Meta censored the No Kings Instagram account during a nationwide campaign

gnabgib

Discussion (600 points, 11 days ago, 424 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50136881

cosmicgadget

The headline is old news but the shifting explanations is entertaining. "Claude's fault."

solid_fuel

After the crap they pulled in the latest Brazilian election, there is no reason to give Facebook the benefit of the doubt. They are obviously and intentionally trying to use their extreme influence over online communities to influence elections. Watch for more fuckery during the current US election season.

40four

Meta can act like they don't know what's happening, but they do. As do all the other tech giants. They've been censoring and curating people feeds for a long time. This story is amusing since it's one instance where a "Team Blue" was affected. In general, it's usually "Team Red" channels are the ones getting censored. There is an interesting project America's Digital Shield that studies these practices ( https://americasdigitalshield.com/ ). They capture "ephemeral" content from search results and social feeds from volunteers, with a balanced distribution of the political spectrum. Basically, the idea is that none of the content we get fed from tech giants is unbiased, even search results are manipulated to affect people one way or the other, especially when it comes to politics and elections. It's pretty upsetting once you understand what's happening.

kaldev

I felt like this whole thing is extremely inorganic. Funded by a WalMart heiress, website went up hours before a massive NYT ad buy, and (in my opinion) what felt like lot of coordinated / paid / botted engagement. Idk, I don't want the internet to be dictated by followers/engagement that can be easily botted via a SMM panel for pennies.

gigatexal

When the Dems take Congress good ol’ Zuck will be woke again. The man has no spine. And because he doesn’t his share price has skyrocketed.

Kalanos

such hypocrisy because free speech is always their excuse not in intervene in algorithms

Ancalagon

Getting the sense Meta's internal slogan is literally: "Be Evil."

jey

I'm not a Meta fan or anything, but this does seem kind of tricky to deal with. Specifically that pages/topics which get sudden influx of activity at once can look similar to a coordinated spam campaign. Especially if combined with being flagged opponents who don't want to see that content. It seems like it could be hard to tell the two apart, or at least the false positives seem hard to control. Can anyone with more experience on these kinds of spam/fraud detection systems could chime in?

aleksandrm

Not the first time, and not the last. They just did it again yesterday to Democratic Senate candidate Angie Nixon. https://newrepublic.com/post/217281/meta-suspend-democratic-...

digitaltrees

Remember when zuck considered a presidential run when he saw how Facebook could sway voters and elections? And then Elon bought twitter for the same reason? We are fortunate for their awkward detestable personalities, otherwise they would have had a shot.

yodsanklai

"Never attribute to evil that which is adequately explained by incompetence"

dualvariable

Meta just pushed some Heritage Foundation post on me today. I aggressively block/hide anything right-wing, and yet somehow "the algorithm" thought I'd be really into that...

nodesocket

Welcome to the party. Remember during covid if you even questioned the lockdowns, mask effectiveness, vaccines you were shadow blocked or even banned. This is why Elon buying Twitter was such a big deal.

bensonperry

one thing i rarely see discussed here... okay, let's assume that meta intentionally has people internally that do things like "bring down the No Kings page specifically at this specific time for political gain." this is like conspiracy level stuff. do you think people at meta aren't liberal and care about this as well? if they were actually doing this people internally would be whistleblowing like crazy

MiroslavPokorny

What a shock, who knew Big Tech was owned by the US gov.