this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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Honestly we should probably regulate these algorithms in general. People like Andrew Tate are a problem, but not the only problem.
My mother went down a conspiracy rabbit hole and never came back out again. You’d be surprised how short the pipeline from gardening, to arts and crafts, to crunchiness, to antisemitism, homophobia, misogyny, new world orders, and all that bs is.
The big question is how? The algorithms aren't the root cause of the problem, they are just amplifying natural human behaviour.
People have always fallen down these rabbit holes and any algorithm based on predicting what a person will be interested in will suffer a similar problem. How can you regulate what topics a person is interested in?
@dojan @Mr_Will
I’d recommend you read ‘Weapons of Math Destruction’.
Algorithms are usually developed with the best of intentions but no one really knows how they will behave out in the wild.
#algorithms
Thank you! I looked it up, and it sounds really interesting. Will have a deeper dive into it!
Thanks for the recommendation, it looks interesting but sounds like it pretty much agrees with what I'm saying.
Algorithms do what they are designed to do, but nobody knows exactly how society will be impacted by that. On the surface, delivering people with a feed of information that matches their interests seems like a good idea. The problem is that people are often interested in divisive topics and reinforcing their existing views, so anything that makes it easier for people to find these topics has a divisive and radicalising effect.