This is wrong. If US politics ever calms down, we'll all admit that media and tech took huge inappropriate steps to suppress conservatives, and we'll just chuckle and say we did it for the good of everyone. But it's out of the bounds of fairness and democracy and we damn well know it.
Or it’s evidence that facebook does indeed have the potential to disrupt the distribution of information to conservatives because their platform is more or less a monopoly. You should always imagine how you would feel if your views were being censored. Free debate is a cornerstone to America
The initial claim was that Facebook is currently acting to suppress one political view. This claim is false, based on that political view being the dominant view on Facebook.
You can say that despite that, we should all be concerned about Facebook's power to suppress political views, and I would definitely agree. First they came for the trade unionist, and so on. But saying that despite the evidence disproving the first point, we should still be concerned is very, very, very different from saying, no, this evidence against the first point is actually evidence of something completely the opposite of that. That's not how evidence works.
Please, don't say nonsensical things that run counter to how reason or facts work. Thanks.
There is no evidence to support your first claim, and some evidence that it is incorrect, but okay, let's hypothetically assume it's true.
That still doesn't make the comment to which I responded make any sense.
- A
- Evidence of Not-A
- "Or it’s evidence of A!"
No, there is no way whatever that it is evidence of the opposite of what it is evidence of. Just re-starting the assertion without any supporting evidence, and worse, pretending that evidence against is somehow evidence for based on restating the assertion again, it's not a good faith statement.
We're not even talking about evidence here. I'm saying this claim is false:
> The initial claim was that Facebook is currently acting to suppress one political view. This claim is false, based on that political view being the dominant view on Facebook.
I'm saying that both can be true at the same time, independently of each other. Try this example:
- Quadrant 8 of the city has the most incidents of graffiti
- The police spend the most time preventing graffiti in Quadrant 8 of the city
Both of those could be true independently of each other. Neither proves the other true or false. One could surmise that the reason police spend so much time preventing graffiti in that part of the city is because it has the highest rate of incidents of graffiti, just like maybe Facebook censors so many conservative news stories because they are so prevalent, but that is not necessarily the case.
You really seem to be missing, repeatedly, that I was replying to a comment that misrepresented the entire concept of evidence. You can agree or disagree with me about whether or not evidence is sufficient, that's fine. But you're still missing that someone tried to claim that evidence for Not-A was actually somehow evidence for A, which is simply not how anything works.
Can A and Not-A both be true? Sure, maybe, it's possible. But evidence for Not-A is not therefore magically evidence for A.
What you don't seem to get is that Facebook and Twitter have censored Trump 65 times according to this study compared to a total of 0 for Biden. You keep ranting about lack of evidence but when confronted with it, you can't register it. Having a large community is NOT evidence of impartiality. For example, /TheDonald was the largest subreddit before it was shutdown completely because it was not inline with the ideologies of China's new asset. So you can take your argument and put it in the garbage where it belongs.
A top 10 list is not an good measure, because it's vulnerable to something like "splitting the vote". E.g. how Muhammad is the most popular baby name in the UK, despite Arabs not dominating UK society: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/muhammed-rea...
It's more than just not ideal - it measures the wrong thing entirely. Yet finding a better measurement is difficult. This 2015 survey claims conservatives are less likely to share their unpopular views on Facebook [1], and this 2020 report claims Facebook News leans left-center [2]. But neither measure the traffic of conservative vs. liberal news stories on Facebook, so it's risky to draw any conclusions on that. On the other hand, they ban white nationalism entirely [3]. I'm not sure it counts as conservative today, but it was official US policy until 1965.
It seems more likely that Facebook, with its noted conservative lean[0], dinged Babylon Bee to avoid repeated embarrassments for President Trump, who quoted from another Babylon Bee story without realizing it is a satire site[1].
I linked to support for the two factual statements I made. The third statement was conjecture, and sure, maybe that's wrong. But given the two factual statements, I think it's a more plausible theory than the one proposed by this article!
> It seems more likely that Facebook, with its noted conservative lean[0],
Do you agree with the assertion that not censoring conservatives is the same thing as supporting the right?
In my mind, those are two very different things. It used to be the case that most people believed in the statement, “I don’t agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
The article you posted asserts that because conservative posts are popular on Facebook, it must support conservatives. In spite of the fact that it also says FB took down 276 fake accounts that were promoting conservative positions. I didn't see any evidence of FB promoting conservative content, but more likely that conservatives tend to like promoting content through FB. Those are two different things.
> dinged Babylon Bee to avoid repeated embarrassments for President Trump,
This appears to be the conjecture you mentioned.
> who quoted from another Babylon Bee story without realizing it is a satire site[1].
Any evidence that President Trump didn't know it was satire? The dude loves to troll people. Also, the article doesn't try to make a conclusion to the affirmative. It says "Unclear".
