Most Americans Think Facebook and Twitter Censor Their Political Views
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Why? Because algorithms.
Maybe "censorship" is a strong word in this instance — do we prefer "selective disclosure"?
Regardless, not what I signed up for. Deleted FB.
It's also possible that Facebook determined that this person has substantially different politics than you, and has put you in different 'boxes'. You can actually check what groups Facebook thinks you belong in. For instance, Facebook thinks my peer group is 'Starting Adult Life', and my US Political Stance is 'very liberal'.
(Facebook also thinks I work in a production occupation, like mining, or lumber, which couldn't be further from the truth, which explains all the ads for industrial equipment)
I went to high school in a really conservative place, and I'm friends with a lot of people who have wildly different views on religion and politics. A few years ago I stopped seeing their posts, even if I added them to the group of people I see first on Facebook. Meanwhile, I started seeing a ton of posts from people who I barely knew in college, presumably because their 'beliefs' were much closer to mine.
I'm extremely cynical, and I find dogmatic people of similar beliefs as annoying as people whose beliefs I disagree with, and my Facebook feed became a personal hell of dogmatism, especially leading up to the 2016 election. As a result I check Facebook at most once a week. It's entirely possible that leaving the platform improved the experience for some of my more conservative peers from high school, who no longer have to see my posts on the walls of mutual friends.
Apparently I'm 'very conservative'... probably because of my friend group, since I've never posted anything political on Facebook.
The four groups I’m in are all related to using a mobile device or wi-fi.
I’m pleasantly surprised but it appears deleting all of my content, unfollowing every person on my feed, not logging in except on incognito windows and very infrequently at best, and using ad blockers has effectively stymied facebook’s ability to establish a good notion of who I am beyond the most extreme basics.
I still use messenger although I try to use encrypted messages when I can, but they don’t mine that for advertising information according to their user policy. Not sure if they mine it for anything else.
Either way, good.
Honestly though, as William Wrigley Jr once wrote, "When two men always agree, one of them is unnecessary." I have one friend that I disagree with about literally everything, and I respect him a lot because every discussion we have is thoughtful, and my ideas and beliefs are better for having discussed them with him.
Anyways, your political bent is probably based on what types of posts you've read or liked, or even who has liked your comments, even if they were apolitical.
https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences
And then open Your Information > Your Categories. I assume this is what they are talking about.
there are more right and left-wing fringe users that love to brigade other users.
> The truth, as always, is the opposite of what the media tells you. I sent a troll about “vigilante death squads” as a private response to a few hostile journalists who were asking me for comment, basically as a way of saying, “Fuck off.” They then published it. Amazed they were pretending to take my joke as a “threat,” I reposted these stories on Instagram to mock them — and to make it clear that I wasn’t being serious.
https://www.facebook.com/myiannopoulos/posts/119449066068882...
Are you saying the screenshots on his instagram are doctored?
I will not take anything on his instagram as any kind of proof of anything; he has absolutely no credibility on anything.
Since you know he fabricated the screenshots, have you contacted a journalist? This is a huge scoop and hasn't been reported yet.
Yup, sounds like you.
We now have evidence the shooting had nothing to do with Milos comments:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5898141/At-four-shot...
Yet at least two people on this thread are acting like there is credible evidence his tweets caused the shooting.
This is the danger of fake news!
How? Without the fake news how would any of this be linked to Milo?
In fact without any of the fake news why would this be linked to the right wing at all?
If CNNs headquarters were shot up I'd understand - but why would anyone on the right target a random small center-left newspaper?
Preconceptions should at least make some sense!
You aren't content just to consume fake news - now you are trying to produce your own fake narrative!
The fact that they don’t is, in my view, rooted simply in a desire to remain neutral in an attempt to prevent their MAU growth from declining and resulting in lower advertising income and less attractiveness to investors.
In other words, it’s a business decision. Twitter could choose to be more restrictive in favor of civility, but it would be bad for business.
"In July 2016 he was permanently banned from Twitter for what the company cited as "inciting or engaging in the targeted abuse or harassment of others", referring to a harassment campaign against actor Leslie Jones and others."
Meanwhile Peter Fonda has spent this week making death threats and still has an active account.
He did a lot worse than that. He was very directly advocating for the kidnapping, harm and rape of a specific child.
You can't get any more open agenda than that as it pertains to the extreme bias in Silicon Valley. Their rules simply do not apply to their favored people. It will be necessary to regulate the tech platforms to stop it (and the Republicans will absolutely do just that, soon). I'm a socially liberal, political independent and the extreme SV bias has me cheering for aggressive regulation of the big platforms at this point.
It would be quite simple to implement: if they fail to consistently enforce their own terms, FCC fines that increase in scale with each subsequent violation. Something along the lines of a $10 million starter fine for allowing Peter Fonda to use the Twitter platform to directly threaten harm to a child and taking no action against the user. Ramp it up by $10m with each violation. Either Twitter stops selectively enforcing their own policies, or they get bankrupted (the fine stacking melts with good behavior over time). You'd either apply this regulation to only major platforms (based on users or revenue or both), or scale the fines / consequences to match the size of the service.
It’s more in a desire to maintain some level plausible deniability that they’re not engaging in mass political censorship. Civility and their legal entitlement to run their platform as they see fit really have nothing to do with it. It’s more they’d like to have their cake and eat it too. They don’t want certain viewpoints on their platform, but they can’t just admit that they’re censoring them.
Appear neutral. If they wanted to actually be neutral they wouldn't use shadowbans and other "hidden" mechanisms to silence and/or censor users whose agenda (political or otherwise) they didn't agree with.
When he isn't playing his troll persona he is actually a very intelligent and reasonable person.
So of the biggest trolls are just that. Trying to paint "trolls" are some drooling man-child in a basement does the world a massive disservice.
As a cynic, I was expecting that Republicans might want more regulation here (in contravention of their general desire for less regulation) because it would be in their own interests.
Note: I'm not saying I expect Republicans to be more self-interested/hypocritical than Democrats. I would expect it of both parties, based on my experience in the field.
This is an extremely odd statement and it took me a while to figure out why you would think that. Because you absolutely do see conservatives shut down speech. Systematically. For a good account of this on college campuses, see https://newrepublic.com/article/147908/invisible-free-speech...
Perhaps we "don't see conservatives going around trying to 'no platform' people" in the same way that fish don't see water.
We expect conservatives to fire public school LGBT teachers who mention their partners when told to talk about their personal lives on parent night.
