aphasial t1_j2w906i wrote
I mean... This is not news. Recommendation engines have been driving things since at least 2012, and basically as far back as Facebook's developers realizing that there were ways to alter user behavior based on automatic filters and prioritization being applied to the News Feed (second only to the "Share" button in importance to the rise of the modern hellscape).
Frankly, I think there's only this near-concern-trolling awareness occurring because suddenly the "wrong" people are in control of the algorithms and platforms. Conservatives have been complaining about the ability of social media to direct attention towards and away from what its designers desire for a decade now.
DragoonXNucleon t1_j2wsd64 wrote
This wasn't true in the beginning of social media. Think about Digg, Fark or the old Facebook. Facebook and Twitter used to he about who you followed and who you liked. Thats the only content you saw. If you wanted someones content, you has to opt-in.
Thats dead.
Now all social media feeds you what they want, rather than what you request. Its not new this year, but its new in the last decade.
aphasial t1_j2xcvqq wrote
Did Fark have anything beyond Fark and Total Fark that would affect filtering via account subscribe/follow links? I seem to be it being a straight weblog stream. Slashdot had a following->newsfeed feature for things like blog stories, but I don't recall that it ever really got a ton of use (or maybe that was just me).
If your social circle (especially friends-of-friends) is large enough, then IMO there isn't much of a difference. On any given day I might have 1200x400 different users and posts available to me, and the FB algorithm has to sort them somehow, even before getting to the "out of the blue" or paid microtargetting ads it wants to show. If someone wants to manipulate your perceptive worldview, they can do it using existing opt-ins with the amount of metadata they've got.
ThePokemon_BandaiD t1_j33d8xk wrote
the big change was when Instagram ended chronological order on the main feed.
MonasticMuff42 t1_j2wg5kd wrote
The reason for conservatives - specifically American Republicans - to be so concerned is that their election strategy has relied on a corner of the media space to be hyper conservative. Now, since Big Tech goes overwhelmingly for the other party, the tables might have turned in this respect. It will be another ten or twenty years before the shift is felt more fully, but their willingness to go with an outsider like Donald Trump back in 2016 shows, at least to me, that they were cognizant of the problems in the propaganda strategy which has consistently won them elections since the 1980s.
aphasial t1_j2xc8yy wrote
>It will be another ten or twenty years before the shift is felt more fully, but their willingness to go with an outsider like Donald Trump back in 2016 shows, at least to me, that they were cognizant of the problems in the propaganda strategy which has consistently won them elections since the 1980s.
Hardly. Much more a result of things like this:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/facebook-experiment-found-to-boost-us-voter-turnout/
If someone at FB (thanks for admitting that "Big Tech goes overwhelmingly for the other party") wants to lean on the algorithms and features, it'd be easy to rationalize. Just look at some of the internal discussions from the Twitter team from two years ago about the NY Post (or... anything else) for an example.
MonasticMuff42 t1_j2xqe62 wrote
Just because I pointed it out doesn't mean I'm in favor of it, nor that I think the Republicans are wrong to point it out. But let's be real, neither of the two parties are strongholds of integrity and courage. If something benefits one party - in this case, the massive bias of Big Tech towards the current status quo Democratic Party - it will be pointed out and critiqued and challenged by the other party - in this case, Republicans raising the issue as one of freedom of speech in the digital polis. And they're not wrong. It's just that if they were in the Democrats shoes, they wouldn't care one bit because the bias would be in their direction and would help them win elections.
Personally, reddit is the only social media I use and I find it easy to discover, join, and participate in subs where more balanced content is posted and there are nuanced views among the participants. But I've been using the platform for a long time - a decade or so, probably. I don't go on r/politics, for example, because it's an echo chamber.
Ultimately it's up to people to be more discerning about the content they read and the communities they join, but platforms should be making it easier for them to do so, and not harder. As it is they are funneling people into the so-called echo chamber and exploiting it. And we can see the results in our society.
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