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> The shape of our politics, our ideology, and even our fundamental grasp of how the world works is, in some substantial way, up to the algorithms. According to
by jacooper 4y ago
> The shape of our politics, our ideology, and even our fundamental grasp of how the world works is, in some substantial way, up to the algorithms. According to a recent survey from the Pew Research Center, a quarter of people under 30 in the U.S. regularly get their news from TikTok clips. That number is growing. People are even turning to social-media video as a replacement for Google search.
> Whether the results of such swipes and searches lead us to enlightenment or drag our worldviews further down toward their least reconciliatory, most conspiratorial depths depends in part on AI.
Honestly, what is the solution?, in the eyes of Capitalism, these Companies are the ultimate winners.
They are creating more revenue, more activity, crushing the competition other than themselves.
Who's going to stop this? especially that no matter how many users complain, the numbers are always going higher, and every monetary incentive is pushing companies towards this AI time blackhole with infinite mass surveillance.
You might say regulation, but why would the U.S. ever handicap its companies when they are basically the new U.S. worldwide influence tool?
No matter what the people vote, these companies have an infinite lobbying budget.
You and me might not use Tiktok, Instagram, Facebook, but let's be honest, we are increasingly the minority.
> If such a system could, say, rank videos by how happy they are, it might help elevate more positive content and subdue the darker stuff: less vitriol, more virtue.
Isn't this even more dystopian?
Imagine there is crisis in Afghanistan, or a nuclear Activity in the east.
The algorithm would just simply filter all of that out, and leave you living in that mindless unrealistic view of the world.
Yes I agree, the algorithms and news coverage are way too negative these days, but removing negativity is not the solution at all, it's basically blinding people from the truth.
Instead of promoting miss-info, you are now hiding the news completely.
- kelseyfrog 4y ago> Honestly, what is the solution? It depends on how much of a shock to the status quo you believe TikTok[1] is. Take the invention of the printing press, for example. It was instrumental in the development of the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution. Both undermined the legitimacy of the the Catholic Orthodoxy and the Ancien Régime, respectively. The printing press was used by adherents of Lutheranism, Jan Hus, Zwingli, Calvin, and Gustav V to propagate texts outside the previous monestary-scribe-book economy which, as you can imagine, also served as an orthodoxy-preserving filter. Likewise, Jean-Paul Marat's L’Ami du peuple[2], Le Pere Duchesne(Hébert), and countless others[3] were able to publish revolutionary texts faster than the monarchy could stamp them out. Both are case where technology outpaced social capacity. The question is, "has TikTok and it's like outpaced our social capacity?" What I mean specifically: is throughput and velocity of idea propagation at odds with our current social superstructure? In hindsight, this was clearly the case in the Reformation ad Revolution. Attempts at stamping out the ideas failed and the social order changed to accommodate the technology. Talking today about outlawing the printing press is considered an absurd. I'll argue the same is true for calling a ban or regulation on TikTok. Bans are a technological solution to the social organizational lag problem. Instead, we should be developing and employing social mechanisms that bridge the gap. After developing and deploying these social mechanisms, it will seem just as absurd to advocate for a TikTok ban. We should be looking at the development of social mechanisms post printing press that acted as a counterbalance and learn from them when developing new social mechanisms that work to temper algorithmic feeds today. 1. Or more broadly dopamine-optimized and AI-generated content feeds. 2. Friend of the People 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journals_appearing_under_the_French_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journals_appearing_und...
- w1nst0nsm1th 4y agoI think you make confusion betweens Internet and TikTok.