We expect Christian colleges to fire people for being not conservative enough.
We expect those colleges to expel students for supporting gay rights.
We expect obscenity laws. (Aside: conservatives strongly support obscenity laws and strongly oppose bans on hate speech. I can understand the worldview that bans both, and I myself have a worldview that calls for banning neither. But I will be forever perplexed over how anyone who doesn't themselves condone hate speech could come to the conclusion that nakedness/lewdity poses a great threat to society which justifies censorship, but that hate speech does not. If anyone here does have that viewpoint, I'd be interested to hear their reasoning.)
We expect attempts to ban flag burning.
We expect the Red Scare.
And it's true that we never hear about Richard Dawkins being uninvited from Cedarville or Wheaton. But that's only because those students/faculty would be expelled from the institution the moment the invitation was extended.
It's normal for conservatives to be illiberal on speech. So normal that, like fish in water, we don't even see it!
So when people like Cedarville's president bemoan the suppression of speech on college campuses while at same time firing his own faculty for publicly criticizing Mitt Romney, expelling his students for their speech, and routinely monitoring the social media accounts of his students, I think it's fair to say (as https://newrepublic.com/article/147908/invisible-free-speech... puts it):
There are many who argue, in the pages of this country’s most respected periodicals, that this power lies with the intolerant left. But the evidence of real, widespread speech suppression shows it lies elsewhere, on the right. This, in turn, suggests that the ostensible champions of free speech are more interested in criticizing campus identity politics than in protecting speech.
Now, revisiting your quote once more:
> you don’t see conservatives going around trying to “no platform” people (which is an insidious euphemism)
Insidious. No-platforming is so thoroughly embedded in American conservativism that you don't even see it even though it's pervasive. That's practically the definition of insidious.
> I don’t see how you could plan to fight censorship with more censorship.
There is one famous example related to the heckler's veto. Rules against heckling/shouting during a speech use censorship to shut down an attempt at censorship. And even that only makes sense in some circumstances; e.g., in a lecture hall but not at a large rally.
Your comment is completely disconnected from reality. If you look hard enough, you’d probably be able to find a couple of minor examples to point at, but intolerance and suppression of speech has become mainstream liberal politics.
I’ve been a liberal for most of my life, I voted for Obama’s twice. But it was the grotesque intolerance for all non-confirming views that drove me away from the left. Any form of individual thought is liable to be labeled as hate speech, and possibly the worst element of it is the demand to have your cake and eat it too. To go around literally violently suppressing freedom of expression, and then attempt to claim some level of victimhood as if it was actually your voice that was being suppressed.
>> you don’t see conservatives going around trying to “no platform” people
I think this is false.
That said:
> I think you must live in a pretty opaque bubble. You might expect those things to happen, but they only do in your imagination.
Each of the things that I listed has actually happened in the past few years.
Consider reading, with an open mind, the link from my parent post. It's written by a former Cedarville student, which is about as far from a liberal bubble as you can possibly get.
There exist a contingent of conservatives who are extremely hostile to free speech, to the point where they create entire institutions dedicated to suppressing and blocking out any non-christian, non-conservative influence.
They are right there in plain sight. They do things like publicly threaten to have campus speakers arrested and fire faculty for opposing Republican presidential nominees [3].
Do you disagree these people exist?
> Most Christian colleges are actually pretty accepting of LGBT.
I agree! [1]
In my post, I referred specifically to conservative Christian colleges, not all Christian colleges. And I even named particular colleges that fit the mold.
And, btw, those very institutions agree with the facts I asserted (if not the way I phrased them). Cedarville, Wheaton, Liberty -- the presidents of these colleges will be the very first ones to tell you that you should not expect freedom of expression as a student or employee at their college!
FIRE, a free expression advocacy organization focused college campuses, even creates a separate category for these institutions (and their illiberal [2] peers on the left): "Warning Schools". The meaning is literally what I say: you should expect to be censored and this fact is very explicitly written in their codes of conduct and staff manuals.
> Schedule a conservative speaker to talk at a College, at you won’t be at all surprised when a gang of violent, intolerant liberals start a riot.
Wait, have you actually scheduled a conservative speaker on a college campus?
I have.
No mob.
Actually, of all the speeches I organized, only one speaker was heckled. (And the speech/speaker wasn't even remotely political. And the heckler was a conservative, not a student, and I think the heckling that was entirely unrelated to either of those facts. He was just a rude nutjob.)
Just as most Christian colleges are very accepting of a wide variety of viewpoints, most other colleges are very accepting of a wide variety of viewpoints.
You don't hear about the countless of uneventful Young Republican/Libertarian speeches. Or the countless weekly bible study groups that happen without incident.
You hear about the tiny handful that go awry. And then a narrative is crafted.
But the point of my post was not that liberal institutions are a bastion of free speech. Just like the point of my post was not to assert that all conservatives are illiberal re: free expression.
The central thesis of my post was just a refutation of assertion that:
>> you don’t see conservatives going around trying to “no platform” people
by pointing out the very real existence of places like Cedarville/Wheaton/et al. that very much do "no platform" any not-sufficiently-conservative-in-just-the-right-way speech.
And additionally to point out that illiberal conservatives (again, to be clear, a subset of all conservatives) are not new in this country. We are not surprised when a conservative expresses illiberal views (which, again, is not meant to imply that all conservatives are illiberal). Whereas the (also real, also subset) illiberal leftists are a newer phenomenon. Maybe that's why we "see" illiberalism on the left but not on the right?
Because we are used to, we expect, a form of conservative illiberalism re: free expression.
> If your unfortunate enough to voice a conservative opinion in the wrong place at the wrong time, you’ll get a Twitter brigade harassing your employer until they fire you.
It's unfortunate that some conservatives are harassed in this fashion, but this is an anomaly, not a norm. This country has millions of conservatives who are open about their political beliefs (on Twitter, FB, etc.) and do not suffer retribution for expressing those beliefs. E.g., the majority of my friends and family.
And, this sort of harassment also happens to (an also small number of) leftists and even not-quite-conservative-enough conservatives. The one person I personally know who was fired for political speech was targeted by conservatives.
Again, consider reading with an open mind the link in my parent post.
People with illiberal views on free expression and with a vendetta and no decency exist on both the left and the right. Which is why, again, I disagree with the initial assertion that:
>> you don’t see conservatives going around trying to “no platform” people
It's just not true. Those people exist, in plain sight, and are very open about their beliefs. Falwell openly threatens to have people (not-conservative-enough conservatives, no less!) arrested for expressing views he disagrees with at the wrong place and time.
