Posted on 08/01/2019 6:39:06 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
Facebook has continually denied that it participates in the practice of shadow banning — a method of blocking a users’ posts or comments from everyone except the user who made the post or comment. But a newly granted patent shows that Facebook not only does practice shadow banning, but wants to protect — by patent — the method it uses for doing so.
Despite the fact that Facebook executives denied the practice in congressional testimony in April, the company was awarded a patent by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) earlier this month for an automated system that would “receive a list of proscribed content and block comments containing the proscribed content by reducing the distribution of those comments to other viewing users” while continuing to “display the blocked content to the commenting user such that the commenting user is not made aware that his or her comment was blocked.” A better definition of shadow banning would be hard to write.
And since Facebook would use the patented system to shadow ban “proscribed” (read: banned) content, one can safely assume that would include political speech deemed unacceptable by the social-media behemoth. After all, Facebook recently slapped down a post by this magazine’s parent organization, The John Birch Society as “hate speech.” That post consisted of the cover of the July 8 issue of the print edition of The New American. That cover showed a real picture of an illegal border crossing and carried the caption, “Immigrant Invasion.”
Though nothing in that post, the picture, or the associated article could be construed as “hate speech,” Facebook took the post down and penalized JBS with a 30-day ban on monetizing posted videos via ad breaks.
(Excerpt) Read more at thenewamerican.com ...
Cue Captain Renault.
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I think it was the caption.
I would think a new category of anti-trust law should be opened up to deal with the growing menace of big info-tech companies like Google and FB. These people are engaged in defrauding the voting public and subverting our democracy, to say the very least.
Chilling to freedom. Similar to British soldiers pulling down handbills and smashing the printing press for Sam Adams and Tom Paine. Modernized.
Good luck to you.
Shadow banning should be very easy to prove. Not on an individual basis, but on a pattern basis. Do it once, okay. Do it twice, no proof yet. Do it enough and often, and there’s a pattern that easily proves it.
How do you collect that data? If you try to use robots, they will block you. If you recruit actual people to do the data gathering, then everyone has to trust those people.
Bookmark
What I meant to ask is, if you are trying to prove Facebook does shadow banning, how do you collect the data need for proof?
Couldn’t you just use an algorithm like the ones they use?
I know that for myself, I felt FB really invaded my privacy. When I found out that based on my *likes”, for every “ like” the algorithm says one thing, and they deemed me “very conservative.”
Couldn’t the same kind of thing be done here? For every shadow ban, a tally goes in to the algorithm . I know this is oversimplified, but isn’t that along the line of how those work?
Seems to fly in the face of equally benefiting the public.
Looks to me like FB has put in something to prevent the link to both the article and the patent page from being reached from a FB post.
Pretty damning itself that FB would prevent these links from working.
Personally, and at zero cost, I shadowed banned f book after a slave auction in Sudan or some other islamic fun palace where the bids were done on a facebook group page set up for that purpose. F book did nothing about it fearing they would lose the halal goat burger advertising accounts or similar.
There has to be automated software to collect the data for consistency. Then the central collection point needs a consistent scoring for liberal and conservative content producers. Then the software needs to evaluate the results from a number of content consumers to see if how much the content producers are not observable (shadow banned). There will need to be large number of the content consumers involved because only a small number will be searching for any particular produced content, or following suggested links to producers who are promoted (shadow promotion) and never getting links to sites that are shadow banned.
The simplest thing I can think of is a browser plug-in to track all the viewings of the conumers. There would be huge privacy problem, so there would need to be an anonymization process to strip personally identifiable info from the collected views. You might biew your brother's page, probably not shadow banned since he is not a major producer but identifiable.
That's a pretty big undertaking. Another solution is political. Require the major players like Facebook to provide all the viewing data to independent analysts who can look for the bias.
Finally there will be quantification issues. There will be shadow banning of all types of content, conservative and liberal. It will be hard to add up the amount of conservative content banned versus liberal content banned.
Your "forced" algorithms does not seem like a bad idea to me. It would have to be designed to detect tampering. Kind of like the centralized spyware/virus-monitoring that some companies force their employees to use.
The third party service sounds like an even better idea. The only challenge I see is how the third party service can effectively masquarade as real users so that the Facebooks don't detect those content viewers and game them.
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