3 ms·
It's an interesting and severely non-trivial debate, and there's no way to 'prioritize'/'curate'/'feature'/'select' content (which controls what passively-brows
by smcin 2y ago
It's an interesting and severely non-trivial debate, and there's no way to 'prioritize'/'curate'/'feature'/'select' content (which controls what passively-browsing users are likely to see, unless they search or click to specific users/topics/groups) without in some way "imposing your] views".
For example, all other things being equal, should known-false or misleading claims be treated equally to unknown or factually correct ones? Should posts from an account with a history of posting those be treated equally to accounts that don't? And of course who gets to determine what constitutes 'accurate'? How do we prevent community voting being misused?
With every election, we are edging closer to legislating (in the US or EU) definition of social networks as a 'public good' with accompanying regulation requirement. Equally we've seen enough evidence of politically-slanted moderation or attempts to influence moderation in many countries.
(This stuff is non-trivial. What about accounts that are accurate about one set of topics (e.g. the Chinese economy) but sloppy on others and post outright garbage on a third? What about accounts that 'merely' retweet or boost content, vs post their own 'original' content? Should online journalists be held to a higher standard than average users? What about 'news personalities' like the Alex Joneses of the world?)
I'm very sure this debate will be revisited after the impending US election/ TikTok divestment/ Telegram controversy.