The algos optimize for engagement, which can roughly translate into the people drive the algos, as they would stop watching or visiting or commenting, if it was not something they wanted to engage in.
So in some ways, is this not democracy to the max?
I wonder if articles like these don’t like the outcomes, or the reflection of society that the algos create. And thus attack them, because they would rather curate and limit conversation and expressions on the internet they don’t like or agree with.
Now it is mis-informed voters.
(1) directly fund studies and reproductions of studies (promising ahead of time to publish the results, even if negative) targeting the exact issues they're concerned about
(2) writing and publishing extensively to show people the results and help them arrive at a correct interpretation of the data
(3) make a public commitment ahead of time to change opinion based on what the data says, and not to overstate underdetermined theses
... instead of spending money trying to control the political narrative?
That would simply be science doing science -- which has always threatened the establishment because it's accountable to reality, not authority.
Science rightly done never claims authority, just reports on what the data says. Truth is powerful enough on its own.
Modern smartphones could easily be meshnet nodes, but they don't really support P2P networking.
See: FireChat, Bitchat (removed from the Chinese app store), Airdrop (Apple limited its functionality in China)
I like to think that I am not alone in this and this happened to hundreds of thousands of people. When you overly optimize for engagement at some point you cause burnout and loss of interest. It felt funny seeing musk claim that all twitter statistics were going up without realizing the cost of it. Social media has to strike a very strong balance to keep you engaged, but not too engaged.
Just call your opponents anti-democratic, extremist or polarising and here you go. Democracy!
The great winnowing of religion where the vast majority of humanity picks an offshoot of a handful of origins distorts our perception of what religion is.
isn't the issue that you can't actually choose yourself, but that it is chosen for you?
err not necessarily, mass media like the printing press, radio, television, the internet etc just increases visibility and expands people's understanding of the world, the risk to democracy is destabilizing economic conditions (extreme inequality). Social media just exacerbates this.
Because if you are right it’s a loosing battle. The masses will always be under informed, and under educated. And the only way to inform and educate them would result very undemocratic society.
This has been raised for decades, if not centuries.
The problem is that what is or isn't considered an educated view is /heavily/ dependent on... the political bent of the person(s) articulating the view, and the person(s) making the determination.
What's worse is that "fringe" views can often lead us to something that has previously been overlooked.
Finally - Australia has 100% compulsory voting - everyone must vote in elections, else receive a fine. That's intended to be sure that everyone is involved in providing their opinion on how the political body that's being voted on is an accurate reflection of the people being governed. What it doesn't do is force people to care, and a phenomena known as a "Donkey vote" occurs.
You can force people to attend classes educating them on civics, but you cannot force them to absorb, or even care, because, for a lot of people, politics is so repulsive - all they see is people squabbling about abstract ideas that the voters have next to no understanding how, or even if, it will affect them.
Would you trust that power in Trump's hands? If so, would you have trusted it in Biden's?
"Keep it from getting into the wrong hands, forever" is not a workable plan. The correct plan is "the government doesn't get that power".
pick one:
- stupid people vote without understanding what they vote for
- stupid people don't vote, but it's not a democracy anymore
That's what we're told, anyways
It isn't too unreasonable to think about that there might be an invisible thumb on the scales for any of these algorithms
Edit: Grammar.
cjs_ac•1h ago
goda90•1h ago
rapnie•59m ago
BackacheDescent•59m ago
eapressoandcats•21m ago
It’s definitely not explicitly stated though.
wg0•47m ago
slg•35m ago
plastic-enjoyer•26m ago
eapressoandcats•22m ago
This didn’t necessarily mean the content was good or neutral, but it generally limited how “out there” stuff could be especially since you need a fairly broad audience and everyone had to see the same things.
With social media everyone can choose their own adventure, and create their own alternate realities, and that doesn’t prevent the social media companies from scaling.
lukas221•20m ago
patcon•11m ago
As in, it was easy for us to evolve to see the same physical reality (sight, sound, smell, etc) but we had to evolve spiritual predispositions in order to create arbitrary attractors in value space, which could pull us toward something shared. This, in turn, allowed civilizations to grow larger even as language complexified our imagined world into much higher dimensions (compared to more primitive animal minds)
So spirituality (and it's inevitable scaled system of religions) is both an oppressor and an enabler of getting here. Like a primitive form of governance that we evolved before we were thoughtful enough to invent governance ourselves :)
agumonkey•7m ago