Senator Seeks Answers from Facebook on Political Censoring Allegations

http://www.commerce.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2016/5/thune-seeks-answers-from-facebook-on-political-manipulation-allegations

by cft • 10 years ago

94 91 10 years ago

commerce.senate.gov

taylodl• 10 years ago

With the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine how can Facebook be held accountable for anything? I'm not defending Facebook's alleged actions, I'm asking how could those alleged actions be in violation of federal law?

legohead• 10 years ago

Also, has this senator asked the same of CNN/MSNBC/Fox/etc?

cft• 10 years ago

The expectation of FB is very different. A normal user would assume that the ranking is based on a news link popularity: sharing, clicks or some other user metric.

billytetrud2• 10 years ago

Cft might have a point, if facebook is essentially tricking people into thinking content is unbiased, that might be considered fraud.

mc32• 10 years ago

It's not the same because neither one of those is essentially the only global news network whereas FB, and vkontakte to a much smaller degree, is the only social network with news which has a global virtually monopolistic shop.

JumpCrisscross• 10 years ago

Of existing statute? Probably not. But there could be a push to subject social networks to the Equal Time Rule [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule

paulmd• 10 years ago

It's an open question whether cable networks (like those that carry internet) could be subject to the Equal Time Rule. Publically-licensed airwaves have traditionally been considered fundamentally different from a privately-owned cable system.

mikeyouse3• 10 years ago

Hilariously, this is what Thune had to say about the Fairness Doctrine when he sponsored an amendment to prevent the FCC from stepping in on talk radio;

Our amendment would have helped preserve the vibrant marketplace of ideas we have today in our media. Our support for freedom of conscience and freedom of speech means that we must support the rights granted to even those with whom we disagree. Giving power to a few to regulate fairness in the media is a recipe for an Orwellian disaster.

So it's an Orwellian disaster for the fairness doctrine to extend to talk radio, but he's okay with the government threatening a private internet company to make sure there's enough conservative opinion being displayed? Nice scruples.

specialist2• 10 years ago

Freedom of speech (in the US) online shouldn't be taken for granted.

During the aughts, treating political and opinions blogs as donations in kind, and therefore subject to campaign finance rules, was pushed pretty hard.

Torgo• 10 years ago

Rush Limbaugh used to say that talk radio didn't need "equal time" protection, because talk radio was "equal time" to the entire rest of the newsmedia. And, having grown up in the 80's, I think he was right.

billytetrud2• 10 years ago

Facebook can do whatever it wants to. Maybe most people on facebook have liberal views and they're showing people what they are more likely to want to read?

I don't agree with Facebook's actions in intentionally creating bias, but bias is essentially a constitutionally protected right via free speech. I don't have to agree with them for them to have a right to do it.

0942v8653• 10 years ago

You're not wrong. But many see Facebook as a communication medium, rather than a company. They would think it's like a pen which refuses to write conservative viewpoints, just because the manufacturer has a liberal bias. Obviously, that's absurd. But it seems that many fail to realize how scary it is that we have relied so much on a single company's platform for communication, when they have already admitted to manipulating us. Maybe this censorship debacle will be a nudge in the right direction, if publicized clearly enough.

H0n3sty5• 10 years ago

Maybe most people on facebook have liberal views and they're showing people what they are more likely to want to read?

Trending happens regardless of political view. If they're manually suppressing views which don't align with FB management then users should be made aware of this.

ekips2• 10 years ago

Why should users be made aware of it?

sparkzilla• 10 years ago

This is incorrect: Facebook is not a media, but a distribution platform. A media, like, say, The New York Times, can have as much bias as it wants, but a platform that distributes media should treat all media equally, otherwise it becomes a media that promotes a certain viewpoint, and enters into competition with its own clients.

mistersquid2• 10 years ago

You've been downvoted but I think your assertion brings up a fascinating possibility which is to what extent should a syndication channel (for example) be considered a distribution platform and, so, any internal ranking algorithm considered network infrastructure facilitating or inhibiting traffic?

Taken along these lines, ranking algorithms which produce highly consistent and curated/biased results could be understood as more or less adhering or flouting Net Neutrality, depending.