Maybe Facebook doesn't have a conservative bias. Maybe it has more conservative content because Dems don't advertise on Facebook as much since they have most of the news media.
No conservative I know or have heard from feels like Facebook is on their side. Wouldn't they if Facebook was biasing content for the right?
So I hear this... but it never seems to make sense to me.
Conservatives and liberals are in a vaguely 50/50 split population wise, and one would expect them to flock to news sources that cater to them.
Liberal news media seems to have more total sources available, however, the conservative sources are larger. For example in TV it's NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN vs Fox. but last month Fox News hit record numbers, and was the most watched primetime network.
> No conservative I know or have heard from feels like Facebook is on their side.
So as a conservative, I always thought Facebook was a place to read things from my family & sources that I follow directly. I didn't imagine them to have a 'side'.
This view of conservative america as some kind of embattled minority is very strange to me. We own the Senate. We own the presidency. We are the majority of the Supreme court.
> This view of conservative america as some kind of embattled minority is very strange to me. We own the Senate. We own the presidency. We are the majority of the Supreme court.
While half the country might be conservative, liberals control key junction points in the whole system. The people can send Republicans to Congress and the Presidency in a landslide, but the laws are ultimately implemented by an unelected bureaucracy, which is overwhelmingly Democrats. (Trump won just 4% of the vote in DC. He won 19% of the vote in New York City, by comparison.) Elected officials communicate with constituents through the media, 90%+ of whom donated to Clinton. Nearly every professor at Harvard identifies as a liberal: https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=14469. And now, there is increasing concern that online platforms are headed in the same direction.
That's a big problem, because that gives liberals tremendous control over the means conservatives use to talk to each other. When Twitter can keep people from direct messaging a New York Post article to each other, or lock the account of the duly elected administration, that correctly alarms people.
> The people can send Republicans to Congress and the Presidency in a landslide, but the laws are ultimately implemented by an unelected bureaucracy, which is overwhelmingly Democrats.
What is stopping Republicans from getting those bureaucratic jobs too?
> No conservative I know or have heard from feels like Facebook is on their side. Wouldn't they if Facebook was biasing content for the right?
No, because Facebook biases the content any given individual sees toward things that fit in better with that person's beliefs. What you can infer about their biasing from what you personally see doesn't tell much if anything about their biasing other people see, or whether or not Facebook is biased as a whole in any particular way.
When it comes to liberal vs. conservative biasing, there is also a problem from squeezing an array of behaviors and beliefs down to just those two labels.
I remember reading an article that tried to show Twitter was massively biased against conservatives. The author found a bunch of accounts that were banned, then took the subset of those for which he could infer from their tweets and retweets whether they had voted for Trump or Clinton in the 2016 election. That left something like 20 accounts, 19 of which voted for Trump. He concluded that Twitter was massively biased against conservatives.
The problem with that is that since we are de facto a two party system, anyone who wanted their vote to matter had to pick Trump or Clinton. Who, for example, are white supremacist or Nazi or "death to all Muslim" people going to pick among those two?
Neither most Republicans nor most Democrats support those people. Democrats though are more likely than Republicans to consider them to be a problem that needs to be actively dealt with now. Republicans are more likely to consider them to be a potential problem that doesn't need to be addressed now. And so the white supremacist vote or the Nazi vote goes heavily to R.
Facebook does not have a "conservative lean". Facebook's users have a conservative lean.
The company itself skews to the left because tech workers under 30 skew to the left. Facebook is in a funny situation where the employees are at odds with the users. Poor Mark Zuckerburg is caught in the middle.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 85.0 ms ] threadThe initial claim was that Facebook is currently acting to suppress one political view. This claim is false, based on that political view being the dominant view on Facebook.
You can say that despite that, we should all be concerned about Facebook's power to suppress political views, and I would definitely agree. First they came for the trade unionist, and so on. But saying that despite the evidence disproving the first point, we should still be concerned is very, very, very different from saying, no, this evidence against the first point is actually evidence of something completely the opposite of that. That's not how evidence works.
Please, don't say nonsensical things that run counter to how reason or facts work. Thanks.
- Facebook is currently acting to suppress conservatives political views.
- Conservative political views are the most dominant on Facebook.
That still doesn't make the comment to which I responded make any sense.
- A
- Evidence of Not-A
- "Or it’s evidence of A!"
No, there is no way whatever that it is evidence of the opposite of what it is evidence of. Just re-starting the assertion without any supporting evidence, and worse, pretending that evidence against is somehow evidence for based on restating the assertion again, it's not a good faith statement.
> The initial claim was that Facebook is currently acting to suppress one political view. This claim is false, based on that political view being the dominant view on Facebook.