I do agree that we don't always see them clearly enough. I hypothesize it's because they are so overt about their repression of speech.
But you very much do "see conservatives going around trying to “no platform” people".
--
[1] For anyone following along, item #3 in this interview does a good job at distinguishing between the sort of conservative Christian colleges I'm referring to and the hundreds of less dogmatic Christian institutions that have much stronger free expression protections for faculty and students: https://www.thefire.org/is-speech-suppression-at-religious-c...
[2] To avoid confusion: I'm using "illiberal" to mean "illiberal specifically on the question of free expression", i.e., opposes free expression. I use "left" and "right" to refer to more general political affiliation. Hopefully that doesn't cause too much confusion...
[3] https://relevantmagazine.com/current/shane-claiborne-says-li...
So where do you think this no platforming of liberals is taking place?
It’s not happening in the media. It’s not happening on social media. It’s not happening on the campus. It’s not happening in the office.
All you’ve actually been able to identify if _some_ conservative Christian colleges (you haven’t substantiated that, but I’ll accepts it’s probably true to some extent), and the football pitch (which isn’t a political forum to begin with). As I said, you want to have your cake and eat it too.
Edit: it looks like you've been using HN primarily for political or ideological battle. The site guidelines explicitly ask you not to do that, and point out that we ban accounts that do. We have to, because flamewars consume everything if you let them. Please (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site as intended from now on.
There was a recent CATO study on exactly this question [1].
Nearly 2/3rds of Republican-identifying respondents believe NFL players should be fired if they don't stand for the pledge.
Over half of the Republican-identifying respondents believe that burning flags should be illegal, that an executive should be fired for flag burning, and also that flag burner's citizenship should be revoked.
None of this is particularly surprising! You expect to find that many Republicans oppose flag burning.
However, you don't expect to hear that Democrats support rolling back free speech protections. The data support this shift toward illiberalism on the left. And you even point out that this shift happened in your original post!
The rise of illiberalism on the left is concerning, but again, nowhere have I claimed that the American left is a bastion of free speech warriors.
My claim is that we do commonly see conservatives going after people for expressing themselves.
And the empirical data demonstrate it's not just "a small minority" of conservatives who feel that's justified. It's a majority. Sometimes a very large one.
So. If you want to complain about illiberal leftists, I'll nod along all day. And you'll notice that this claim was not the portion of your post I took issue with, because I don't disagree. I took issue with your claim that:
> you don’t see conservatives going around trying to “no platform” people
because they do, and the data very clearly indicates that the majority of Republicans believe it's justified.
And, once again, to be very clear, there is no implied assertion anywhere that leftists do not do the same thing.
> I think you must live in a pretty opaque bubble.
Either I'm not the one in a bubble or else someone should tell CATO their methodology is flawed ;-)
[1] https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/survey-reports/...
That's the thing you don't understand about Republicans. They don't consider regulation on social media platforms as something in their interest.
The model, "IF you don't like something, then advocate making a law against it" is not how conservatives see the world. However, this is the model which liberals subscribe to. There is nothing which liberals don't like, which they don't advocate making a law against it.
Before you point out other things, their model is "Govt should only act against things which are objectively morally wrong, like violation of private property rights".
Keep in mind, they opposed Gay marriage for as long as they could, but at this point, 'reverting gay marriage' is a dying (or never was a) cause among conservatives, reverting 'Roe v Wade' is.
There is a liberty-leaning wing of the Republican party, but it's not currently the dominant force in the party.
There's also a liberty-leaning wing of the Democratic party.
> However, this is the model which liberals subscribe to.
Well, that's just definitionally false... I think you meant "democrats" or "leftists" or something.
But just like the Republican party, the Democratic party has both liberal and illiberal contingents (and the illiberal democrats tend to be further to the left than the liberal democrats). It's hard to say which wing is ascendant because the party is in flux.
US party lines aren't really good predictors of whether someone will support free speech; a slim majority of Republicans support banning flag burning, while a slim majority of Democrats support banning hate speech. Even "small government" Republicans are far more unified around tax policy and welfare while relatively split on questions of free expression.
In the 1990s, in the midst of the Culture War I, the thing Rs and Ds could really unite around was the illiberal policy of regulating speech in the music industry [1].
> Govt should only act against things which are objectively morally wrong
Ah yes, objective morality! Definitely a thing that exists and is never a source of contention! Now, if only everyone were as objective as me ;-)
--
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parents_Music_Resource_Center
Restricting the platform is their right. But the issue is people believing they are being censored and by banning certain ads they reenforce that viewpoint.
However, that belief isn't totally without basis. Facebook fired its entire trending topics curation team [1], after allegations that its members suppressed conservative stories [2]. Even though Facebook denied that any ideological suppression took place, their actions in firing the team could be interpreted as confirming them, especially considering how badly their algorithm performed without human oversight afterwards.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/29/facebook-...
[2] https://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-sup...
To me it looks like the polls say that they believe these companies censor content, and that these companies also lean left. Nothing about their viewpoints.
We could have enriched our online culture with a flourishing set of shared emoticons by now!
Emojis should have only been embedded user-defined pngs. I know I'm being cranky and old, but I feel our character sets shouldn't have been used to encode novel cute pictures.
It's called an "alphabet".
"Shared emoticons" sounds like what you really want is a way to channel community defined imagery into a palette of images. There are in fact ways to do that now, usually called "stickers".
I'd never want just anyone to be able to define new Unicode targets. We'd soon be overrun with Ricks because idiots.
Since the page doesn't promote any political view at all we might hesitate to make the leap that they are censoring political views but because the entire purpose of that app is intended for exposing corporate/political/social issues it's a bit difficult to believe FB doesn't have that in mind when they block a link to it from being shared.
I'd love to hear what other reasons they might have because I really cannot think of any that hold up.
Here's the link: http://anonymous-video.com/index.html
You're assigning far too much agency to the decision as if someone at FB reviewed anonymous-video.com specifically and decided to block it or not.
Its just a machine learning model that has been trained on a bunch of existing spam finds signals in common with your link.
The policies are explicitly written in code (Haxl) but a lot of them invoke machine learning models to do actual classification of stuff (URLs, images, comments, &c.)—although I’d imagine an increasing amount of the computation is being moved over to the Haxl side because it’s so much less resource-intensive than the FXL system it replaced. Where possible, SI usually errs on the side of “better safe than sorry” when it comes to spam, malware, fake accounts, &c.—hence users’ complaints of “getting zucc’d” when someone reports them, or their activity on the site triggers a filter.