I think the analogy is worth thinking about, even if we judge human-readable content (news stories) differently than machine-readble content (uninspected packets).

sbuttgereit• 10 years ago

I think the complaint is that when conservative ideas "organically" trended, meaning were being actively discussed/traded/etc by many people, curators would substitute their favored stories as "trending", despite the fact they weren't or weren't to the same degree. The Senate letter suggests that by suppressing actually trending conservative news in favor of progressive news that was not trending and then calling it "trending" that something akin to false advertising fraud is in play.

In one sense, assuming this happened and is true, the Senate has a point. Having said that, even if the Senate does have a point, this doesn't rise to the level of being worth pursuing. In fact, I think as a society we're all too ready to try to invoke legal remedies for relative minor transgressions, including for claims of false advertising. Yes, Facebook should be able to do what ever they want on their service; including being a little fast and loose with the truth and still get away without legal sanction so long as no one was hurt as a result.

If they lied about what was trending or not or, shall we say, carefully defined what it means "to trend", I know about it now, I suffered no direct physical or financial harm, and can make the case Facebook isn't to be trusted in such matters. I'm not a conservative, but I am nearly wholly opposed to political progressivism and the political left's agenda. I can tell you I had already figured Facebook manipulated (manually or algorithmically) their news feed and trending news box to meet their own interests be that political or economic. Nonetheless, I think the First Amendment concerns are greater than the concerns of possible puffery about what is "trending" or not and that government force, or the threat thereof, is not the answer.

rdancer2• 10 years ago

People's political views are not cookie-cutter copies. Maybe you think public policy should be guided primarily by what is just, and consequently your hope is that the censors' idea of justice is the same as yours. Or maybe you subscribe to the notion that politics ultimately is the competition of divergent private interests and shifting alliances, and in that case you should hope is that the censors have your best interest at heart (perhaps by virtue of being your employees). Even the former is exceedingly improbable if you go into the minute details of your personal politics. You are much more likely to be manipulated away from than reinforced in your current views.

lu7• 10 years ago

This was high time coming.

Few more sessions with senates, parliaments and assemblies of the world, and Zuck will be off to go cure a African disease or something appointing a yes woman like Sundar Pichai to clean up the mess.

And thats whats wrong with Silicon Valley.

zxcvvcxz• 10 years ago

There's no legal precedent here. Tech can go like Hollywood and push whatever political agenda they want.

That being said, this is the type of thing that makes 1984 look a lot less like fiction. How many 13-18 year olds, who don't watch TV, are instead experiencing intense indoctrination controlled by Facebook? No matter your political leanings you must find this troublesome.

I remember when I was 18 I went to college, started working, started paying taxes, and stopped watching TV. Suddenly I had space to question my political views, which I realized on the whole had been implanted by the media. Facebook could be even worse - how many people actually get away from their influence?

imaginenore• 10 years ago

Or you can just admit that facebook is liberal leaning and treat it like any other liberal site.

maxerickson• 10 years ago

How often will that indoctrination be better than they'd get otherwise?

Not that I approve of Facebook manipulating users, I think we are at a point where we need to diffuse power wherever we can. We certainly shouldn't blithely hand it to businesses. That said, it's hard to not end up at least giving the above aspect of it some consideration.

weberc2• 10 years ago

How often will that indoctrination be better than they'd get otherwise?

Surveying university campus climates, just about anything looks like an improvement.

mmanfrin• 10 years ago

  intense indoctrination

Where you seeing that? And if filtering a few news stories on a social networking site is 'intense', then what are those private companies writing specifically tilted views of history for school textbooks in Texas doing?

oxide• 10 years ago

well, that's only mild indoctrination.

intense indoctrination requires that it be done through the internet, via an optional social media service.

slackstation4• 10 years ago

The crazy thing is that you don't need to do any "intense indoctrination". Facebook has both numbers and time on their side.

The same large numbers that makes A/B testing and "growth hacking" so effective for a marketing message can be learned and automatically applied here on a scale that dwarfs even Google.

All of the messages between people on Facebook in a country? In the US, I'm sure it's probably 80%+ of the American electorate at this point. Just subtle suppression of a few stories is enough. Even manipulating trending topics might be enough to have a statistical effect. Facebook was researching emotional effects as far back as 2012 and they never said that they stopped nor did they close that part of the company.

