I postulate that corporate social media has only one goal outside of making money: influencing public opinion. Any algorithms that optimize for engagement with ideas that are hostile to democracy should be forbidden, just as influencing foreign elections in general.
Corporate social media has had one goal, and it’s had that goal since the 2010s, which is to increase engagement and increase numbers.
This was revealed quite plainly all the way back in, I think, 2013, when it was revealed that Facebook was doing experiments and found that hateful speech, disagreements, slander, and all this stuff increased engagement. Getting people to go at each other’s throats increased engagement more than bringing people together into communities, and as such, Facebook started to optimize for this.
More than 13 years ago.
That started a societal tonal shift in societies affected by Facebook and future social media companies that followed the same pattern.
And look where we are today: no one can get along anywhere. Everyone’s afraid of everyone. We have increasingly unstable social structures that are imploding in themselves, while the rich and powerful keep asserting control while the peons go for each other’s throats over the scraps.
Just remove algorithms that are predictive in nature. Everything non-deterministic, targeted to anything more than high level and imprecise location or similar should be illegal. At the end of the day, the spirit of the law needs to be that dragnet mass surveillance, and the capture and sale of user data for predictive purposes, is an information asymmetry that is an attack vector for propaganda, manipulation, coercion, and general logical corruption of a population.
It is an imminent national security threat to allow such practices, which benefit the most unethical and immoral criminal participants, the most.
I postulate that corporate social media has only one goal outside of making money: influencing public opinion. Any algorithms that optimize for engagement with ideas that are hostile to democracy should be forbidden, just as influencing foreign elections in general.
Corporate social media has had one goal, and it’s had that goal since the 2010s, which is to increase engagement and increase numbers.
This was revealed quite plainly all the way back in, I think, 2013, when it was revealed that Facebook was doing experiments and found that hateful speech, disagreements, slander, and all this stuff increased engagement. Getting people to go at each other’s throats increased engagement more than bringing people together into communities, and as such, Facebook started to optimize for this.
More than 13 years ago.
That started a societal tonal shift in societies affected by Facebook and future social media companies that followed the same pattern.
And look where we are today: no one can get along anywhere. Everyone’s afraid of everyone. We have increasingly unstable social structures that are imploding in themselves, while the rich and powerful keep asserting control while the peons go for each other’s throats over the scraps.
Just remove algorithms that are predictive in nature. Everything non-deterministic, targeted to anything more than high level and imprecise location or similar should be illegal. At the end of the day, the spirit of the law needs to be that dragnet mass surveillance, and the capture and sale of user data for predictive purposes, is an information asymmetry that is an attack vector for propaganda, manipulation, coercion, and general logical corruption of a population.
It is an imminent national security threat to allow such practices, which benefit the most unethical and immoral criminal participants, the most.