to use Star Wars parlance, imagine 1,000 Jedi academies forming and coordinating at higher levels where possible. These academies could take many shapes and sizes, and some current examples include Khan Academy, Ad Astra Academy, Acton Academy, or even homeschool cooperatives.

AKA "Brandolini's Law": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

This has always been the case and false rumors have a long history of spreading like wildfire. They're nothing new to social discourse, not even in the era of digital social media. Yet somehow, many of the most successful and humanitarian societies have managed to avoid forcing a uniform "misinformation-free truth" down peoples throats through censorship of contrary opinions without collapsing in ruin. If the freedom to claim whatever you like is profitable to many, the freedom to repress those who say what it doesn't like is even more profitable to a small group of powerful interests and government officials.

> Yet somehow, many of the most successful and humanitarian societies have managed to avoid forcing a uniform "misinformation-free truth" down peoples throats through censorship of contrary opinions without collapsing in ruin.

1) Yeah... And some didn't.

2) The mis- and disinformation-spreading machinery is getting ever more effective and efficient.

3) Removing the worst of the mis- and disinformation is not the same as "forcing a uniform 'misinformation-free truth" down peoples throats through censorship".

Make “mistruth” dispelling monetizable? Not sure how that could be done.

I see the root problem as the same as general device addiction. Seeking instathrills. So, teaching mindfulness and attention-strength-training. General mental health.

By letting people make their own decisions. You've no right to make any claims to better discernment of truth than anyone else, and no one else does either. Your claims to truth have no priority above anyone else's.

engagement is a false value proposition to maximise. works though.

I don't think most people have issues with non-mainstream positions or interest groups, or at least to the degree of their being banned. What's at stake here is Facebook's role in amplifying content that is at best misleading and at worst outright falsehoods. We've got a situation in this country where half the population believes the election was fraudulently stolen from Donald Trump and a significant portion believes that COVID vaccines are dangerous.

FWIW, I think it's perfectly fine for people to make those claims and put them in the town square, but Facebook doesn't just provide the venue, they amplify and drive users to that content, encourage them to engage with it, and then reshare it to their own networks, putting a veneer of truth and acceptability on it.

EDIT: I said "half the country", I should have said "half of the republican party" - apologies for the mistake.

I don't believe it's anywhere close to half who believe the election was fraudulent. It's widely reported and talked about just like other fringe ideas, but it's surely not half of Americans who think that.

I believe the current belief is that 50% of Republicans believe it. So if you extrapolate to the American Population you would be looking at about 50 million Americans who believe the election was stolen.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/24/republicans-...

So that's roughly 50 million / 331 million or 15.1%. Nothing close to 50%.

> Facebook's role in amplifying content that is at best misleading and at worst outright falsehoods

That's nothing but an excuse.

I'm not 100% sure I understand your point, but I take it to mean that you're saying that Facebook's role is just an excuse to ban content I (or some groups) don't like?

If there was a true marketplace of ideas, everyone would have an equal playing field to build their own audiences, sway people to their positions, debate and discuss. But that's not how facebook works - engagement drives eyeballs, eyeballs drive revenue, and so Facebook optimizes for engagement, which itself happens to optimize for the most extreme and dramatic and horrifying positions. "Were the COVID vaccines hurried through approvals too fast?" doesn't drive as much engagement as "Covid vaccines are killing thousands, data shows".

Yeah, sorry, I wasn't super clear there. I meant to emphasize the characterization of the content: "at best misleading and at worst outright falsehoods".

Calling it that makes it easy to say it should be banned - but remember that the wuhan lab leak hypothesis was characterized exactly the same way. And that turned out to be acknowledged as plausible and even likely. If you're pro-censorship here, then you're in favor of banning speech about things that could be true and important.

Oh, sure, I think the problems in these kinds of discussions is that each reader has their own mental picture of the type of content that is being described, which colors the discussion. I think the wuhan lab leak hypothesis is a good example - I don't think anyone serious or in a position of power was arguing that the statement, "It is possible that COVID-19 was the result of a lab leak" should be banned or restricted. Some people said that was hasty or lacking evidnce, that's different, that's people's opinion about an opinion.

But there were also people saying, "china intentionally released covid to kill americans" and calling it "the china flu" and encouraging aggression towards china. That's obviously much more inflammatory.

I'm not even arguing THAT should necessarily qualify as an outright falsehood (though I don't think it's a helpful way to have a conversation about a complex subject). I'm talking about, "Covid vaccines are killing thousands, so you shouldn't take one". Or, "the election was stolen from donald trump".

I'm also not really arguing for censorship here - I'm just arguing that Facebook is a net negative in that they algorithmically optimize for the most inflammatory, most aggressive content, with the side effects that it amplifies the least true content.

> I don't think anyone serious or in a position of power was arguing that the statement, "It is possible that COVID-19 was the result of a lab leak" should be banned or restricted.

https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/other/facebook-lifts-ban-on-w...

> "The social media giant banned any content that asserted COVID-19 was man-made or manufactured in February but told Politico the decision has now been reversed."

There was no distinction made between 'lab leak' and 'intentional leak' when censoring the conversation. To me, it's a great example of why censorship of these things should be nipped in the bud. There's plenty more examples if you ddg "lab leak theory".