With Facebook it's not if, it's how much manipulation is going on. Not just in America but, around most of the Western world.

jessriedel• 10 years ago

Do you mean legal basis/restriction rather than legal precedent?

snorkel• 10 years ago

There's no specific law or regulation referenced in the complaint. This is just grandstanding. Facebook PR flaks will gladly reply with a generic corporate non-answer and that will be the end of it.

seomint• 10 years ago

How would this be different from the way Google's algorithm ranks news stories or for that matter how the New York Times editors choose their stories? Perhaps some transparency form FB on how they rank content would be useful. Might also be nice to have a setting in FB for this sort of filtering.

JulianMorrison• 10 years ago

What's probably happened is "conservative views" are hate screeds. They're racist, they're sexist, they're homophobic or transphobic, they're advocating violence. And so they've been blocked.

jauer• 10 years ago

I don't think so. When I've seen conservative news being shared and bouncing around to the point that it should be trending it's usually fairly benign things like Clinton scandal pot stirring.

Try reporting something like a page post from Franklin Graham pointedly referring to Caitlyn Jenner as "he" with associated condemnation (and associated comments advocating violence) and watch it get bounced back as "not violating community standards".

Seems like backwards priorities to me. Anyway, if you are trying to steer discourse it's more subtle to suppress featured items than it is to ban figures beloved by certain segments of the country. Also less risk of offending people away from FB and risking ad revenue.

snowwrestler2• 10 years ago

For those not aware, Senators send letters to companies on a pretty regular basis. It does not carry the weight of law, just the PR pressure of having a Senator publicly questioning you. Companies usually take it seriously and respond in some fashion.

More examples in an earlier comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8634332

r00fus• 10 years ago

So how is this different from a shakedown? Get your PACs to fund me or I'll make things uncomfortable...

snowwrestler2• 10 years ago

Well I don't think any of those letters mention PACs or campaign contributions at all.

guelo• 10 years ago

I'm looking forward to the senator's inquiry into Fox News.

"Congress shall make no law"

primitivesuave• 10 years ago

There is nothing that the government can do to influence Facebook's news-ranking algorithm (even if it is a human editorial process), just like there is nothing it can do to influence Google's PageRank or CNN's coverage of trivial and inconsequential events. Sending a letter accusing Facebook of liberal bias is like accusing Fox News of conservative bias. It accomplishes nothing, since any organization can easily justify its actions as free speech.

emblem21• 10 years ago

Is there a way to place a bet on the sentiment analysis rating of HN in the event of Facebook being caught pushing Hilary to trending instead Sanders and/or preventing Sanders from trending?

My gamble is that it would be the complete opposite of how this thread is evolving.

pbarnes_1• 10 years ago

Zzzzzzzzz. Where were these guys on Fox News? Or the last 8 years?

Please.

jedberg• 10 years ago

Facebook already responded:

https://www.facebook.com/tstocky/posts/10100853082337958?pnr...

TL;DR: We don't manipulate the feed and we're pretty sure none of our contractors have, and we've checked before, but we'll check again.

onewaystreet• 10 years ago

It's funny how the debate on this has skipped directly to whether it's OK for Facebook to do it not whether they actually did it. Also, the allegations are that a few curators suppressed news stories from conservative sites from appearing on the trending news feed. Even if this turns out to be true it's a far cry from the "Facebook is censoring news!!!" allegations that are being thrown around.

slackstation4• 10 years ago

Their use of contractors is subtle. I'm sure employees manipulated the feed. The research they did in 2012 with Cornell had Facebook directly manipulating feeds to illicit emotional outcomes and they measured how those emotions propagated out to the rest of the subject's network.

Again, the question is not if but, how much they manipulate. Calling it an "Algorithm" that is staffed by "Quality Editors" who can group tags and things together to make trending topics bigger is just a defense mechanism. Facebook can say or make anything they want to appear or disappear in your feed.

jonathankoren3• 10 years ago

No. That does not happen. I worked on it. If you read all the articles, all of them tell the exact same story. Trends are detected, and then approved to go into a candidate set to be algorithmically ranked for each person. As part of approval, the curators write the headline, snippet, and choose the top article on the results page according to a standard that insists on an unbiased widely recognized news source. The accusation of bias boils down to, "I wanted to link to Breitbart, but that's not unbiased source, so I had to link to the AP." Well call the whambulance! You can't link to alternet either.

