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Comment by ogig | Hacker News Reader

One of my main concerns with mainstream social networks is this kind of subtle censorship/filtering. Some people think their Facebook stream is an accurate representation of their friends and surrounding reality, they are ignorant of the algoritms that decide what they will see and what not.

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This so true and a major concern. The next wave of highly effective propaganda and thought control could very easily manifest itself through this. Today, people know better than to blindly believe the news media. If information is coming from a single entity, it could be pushing an agenda, so take it with a grain of salt. We all know that. But when it appears to come from a community, that's entirely different. It seems completely genuine and trustworthy.

But what happens when Zuckerberg meets with German political leaders to discuss the silencing of anti-refugee posts on Facebook? We know that the technology exists. If you've ever advertised on Facebook, you've seen how easily one piece of content can be given massive priority while others can go quietly ignored. But that's not how it seems to the user. It just seems like all of their friends are thinking one way....so they should too.

There are massive implications to this.

Germany does not intend to silence anti-refugee posts. Germany wants to stop illegal incitement of hatred. Such as promoting or even threatening to burn down asylum centers, to hurt or even kill refugees and those that help them.

Those are not just words, asylum centers are being burned to the ground, refugees are attacked, just recently some were killed on the border the EU, just yesterday someone tried and almost suceeded in killing a politician who helped refugees.

You have to be insane to support this as free speech unless you support these nazis.

“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”

— Widely attributed to H. L. Mencken

Would HN be better if personal insults and death threats were allowed, would it improve the exchange of ideas and the expression of opinions?

Yes. Your idea of a personal insult is my idea of spirited debate. I've been warned twice in the past few weeks by HN moderators because I've used similes that they've found offensive. Honestly? I find that offensive. They'd better censor their censorship.

I'm no stranger to insults, I can take what I can dish, but I also think this is true: everybody can argue their point without being personally insulting (some, like me, take getting hellbanned a bunch of times, others just do it straight away), but not everybody can look past the insults and focus on the points made. So a free-for-all this excludes people who simply don't like being insulted while gaining nothing when it comes to the content of the discussion, the arguments.

FWIW, I'm not a huge fan of downvotes, and I don't even like things being ranked by upvotes. But the rough spirit of focusing on substance and backing up claims, that I like.

I think you will find many people disagreeing with you on that. In Germany it's even illegal to insult people because in Germany dignity is considered to be a human right just as much as freedom of speech is.

Clearly, Germany has failed - If people had any dignity, they wouldn't need a government to protect it.

The minister in talks with Facebook called the content "ideological trash" and "right wing nonsense" so it's pretty clear it's not just limited to incitement of violence.

The incitements of violence in question definitely qualify as ideological trash and right wing nonsense.

It's already happening.

This is what the US internet looks like, post-Arab Spring.

Recently a Chinese copy of twitter, Weibo, decided to implement similar functionality, but their ability in machine learning is very limited, so their lame work has only promoted paid members and threads. In the first week of its introduction, most users has noticed that there's roughly 50% less threads were read by other users.

Actually I think theres's big future for this kind of censorship, if performed well, can be hard to detect and hard to test(think about A/B testing). So I disagree with 'subtle', it's just our enemy get smarter.

Is this censorship or editorial/curation?

I've been infuriated by Facebook because I have a local events group on high priority in my feed, but FB has decided I only want to see about one post in five. So I miss a lot of news I want to see.

Meanwhile I still get porn posts on the various technology groups I read, even though I keep asking not to see similar content.

I'd have no objection to a good AI editor curating my feed. But FB has a very bad AI editor making bad choices for reasons that ignore my interests, and I really don't want that at all.

The difference is completely in the eye of the beholder.

But a huge centralized curator that decides what everybody reads is something people feared for centuries. It does not really matter if its intention is benign.

Absolutely. And even more dangerous is the perception that there isn't a curator, when there really is one. That is the case with Facebook today.

Does switching it from "top posts" back to "most recent" still fix it, or is even that filtered? They clearly want you to use their "curation," but a bit of fast scrolling and skimming still does a much better job.

Don't use networks that don't share their code. Don't use networks that hold your data and don't give you raw access to it. Share directly with your friends instead of a large corporation.

Edit: Instead of downmods, please post reasons why you should use networks run with secret codes and which suck your data into their proprietary databases.

HN is known for its inability to downvote properly. Gave you an upvote. :)

Thanks. I know :) Unfortunately, others have since come and bumped the comment back down.

I didn't downvote you, but I'm not aware of any "network" (by which I assume you mean website or application) that matches the requirements you set. Open source websites simply don't exist - as it's impossible to actually validate that the code running on a server matches whatever source code a company might distribute, and every site and application attempts to limit or control access to your data in some way.

Hacker News itself explicitly doesn't share their fork of the Arc forums, and don't allow raw access to your data.

There are plenty of networks that fit this requirement!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10408968

Fair enough, but the entire web doesn't, which makes jsprogrammer's imperative practically impossible if taken at face value, unless one wants to avoid most of modern technological society altogether.

No, the entire web doesn't. One can still reject secret code and proprietary databases while still accepting that they exist. One can even still use them.

I'm not sure I really need much code running on a server that I don't control. I could just share my data directly with those people I want to, instead of handing it off to FB to catalog and exploit.

GNU Social is Open Source and federated.

Your criticism is still valid, obviously there is no way to validate that a GNU Social instance is not running modified code.

But the federation itself mitigates this to some extent. If you don't trust one instance, you can always fire up your own.

I've documented evidence of Twitter censorship; what likely amounts to millions of tweet-replies. This seems to be used to shape perceptions and opinions on twitter in at mass-scale:

https://twitter.com/taoeffect/status/651215054235242497

I've now registered my username on Kloak as @greg, and am recommending to all my friends to move off of Twitter to similar networks.

Here are some networks to ditch twitter for:

- SpiderOak's Kloak (in beta): https://spideroak.com/solutions/kloak

- Indie's Hearbeat (in alpha): https://ind.ie/

- Twister: http://twister.net.co/

- Vole: http://vole.cc/

Bye Orwell, won't be seeing you in the land of free speech!

GNU Social is a great alternative.

>Register for an invite to the private beta (iOS only)

Sigh.

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