Here's the link to the article that was shared here where I found the link to the video that led me to the anonymous-video.com site.
https://lmgsecurity.com/exposing-the-secret-office-365-foren...
I did a Google search on the anonymous-video.com domain name and nothing at all came up about spam or malware or anything nefarious at all, unless you consider the videos hosted there to be "spam", but that's a huge leap to make because they're not selling anything there.
The entire site is blacklisted on FB, not just the video maker. This convinces me even further that this is not a decision based on machine learning models.
I understand FB has the right to do this, and I'm not arguing here they shouldn't. I do, however, think it's important that we know and understand how, why, where, and to whom, when it is done.
And I do think that FB users should be concerned about this specific site being blacklisted. I am.
That's not a reason. It's an explanation that fails to provide cause.
* washingtonpost is behind a GDPR paywall (for me at least), it took a few attempts even for the link preview to load when I tried posting that
* 99.9999% uptime of web APIs is not 100%, fb servers really could have been having trouble reaching washingtonpost
* I was able to share that post fine (once the link preview finally loaded properly), so WFM..?
If this was not true, Vero would have taken off instead of falling flat.
Social media is pretty much broken at this point. The idea was to increase reach and communication. Instead we've got people grouped into thought bubbles and echo chambers. I'd argue that Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are causing more harm to society at this point than any potential benefit they provide.
Is there any evidence to support this assertion and that Facebook isn't merely showing you information that is palatable to you? (Note that this greatly expands the use of this fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_repugnance)
I think we all have to answer these questions first:
1) Are you comfortable with receiving information that is true, or even mostly true, but that which is distasteful to you personally?
2) If so, do you wish to impose this expectation on everyone else?
The story was broadly covered by sources across the political spectrum.
And in answer to your two questions: Yes, I expect news sources to have journalisic integrity, even if the truth is not popular.
Which is basically just content monitoring that AI can't do... child exploitation, hate speech, gore, pornography, etc.
I think it's a pretty damn right-wing slippery-slope you're traversing if you assume that's equivalent to "censorship of rogue ideas"
Californians have a different idea about hate speech than people from Alabama who have a different view of hate speech than someone from Bangalore.
So if you hire your censors from California you are going to see right wing rogue ideas considered hate speech.
I'm not sure why intent matters. The point is I can't turn it off and see all the information if I wanted to. My access to information is being artificially restricted.
> 2) If so, do you wish to impose this expectation on everyone else?
This is completely unnecessary. Just need an option in preferences: Use algorithmic feed [Yes] [No].
Edit: Like privacy, this is another case where the ad-driven business model is in conflict with the best interests of the user. Ad-supported algorithmic feeds optimize not for truth, educational value, or even user happiness, but for engagement. This often means eliciting a strong emotional reaction - positive or negative. In effect algorithmic feeds create the informational equivalent of how grocery stores put high-margin junk and processed foods in the high traffic areas. They want you to buy this stuff - your health be damned.
Or you know, what actual real life and political experience points to, and labelling it "conspiracy" is the "jumping to conclusions fallacy".
Twitter openly admits to censorship. They censored legitimate journalism for political reasons.
Source: https://www.lgraham.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/4766f54d-...
Try Reddit for your garbage opinions.
I think the logic goes like this: "We wouldn't tweet that. Nobody we know would tweet anything like that. Therefore, this is not from real people." Maybe the Twitter employees need to get out a bit more, perhaps taking a lengthy visit to rural Oklahoma or West Virginia.
There may be some feelings of guilt here. To deal with that, just claim that the tweets aren't from real people.
2) Yes.
Was that supposed to be hard?
It's no surprise that algorithms create an information bubble for us. I like to use music as an example: the best music recommendations I've ever received have been from friends. I'll describe music I'm listening to and like, and they'll recommend something for me. I'd say 50% of the time I find it unobjectionable, 30% of the time I hate it, and 20% of the time I love it.
Sites have been trying to replicate this functionality using algorithms for a well over a decade. Last.fm used to be a great way for me find music. As far as I could tell, it would just pick music from people who listened to the same artists as you. I'd say I found 30% of the music unobjectionable, 50% of the music terrible, and 20% of the music great. Functionally, this was remarkably similar to my friends recommending me music, because I only care about the music I loved.
Over time their algorithm got 'better' and nearly stopped recommending music I disliked, however I found that it mostly just recommended me music that was in the unobjectionable middle ground of 'meh'. I stopped looking for music on Last.fm because it stopped giving me music I loved.
We've positioned machine learning as a replacement to curation, but what it really does is put forth the least objectionable content. Machine learning lacks the ability to deal with the nuances surrounding controversial or challenging content. It never takes the leap of faith that a person would when recommending you something.
I am really interested to see how this all plays out over the next few years, because I think people are beginning to realize they are addicted to the perpetual stream of 'good enough' content. The network effect will probably protect Facebook for the time being, I assume the first sites affected will be content-driven, like YouTube.
Of course, XKCD addressed the issues I have with algorithms far better than I could ever hope to:
I don't think the problem is with ML. You could easily train a net to make boulder selections with an appropriate data set. I believe what you are seeing is an accommodation for the average person. Most people aren't adventurous, and it makes business sense to get algos working for the middle majority than to cater to tail ends.
It also, IMO, makes content at places like youtube less technical and more clickbaity. But again I believe this is somewhat intentional.
> I don't think the problem is with ML. You could easily train a net to make boulder selections with an appropriate data set. I believe what you are seeing is an accommodation for the average person. Most people aren't adventurous, and it makes business sense to get algos working for the middle majority than to cater to tail ends.
You literally just said the same thing the GP did while ostensibly disagreeing with him: ML curated content caters to the lowest common denominator - i.e. the content that most people would be okay with.
Would that mean more rock and less bluegrass? (I'm kidding, of course)
In all seriousness though, the problem probably is the data set to a certain extent. I am pretty adventurous, true, but at the same time I think the problem is that regardless of what data we collect, we only have the ability to determine if something is inoffensive.
All you need to do is look at a site that aggregates reviews like Yelp or Amazon, and read some reviews. 95% of reviews are either 1 star or 5 stars, and it's obvious from reading the text that the rating is meaningless. "I ordered the wrong item by mistake, 1 star" "Food is overpriced, but the bathrooms are clean and wait staff is attractive, 5 stars."
