[swatcoder]

As with all these discussions: accountability and consequence.

We can point at a media company, call out its vested interests, scream about its bias, protest in front of its office, sue it for slander and misrepresentation. We can call out individual personalities the same way. We can strive to drive the companies out of business and the personalities out of work, if we deem it necessary, and we can accumulate a paper trail that holds each one to account.

As neither individuals nor corporate entities, algorithms do not yet carry this kind of legal or public accountability even as we some start to hold them up as oracles. In most cases, failures of an algorithm are treated simply as bugs or user mistakes. Nobody is responsible for anything bad and the so the algorithm can persist and its vendor can shrug off their own responsibility by gesturing towards an perpetual development process instead of accepting consequence: "we work to make the algorithm better every day, try again tomorrow!"

[s_dev]

>We can point at a media company, call out its vested interests, scream about its bias, protest in front of its office, sue it for slander and misrepresentation.

Right but the previous election had Russian servers spinning up fake news websites that displayed straight up generated news. Again how do you hold them accountable? You can't the only defence against bullshit is independent thinking.