[RayChuang88]

If Trump wins this election, then both Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey could be hauled in front of Congress to find out if such a "gentleman's agreement" with the Obama Administration to censor their social media services against the political Right exists dating from that February 17, 2011 private dinner. In fact, they may ask the same question to Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix, if the search and discovery algorithms for movies and TV shows were doing the same thing after that dinner. If the answer is yes, then Facebook, Twitter and Netflix could be hit with substantial fines, redoing their search and discovery algorithms by court order and Zuckerberg, Dorsey and Hastings could be forced out of their CEO positions.

[bicyclerepair]

Never understood the attraction to twitter or facebook.

[nerdgirl]

I agree completely. Much of the public thinks an “algorithm” is some mysterious concept like writing encryption functions or something! In fact, algorithms can be very simple. It’s just the set of instructions that the program uses to achieve a result, like a recipe. So the censorship code is likely to be something people will be able to understand very easily - for example, Twitter has something like this silly example below in place:

var shadowBanUsers = [’seanHannity’, ‘rushLimbaugh’, ‘mikeCernovich’, ‘milo’]

Then if the tweet “puller upper” gets a hit on one of these names, BAM they are muted.

If these companies are doing what it seems obvious that they are doing, it won’t take brainiac experts from MIT to see how they’ve done it. It will be quite plain, with KEYWORDS listed in arrays, with functions that are clearly intented to suppress certain users, phrases, and trends.