I find star ratings most useful because people who rate things 2-4 stars generally have the most nuanced and productive things to say about the product, and actually rate things what they think they should be rated, rather than using the rating system as a vote for "rate this higher/lower."
I don't think it's possible to actually come up with good recommendations based on user-reported like/dislike rating. It's not wrong for a user to dislike a song because it reminds them of an ex, but using that as a basis for a recommendation to someone else is entirely useless.
Systems like Rotten Tomatoes works really well in this regard, but almost has the opposite problem, which is that it tends to underrate movies with broad appeal, but that's generally not a problem since users will be exposed to those movies anyways.
I would say most people aren't adventurous in everything except their interests, which they are very adventurous in. The problem is that there will always be more people with a meh feeling toward a random subject than people with a genuine intrest in it, and a brute force ML algorithem trained by just throwing unholy amounts of generic personal data at it before being being relased on the giant mashup of random subjects that make up something like youtube won't catch that nuance
Ehhh... mathematically, most ML methods basically assume that the underlying data and label manifolds should be smooth (in the real analysis sense). Sharply peaked output distributions, small mountains of "loved it!" surrounded by valleys of "ugh", are hard to work with for many models, compared to a wavy surface between "ok" and "ok, I guess".
Then see how many minutes it takes before your entire thread is flagged and effectively censored.
Doesn’t have to be a giant to exhibit the behaviors people find objectionable, like applying selective censorship.
Just two days ago this NYT editorial [1] was on the front page of HN with 20+ upvotes IIRC, and before there were more than 1 or 2 comments the post was deleted and unviewable. (And didn't show up as flagged either -- just totally deleted.)
I'm not sure how many people on HN are aware of what appears to be admin censorship of this topic. And it's not like it's some incendiary blog post -- it's an Op-Ed from the nation's traditional "newspaper of record", part of the national conversation, and relevant to our industry.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/opinion/harvard-asian-ame...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17403488
Other recent threads on the subject:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16759138
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16250371
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17327774
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17320360
This happens for articles that discuss China, diversity, etc.
Because it's not.
Spacing them out means they're getting some later, leaving them vulnerable longer. It also lends false credence to the idea that they're dangerous. In many cases, it may also mean kids miss out on the later doses, because repeated doctor visits to administer them may be unaffordable (copays) or difficult (scheduling, transportation, etc.). Multiple visits for shots also exposes them to germy pediatrician waiting rooms more frequently.
You state that such a discussion should not occur, and that those new parents should not have access to those (including our pediatrician, by the way) who state that the current schedule is much too aggressive and can safely be spaced out.
Denying new parents the opportunity for such a discussion is pure and simple arrogance and it does nobody any good except the egos of those who engage in that censorship.
---------------------
Whackadoodles. Nice. The arrogance is strong in this one.
Your own linked article (about not a study, but merely a survey whose demographics and actual questions are hidden from us) states that parents concerns should not be dismissed. This is a discussion about censorship, and you've shown yourself only too willing to engage in it.
You don't agree that giving a vaccine later means you're not getting its benefits as quickly?
You don't agree that three pediatrician visits is 3x the exposure to the germs in a pediatrician's waiting room?
As for your pediatrician's particular practice, they may simply be avoiding conflict: http://time.com/3726887/doctors-space-out-vaccines/
> And while nearly 90% thought that such spacing out of the immunizations would put the children, and the community at risk of spreading infectious diseases like measles, 37% said they agreed to do so often or always.
(There are also a smattering of whackadoodles in any profession...)
The word I like to describe all of this stuff is scientism -- it looks like science, feels like knowledge, but it's just well-formed nonsense.
I do think there’s some kind of “you can’t discuss that” attitudes on here about certain topics. Diversity stuff is an area I can imagine reasonable and even good comments getting downvoted. Sadly I don’t have any sources, but this is my intuition after reading HN regularly.
Supposing we take your argument seriously though, comments past the page fold which also have their contrast lowered to the point of illegibility are certainly censored even moreso.
Incidentally, I do think the way the comment fading works is pointedly user-hating and dumb (it's traditionally dumb, though!), but it's not really censorship. More generally, since we're talking about taking things seriously, framing forum irritants as some sort of oppression is a solid way to ensure few people take you seriously.
That topic in particular (gender in STEM, feminist topics, etc.) I find is usually a no-go zone anywhere else on the net unless you have a specific opinion abut it, but on HN it wasn't censored and I felt comfortable expressing an opinion.
It's sometimes hit and miss. I think sometimes posts on certain hot-topic political issues are downvoted because many people come here for tech related stuff and don't want to see anything else-- especially that which leads to an unwinable argument.
The problem is these "genuine questions," for other people, are received as: bad faith questions, "sea lioning", poorly researched questions (e.g., simple query would find the answer), microagressions, dog whistles, sock puppet arguments, or other incendiary social media argument techniques.
Whether every instance of "hi, I'm new here, why is affirmative action a good thing?" is actually bad faith, etc. is irrelevant.
Diversity as a topic gets downvoted, flagged, and removed because the heat keeps happening on those threads. Regardless of which side you occupy or support or even if you claim to support no side at all, it consistently produces uncharitable and unproductive discussion.
>The problem is these "genuine questions," for other people, are received as: bad faith questions, "sea lioning", poorly researched questions (e.g., simple query would find the answer), microagressions, dog whistles, sock puppet arguments, or other incendiary social media argument techniques.
Those things - I don't understand or currently agree with your view, so it's a "bad faith question" - are Bay Area culture.
In the rest of the adult world, it's OK to not share your opinion before asking questions.
It's a common misconception, but HN users are overwhelmingly not in the Bay Area. When I looked at this a few months ago, the number was about 10%. (Actually between 5% and 14% depending on how you count.)
I noticed a similar trend on Facebook. My posts about the tragedy occurring right now in Yemen got almost no traffic on Facebook, despite being worded and cited similarly to my other popular posts.
However, I find it hard to justify calling this "censorship" because it is the site working as intended. Controversial topics are avoided because the goal of the site is ultimately recreational. There are many things you can't discuss on HN because the userbase just isn't interested, but nobody would argue that HN censors discussions of, say, the hardcore music scene in the Bay Area.
Partly due the to recent news on Harvard admissions, most of my Asian friends think affirmative action is racist against them.
In the old Internet (forums and Usenet), sure, there was crowd psychology too. There always is.