mryan• 10 years ago

The FB post you linked to is a response to the general allegations, and not a response to the Senate's request. Thune's letter quotes part of tstocky's post:

In a statement responding to the allegations, Facebook has claimed to have “rigorous guidelines in place for the review team” to prevent “the suppression of political perspectives” or the “prioritization of one viewpoint over another or one news outlet over another.”

kevin_b_er• 10 years ago

This senator may slowly be realizing how dangerous mass privatization is. Facebook might look like a public gathering place, but it is not. It is a corporate and private space, and rights such as free speech do not apply in a private and corporate space. Too bad for senator Thune that a corporation is using its power against political views he likes. The sword of privatization and its erosion of public spaces where free speech is preserved cuts both ways.

H0n3sty5• 10 years ago

I wonder if there is any truth to the story about Zuckerberg telling Merkel that Facebook would censor anti-immigration posts in Germany.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-26/merkel-con...

latenightcoding• 10 years ago

Relevant: https://www.facebook.com/sheryl/posts/10156387360185177

H0n3sty5• 10 years ago

Thanks. That answers my question.

danielrhodes• 10 years ago

It's not anti-immigration posts that cause an issue, it is posts that contain racism and incitement of violence. Those posts have real world consequences, and are of questionable value when it comes to civil discourse. Thus, Facebook doesn't create a chilling effect if they censor those things, which is why they are cooperative.

slackstation4• 10 years ago

It should be relatively easy to detect bias if Facebook is open with their algorithm.

Facebook has conducted research on how even small changes to the overall system can materially affect the mood and how that mood was contagious to a given subject's social network. (“Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion through Social Networks”)

The public was disturbed. The university partner in all of this had put out a press-release saying that it passed their ethics board only because the University researchers themselves weren't doing it directly but, merely helped design the experiment.

This says that Facebook has people on staff that have been conducting this sort of thing at scale since 2012. They have no one to answer to. They have everything to gain. If they stay secret, they have nothing to lose.

An individual has no way to detect this because like the proverbial frog in lukewarm water slowly brought to a boil, the filtering on our social network never was so alarming that we jumped out en-masse.

Now Zuckerberg and company could be listening in and manipulating the social discourse of almost all of the free world. We wouldn't know.

People highly suspect that Twitter has a leftist agenda with pushing certain speech and suppressing other speech. Even if you completely agree with Twitter or Facebook's political stance, it should disturb you.

It's like getting on a soapbox in the town square and the air only carrying certain ideas to the town people's ears and refusing to vibrate for others but, you hear all of them just as loud. Over time you'd think that people just aren't responsive to your ideas, get down off your soap box and go home, thinking that democracy was done and that people just didn't like your ideas.

So, Facebook has the means, has the technology, has the research to know how effective it is, has had practice in (publicly) as far back as 2012.

The question isn't if they are going to manipulate the 2016 election, the question is how and to what degree. Even if they deny it, there's really no outside body to know at this point without any inside information.

Granted, Google also has this power to a certain degree and bears responsibility for demonstrating that they aren't manipulating politics. Google has more transparency and their products are to the end of being the library of the world.

Facebook manipulates the messages sent between friends and family. They step into trust relationships. There is a world of difference between the politics of a site on the internet as a search result and an impassioned plea by one of my friends or a family member. The idea that Facebook would suppress those ideas from me is the most disgusting, despicable and detestable thing I can think of. I hold Facebook to a much, much higher standard than Google. Their transparency is much, much poorer.

Ultimately, Google indexes the open internet and I can test their results against other search engines and research projects. Facebook owns both the network and messages. It is impossible for an outside party to verify anything that Facebook says about this at this point. We know that what they do can be significant; that they have researched how effective it can be since 2012.

I don't think it's overly cautious nor paranoid to ask them for transparency on this.

wewinintheend• 10 years ago

I know that facebook censored/prevented me from posting "I bet this woman was not a terrorist." when this occurred: http://www.nbcnews.com/news/other/woman-shot-killed-capitol-...

kaishiro• 10 years ago

Is there a specific reason why Senator Thune is going after Facebook for this alleged bias? Why does there seem to be a separate standard of bias for Facebook vs. CNN/MSNBC/Fox/etc? I'm not making a point with these questions, I'm genuinely curious if there is something else going on under the hood that I'm unaware of.

alexandrerond• 10 years ago

I find always surprising that people and now politicians expect Facebook to act like a public service and not like the private company it is.

