How Facebook is Already Censoring Donald Trump (and Bernie Sanders) Without Even Realizing It
As reported on by Gizmodo earlier this month, Facebook employees were polled if they had the moral responsibility to try to prevent Donald Trump from becoming President.
This caused quite the uproar in the tech community because many thought this could create a scary precedent where Facebook can use its immense communication powers to limit certain candidates social reach. This effectively would make Facebook the default electoral college in the USA because only candidates approved by Facebook employees could expect to have organic marketing results.
Which leads me to my whole point here.
The Facebook experience, as it currently stands, is no longer organic.
It doesn’t have to even actively try to prevent a particular candidate when it’s algorithm is already passively doing so.
Facebook page admins have known this since 2009. Users are slowly becoming aware.
It’s been obvious to me for awhile, but as a computer scientist, I assumed Facebook would still show stuff if it was engaging enough, regardless if it’s in your interest group. That’s why you still see wedding engagement posts from friends you haven’t connected with in awhile. That’s how I thought the system worked. If a piece of content became engaging enough within your friend network, you would see it.
However, it has now become evident to me that there is one exception to this rule. Political posts.
Facebook will not show you political posts from the other side of the political spectrum. Regardless of how many likes it gets and how engaging it is.
How do I know this?
One of my apps went viral. It got covered on CNET, DailyCaller, Mediaite, and many others. However, it was an app about Donald Trump. I even tried to make it as neutral as possible. It both makes fun of Trump, but at the same time, it is still really fun for Trump supporters.
So when it came time to inform my friends and family about the success of this app, Facebook really dropped the ball for me.
Here’s the post I made;
I shared the CNET facebook post about my app to all my friends and…
…
…
I got 10 likes.
Furthermore, the 10 likes were exclusively my entire immediate family and a couple close friends that lean Trump. Almost everyone that liked it even shared the post to their friends. Those posts only got the same 10 likes or no likes at all.
10 likes…
My checkins to McDonalds get more likes than that.
This was a major publication writing an entire article on my app and featuring it on their frontpage!
I’ve posted similar posts before when my other projects/businesses get press and I’ve grown to expect 50+ likes and a ton of comments from them (I know it’s not that much, but I only accept people I am actually friends with IRL on Facebook, so I only have a few hundred friends)
But not this time.
The word “Trump” seems to have made my post invisible to practically everyone despite the fact that it’s engagement score is probably off the charts.
I’m not even a Trump supporter either. My feed is filled with only pro-Sanders stories.
I’m getting censored on Facebook from my own friends if I post about Trump.
I bet there is person like me on the other side with mostly pro-Trump friends that is getting censored from sharing any Sander’s posts.
This is just not right.
Even though it’s nice that the information you see when you log into Facebook is information that Facebook thinks you would enjoy. It doesn’t change the fact that is completely manufactured and not based in reality.
It started in 2009 when Facebook first released a sorting algorithm to the news feed. The filtering became even more engrained in 2013 with another news feed update and was refined even further in 2015. It is now so effective, that only information you actually care about gets shown to you.
That sounds all good and dandy right? Why wouldn’t you only want to see things you actually care about?
That’s true for recipe and cat videos, but it becomes a problem when you step back and consider the information flow to a society.
Nowhere is this more evident than politics. In politics, you need to hear about information you don’t care about in order to get fully informed. If you only hear from one viewpoint the entire time, you can’t even fathom why someone else would believe in something else. As a society, that’s incredibly dangerous and I’m pretty sure we are currently seeing the results of this during this current election cycle.
Our society is polarized like never before.
The other side is always wrong. Your side is always right.
I admit that Facebook has ZERO legal responsibility to make sure their platform is neutral. That ended in 1987 with the removal of the fairness doctrine. I don’t blame them at all.
However, the way they currently filter political posts has basically led to almost complete censorship of opposing viewpoints without them actively trying to do so.
And that’s just not right.