However, these social media designs were far less prone to hiding unpopular opinions. As a general rule, unless you had an overtly strict moderator or something, you could read posts with unpopular opinions, even if the "crowd" disagreed.
Big social media sites (Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/etc.) in contrast use algorithmic reordering, shuffling, and tweaking of your feeds / timelines / etc. Likes / retweets / etc. are one component to what gets displayed on your feed. The net result here is that unpopular opinions are often effectively "silenced". IMHO this leads to a negative and polarizing effect.
I can't call it 100% censorship though. It's different. On most social networks, you are free to, say, start your own little space (a subreddit or your own Twitter space and whatnot) where, say, the less fortunate sides of diversity initiatives are discussed. Unless the subject strays into TOS violation territory, you can probably say what you want. However, there's a good chance in said subreddit (in this polarized environment and considering crowd psychology) that it is the positive side of diversity initiatives that are downvoted to oblivion. And the reverse is true as well. Basically, crowd psychology and the binary like/retweet system ensures that no one hears what the "other side" has to say. Maybe it's a "dark pattern" of sort? Tweak the emotions of the user in the right way, not the wrong way, and they might spend a bit longer looking at that advertisement...
Hacker News doesn't feel as "bad" to me as the bigger social networks for some reason -- I'm not a big fan of upvote/downvote systems, obviously, but at least HN includes tools like the showdead option that's pretty easy to enable. There was a large discussion about diversity initiatives during relevant stories (the James Damore memo for instance), but for others, I know that some of the "crowd" here is wary of overtly political articles period, favoring only pure tech articles. So you are going to get some front page selection bias against articles of a "political" nature.
There is great confusion on the scope and purpose of the First Amendment in play here.
Secondly, media is drilling down on two toxic ideas:
always two sides to every story
, and
objectivity, claim of no bias.
These things combine to present ordinary Americans with the expectation of objective media and free speech everywhere.
A side effect is a surrender of critical thought in return for unwarranted trust.
The remedy should be to evaluate all of this with a critical eye and help people understand there is always bias, and how they can and shoild be using diverse sources to stay informed.
Where did the assumption of an un-biased platform come from? These companies are in the business of making money, as much as they preach about 'making a difference in the world', they will always default to whatever gains the most public favor and generates the most revenue.
I am actually surprised by the statistics, I had assumed that less people thought they were being censored. Although this presents an opposite problem, if everyone thinks they are being censored then they can claim the real truth is being 'censored'.
Biases will always exist when money is involved.
Note that there is no "true neutral" in this world; neutrality itself is a political position that helps certain people and hinders others.
Conservative comedian Owen Benjamin being banned from Twitter for life is but one:
But hidden camera footage of a Twitter engineer openly admitting that they shadowbanned conservatives came out last year.
I think the biggest contributor is just that left-leaning people are more likely to be offended by right-leaning views. As a result, even an entirely neutral algorithm focused on retention / user satisfaction will be more careful about showing right-leaning views to users who aren't obviously right-leaning. To me, it's tough to call that censorship.
As a result, I see the issue more as a symptom of the real problem, but that's a lot tougher to solve.
More likely to have empathy is another way to phrase that.
At the bottom? Fear of the other; in the United States, fear of the other rooted particularly in racism. Because it's not "nationalism" here--a disease by itself, but a controllable one. It's white supremacism, given nicer clothes by calling it "white nationalism" for some godforsaken reason, peddled by leaders who want the bottom to vote their way. It's not like it's news. Lee Atwater pegged this whole disgraceful thing decades ago. To legitimize and get boots on the ground for economically regressive policies, the right wing of the United States leveraged this racially-motivated insecurity; now the racist tiger has eaten them and they are so very surprised that the racist tiger was racist all along.
At the top? They're the ones doing the peddling. Some is surely true-believer racism. Some is also surely cynicism--because the bottom will eat it up and there's your leash to drag them where you want. It isn't exactly complex.
(And, no, Obama and Clinton are not "ultra right" from a European perspective; that's the sort of mendacious both-sidesing I expect out of actually far right speakers, though. Obama and Clinton would be generically center- to center-right politicians on a Europe-calibrated axis. The modern Republican Party is more like Ukip.)
I do want to compliment you for the rhetorical twirl of trying to co-opt reality with the Russian specter, though. It's bold. Projecting...but very bold.
Broad characterization of the opposing side as evil, morally bankrupt, racist, sexist, fascist, communist, or other negative traits is why our politics are so toxic.
Instead of "but both sides" and a false appeal for civility, you could read some accounts of people involved with the movement.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2012/10/how-i-l...
That article was a good personal account which could definitely change minds.
All things are relative. Given that description of Obama or Clinton, what would you classify those who ran as Republicans in the last election?
For the primaries, using similar measures at least, the Republicans all more or less clumped together to the right of Clinton.
He very clearly is not in favor of free education, he is very clearly not in favor of raising the minimum wage, he very clearly is not in favor of universal health care, and very clearly is not in favor of more bank regulation.
So I find the claims that Clinton was more to the right of Trump quite dubious.
In every case, there is some "more important cause" that someone prioritizes that makes it look like they don't have empathy.
I think you will find a lot of leftists caring deeply about the lives of people who are currently working in coal mines or in a police force, and concluding that the best answer for them is found in different employment.
It is no lack of empathy to the life of a coal miner to say that coal should stop being mined any more than it is a lack of empathy to the life of a soldier to say that a war should end.
It's the same with people on the right with this immigration issue. They care about immigrants, but they care about rigid immigration policies to prevent "free-riders" even more. That's why you will find very few right-leaning people against legal immigrants as opposed to the many against illegal immigrants.
That's a terrible way to put it.
Or to be more honest, they think white rural Americans dying of drug overdoses is funny. I mean these stupid rednecks deserve it right? Fewer white births than deaths in many states? (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/us/white-minority-populat...) It's about fucking time!
Now I'm being a bit unfair to the left here partly because I'm more pissed at them, as I'm a liberal who would have thought this was "my team" just a few years ago. Of course there are people that would say all that and probably worse regardless of their politics. But something seems very wrong. IMO it's been a long time since this large of a number of people on either side truly think their political opposition ought to be killed. I've seen people on the left say Trump voters should be shot, he should be assassinated, etc., and I've seen similar shit coming out of the right as well. Not even on the internet; I have heard this things IRL. Maybe modern society/technology has done something really fucked to our empathy? I have no idea, but I'm pretty sure it hasn't been like this as long as I've been alive.
