this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
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This is the real shit right here. The problem is that social media companies' data show that negativity and hate keep people on their website for longer, which means that they view more advertisement compared to positivity.
It is human nature to engage with disagreeable topics moreso than agreeable topics, and social media companies are exploiting that for profit.
We need to regulate algorithms and force them to be open source, so that anybody can audit them. They will try to hide behind "AI" and "trade secret" excuses, but lawmakers have to see above that bullshit.
Unfortunately, US lawmakers are both stupid and corrupt, so it's unlikely that we'll see proper change, and more likely that we'll see shit like "banning all social media from foreign adversaries" when the US-based social media companies are largely the cause of all these problems. I'm sure the US intelligence agencies don't want them to change either, since those companies provide large swaths of personal data to them.
While this is true for Facebook and YouTube - last time I checked, reddit doesn't personalise feeds in that way. It was my impression that if two people subscribe to the same subreddits, they will see the exact same posts, based on time and upvotes.
Then again, I only ever used third party apps and old.reddit.com, so that might have changed since then.
It's probably not true anymore, but at the time this guy was being radicalized, you're right, it wasn't algorithmically catered to them. At least not in the sense that it was intentionally exposing them to a specific type of content.
I suppose you can think of the way reddit works (or used to work) as being content agnostic. The algorithm is not aware of the sorts of things it's suggesting to you, it's just showing you things based on subreddit popularity and user voting, regardless of what it is.
In the case of YouTube and Facebook, their algorithms are taking into account the actual content and funneling you towards similar content algorithmically, in a way that is unique to you. Which means at some point their algorithm is acknowledging "this content has problematic elements, let's suggest more problematic content"
(Again, modern reddit, at least on the app, is likely engaging in this now to some degree)
That's a lot of baseless suppositions you have there. Stuff you cannot possibly know - like how reddit content algos work.