[ska]

> Most Twitter users, as best I can tell, aren't actually complaining about what they see. They are complaining about what others see.

FWIW this doesn't match my experience at all, but I've hardly made a study of it. What I mean by that is that the limited complaints I have heard are mostly about a) bad quality advertisement targeting and b) political targeting, also mostly bad quality.

"quality" here meaning accuracy of the targeting, not a comment on the content.

[prawn]

Nor mine. My complaints are about what I see. I don't want an overload of ads, and especially not irrelevant ads. I don't want suggested content/topics. I don't want suggested follows. I just want to see tweets from the people I chose to follow. Same with Instagram.

But I think the reason they push against this is that is risks people losing interest as the sort of people I follow aren't strong/consistent content creators. They're just people I know personally and want to stay in touch with. Twitter wants to be a firehose of stuff that fires me up. Instagram wants to be endless TV channels of constant content. Whereas I like being able to get up to date on everything my friends have posted, and then go back to what I was doing.

[stickfigure]

Oh come now. I constantly hear this concern from my friends (almost exclusively left-of-center).

And they aren't totally wrong? I have a qanon-er in my family; she's carefully curated her media sources to guarantee a pure, steady stream of nutjob garbage. The thing is, censoring twitter/facebook/youtube makes no difference - these people will find their fringe no matter how hard they have to look. At least on youtube there's a chance the algorithm will show some non-bullshit.

I don't know what "the answer" to any of this is, but I suspect we all need to be a bit more tolerant of online stupidity.

Also: If your social media feeds are showing you crappy content, you are to blame. It's incredibly easy to like/dislike/hide-like-this content. My feeds are fantastic. I suspect the people complaining about their feeds actually like garbage and even more so like to complain.

[twoWhlsGud]

Old joke: "If you owe the bank $1M it's your problem, if you owe the bank $1B it's theirs". New joke: "If a few citizens become radicalized/crazy in ways that threaten the very functioning of your society it's their problem ... "

[pessimizer]

...but if the majority of citizens act in ways that threaten the very functioning of your society, you may live in a monarchy or oligarchy.

[toofy]

i’m not sure why this would be the only option you come to.

it’s much more likely that folks are concerned because the populism wishes to destroy pluralism.

[ilyt]

> Also: If your social media feeds are showing you crappy content, you are to blame. It's incredibly easy to like/dislike/hide-like-this content. My feeds are fantastic. I suspect the people complaining about their feeds actually like garbage and even more so like to complain.

I'd imagine most people have reasonable assumption than YT will only show you more stuff that you like (as in press the like button), not that any engagement, even downvotes, will continue to put more shit into your stream.

Ever wondered why YTbers ask for comments and don't shy from saying "if you didn't like it, downvote and tell me in the comments"? That still drives engagement and that is all to algorithm.

Once you get it, it's easy to keep the shit you don't want in the stream, but not everyone is well versed in algorithmical ways so it's not that hard to get into algorithmics hole

[shadowgovt]

> these people will find their fringe no matter how hard they have to look

This is likely true. Most of the discussion around "the algorithm" is mainly centered around whether there's something about the way the major online sharing channels are selecting what to present that acts as a funnel towards QAnon and other radical theories, not whether people already dedicated to finding such information can find it.

[pixl97]

YT: "you searched WWII", recommended video is "how to become a nazi in 2022"

I had to click do not recommend this content on a ton of videos.

[shadowgovt]

Precisely. If I had to hazard a guess, I think their algorithm is hyper-optimizing for linkages, and when linkages are broad but tenuous, it hyper-optimizes for the ones with only the slightest dominance.

Hypothetically: all sorts of people are interested in the history of World War II... it's a big war, it defined politics for over half a century, and it's taught every year in the history classes of at least a hundred nations. So you're looking at a topic with hundreds of "also likes" connections but no strong winner.

Perhaps there is a 0.000001% chance that if you watch a WWII video, your next video will be one on modern Nazism (including recruitment videos). I wonder if YouTube's algorithm boosts that small fluctuation in a sea of noise into a single recommendation result (or even grabs the top 5, but the signal is so noisy that this one still shows up in that top 5)?

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> Also: If your social media feeds are showing you crappy content, you are to blame.

Yes and no. Youtube radicalisation / algorithmic extremism is a thing, because the engagement-maximising algorithm has a strong bias for rabbit-holes, kooks, con-artists and incendiary nonsense. The "funnel towards QAnon" that the sibling comment mentioned.

