Media Bias Fact Check: Hacker News

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/hacker-news/

by Zetice • 3 years ago

47 70 3 years ago

mediabiasfactcheck.com

tpmx• 3 years ago

Of course, HN achieves this by killing anything politically controversial via the flagging system.

Next up, their analysis of the political bias of the Linux kernel mailing list?

shusaku• 3 years ago

And now this whole post is flagged…

mysecretaccount• 3 years ago

Left-right seems like a false dichotomy to me. e.g. the reason to avoid cable news is not because of some sort of "left" or "right" bias (which is already nebulous), but because of conflict of interest: health care and military contractor ads sandwiched between pundits attempting to sway public opinion regarding health care and defense policy.

Moncefmd• 3 years ago

The factual levels and the bias analysis address the dimension you are mentioning in my opinion

cj• 3 years ago

The biggest problem with cable news (IMO) is instead of presenting a news story and moving on to the next, they present a story and then give their personal opinions on it. Instead of letting the audience form their own opinions.

In other words, cable news has turned into a level of quality that’s no better than late night talk shows.

ghayes• 3 years ago

Alternatively, the real problem is that they are in the entertainment business more than the news business. On a good day, news is boring. Instead, on cable networks, everything is a panic. Cable news has ended up on the extreme end of sensationalism.

dvt2• 3 years ago

Imo, HN has moved from being moderately libertarian/right to today's slight liberal left slant as its user base aged from young, hungry, hopeful entrepreneurs to jaded senior engineers or VPs in large fortune 500 companies. I think the has also been an influx of non-US users over the past decade, which also tend to lean more left. I'd be curious to see if anyone else that's used this site regularly for the past 10+ years would agree with this.

cup• 3 years ago

My impression is that the site has gradually shifted right, but the Overton window has shifted right faster giving the illusion that it has gone left.

Edit: There is something ironic to be said about my very benign comment triggering someone to the point that they felt compelled to create an account and call me classically right wing slurs (subhuman, animal, low-iq). I think its worth considering that the internet/social media has contributed to a growing mental health crisis. Hurt, sick and lonely people seem to congregate online.

flangola73• 3 years ago

That's a perfect summary of it!

dvt2• 3 years ago

Yeah, this is actually a great point, and also a possible contributing factor.

version_five3• 3 years ago

Are you saying the realm of acceptable things one can say had shifted to the right? I may have misunderstood because I've never heard that before. I can see that maybe one could claim the leftward shift has stopped and momentum is to the right, but I don't think the fever has broken yet, and I've never even heard anyone claim it has, outside of a few "tide is turning" twitter posts.

(I'm using left/right as I think they're commonly used now, the traditional split isn't really relevant)

silisili• 3 years ago

Weird. I was going to posit the exact opposite. Like the window has shifted left and this site may seem lean a hair right of center because of it.

Maybe the window is shifting so fast in both directions everyone in the middle just kinda orbits back and forth?

scarmig• 3 years ago

I suspect that if elections had the HN commentariat as the voters, it would result in landslide wins for most Democratic politicians. I don't think this has shifted much in the last decade.

That itself doesn't dispute your point, as I can sympathize with the idea that Democrats aren't particularly left-wing. But I'd also caution against using that as the yardstick, since most people do think of Democrats as "the Left" and it can result in confusion.

Broadly speaking, I'd say HN comments more or less center around the Democratic mainstream, but with a very high level of variance in political viewpoints compared to the general population. You get everything from unreconstructed Stalinists to Mencius Moldbug acolytes here.

JenrHywy• 3 years ago

That's an interesting observation, but I think it depends on time period you look at.

A few years ago, the discussion certainly seemed more Left-ish than now, especially around BLM/trans/women-in-tech issues.

HN of 5+ years ago was a mix of libertarianism/pro-business on the economic side but I'd say center-left socially - ie generally supportive of social support programs

Now, I think both econ and social have both moved towards the center. The libertarianism is still there, but is more "pure" in that it's far more skeptical of business ethics. There still seems to be a decent contingent of hardcore socialists and communists, too. Politically, I think the "woke" stuff is being seen through a more critical lens (or at least, people are more comfortable expressing that criticism) than a few years ago.

civilized3• 3 years ago

Re the larger world Overton Window shifting right: are we talking about law or culture? They have moved in different directions on different issues.

What would be an example of something people on the left advocate for that was acceptable some years ago but isn't now? According to whom?

hn_throwaway_99• 3 years ago

I don't really agree with this. I think HN gets a pretty decent mix of all political viewpoints, just based on the percentage of times I see stuff that I agree with (politically) and the times I don't. If anything, the thing I really like is the stuff that feels blatantly tribal one way or the other is still consistently downvoted. To your specific points:

1. "as its user base aged from young, hungry, hopeful entrepreneurs to jaded senior engineers or VPs in large fortune 500 companies" I think that's a vast, and honestly unfair, over-simplification. I think a lot of folks have become genuinely disillusioned, and it really has nothing to do with changing with age (heck, if anything, I see young people as being more disillusioned than I am). For example, not speaking so much of any political change, but I certainly vastly underestimated how effective the Internet and social media would be as a tool of division. And I personally have some regret of some jobs I had that made this situation worse.

