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Ironically it's the kind of censorship the Biden laptop story got that scares me the least. Brazen, obvious, and now widely known about. What's really scary is

Ironically it's the kind of censorship the Biden laptop story got that scares me the least. Brazen, obvious, and now widely known about. What's really scary is the silent implicit algorithmic ranking that decides which stories, channels, websites get traffic. Invisible and much more effective, leaving no big "banned from Facebook" banner a victim can point to. Just a mysterious, gradual dwindling of traffic. It could be for legitimate reasons, or because someone has their thumb on the scale, for political or economic reasons.

disgruntledphd2 4y ago
It's generally because someone pushed a new model which changed the distribution of content. We're pretty bad (as a species) at understanding what heaps of matrix multiplications net out to on an individual source basis.
_-david-_ 4y ago
>Ironically it's the kind of censorship the Biden laptop story got that scares me the least. Brazen, obvious, and now widely known about. We know about it now. The problem is a large number of people when polled said they would not have voted for Biden if they had known about the laptop before the election. It may have been enough to swing the election.
SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
I get what you are saying... but let's consider for a fact that if the media had run the Biden Laptop story AS IF it was the Trump Laptop story - the election for leader of the free world would have gone the other way. You can be happy or sad about the ends - but should be terrified of the means. It wasn't an award show snub, or a gender bathroom debate, it was the entire direction of the USA with the largest military on Earth.
- tarakat 4y ago
  But that's just it - the silent re-ranking of stories, algorithmic or editorial, can also flip elections. Not just elections, it can entirely change the direction a culture is headed. And it causes no backlash - you wouldn't even know it was happening, unless you laboriously compared statistics with how much exposure stories (not just news stories, films and books shape our perception of the world just as much) get, for the few sufficiently objective categories where a meaningful comparison can be made.
  - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
    Don’t take it that I don’t agree, just that it doesn’t need to be subtle. We already had the FBI and bureaucracy cover up a scandal because they were invested in someone else winning the presidential election. Let’s worry about the thing that already happened instead of the hypothetical.

disgruntledphd2 4y ago

It's generally because someone pushed a new model which changed the distribution of content. We're pretty bad (as a species) at understanding what heaps of matrix multiplications net out to on an individual source basis.

_-david-_ 4y ago

>Ironically it's the kind of censorship the Biden laptop story got that scares me the least. Brazen, obvious, and now widely known about. We know about it now. The problem is a large number of people when polled said they would not have voted for Biden if they had known about the laptop before the election. It may have been enough to swing the election.

SV_BubbleTime 4y ago

I get what you are saying... but let's consider for a fact that if the media had run the Biden Laptop story AS IF it was the Trump Laptop story - the election for leader of the free world would have gone the other way. You can be happy or sad about the ends - but should be terrified of the means. It wasn't an award show snub, or a gender bathroom debate, it was the entire direction of the USA with the largest military on Earth.

tarakat 4y ago
But that's just it - the silent re-ranking of stories, algorithmic or editorial, can also flip elections. Not just elections, it can entirely change the direction a culture is headed. And it causes no backlash - you wouldn't even know it was happening, unless you laboriously compared statistics with how much exposure stories (not just news stories, films and books shape our perception of the world just as much) get, for the few sufficiently objective categories where a meaningful comparison can be made.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  Don’t take it that I don’t agree, just that it doesn’t need to be subtle. We already had the FBI and bureaucracy cover up a scandal because they were invested in someone else winning the presidential election. Let’s worry about the thing that already happened instead of the hypothetical.