from Hacker News

Facebook fired an employee who posted evidence of preferential treatment

by RaitoBezarius on 8/7/20, 3:21 PM with 83 comments

  • by arkadiyt on 8/7/20, 3:42 PM

  • by ergodicity001 on 8/7/20, 4:08 PM

    I saw a video recently where someone was discussing Facebook's "moat". Essentially, among Big Tech, it has the least defensible moat, which I think is true.

    https://youtu.be/4SrxqfKn9Bw?t=1605

    I think Facebook has very little choice right now. Libra could have been a moat, but it is more or less dead now. They are being cornered into being more pro-conservative, because otherwise their moat (engagement, which is what advertisers pay for) will collapse by the time COVID is done. They need to walk the fine line between proving their engagement and hoping that advertisers would actually want to show ads to the group which is engaged.

  • by dangerface on 8/7/20, 3:58 PM

    The title buzzfeed came up with is misleading as the article isn't really about an employee getting fired or their evidence. Its more a general editorial on Facebook and the US election.

  • by A4ET8a8uTh0 on 8/7/20, 3:50 PM

    It is mildly off-topic, but it is not intended to derail this conversation. Did anyone else notice that Buzzfeednews and Yahoo news gotten somewhat decent ( as in, Yahoo actually had an in-depth analysis that wasn't all talking points ).

  • by mhoad on 8/7/20, 3:43 PM

    It feels like you have to squint fairly hard at this point to continue to see Facebook in the same terms that they define themselves as just being interested in "presenting the marketplace of ideas".

    This seems to be the latest in a pretty long series of actions that seem contrary to that idea and that something else might be the real motivating factor.

  • by Miner49er on 8/7/20, 3:52 PM

    Facebook seems to have a conservative bias. I've never used it myself though, so I can't completely say. I'm also not saying whether or not they should, but they seem to.

    Zuckerburg regularly hangs out with conservative political figures, but not liberal or letist ones. [0]

    They censor the left regularly [1]. Also, is there even any leftist publications in the FB news tab?

    They let the right slide by on things regularly though. They don't censor racism. [2] And they apparently have a bias that allows right publications to break their rules.

    [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-holding-priv...

    [1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2019/04/24/facebook-whil...

    [2] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-employ...

  • by bra-ket on 8/7/20, 4:27 PM

    Good job FB, don’t let woke liberals silence opponents

  • by jerkstate on 8/7/20, 3:51 PM

    It sounds like the issue is that fact-checkers are being overridden sometimes when they flag right-wing news sources. I think that if you asked a right-wing person, they would tell you that many of these fact-checker organizations have a distinct left-wing bias. Maybe they (the fact-checkers) aren’t infallible and get it wrong sometimes?