Unless you lean hard against it - which first requires awareness of the problem and the skills or knowledge to spot it - it will be in your feed. "you are to blame" is to an extent blaming the victims.

[XorNot]

The sentiment I've heard a lot is "I'm not clicking on that, it'll take weeks to undo the damage to my recommendations".

[rchaud]

How many average users are even aware of this?

It took until 2021 for people to figure out that quote-tweeting politician hot takes to dunk on them, actually helped politicians' reach because Twitter counted it as engagement.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> How many average users are even aware of this?

An increasing number, but still very low. And awareness in itself won't solve the issue entirely. This is why the "you are to blame" sentiment is to an extent blaming the victims.

[unsupp0rted]

Please teach me how I can get YouTube to stop showing me videos about cars and food reactions. And American local news channels.

Dislike button does nothing.

Hide because I don’t like this video option does nothing. It hides that video and keeps recommending competing channels on the same topic.

Don’t recommend channel button blocks the channel so that three more competing channels on the same topic take its place

[joshka]

See https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6342839?hl=en&co=G...

[viraptor]

I think there's some nuance here though, where people do make a distinction between opposing views and harmful content. (likely not everyone, but still)

What I mean is, I don't care if someone reads a politician I hate. I care if they read a politician who enables the next pizzagate or worse. Or if they read state sponsored misinformation while thinking it's genuine opinions. And yeah, I do acknowledge there's some overlapping grey area.

[pessimizer]

The main takeaway is that you care what other people read, not about what people are making you read.

[kannanvijayan]

> The main takeaway is that you care what other people read, not about what people are making you read.

As do I, and you. I was pretty happy when all of those ISIS accounts that were spewing violence and hate got shut down. I'm sure you have your boundaries on what you'd want society to allow and restrict on public mediums.

The specific details of what those boundaries are will depend on your personal notion of what constitutes communication which can be considered abusive. As it will for any other person.

Copyright violations. Beheading videos. "Pornography" or pseudo-"pornography" involving minors. Direct threats of violence towards individuals or groups. Deepfakes generated without consent. Etc. Etc.

I guarantee you if we have a back and forth discussion we will discover where your boundaries lie across the myriad issues where people typically want to control public discourse.

[ilyt]

Right but I don't want some wanker at Twitter or Facebook office decide that.

If I want to press the ban/blacklist button on tag, account, group, or whatever social unit to not see it again that's my decision. Sure, some of them should be default (probably don't want people to get porn the second they sign up), but user should be in power to moderate and filter their own stream.

> Copyright violations. Beheading videos. "Pornography" or pseudo-"pornography" involving minors. Direct threats of violence towards individuals or groups. Deepfakes generated without consent. Etc. Etc.

3/4 of what you mentioned is illegal in most places in the first place so it isn't point of contention.

And that isn't really a problem. Site deciding this or that political view is now bad is.

You try to put removing the illegal/disturbing content in same category as worldview manipulation. The first is way more black and white than the second and should not be considered together, even if similar systems are used for them.

[kannanvijayan]

The distinctions you're bringing up seem kind of perfunctory to me.

The wanker at the twitter office that was presumably appointed by twitter management to do that, yes? And some people want to appeal to that particular seat of power to influence and limit discourse along some dimension, within twitter.

And yet other appeals to higher powers, such as governments - control communication with deeper consequences across broader domains.

What's legal or illegal evolves with politics and culture. So there's no fundamental purchase there for the kind of moral conversation you were trying to elicit.

If in a few years the people you accuse of wanting to control other people's speech are able to get some laws passed making the speech they want controlled properly illegal, I'd venture you would resist accepting that as suddenly legitimate - even if those things would be "straight up illegal" at that point.

I guess I should have been more explicit in the first response - but what I'm suggesting is that this conversation is better had in less absolutist terms than what you proposed. There was the implication that the other person somehow inherently wanted to control communication in a qualitatively different way than you (or I did).

That's not to go down the path of sophistry - but just to suggest to orient the conversation around where the boundaries should be placed in practical terms, and discuss where the differences in boundaries lie and on an issue by issue basis evaluate that, rather than absolutist/ideological terms.

"You want to control speech (and I don't)" doesn't really lead anywhere in terms of discourse. It's a dead end.

[fzeroracer]

The problem with your ban/blacklist option is that they first require users to be exposed to that content in order to personally ban it. Either you yourself will have to watch the beheading video in order to know to ban it, or another group of users will need to tag it as 'disturbing' and you will need to ban 'disturbing' content'.

