I feel like this is general knowledge for the past 5 or so years, but the real question is "What do we do about it?". Personally, I put real effort into not spending time being outraged online, but this is a societal ill that's bigger then I am...
What do we do? We treat platforms with algorithmic news feeds as publishers not platforms in the Section 230 sense.
Think about it this way: imagine if you took a million random posts or videos. You would find a wide range of political views, conspiracy theories and so on. Whatever your position on any of those issues, you could find content pushing those views.
So if your algorithm selects and distributes content that fits your desired views and suppresses content that opposes your views, how are you different from a random publisher who posts content with those exact same views?
This is kind of like the "secret third thing" of Section 230 where you get all the protections of being a platform and all the flexibility of being a publisher and we need to close that loophole. Let platforms choose which one they are.
Another example: if I create a blog and write a post that accuses my local mayor of being a drug addict and a pedophile, I can be sued for defamation. You can try the journalism defense but it won't shield you from defamation. Traditoinal media outlets are normally very careful about what they publish for this reason.
But what if I run Facebook or Twitter and one of my users says the exact same thing? Well I'm just a platform. I have a libel shield. But again, my algorithm can promote or suppress that claim. Even if I have processes to moderate that content, either by responding to a court order to take it down and/or allowing users to flag it and then take it down myself with human or AI moderation, the damage can't really be rolled back.
We've let tech companies get away with "the algorithm" being some kind of mysterious and neutral black box that just does stuff and we have no idea what. It's complete bullshit. Every behavior of such an algorithm reflects a choice made by people, period. And we need to start treating this as publishing.
I'd suggest something like banning algorithmic amplification - your feed is posts of people you follow and nothing else. But that's not what will happen. What will happen is there will be [1] vague laws about preventing vague "harm", written to give legal teeth to the Overton window. Not in those words, but companies that would go against it will be mired in lawfare, while those that comply will be allowed to grow.
And if you complain, they'll motte-and-bailey you - you're not in favor of "harm", are you? We're not an authoritarian speech police, we only seek to protect people from "harm".
My IG feed is largely taken over by congressional members videos, crazy $#!t the president (and his crew) says, and the keystone cops. And boy howdy is there a lot of rage inducing behavior going on.
I feel more informed than if I was only listening to NPR.
That said, I stay away from anything that’s produced—sound track, too many cuts/edits, talking head commentary. I guess in this context, if I’m going to be driven to emotional anxiety, it’s going to be from something that happened or something someone said, and not the internet’s interpretation.
You can’t “produce content” that I will watch _as news_. It has to be in some real way happening (with some deference to Rashomon).
Is this unavoidable? I mean it does generate clicks and views and user engagement so if one platform is doing it, doesn't that automatically mean that the other has to do it? Otherwise they will continuously lose market share.
Given how TikTok "trends" seem to consist mostly of "get teenagers to do stuff that causes huge expenses for US society":
* "eat tide pods"
* "stick a fork in electrical sockets in your school"
* "destroy your school's shit" aka "Devious Licks" - bathrooms, chromebooks (jamming stuff into the charging ports to start fires...)
* "drink a shitload of Benadryl to see what happens"
* "steal a kia/hyundai and drive 80mph, run from the cops, etc"
...convince me that this is not a purposeful attack on US society by the CCP?
I look at people who use fb or tiktok, or x, the same way I look at smokers or alcoholics. With sadness and pity. The fact that we let children use this is hard to accept. The fact that fellow hackers and engineers, some of the brightest minds, have contributed to this is extremely disappointing. Shame on you.
Throw away your 'smartphone' and stop using anti-social media. It is killing society, and only making the Billionaires more powerful. They are evil and will do anything to stay in power.
Did we forget Gresham's Law applies to content and has done so since humans could communicate?
Bad or wrong ideas are the ones that get talked about. Do we discuss the 10 issues politicians get correct, or the 1 they screw up?
Platform is irrelevant here; the exact same phenomena occurs/ed on radio and TV decades before it did on social media platforms, and in news papers centuries prior.
The feedback loop for this moral hazard is slow but implacable. You can treat the zeitgeist as a dumping ground for so long, until you get so big, that you can no longer treat it like an idealized infinite substance.
If you like better content look for kagi's small web or better yet find a better algorithm that optimizes for your preferences rather than engagement.
I have my instagram, x on a locked down browser in a container with a fake profile that an LLM drives and finds the posts for specific users and compiles a gist of all the important things in my locality(or what u care about) every evening, without me ever going near that FOMO driven dumpster fire of tiktok/insta/x.
When I hear "Meta" and "Facebook" the top 10 things I think:
1. "Surveillance"
2. "Advertising"
3. "Scams"
4. "AI slop"
5. "Manipulated experience"
6. "Child harms"
7. Misinformation campaigns.
8. Disinformation campaigns.
9. "Doom scroll regret"
10. "Zuckavatarphilia"
But I don't claim to have the "right" opinion and am curious how other people respond to the brands. If each of you could reply, and re-list those associations in the order you experience them, I will collate the results and post them everywhere I can think of. It would go a long ways to satisfying my curiosity, and the curiosity of reporters that like to repeat things they read on the internet.
In my experience there’s a strong “banality of evil” that happens.
Some poor schlub ML Eng has shipped a feature that wins an A/B test. They’re pushing to get promoted. Their management wants to show they’re hitting their KPIs.
An engine of destruction filled with well meaning people just hoping to advance in their careers.