2. As HN has become more popular I've seen a large influx of more right leaning viewpoints. Of course, I think that's probably just because I consider myself more left/centrist, so it's hard for me to say if there has been a real change in direction, but I think I have seen more just blatant political takes, but again I still see informative, quality comments still bubble to the top most frequently.

lmm2• 3 years ago

I think it's shifted somewhat in a US-specific authoritarian-left direction as that becomes a bigger force in US tech culture. I don't think people are more cynical than before, but it's expressed differently; the live-and-let-live culture has vanished under polarization and toxic positivity, and again I think that's a strongly US phenomenon. I also think that it's partly an explicit top-down shift, particularly with dang taking over and having an explicit policy that is anti- particular kinds of negativity even when that negativity is correct (e.g. telling people they're wrong is moderated a lot more harshly than before).

Maarten88• 3 years ago

On cultural issues I agree this site leans progressive, from a US perspective. (from my international perspective, politics in the US seems to be between far right and religious fundamentalism).

But arguing for more regulation, consumer protections and limiting the influence of corporations or wealthy individuals has never gone well on HN. Which is understandable, given its origins and owner. It's really slanted towards business/entrepreneurship.

Manuel_D• 3 years ago

It seems kind of invalid to try and apply a media bias score to social media. What's the media bias of Reddit? It's going to be very different comparing /r/WhitePeopleTwitter with /r/PoliticalCompassMemes. Similar deal with Wikipedia, bias is more on a page-by-page or contributor basis.

brucethemoose2• 3 years ago

HN is essentially a single subreddit.

But its a fairly specific/topical subreddit, where a left-right score is questionably meaningful.

hgsgm2• 3 years ago

Is 0 an invalid score?

hgsgm2• 3 years ago

What are talking about? HN is not Reddit. MBFC doesn't report on Reddit. Wikipedia has editorial leadership and enforcement.

stephendause• 3 years ago

I agree that it seems kind of invalid but only kind of. Any site that has an editorial policy and/or a ranking algorithm for what gets more views will have some forms of bias. I agree that in the case of reddit, it makes sense to evaluate each subreddit on its own. Also, if a page where users make submissions that mostly lean in one direction or another, that could be useful information to know.

wsgeorge• 3 years ago

What's the media bias of Reddit?

A couple of ways you could answer this:

1. Where does the Reddit user community lean, taken as a whole. That shouldn't be hard to compute or guesstimate.

2. Where do the owners of Reddit lean (as reflected by the subset of their policies which can reasonably dictate political leaning)?

3. Where do the most influential Reddit user accounts and communities lean?

Computing a media bias score for social media isn't that far fetched, even if the result may be fuzzier than, say, a journal with an editorial bent.

version_five3• 3 years ago

There's a [dead] comment that I agree with, making the point that HN is mostly a tech website, and so it shouldn't be surprising that the stories are "neutral" relative to - I'd say orthogonal to - the (historical) left/right political spectrum. Mostly HN doesn't allow political stories - if you lurk on "new" you can find them, usually they don't get discussed or get flagged, but a normal user would just see some tech stuff.

The comments are a different story, I don't think I could pin down a clear average directional bias, but there are lots of different opinions, most of which get downweighted if they're too strong. But I don't think the comments are what the linked website is considering anyway.

A more moderate version of the other post: is lobste.rs politically biased?

giantg22• 3 years ago

Seems odd to rate HN given it's an aggregation of articles from other sources.

clipsy• 3 years ago

So if I set up an aggregator that includes only positive stories about Democrats and only negative stories about Republicans, would you say it's odd to rate that?

timbit42• 3 years ago

Is that how stories are chosen to be on Hacker News?

giantg22• 3 years ago

Sure. It's not a real news source. It's better to rate the underlyings.

barbarr• 3 years ago

Is there a category for Rust, Deno, and CRDT bias? (Just kidding, of course)

andreygrehov• 3 years ago

Who is going to fact check fact checkers?

tomrod• 3 years ago

More fact checkers. It's cool though, they tend to be spot on.

diziet• 3 years ago

I like that typically political leaning topics get moderated away. HN is for technical/startup/hacker leaning news.

panny• 3 years ago

Agreed. The reason I stop reading tech sites is they always seem to devolve into evangelist articles about climate change.

Freedom2• 3 years ago

IME, only ones negative to the US get moderated away. Users are free to spray gun against other countries all they like, under the guise of "curious" discussion.

jiggawatts2• 3 years ago

I don't see much of a left-right slant, but that doesn't mean Hacker News is bias-free. There are other types of biases!

The Silicon Valley ex-FAANG startup slant is very obvious to me, as a foreigner working in an ordinary big enterprise setting.