Facebook answers to its interests as a company.

Since when are not newspapers curated, and leaning left or right? Did someone go ask Fox News to explain manipulation to the Senate? Facebook may make decisions that cost its credibility, but it's in its own right as a private company to select the content they provide, just as it can skew your timelines or suck every piece of data from your browsing habits and resell it to advertisers ( you accepted their terms after all)

Facebook is not a public service nor an NGO nor a bunch of nuns doing charity work.

IronWolve• 10 years ago

Seems like every government agency from city/state to federal is using twitter and facebook to communicate to people. Facebook is monopoly in some areas. To block/censor groups and people on any grounds other than criminal for a personal agenda, is really causing a mix of issues.

spinlock2• 10 years ago

I'm confused. Are corporations only entitled to 2nd amendment protection when we're conflating money with speech or does it also count when it's actually speech?

IIAOPSW• 10 years ago

Are corporations only entitled to 2nd amendment protection

Corporations are entitled to keep and bear arms?!

spinlock2• 10 years ago

Only as part of an organized millitia.

thephyber• 10 years ago

It's amazing how far (so far unfounded) allegations by "unnamed sources" go these days. It's not like "former employees" ever have a desire to bad-mouth their former employer, especially if they were social conservatives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

We have become a nation that is willing to believe anything that agrees with our confirmation bias, including outlandish and far-reaching conspiracy theories.

Facebook has publicly stated they have done psychological A/B testing, so I suppose they opened themselves up to this line of accusation.

dragonwriter• 10 years ago

Politicians don't need to believe something to cynically exploit it.

adrianwaj• 10 years ago

story blocked "Access Denied: You don't have permission to access "serve-403-cf.www.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2016/5/thune-seeks-answers-from-facebook-on-political-manipulation-allegations" on this server."

Any alternatives to FB out there worth using? There are 6 mentioned in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10701871 and I've also heard of unseen.is as a messaging platform from Iceland.

philliphaydon• 10 years ago

Twitter is actually being censored and no one cares about that?

Yetanfou• 10 years ago

Here's an interesting experiment concerning Facebook censoring certain types of 'hate', while leaving others alone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3KfQoFHEDs

facit: two pages were opened on the same date, one inciting to violence against 'jews' (the page was called 'Stop Israelis' but the message seems clear), the other doing the same against 'palestinians'. After posting more and more - and stronger and stronger - messages to both pages the makers reported both pages to Facebook. Result? The page inciting to violence against 'palestinians' was closed the same day, with an explanation from Facebook that said page was 'found to be in violation of their community standards'. The other page, which was identical in most parts except for the fact that it was 'jews' which were targeted was not closed, with Facebook answering that 'it was not found to violate any of their standards'.

When this brew up a bit of a storm on the 'net Facebook eventually rescinded and closed the page, explaining it away as 'an error'.

What I suspect is that there is a large peer pressure inside the Facebook censor team to align to a certain - and probably narrow - spectrum of acceptable views, one which traditionally is called 'left-wing' or 'liberal' even though both names don't seem to fit the ideas being espoused. Living in Sweden I've seen the same concept at work in the traditional media, this has gotten so strong that the word for it in Swedish - åsiktskorridor (literally 'view corridor', roughly 'acceptable views') - has become a mainstream word. This has lead to an explosion in the number of 'alternative' media channels as well as a record low level of trust in the 'traditional' media.

In other words, Facebook would do well to study the Swedish situation and learn from the mistakes made here if they don't want to end up in the same situation: mistrusted, deemed unreliable and outdated.

awinter-py• 10 years ago

using the media to influence elections is what the media is for. That said, two potential mines in this minefield can explode with some force:

1. are there contractual obligations to republican orgs that purchased ad space on FB that are breached if FB has a systematic internal bias against their political position. I.e. can every conservative org band together in a class action? They might not win but they have the political clout to run a very damaging discovery process.

2. using information to influence financial markets and benefiting from it is very illegal and people go down for it all the time. If some third party made a successful trading business using facebook information, I'm sure there's someone at the DOJ who can turn that into a conspiracy to defraud markets case.

Senator Seeks Answers from Facebook on Political Censoring Allegations

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