Comment by mlsu

In tech specifically: is it the same mechanism? I mean, does commercial advertising and political propaganda flow through the same channel?

I would love your input as someone on the inside. My understanding, broadly, is that when there’s commercial advertising, it goes through a different channel; there’s an auction, the ad is marked, CTR is tracked etc. whereas I think the political polarization and the use of propaganda on social media happens much less explicitly: it’s “mixed in”with the non-ad content that’s posted, and therefore much harder to detect or remove.

I’m also curious how you might handle influencers. Those, like propaganda operations, are an attempt to influence people’s behavior but “from inside” the ad/non-ad boundary.

And then, I’m convinced, a lot of our politics today is simply an emergent phenomenon of the algorithmic feed. That there is no master, corporate or political, that lead to this condition. It simply happened as a result of “for you.” (I think this is changing, as the powerful are discovering how powerful the algorithm is at influencing their subjects).

I think I agree with you broadly. The total sublimation of human relationships and interactions into “the machine” has a whole host of really bad side-effects. Jacking into cyberspace causes the shakes, at a society wide level and certainly at an individual level as well.