Examples of this slant:

Microsoft is evil and Azure is just a myth.

All servers are Linux by definition.

Developer time costs infinity moneys, servers are free.

Etc...

gcoakes2• 3 years ago

Can you please point me towards someone using non-linux servers in a production environment? Besides naturally vendor locked developer tools (my company uses them to build Windows desktop software), I'm genuinely confused why someone would want Windows Server. Same is true for MacOS except my company definitely doesnt use them. Are you referring to BSD's? Or, maybe IOT or industrial things with sel4 (which doesn't seem to meet the term "server")?

jiggawatts2• 3 years ago

It's hard to tell if you're joking or not[1], but in a typical enterprise setting, easily more than half of all VMs will be Windows Server. At every large (>10K user) enterprise or government org I've worked at, there will be typically 1K-6K Windows Server virtual machines.

First of all, there are hundreds of thousands of software vendors that have written Windows-only software. There's an enormous amount of inertia behind that. Tiny dev shops especially can't afford to rewrite their software for another platform on a whim.

Second, ASP.NET + Microsoft SQL Server was and is an excellent platform for web development, especially for internal-use apps[2]. If you're paying your dev staff $100K or more per annum, the cost of licensing is comparatively unimportant. Sure, ASP.NET Core now runs on Linux, but it's relatively new and there is no direct upgrade from the Windows-only .NET Framework.

Third, Linux-compatible databases used to come in two categories: proprietary and garbage. Using something like Oracle or IBM DB2 is basically "the same" as Microsoft SQL Server. Just as closed source, just as proprietary, just as expensive. MySQL was a hilarious joke outside of startups and remains so in the minds of anyone working in a real enterprise. It's the Microsoft Access of the Linux world. PostgreSQL is very good now, but wasn't really in the running until a few years ago.

[1] The fact that you've even asked this question rather confirms my point about the extreme level of bias seen here.

[2] E.g.: seamless single-sign-on from your desktop to a web app is literally just a boolean "Enabled"/"Disabled" config option in IIS! Doing something like this on Linux is... sucks breath in through teeth... a lot of work. https://cdn-blog.netwrix.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Pict...

revelio2• 3 years ago

StackOverflow?

lucb1e• 3 years ago

Calling Al Jazeera and The Guardian obscure sources? They could have used my website as example, not a soul would recognize it but it was on the front page on a few occasions. Interesting choice of evidence there

It also doesn't seem to take the comments into account at all, which is rather the point of HN unless I'm majorly off base here. If the sites submitted are religious extremist but everyone is laughing at them and posting replies based in atheism, you can hardly call the site a good source for religious content. Since they're just looking at the domains being used as "source" here, they might as well not have rated HN at all

reducesuffering• 3 years ago

It’s hilariously on point and expected from TFA that the comments equally bemoan HN for actually being too left or too right.

Also expected that the right wing claims about HN being too left contain:

“But you're a worse-than-an-animal, low IQ, mentally ill, incompetent leftie after all.”

with no equivalent.

daveoc642• 3 years ago

As someone from Europe, I'm quite surprised by this.

HN is very far to the right by European standards, as even the Democrats are.

That perhaps shows why "left" and "right" are overly simplistic labels.

kaba02• 3 years ago

Indeed! And very libertarian, where everyone should fend for themselves, and the solution to most problems is more capitalism.

revelio2• 3 years ago

The idea that all of Europe is highly left wing isn't really accurate. Recall that Switzerland, the UK, Ireland and even Russia are all countries in Europe.

Anyway, pretty much every HN thread about anything Europe related will be full of top voted comments saying things like "Thank goodness for the wonderful EU regulating American companies, how ever would we survive without that?" and most of the comments will be all about how irresponsible those terrible US startups are. So I don't recognize the idea that this forum is libertarian. There are a few libertarians but they tend to get modded down pretty fast by the big government types.

For a different example go look at any discussion during COVID about lockdowns, vaccine mandates, masks etc. Libertarians were consistently flamed and flagged to death here, as was true on every other social media site. Really I don't know of any forums where libertarians are the majority. If you find one please do let us know.

daveoc642• 3 years ago

The idea that all of Europe is highly left wing isn't really accurate. Recall that Switzerland, the UK, Ireland and even Russia are all countries in Europe.

Those countries are all very left wing in comparison with the USA.

Sure, the UK has a "Conservative" party in power, yet it is one that recognises that the overwhelming majority of the public supports universal public healthcare. It's also one that handed out hundreds of billions in support during the pandemic and has just handed out billions to the population to pay energy bills.

For a different example go look at any discussion during COVID about lockdowns, vaccine mandates, masks etc. Libertarians were consistently flamed and flagged to death here, as was true on every other social media site.

There have been quite a few successful posts I've seen here that have had an anti-mask, anti-vaccine, or anti-lockdown theme. These continue to exist now.

Media Bias Fact Check: Hacker News

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