Yes, we've all seen this "fair" fact checking. Hint, if the left is OK with it, the right is furious about it. You cannot be fair to both in a way that is accepting to liberals.
> Facebook has been caught out for tipping towards the conservative side of that scale, suppressing that penalty on some popular conservative pages
As they should, for both sides. But interestingly this makes my point even more. That everybody is quite aware of what censorship was about and is taking place. Yet they put on this falsity and get shills to help defend them because?
> To understand Facebook's behavior, it's useful to remember that their goal is growth and retention.
Right. They are censoring and aligning everybody on FB to the same thought process, which happens to be a majority of Americans.
> I suspect, based on observation of their behavior, that they've discovered for themselves that without those measures, growth and retention are being harmed more than they'e harmed via time-outs and fact-checking
When censorship is the result, do you think we should have more that a suspicion? What about the people on the right leaving? They don't seem to care about retaining those? Interestingly the people left align with the CEO's own political beliefs.
Right, and usually they would. Growth and retention is the lifeblood of everything Facebook does; Zuck would rather cut off his own right foot than intentionally lose users.
Which is why the only rational conclusion I can find with the evidence I see is that Zuck is either afraid that continued inaction was eventually going to land him in jail (or put him through years of Congressional investigations) or they have hard numbers showing that for every X people on the right they retain, they are losing N*X other users, N > 1.
Occasionally, if it's a common piece of misinformation that's been widely-shared enough to justify manual intervention, a fact-check box may appear underneath. This happens to "facts" with a conservative political slant, as well as "facts" with a liberal political slant. If you run a page, your page can get "strikes" for this sort of thing that will cause you to down-rank in people's pages, but if anything, Facebook has been caught out for tipping towards the conservative side of that scale, suppressing that penalty on some popular conservative pages (https://www.engadget.com/facebook-overruled-fact-checkers-to...).
Rarely, you'll share "misinformation" that is also in violation of community standards (I'll leave that to the reader's imagination) and get a time-out proportional to how often that happens.
To understand Facebook's behavior, it's useful to remember that their goal is growth and retention. They want everybody using the service. I suspect, based on observation of their behavior, that they've discovered for themselves that without those measures, growth and retention are being harmed more than they'e harmed via time-outs and fact-checking (i.e. organized boycotts over Facebook being a place where falsehoods spread wildly, people encouraging their more vulnerable friends and relatives to stay off FB so the misinformation parade doesn't convince them to take horse-dewormer, etc.).