Is it the media or the lawmakers (or both) who have no idea of what they are talking about? If I create a new search website which ignores your entry and just picks 50 random web pages as the "search" result, even that method of picking is an algorithm.
Besides Apple, what is the alternative to Google for tablets and phones?
algorithms
Heh.
I constantly read that as al-gor-isms on first pass.
They don’t know what an algorithm is. An algorithm is the statement, in logical terms, of the steps required to solve a problem. It is independent of any specific programming language.
It is not a program. A program is executable code that can run on a computer. The program is the realization, in a specific programming language, of the concepts found in the algorithm.
Seems like a worthy goal but something that could never be enforced.
Open Source software is the way to go for anything that the public deals with. I can understand business software being proprietary but most of the web should be open source. A lot of it already and is fairly secure. Over 25% of websites are made with WordPress including many ecommerce websites, city/county/state/federal websites. Anyone can look at the source code.
EVERYTHING in public schools should be Open as well. Curriculum, software that students use, book lists, teacher’s criminal records.
The Filter Bubble Transparency Act would require internet platforms to let people use a version of their services where content selections are not driven by algorithms.
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Good luck with that. Google already pre-filters items it doesn’t want *anyone* to see from its search results or it twists results to fit its leftist politics. Think of how the Hunter Biden laptop story was effectively purged by the media in 2020.
Discriminatory algorithms that keep people from seeing content that big tech wants hidden is bad but censorship by banning users who create content is the bigger problem.
Here is an idea to mitigate censorship.
Take an open-source browser and modify it in such a way that if the URL of a banned user on one of the big social media sites is entered it will take you to a similar page for that user but on another site.
i.e. If a users URL were https://twitter.com/somebanneduser and that user were to be banned on twitter then whenever that URL was entered into the browser it would take you to https://SomeAlternateSite.com/somebanneduser
This would really piss off the major social media sites.
Instead of existing links to the banned user taking people to the original site where they would see the obligatory THIS USER HAS BEEN BANNED FOR VIOLATING TERMS OF SERVICE message they would be sent to the users page on another site...this way the banned user would not lose contact with their followers. The banned users link could be pointed at any URL including a server under the users direct control.
This is a pretty simple idea but the utility of it could be huge... as things stand now a banned user just loses contact with most of his followers.
You can’t copyright a users URL and there is no way for the original social media site that banned the user to directly interfere with this scheme.... it no longer would depend in any way on cooperation from the site that enacted the ban.
If a new social media site such as gettr.com created such a modified browser they could funnel all banned users to their site. The modified browser could redirect any URL that pointed to a banned user to a page instructing them how to verify their identity and create their new site on the new platform. The modified browser could easily use simple text parsing to determine if a URL pointed to a banned page.
News of such a browser would spread quickly and when someone tried a link to a user they followed and discovered they had been banned they would know to get the modified browser and try to view the content that way.
It’s just a workaround until the media sites are hopefully brought under control..and it might make it less appealing for big tech to ban users since they would know that would funnel followers to a different social media site where they might just be inclined to stay.. some banned users have had millions of followers and a big chunk of them would have switched to whatever new site continued to carry the banned content. i.e. RealDonaldTrump 100+ million followers.
Just an idea...
What about vote counting without algorithms?
"The algorithms that personalize content on social networks and other apps can make services addictive, violate users' privacy and promote extremism, critics and many lawmakers argue. Conservatives have also claimed that services deliberately censor their speech." ~
They are trying to get ahead of Trump’s social network.