That fact almost proves the point OP was making though, when your argument is emotion based offense at hostile views comes naturally.
"liberals are easily offended" is just right wing spin of the clear fact that the left have always cared more about real people.
Some of these rules, IMHO, are absurd, but many you'd come to the same conclusion without faith as with it.
They mostly agree with their understanding of the Bible, so extend the benefit of the doubt to issues they don't yet understand.
Similar to supporting a policy because your favorite politician supports it.
Every time I've dug into some divisive issue I see core rational arguments on both sides along with these faith based cop outs or short sighted emotional appeals.
From Russia eh?
I'm sure you meant to phrase it differently but in its current form, your comment comes across as more snarky than substantive or civil.
I wonder what causes that.
There seems to be an idea that the things that offend them are, like, “naturally” abhorrent, so it’s not offense so much as, like... digust in satanic things, virtue in “common sense”, etc. There’s a whole language to talk about things that carefully avoids the concept of “being offended”.
I'd have to avoid all the late night shows, most newspapers and TV news stations, and most social media. It doesn't take long to get inoculated. As a left-leaning person, it's much easier to see almost exclusively your own ideas being reinforced.
> There seems to be an idea that the things that offend them are, like, “naturally” abhorrent, so it’s not offense so much as, like... digust in satanic things, virtue in “common sense”, etc. There’s a whole language to talk about things that carefully avoids the concept of “being offended”.
I'm sure that's a debate to be had--but to apply most applicably to this discussion, I mean "sufficiently offended to leave a website, stop watching a video, block something, report something, or otherwise feel like you've had a negative experience." The kind of things social media algorithms will pick up on.
You used the word “exclusively”... “As a left-leaning person, it's much easier to see almost exclusively your own ideas.”
I think you’re making a strange assumption here: some of my conservative ideas are almost universally rejected by the media around me, therefore many liberals must feel all of their ideas are universally accepted by the media.
That’s not true though. For example some liberals feel that capitalism is immoral. That idea is almost universally rejected in the media, and by most Americans.
I think your point—that some ideas which are important to you are being suppressed—is important to raise. I care about those ideas and seek them out. (Although I’m conservative in many ways)
But I think you really weaken your position in the debate by tacking on strong claims about how enfranchised leftists must feel in the media.
The people who feel comfortable with the media are really neither left or right. They are people who feel comfortable with the status quo, who feel most happy when everyone agrees and actively move away from discord. Non-ideologues. These people are neither left nor right.
https://www.google.com/search?q=obama+arugula
https://www.google.com/search?q=obama+tan+suit
https://www.google.com/search?q=obama+dijon+mustard
https://www.google.com/search?q=obama+feet+desk
Yeah, spare me.
Considering "right leaning views" includes things like women should not have reproductive control over their bodies, trans people should not be able to use the bathroom they feel comfortable with, and gay people shouldn't be married, and people should have their children yanked away from them at the border, yes, I can very much see why they would be offended by that.
You're not getting a lot of people being offended by the nuances of tax policy, for instance.
This theory only makes sense if there's an asymmetry between left offended at right and right offended at left. I don't think that's true. At least I don't think its true in the direction of left-more-offended-at-right. A large fraction of right-wing media seems built around selling a feeling of indignation and contempt (Ann Coulter, Bill o', any Murdoch publication etc). I've seen "liberal" used as a sneer by conservatives, but never in the opposite direction.
As a conservative, it's tough to avoid seeing opposing points of view. You'd have to avoid all late night shows, nearly all TV stations and newspapers, and most social media. We're quite accustomed to seeing opposing views and if it actually bothered us seeing them, we'd be frustrated virtually all the time.
Left-leaning people can quite easily participate in society without seeing opposing views. You can openly discuss even political activism at work without issue. Avoid Fox News and Breitbart and you're unlikely to see anything much different than what you already believe.
Maybe "offended" isn't the right word, but I do think it's a contributing factor.
Very little of this is regional because most media consumed is not regional, and most reporters and editors lean left.
As to your specific points:
> Would you assume I'm right-wing if I do not use politically correct terminology?
Frankly, yes. Politically correct speech appears to be today's shibboleth[0].
> Will slowing down change my world-view or simply the language I use to express it?
Slowing down a poster will reduce their ability to express their viewpoint, diluting it among other posters.
I would, because it implies that your desire to not change how you speak is more important to you than making others feel comfortable.
Most people are unable to decouple their sense of self-worth from the public perception of themselves. It takes a great deal of introspection and self-discipline to detach in the manner described, and even then, it stings at first before the brain kicks in to post-hoc rationalize the response. It's how human beings are wired and a few years of deep thought are not going to change millenia of evolutionary responses.
"If it feels bad it's censorship" is not a particularly useful definition of 'censorship'. It should give you pause that most messageboard complaints about 'censorship' revolve around it - you never see someone passionately argue how their top comment (with page-consuming thread hanging off it) is 'censoring' other viewpoints.
Why would someone complain about their comment being the top comment? They are the most popular person at that point.
But doesn't that imply that you're entitled to a response? And why would you say there's no rationale? It might not be a rationale that you like, but there certainly is one; your post was either violating the guidelines or wasn't contributing to the conversation.
"Why would someone complain about their comment being the top comment? They are the most popular person at that point."
That viewpoint is part of the problem; votes aren't supposed to be about popularity.
These people can only exist in a bubble though. Most people outside that bubble are laughing at them.
https://www.axios.com/conservatives-republicans-social-media...
Note that there are plenty of other custom icons that Twitter allows.
As the article says, this move cost Twitter millions in revenue. If you don't have the ability to just choose not to make money because you're not interested in the transaction, you don't actually control the company, the public does.
It is if you allow the other side to do exactly the same, as noted in the linked article.
Maybe it is. It is still censorship. And it is based on the political opinion of the CEO.
If they apply the same approach to different political campaigns it doesn't seem politically motivated to me.
"No attack ads" isn't the same thing as "no anti-Hillary attack ads". If you can cite the Hillary campaign getting a custom emoji for an anti-Trump hashtag, do so.
Irrelevant. Twitter denied them a custom icon whereas allowed their opposition to have one. The content of the icon has no bearing on the matter. It's censorship. That is twitter's choice but it is still censorship, based on the CEO's politics.
This is NOT TRUE.
Click the article. Look at the screenshot. It clearly shows the Republican National Convention was afforded a custom emoji.
You've fallen for some propaganda.
