And what views would those be specifically?

Twitter suspended Jason Whitlock for tweeting "Black Lives Matter founder buys $1.4 million home in Topanga, which has a black population of 1.4%. She's with her people!"

They suspended the Chinese virologist Li-Meng Yan for supporting the COVID lab leak theory.

They blocked sharing the Hunter Biden story (for which they later apologized, after it blew up despite their efforts to suppress it).

So while the implication you're making is obvious, it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The evidence shows that social media companies censor people for political reasons.

I didn't say it was the case with every single twitter ban. Twitter has lots and lots of horrible bans.

I was responding to the idea of "people start talking abstractly about “non-mainstream positions”". Whenever anyone gets that generic about what the problem was, be suspicious.

There are multiple misconceptions and straw man arguments in your post.

First of all algorithmic censorship is real and has been exposed quite a few times with whistleblowers, undercover journalists and just banning people for things mainstream media organizations do routinely (like filming someone's house). The bar for repercussions is set lower for anti-establishment and "right-wing" content creators, although it is beginning to affect radical leftists too and they are beginning to wake up to this fact (https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/06/anti-corbyn-blair-censors...)

And your post only mentions one specific aspect of the libertarian / fiscal side of conservatism while conservatism is much more broad and now due to the polarization of society other non-related issues have gifted themselves along partisan lines (most of which used to be populist left wing causes): Vaccines, masks, lock downs, Israel, free speech, 2nd amendment rights, anti-establishment stances, free speech, section 230, big pharma, etc. And even then for fiscal conservatism, which is the more benign and popular aspect of it, it is hard to find on front pages and default news feed of the major platforms anything related to it.

Talking about cutting social programs, which is the counterpart of cutting taxes, will draw criticism, especially if it affects the favored minority of the time in some way in some percentage, will get you demonetized and demonized which usually means lynch mobs, mass reporting and worse.

Perhaps, yet the person who gets the most FB page views is apparently Ben Shapiro.

> And your post only mentions one specific aspect of the libertarian / fiscal side of conservatism while conservatism is much more broad and now due to the polarization of society other non-related issues have gifted themselves along partisan lines (most of which used to be populist left wing causes): Vaccines, masks, lock downs, Israel, free speech, 2nd amendment rights, anti-establishment stances, free speech, section 230, big pharma, etc. And even then for fiscal conservatism, which is the more benign and popular aspect of it, it is hard to find on front pages and default news feed of the major platforms anything related to it.

I see all those topics in my FB feed so at least from my perspective I have no idea what you're complaining about.

> Perhaps, yet the person who gets the most FB page views is apparently Ben Shapiro.

Shapiro, even if he is at the top, only represents a very small fraction of the overall attention space people see compared to everything else that's on Facebook. This is a cherry picked example at best. Also Shapiro is not anti-establishment by any definition of the word, see his stance on BlackRock buying up real estate as a recent example. Also outside debating naive socialist college students, he's not really an intellectual powerhouse outside variations of "it's a free market, they can do what they want and it will turn out fine; here's my cherry-picked facts", which is a narrative Facebook has a direct interest to promote. Anyway I digress.

> I see all those topics in my FB feed so at least from my perspective I have no idea what you're complaining about.

Your personal anecdotes are irrelevant. Also I never said they were outright banned, I said algorithmically manipulated. For instance Facebook is actively suppressing topics that are discussing vaccines in a negative light, such as discussion on long term effects which we obviously don't know since they just came out.

If personal anecdotes are irrelevant, then what are you basing your opinions on?

Presumably, you work at FB otherwise you wouldn't know this ;)

> Shapiro... is a cherry picked example at best.

Hardly -- look at Roose's posts about CrowdTangle.* He is in the top 10 in every report, usually multiple times. Mostly the top 10 is Shapiro, Bigino, Fox etc.

* Good collection at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/14/technology/facebook-data.... But if you don't like the NYT you can simply read the daily reports on twitter yourself (up to the date when FB removed access to the tool). It reports the opposite of what you claim.

> He is in the top 10

You are conflating being at the top with having a majority of the attention volume.

And even if this kind of content had the majority of the volume, the presence of popularity doesn't negate efforts of suppression. If anything that proves that Facebook is more popular with Boomers as opposed to the younger audience, which is also the kind of demographic these talk heads attract.

The story at least proves that FB has a need to for certain content suppression and has failed doing so, at least in the eyes of the leftists public opinion.