- Users of social media platforms like Facebook are part of constant marketing experiments
- Because algorithms are driven by AI and machine learning, it’s impossible to know how social media companies are choosing what to show — and not show — different groups of people
- Because there is no “random assignment”, marketers can’t fully tell if one ad might work better than another one.
- In the process, groups of social media users can be excluded from important messages
- Algorithms are so precise, they can target people down to an individual level
In other news, its been over a decade since Facebook started selling user data to Cambridge Analytica, who used it to massively target and proliferate polarizing political advertising during the 2016, greatly contributing to Trump’s win and the proliferation of QAnon insanity and general political diviseness and radicalization in the US.
I’d call that quite an ‘experiment’, but sure, Facebook is still definitionally doing a massive psy-op campaign, all the time, with new tech too, yep, that’s bad.
I hate this interpretation of black box algorithms.
We know how they work. It isn’t magic. We intentionally built them to be the way that they are.
What we don’t know is precisely which outputs you get from a large combinations of inputs, because it would require memorizing entire databases and simulating results as a weird form of mental math, and how we score things will be impacted by interpersonal biases even if we attempted that.
I mean, still sounds like a black box.
I think the point is that we designed the black boxes to do X and they do X consistently, just with slight variation.
If I make a cake making machine and it consistently makes cakes, its not a magic box just because I’m not sure if it will be creme frosted or not.
I mean, maybe it’s just different vocabulary for both of us?
To me: a blackbox is a thing where input and output comes out in a consistent way, very functional. While the box can make accurate predictions or decisions, the exact reasoning behind them is often unclear.
Looks like we are on the same page, but just talking past each other.
That’s what a black box is, but colloquially, it’s also a way to call something “unknowable” or “magic.”
I thought you were referring to it as the latter, not the former.
I had an idea a while ago on how you could lightly regulate social media platforms.
Require them to:
- Group users into cohorts of a size greater than X. ie, individual level targeting isn’t allowed. The higher this number the better.
- make available to users the cohort they are in
- publish openly every single cohort and their size
- make it possible to view feeds as if you were in a specific cohort.
Will this stop them funnelling customers into rabbit holes? No, probably not.
But it would make “targeted indoctrination” harder as they would have to try and indoctrinate multiple people at once. And it would make it more transparent just how many people are being fed propaganda or whatever you want to call it.
This is one area where BlueSky is breaking new ground in an incredible way with user-created feeds.
Meta will never give you this because they want to be in constant control of everything you see. Maybe like 20% things you’ve expressed that you actually want to see.
This not only gives you the power to control what you see but also disincentives creators and marketers from trying to abuse and manipulate the single algorithm. Like, don’t bother, because there isn’t one.
Fedi could learn a lot from them.
I’m not sure what I’m understanding that’s markedly different from what we have here in terms of feeds, nor am I sure letting users curate and create their own personal echo chambers is a real “solution.”
If I understand it correctly, only some of the ways of viewing Lemmy content actually have an algorithm behind them (Hot view, for instance) whereas things like Top are… literally just the top posts/comments based on aggregated upvotes/downvotes. New just shows things chronologically from newest to oldest, Old is the opposite of that. Controversial is potentially an algorithm but I’m not deeply sure about that, because it seems like it could be calculated as simply as Top is.
Manipulating things over here is more like making spam accounts and flooding with upvotes/downvotes, which is a problem but hopefully one that gets addressed as development continues.
I also thought Mastodon was just a chronological feed as well. Not a lot to manipulate there?
I’ll be real, I don’t get the hype for Bluesky when it’s venture capital funded (by Blockchain Capital no less) and eventually those VCs are going to want a return on investment. At some point, something will have to be done to produce a profit and won’t that be when the screws start being turned on the users?
Fedi could learn a lot from them.
I left Facebook because the lack of control, so I’d say Fedi learned.
Fedi learned lots of things, but they haven’t learned about user-generated or shared feeds.
Fedi is ours, so make a PR adding support for it!
Why do so many people assume everyone on the Fediverse is a software developer?