If the Clinton campaign ran an ad that was targeting Trump in a similarly negative way and Twitter allowed that, then it would be bias.
But so far I haven't seen that counterexample.
By your logic, taking down a post of someone being doxxed is also censorship.
The other side is not doing exactly the same. The other side never intended to do exactly the same, and for good measure, the CEO promised that if they did, they would be prevented from doing so, too.
You are now making the claim that, if side X exhibits behavior A, and opposing side Y exhibits behavior B, it is no longer legitimate to compare behaviors A and B - whatever the behaviors are, they are exactly the same simply because they're held by opposing sides.
The other side wanted a custom icon. They got it. The content of the icon is irrelevant to the question "did twitter censor political views not shared by the CEO?" The answer is "yes", regardless of the content of the icon granted to the other side.
They were allowed other hashtags that didn't have the same negative "attack ad" approach so it doesn't look like politically motivated bias so much as them just not wanting to promote negative attack ads on their platform.
You can call it censorship. That's fair. But it's unfair to call it bias or politically motivated censorship.
It absolutely, most certainly is not. The content is quite vital to the decision.
I suspect it was approved because #RNCinCLE isn't an attack/allegation on someone else. I also believe it was a Twitter-initiated hashtag, not one bought by the RNC.
I similarly suspect the Hillary Campaign would've seen an application to add an emoji to #DumpTrump rejected. Hell, Pepsi probably can't sponsor a #CokeSucks one.
> However, both DNC and RNC conventions had custom emojis this cycle and they did not use disclaimers.
> But, the only other campaign large enough to have this type of deal would have been the Clinton campaign and my contacts inside TW informed me that they did not have one in place. So basically, “cancelling for all political campaigns” really meant cancelling ONLY for Donald J. Trump’s campaign.
The DNC and RNC both got custom mascot emojis for their hashtags, and the Trump campaign did not get a #CrookedHillary emoji, nor did the Clinton campaign get (or ask for) a similar anti-Trump emoji. So the other side was quite clearly not allowed to do the exact same, nor did they even ask to do the exact same.
EDIT: I ask because this is an example of an attack ad targeted to an individual candidate rather than a general promotion or political concept, which I can see why Twitter wouldn't necessarily want to promote.
Any ad that directly mentions the opposing candidate, no matter how polite, is an attack ad. And there is no guidance from ANY regulatory authority that I can see, that bans, discourages, or even regulates them.
Which, frankly, has been an issue that plagues them on both sides of the political divide.
A blog post (not journalism!) by a paid member of a political campaign infamous for its loose relationship with fact and truth, quoting other paid members of the Campaign, to push a particular message that the campaign has been aggressively pushing...
I mean, dude, what the fuck. How can you call what is literally campaign propaganda produced by two members of a partisan campaign PR department a "smoking gun"?
I'm at a loss for words. What is happening to Hacker News?
Your response is overblown and strident.
How, exactly? Is Facebook doling out admin privileges to random users? Or are we confusing "receive criticism" with "censorship" here?
That's no more "censorship" than me unfriending you on Facebook would be.
> On Facebook, a similar phenomenon might occur due to liberal users reporting conservative ideas they don't agree with as hate speech.
That'll put it in a review queue, upon which Facebook employees make a decision. If it gets deleted, it's because you violated Facebook's rules.
It's more complicated than that, though. It takes more than just a report to get someone's content deleted.
Take a look at the examples from their moderator training:
https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-hate-speech-cens...
See, for example, the slide about "female drivers", "black children", and "white men" - Facebook's policies (via some pretty odd logic, IMO) protect posts about "white men", but not "black children". A liberal bastion, they're not.
> One document trains content reviewers on how to apply the company’s global hate speech algorithm. The slide identifies three groups: female drivers, black children and white men. It asks: Which group is protected from hate speech? The correct answer: white men.
> The reason is that Facebook deletes curses, slurs, calls for violence and several other types of attacks only when they are directed at “protected categories”—based on race, sex, gender identity, religious affiliation, national origin, ethnicity, sexual orientation and serious disability/disease. It gives users broader latitude when they write about “subsets” of protected categories. White men are considered a group because both traits are protected, while female drivers and black children, like radicalized Muslims, are subsets, because one of their characteristics is not protected. (The exact rules are in the slide show below.)
Would it not be the same the other way around because of the subset rule? Black women would be protected whereas male drivers and white children would not?
Do you have any proof of that claim?
Too often “free speech” is a messy and conflated concept used to basically argue against anyone being told to shut up. Various arguments about the size or dominance of a social media platform are often used to try and get them covered like the government under the 1st amendment. Then if all that fails, the argument switches to free speech as a vague principle rather than a legal right.
To be fair, it isn’t just conservatives who seem to feel this way either. Americans in general just seem, on average, not to understand this issue as well as they think they do.
Moreover people like Mill or Popper would argue people have a duty to engage every idea, because that's how the open society works.
The reduction of free speech to the first amendment and to State censorship is a modern american barbarism that is as absurd as it is baseless in either its historical roots or its application by any free judiciary, including the American one.
Telling people to shut up because their ideas are unpopular is and always will be illiberal.
You're free to think that it's all bunk and tyranny of the majority is just fine. Many people do.
I'd just like it to be clear to everyone that such an opinion is being against free speech. Because what greatly annoys me is when people try to claim that they advocate a "reasonable" version of free speech when they simply oppose it. Or indeed try to claim that their censorious position is a liberal one.
Which I am not at all accusing you of incidentally.
I would wager a large sum of money that if left-wing opinion were treated in the same way there would be much whining about minority rights and the importance of an individual's free speech from the left.
Maybe not, but on some sites you are abusing your privileges as a moderator by behaving this way.
That person is feeling 'censored'.
And now every other person is a 'bot' or a Russian troll.
That's probably a big contributor to the perception.
The leaders of many of the big tech companies are very public in their support of certain views, and steer their companies to publicly support those views, as well. So it makes sense for people with differing views to believe that that companies which don't share their views would be against them.
If the tech companies were to focus solely on being good technology companies and not trying to re-shape society, the public might have a different perception.
Other users can't censor. That's not an ability they have.
And really, the only hostility I've seen targeted at conservative views are those viewpoints that decide that certain people shouldn't have the same rights as everyone else. And I can very much understand that, if you were told that you couldn't marry the person you loved, or even that you shouldn't be allowed to exist in public, you'd be quite hostile to the people who spout those viewpoints too.
(edit: spelling)