Most people do not like casually being exposed to such content, and so any sort of soft policy against it results in users self-selecting out of the social ecosystem. It's no longer just your decision, but one that affects the entire platform. And soon the entire platform becomes dedicated to that disturbing content because everyone else has left.

You could go to Parler or Gab or whatever site right now to see the results of your experiment in action and see why user self-moderation leads to the destruction of the site. This is why users offload that mental stress to the owners of the site who then hire people to manually filter the cruft themselves (often for the worse of the people doing said filtering, but that's a whole 'nother thing).

[nostromo]

This is an age-old panic that happens with each new technology.

The printing press was seen as dangerous. Then the phone, then TV, and then the internet. And now it's social media.

Each time the arguments are the same. People worry that the "wrong people" will have the ability to share ideas to a broad audience.

And yet each time we've shown that more speech is correlated with an expansion of civil rights and liberal governance.

[dsfyu404ed]

You can credit the printing press and increase in accessible information to the literate classes with the enlightenment, broader literacy, modern banking and a whole lot of other good things but the backdrop of all these developments was 100-300yr (depending on how you count) of religious and succession wars as some power was taken from the catholic church and the rulers that were closest to it and redistributed to a broader set of local rulers.

It was definitely a step forward for humanity but it wasn't all unicorns and rainbows.

[toofy]

> Then the phone, then TV…

doesn’t the FCC heavily limit broadcast television and radio who and what behaviors are tolerated? like very heavily, no?

and aren’t there limitations on what you can and can’t do with a telephone?

[Karrot_Kream]

You might be thinking of the Hays Codes which were voluntary or the Fairness Doctrine, which was repealed by the FCC in 1987.

[ska]

> Oh come now. I constantly hear

Path dependence, it's a funny thing.

[wallfacer120]

If you haven't noticed the chorus of coastal media types asking for people they disagree with to be prevented from speaking in any public forum, then you are truly oblivious.

[shadowgovt]

I've seen them asking for private forums to stop giving such folk a platform, because an organization can choose to do what it will with its private property.

But public forums? No, I can't say I have. In fact, I remember witnessing a President giving a large speech in a public forum that was followed by a riot at the Capitol (whether said speech was causal to the riot is still a matter for the courts). Nobody challenged his right to give the speech until the question of whether it was "incitement to riot" came up, and that challenge is unrelated.

[ilyt]

Define "public forum". Because both Facebook and Twitter have way more range than most of what would be defined as "public forum" does

[shadowgovt]

Range doesn't make something a public forum. Generally, control of the space by the public (or their delegates) does.

A letter to the editor of the New York Times has the potential to be seen by 343,000 households (a number down from 1.3 million). This never made the New York Times' letters page a public forum.

Twitter, for example, was at least previously accountable to shareholders. Now, it's very much a private forum.

[ilyt]

And New York Times have competition in the space.

There is no meaningful competition to what Twitter or Facebook does. If you stifle voices on that platform majority of the country won't hear them.

Them not being technically public is the problem in itself , they function like public forum for opinions but one that is manipulated by corporation.

[shadowgovt]

Twitter is competition to Facebook, Facebook to Twitter, and as we're observing thanks to Twitter coming under new management, Mastodon is competition to Twitter also.

> If you stifle voices on that platform majority of the country won't hear them

This is technically correct (the best kind of correct) but doesn't imply either a legal or moral responsibility on Twitter's part. Freedom of the press has never meant one is obliged to let others use one's press; in fact, it means the opposite.

If people want a channel more unbiased than Twitter [1], they should build it. The Musk purchase has shown how fragile the bird really is when the users lose confidence in it.

You note that them not technically being public is a problem. I think you raise an interesting question: what would a technically public forum look like and who would build it? If the government built it, do we imagine it would run the Post story, or would those in charge of it squelch it because the story is harmful to the active regime? It is, perhaps, best for the government to be out of the business of editorial work; leave that to the press.

(... and if one wants a government-subsidized communication channel that isn't edited by someone else: that's the Internet and we already have it. Then one's goal to combat Twitter becomes building a service as easy-to-use as Twitter that everyone can use; make the press itself as free as possible. I recommend supporting the Mastodon project if that's one's goal. Or put effort into making one of the many, many blogging software packages of the world ever more turnkey. The way to maximize freedom of the press is to maximize presses, not constrain how the freedom can be used).

[1] long experience suggests to me what you actually get when you try this experiment is a channel with different biases, but by all means.

[jshen]

Or maybe we’re all in filter bubbles, including you.

[ska]

> "chorus of coastal media types"

KIIS-FM has a choir?