You might say, it’s ultimately the designers of the incentives that matter. Even there, the leadership will change. Inevitably the needs of the capitalist machine take over.
Zuckerberg himself demanded these features. Some board members even protested, yet they got ignored. Also, you can't tell me that the "engineers" at Meta don't know what they are building. Some may be in denial, blinded by their fat paycheck, but I assume most just don't care.
It's the same story since at least 2012. It is well documented in the book "The chaos machine" by Max Fisher.
Facebook employees, journalists and psychologists have studied the phenomenon and Facebook's (as well as Youtube's) response is always the typical "We have done something" to calm the protest, but it's never really the case. It's a constant game of deflecting, delaying, diminishing, denying.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 68.2 ms ] threadNot saying “well duh” I just think at this point I have to ask “are we going to do anything about it?”
We’ve known about the financial incentives to promote anger and outrage online for at least a decade now. So what are we going to do about it?
Think about it this way: imagine if you took a million random posts or videos. You would find a wide range of political views, conspiracy theories and so on. Whatever your position on any of those issues, you could find content pushing those views.
So if your algorithm selects and distributes content that fits your desired views and suppresses content that opposes your views, how are you different from a random publisher who posts content with those exact same views?
This is kind of like the "secret third thing" of Section 230 where you get all the protections of being a platform and all the flexibility of being a publisher and we need to close that loophole. Let platforms choose which one they are.
Another example: if I create a blog and write a post that accuses my local mayor of being a drug addict and a pedophile, I can be sued for defamation. You can try the journalism defense but it won't shield you from defamation. Traditoinal media outlets are normally very careful about what they publish for this reason.
But what if I run Facebook or Twitter and one of my users says the exact same thing? Well I'm just a platform. I have a libel shield. But again, my algorithm can promote or suppress that claim. Even if I have processes to moderate that content, either by responding to a court order to take it down and/or allowing users to flag it and then take it down myself with human or AI moderation, the damage can't really be rolled back.
We've let tech companies get away with "the algorithm" being some kind of mysterious and neutral black box that just does stuff and we have no idea what. It's complete bullshit. Every behavior of such an algorithm reflects a choice made by people, period. And we need to start treating this as publishing.
I'd suggest something like banning algorithmic amplification - your feed is posts of people you follow and nothing else. But that's not what will happen. What will happen is there will be [1] vague laws about preventing vague "harm", written to give legal teeth to the Overton window. Not in those words, but companies that would go against it will be mired in lawfare, while those that comply will be allowed to grow.
And if you complain, they'll motte-and-bailey you - you're not in favor of "harm", are you? We're not an authoritarian speech police, we only seek to protect people from "harm".
[1] Or rather, are - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Act_2023
I feel more informed than if I was only listening to NPR.
That said, I stay away from anything that’s produced—sound track, too many cuts/edits, talking head commentary. I guess in this context, if I’m going to be driven to emotional anxiety, it’s going to be from something that happened or something someone said, and not the internet’s interpretation.
You can’t “produce content” that I will watch _as news_. It has to be in some real way happening (with some deference to Rashomon).
* "eat tide pods" * "stick a fork in electrical sockets in your school" * "destroy your school's shit" aka "Devious Licks" - bathrooms, chromebooks (jamming stuff into the charging ports to start fires...) * "drink a shitload of Benadryl to see what happens" * "steal a kia/hyundai and drive 80mph, run from the cops, etc"
...convince me that this is not a purposeful attack on US society by the CCP?
Did we forget Gresham's Law applies to content and has done so since humans could communicate?
Bad or wrong ideas are the ones that get talked about. Do we discuss the 10 issues politicians get correct, or the 1 they screw up?
Platform is irrelevant here; the exact same phenomena occurs/ed on radio and TV decades before it did on social media platforms, and in news papers centuries prior.
I have my instagram, x on a locked down browser in a container with a fake profile that an LLM drives and finds the posts for specific users and compiles a gist of all the important things in my locality(or what u care about) every evening, without me ever going near that FOMO driven dumpster fire of tiktok/insta/x.
Best LLM RoI I made.
1. "Surveillance"
2. "Advertising"
3. "Scams"
4. "AI slop"
5. "Manipulated experience"
6. "Child harms"
7. Misinformation campaigns.
8. Disinformation campaigns.
9. "Doom scroll regret"
10. "Zuckavatarphilia"
But I don't claim to have the "right" opinion and am curious how other people respond to the brands. If each of you could reply, and re-list those associations in the order you experience them, I will collate the results and post them everywhere I can think of. It would go a long ways to satisfying my curiosity, and the curiosity of reporters that like to repeat things they read on the internet.
Some poor schlub ML Eng has shipped a feature that wins an A/B test. They’re pushing to get promoted. Their management wants to show they’re hitting their KPIs.
An engine of destruction filled with well meaning people just hoping to advance in their careers.
You might say, it’s ultimately the designers of the incentives that matter. Even there, the leadership will change. Inevitably the needs of the capitalist machine take over.
Most of them are click baits anyways.
I know https://www.reset.tech/ does really good work in this space, but are there others, and who is funding them?
Is it really whistleblowing when everyone already knows it?
Facebook employees, journalists and psychologists have studied the phenomenon and Facebook's (as well as Youtube's) response is always the typical "We have done something" to calm the protest, but it's never really the case. It's a constant game of deflecting, delaying, diminishing, denying.