I'm saying that both can be true at the same time, independently of each other. Try this example:
- Quadrant 8 of the city has the most incidents of graffiti
- The police spend the most time preventing graffiti in Quadrant 8 of the city
Both of those could be true independently of each other. Neither proves the other true or false. One could surmise that the reason police spend so much time preventing graffiti in that part of the city is because it has the highest rate of incidents of graffiti, just like maybe Facebook censors so many conservative news stories because they are so prevalent, but that is not necessarily the case.
Can A and Not-A both be true? Sure, maybe, it's possible. But evidence for Not-A is not therefore magically evidence for A.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/oct/19/facebook-tw...
https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/19/new-study-shows-faceboo...
https://www.govpredict.com/blog/political-contributions-by-f...
There is some reason to believe said employees do try and suppress conservative content.
https://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-sup...
The idea that a companies politics must coincide with that of their users is a bad one.
[1] https://civicscience.com/is-facebook-changing-the-political-...
[2] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/facebook-news/
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/27/facebook-...
[0] https://www.deseret.com/indepth/2020/10/15/21409131/conserva...
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/10/16/dona...
Do you agree with the assertion that not censoring conservatives is the same thing as supporting the right? In my mind, those are two very different things. It used to be the case that most people believed in the statement, “I don’t agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
The article you posted asserts that because conservative posts are popular on Facebook, it must support conservatives. In spite of the fact that it also says FB took down 276 fake accounts that were promoting conservative positions. I didn't see any evidence of FB promoting conservative content, but more likely that conservatives tend to like promoting content through FB. Those are two different things.
> dinged Babylon Bee to avoid repeated embarrassments for President Trump,
This appears to be the conjecture you mentioned.
> who quoted from another Babylon Bee story without realizing it is a satire site[1].
Any evidence that President Trump didn't know it was satire? The dude loves to troll people. Also, the article doesn't try to make a conclusion to the affirmative. It says "Unclear".
It's a pretty popular site with a ridiculous headline. More likely he's trolling.
No conservative I know or have heard from feels like Facebook is on their side. Wouldn't they if Facebook was biasing content for the right?
Conservatives and liberals are in a vaguely 50/50 split population wise, and one would expect them to flock to news sources that cater to them.
Liberal news media seems to have more total sources available, however, the conservative sources are larger. For example in TV it's NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN vs Fox. but last month Fox News hit record numbers, and was the most watched primetime network.
> No conservative I know or have heard from feels like Facebook is on their side.
So as a conservative, I always thought Facebook was a place to read things from my family & sources that I follow directly. I didn't imagine them to have a 'side'.
This view of conservative america as some kind of embattled minority is very strange to me. We own the Senate. We own the presidency. We are the majority of the Supreme court.
We are not the underdogs.
While half the country might be conservative, liberals control key junction points in the whole system. The people can send Republicans to Congress and the Presidency in a landslide, but the laws are ultimately implemented by an unelected bureaucracy, which is overwhelmingly Democrats. (Trump won just 4% of the vote in DC. He won 19% of the vote in New York City, by comparison.) Elected officials communicate with constituents through the media, 90%+ of whom donated to Clinton. Nearly every professor at Harvard identifies as a liberal: https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=14469. And now, there is increasing concern that online platforms are headed in the same direction.
That's a big problem, because that gives liberals tremendous control over the means conservatives use to talk to each other. When Twitter can keep people from direct messaging a New York Post article to each other, or lock the account of the duly elected administration, that correctly alarms people.
What is stopping Republicans from getting those bureaucratic jobs too?
Many of them aren't especially attracted by quaint notions of serving, you know, the public.
Same with being in academia.
No, because Facebook biases the content any given individual sees toward things that fit in better with that person's beliefs. What you can infer about their biasing from what you personally see doesn't tell much if anything about their biasing other people see, or whether or not Facebook is biased as a whole in any particular way.
When it comes to liberal vs. conservative biasing, there is also a problem from squeezing an array of behaviors and beliefs down to just those two labels.
I remember reading an article that tried to show Twitter was massively biased against conservatives. The author found a bunch of accounts that were banned, then took the subset of those for which he could infer from their tweets and retweets whether they had voted for Trump or Clinton in the 2016 election. That left something like 20 accounts, 19 of which voted for Trump. He concluded that Twitter was massively biased against conservatives.
The problem with that is that since we are de facto a two party system, anyone who wanted their vote to matter had to pick Trump or Clinton. Who, for example, are white supremacist or Nazi or "death to all Muslim" people going to pick among those two?
Neither most Republicans nor most Democrats support those people. Democrats though are more likely than Republicans to consider them to be a problem that needs to be actively dealt with now. Republicans are more likely to consider them to be a potential problem that doesn't need to be addressed now. And so the white supremacist vote or the Nazi vote goes heavily to R.
The company itself skews to the left because tech workers under 30 skew to the left. Facebook is in a funny situation where the employees are at odds with the users. Poor Mark Zuckerburg is caught in the middle.
Relative to other tech companies, the company's rank-and-file leans more center than left.