Comment by ethin
4 days ago
How exactly would you do this without, you know, violating the first amendment? Algorithmic feeds are nothing without the content. People get toxic sludge because they signal to the algorithm that they like that.
4 days ago
How exactly would you do this without, you know, violating the first amendment? Algorithmic feeds are nothing without the content. People get toxic sludge because they signal to the algorithm that they like that.
It’s just the algorithms promoting things I want banned.
You may choose to sign up to see all the toxic sludge you wish, as is our constitutional rights as Americans.
You say “they signal to the algorithm”, but how? How did they see it in the first place to be able to provide that signal? It was suggested to them.
Often because that kind of content is really sticky for the site. Whether because you like it or it outrages you or scares you it’s manipulative in a way that is symbiotic with the platform’s goals.
It provides perverse incentives for creators and companies.
> It’s just the algorithms promoting things I want banned.
And again: the only reason the algorithm promotes things is because that person signaled that they were interested in it. They might've gotten it recommended by a friend, acquaintance, whatever, but the point is that if nobody had recommended anything to them the algorithm would have no data.
And again: how do you propose to get this to survive the first amendment? Algorithms are a form of speech under law.
But that’s not how algorithms work. Start an account. You don’t have friends. It recommends stuff. And it can get weird fast.
You can watch a popular video on benign topic A and somehow that leads you to it being more likely to recommend extreme topic Q.
I’ll say it again: no algorithm. recommendations based on anything involving you are algorithmic.
If you follow a friend, and a friend shares a post, that’s not an algorithm picking what you see. It’s just a post like RSS. You can go choose to follow that new person to see more.
If I follow my friend Bob and his friend likes UFO conspiracies that shouldn’t lead to me seeing UFO conspiracy stuff unless Bob promotes it manually.
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By that logic no product regulation could ever exist because it restricts in some way the free expression of any corporation subject to it.
Obviously that's nonsense. Government bodies in the US are permitted to regulate the products traded on the market, at least within reason.
> the only reason the algorithm promotes things is because that person signaled that they were interested in it.
What point do you believe yourself to be making here? The only reason anyone shoots up heroin is because they want to. Or alternatively, someone can want a particular product without appreciating the toxic chemicals it happens to expose him to.
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> It’s just the algorithms promoting things I want banned
Then make a public case for prohibition. Currently, there isn’t support for it. There is for age gating social media the way we do drugs.
Presumably by outlawing the types of algorithms used with the legislation carefully limited to a particular context rather than anything being authored by an individual. Right to express oneself preserved, government regulates a harmful product, business as usual.
As far as this specific Colorado legislation goes (which is concerned with the ability to comply with their previously passed data privacy law) I think it's not entirely bad but I have two issues with it.
First, it reverses the problem. Services should be sending an age-appropriateness (or even just general content classification) signal to the device for local processing, not the other way around. If you're going to mandate that OS creators do anything it should be to implement a certain baseline level of (interoperable!) functionality as far as parental controls are concerned.
Second, the entire thing should be predicated on some metric such as MAU or revenue or combination thereof not on the exceedingly vague idea of a "free, publicly available code repository".
> First, it reverses the problem. Services should be sending an age-appropriateness (or even just general content classification) signal to the device for local processing, not the other way around.
OK, so say the device receives a signal that say that an app is not appropriate for children under 13. How would the device find out if the user trying to run the app is under 13?
The question itself (ie if the user is under 13) doesn't matter. Already for the current legislation there's nothing stopping the device owner from intentionally lying about the age. So really this entire exercise is about providing a standardized means of control over filtering, thus my observation that the proposed measure is both backwards and overly limited in scope.
The software on the device can do whatever it would like with the signal it receives, including consulting the user account metadata for declared age if the device owner so desires.
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I definitely agree with those. Age verification laws in general I have lots of beef with because they're so nonsensical.