Posted on 12/15/2021 7:54:54 AM PST by Kaslin
One of the most ubiquitous tropes in politics is members of Congress finding ways to blame society’s ills on something new that they don’t understand. Rock music, violence in video games, and profanity on television all had their turn as the societal scapegoat in recent decades. The most recent flavor of moral panic is social media — in particular, lawmakers have begun to cast their suspicious gaze upon the mysterious algorithm as a potential public nuisance in need of their regulation.
The story goes that the algorithms being used to rank what content is displayed on users’ social media feeds are amplifying political radicalization, dangerous misinformation, and inflicting psychological harm on users. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, even questioned “whether there is such a thing as a safe algorithm.”
Though we tend to take it as a given, a platform hosting user-generated content would be an unsatisfying morass if it did not employ some system to tailor what is displayed according to each users’ preferences. That’s why nearly every such platform analyzes users’ searches and interactions and uses that to inform algorithms, so that each person doesn’t have to sort through thousands of posts that don’t interest them to get to content they want to engage with.
Politicians have fixated on this as a predatory practice; an industry-wide conspiracy to warp your brain. The truth is that literally every successful product or service offered anywhere succeeds by offering consumers more of what they want. Ultimately, that is all these ranking algorithms are: pieces of code filtering content in a pre-set way according to user inputs.
It’s true that some people may always be vulnerable to being fed more and more of the kind of content that leads them to a bad place, whether it be someone with body image issues or someone with extreme political views who seeks to constantly reinforce their biases. But that is not a problem unique to digital mediums; social media does not exist in a vacuum.
While studies leaked by Facebook employee-turned-whistleblower Francis Haugen are being spun as evidence of social media giants knowingly boosting engagement to promote harmful interactions for profit, the studies themselves paint a more nuanced picture. While a minority of teens polled professed to feeling that Instagram made them feel worse about themselves, the large majority felt the platform was neutral or beneficial to them.
For one of the studies revealed by Haugen’s leaks, Facebook cut off the News Feed content ranking algorithm for .05% of their users and observed the reaction. Rather than seeing engagement plummet, Facebook actually made more money from advertising, as users had to scroll more to find interesting content (and thus ran across more ads).
This evidence suggests that supposed solutions proposed by lawmakers, such as the “Filter Bubble Transparency Act,” which would require social media platforms to allow users to disable algorithmic ranking of content, won’t solve anything. Academic studies of other platforms such as YouTube have also reinforced that how users interact with content online is not as easily manipulated as just tweaking an algorithm. Users will still gravitate towards content that interests them — it will just take them longer.
As companies design platforms to allow people to connect and interact with one another from across the globe, all of the foibles that characterize human interactions in the physical world inevitably manifest themselves online as well. Leaning on platforms to solve societal ills is likely only to create new problems, as we have already seen with platforms attempting to be “responsible” by policing “misinformation.”
Social media is still relatively new, and exists in an ecosystem of information sharing that includes broadcast networks, talk radio, and old-fashioned, face-to-face human interaction. Perhaps politicians should be more willing to recognize that no law or regulation is going to suffice to solve complex societal problems which pre-date the internet, no matter how scary or nefarious they make algorithms sound.
Algore-rythms not required for us to calculate that 500 million is a lot smaller than 7 +/- billion inhabitants on muvver erf.
Let’s RANK dicky blumanthal’s fake claims of Vietnam bravery.
I call BS. Its one thing to use it for marketing but it can also be used for evil like shadow banning or eliminating entire subjects from view. Like we have seen with the Biden laptop or alternate treatments for COVID.
Its in our face every day. The writer must be working for big tech.
Whilst he shakes hands with and congratulates Commie scum.
Well if the algorithm just helps people find what interests them, I would call it neutral and doing its job. If it just shows what is most popular among all users then its just doing its job less well. If it shows content at random its just doing its job but even less well. But if it starts being based on something else, like deciding what people ought to see independent of their preference, then its not really a content provider but a content promoter.
The problem is that the bolded part above is not true.
FR: Never Accept the Premise of Your Opponent’s Argument
Basically all that Congress needs to understand to do its sworn duty is Congress's constitutional Article I, Section 8-limited powers, mainly military, trade, delivering the mail, etc.
In other words, what the career lawmakers running DC don't want people to know is that nearly every so-called “federal” domestic policy problem beyond Congress's Section 8 powers is actually a state power issue.
"Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States." —Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
"From the accepted doctrine that the United States is a government of delegated powers, it follows that those not expressly granted, or reasonably to be implied from such as are conferred, are reserved to the states, or to the people. To forestall any suggestion to the contrary, the Tenth Amendment was adopted. The same proposition, otherwise stated, is that powers not granted are prohibited [emphasis added]." —United States v. Butler, 1936.
The reason that the states let the crooks running Congress get away with pushing them around is that citizens elect state lawmakers who evidently don't understand the fed's constitutionally limited powers any better than the voters who elected them do.
Consequently, career state lawmakers don't understand that the federal funding that they are continually begging Congress for is arguably state revenues that Congress stole from their state by robbing citizen's wallets by means of unconstitutional federal taxes according to the Gibbons v. Ogden excerpt above.
So is Congress now expecting us to believe that algorithms are stealing state powers and state revenues?
Consider that Biden's unconstitutional, unaccountable Build Back Better funding can at least be regarded as the states recovering revenues that Congress stole from them.
The bottom line is that the states need to eliminate the unconstitutional middleman, the unconstitutionally big federal government, from "helping" the states to manage their revenues.
The ultimate remedy for alleged election-stealing, Democratic Party-pirated federal and state governments that allegedly manufacture crises to oppress everybody under their boots...
Consider that all the states can effectively “secede” from the unconstitutionally big federal government by doing the following.
Patriots need to primary federal and state elected officials who don't send voters email ASAP that clearly promises to do the following.
Federal and state lawmakers need to promise in their emails to introduce resolutions no later than 100 days after start of new legislative sessions that proposes an amendment to the Constitution to the states, the amendment limited to repealing the 16th and ill-conceived 17th Amendments (16&17A).
In fact, I challenge the states to ram the repeal amendment for 16&17A through the ratification process faster than Nancy Pelosi irresponsibly rammed unconstitutional Obamacare through the House. /semi-sarc
Insights welcome.
Algorithms are to blame. They are merely written procedures on how to process data. Written by humans. They are just as bad as a published article that includes all sorts of inflammatory racist terms and such.
You can blame editing. But, that is done by humans, too.
If an algorithm suppresses speech, it is because it was intended to do just that. If it creates economic harm, ditto.
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