Comment by MBCook
4 days ago
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.
Okay, so let's say we decide to go through with "banning the algorithm" (whatever that is). Let's say this is actually implemented, as naively as everybody seems to think this issue is. What happens to:
* The homepage of Reddit * The YouTube homepage * The federated timeline of my Mastodon instance * The algorithmic feed that Bluesky uses (which is more customizable than Facebooks)
I could sit here and go on and on. All of these, in one way or another, are algorithmic, in the strict definition of an algorithm. So, are you also saying that the federated timeline of my Mastodon instance shouldn't exist? I mean, in a sense, that's an "algorithmic feed". How am I supposed to find interesting users who I should follow then? By word of Mouth? Because that's not going to work. By forums or awesome lists? Now you've just created yet another kind of echo chamber because what I find depends on what forums or awesome lists I frequent, and that leads to me only seeing what I want to see. Which... Doesn't really solve the root problem that "banning the algorithm" would try to solve. If anything, it makes it worse. Instead of everyone being able to look at alternate viewpoints/ideas, they are suddenly restricted to only those viewpoints/ideas which they want to see/read/hear/whatever. In something like Email that's fine: I only want to see emails for mailing lists and such I've subscribed to for example. On something that is supposed to be a social network, federated or no, that... Kind of destroys the "social network" part.
Like maybe I'm just misunderstanding what everybody means when they talk about "banning the algorithm" and "getting rid of the toxic sludge" but the law (the first amendment) prohibits viewpoint discrimination. Being "content neutral" isn't possible (everything is biased in some manner). So I guess what trips me up is: how exactly would you word the law and thread the needle fine enough that you would only ban the kind of feeds Facebook uses for example, without also causing a ton of second, third, fourth, and maybe even fifth-order effects far beyond what anybody intended to do? And how do you do that without violating the first amendment in the process? Maybe I'm missing something critical here or something, but from all the studies I've looked at that indicate that screen time and such is not actually as harmful as the narrative would like you to think, this looks to me like a solution in search of a problem, and a solution that would have consequences that people haven't thought about.
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.
> By that logic no product regulation could ever exist because it restricts in some way the free expression of any corporation subject to it.
Except that this is case law, not something I'm pulling out of my ass. See Moody v. NetChoice, LLC, 603 U.S. ___ (2024), in which the court ruled that compiling and curating user-generated content into "a distinctive expressive offering" is protected editorial discretion, and that "the First Amendment offers protection when an entity engaging in expressive activity, including compiling and curating others' speech, is directed to accommodate messages it would prefer to exclude." The court did not rule on whether the same First Amendment protection extends to personalized curation decisions made algorithmically solely based on user behavior online without any reference to a site's own standards or guidelines. However, we cannot definitively say that the algorithms Facebook and co. use are not making decisions based on standards or guidelines of some kind, whether those be the community guidelines FB publishes or something else, because we don't know how they work internally, and they very well could be AI-driven with community guidelines in the prompt or something. Or they could be generic off-the-shelf recommender algorithms. Or something totally different. This bit TikTok in Anderson v. TikTok, where the third circuit court ruled that TikTok's "for you" feed was first-party expression and therefore not shielded by section 230, which is itself a massively misunderstood law of it's own.
Literally the only thing I am trying to illustrate is that "ban all the algorithmic feeds" is not as easy as you suggest, and the definitive research proving that they are harmful has yet to actually be found when meta-analysis is conducted[0][1]. The (far more) harmful thing is these platforms extremely lax moderation. Granted, moderation is impossible to truly do competently at scale, but still.
[0]: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/18/yet-another-massive-stud... (this one links to 6 other studies)
[1]: https://www.techdirt.com/2026/01/21/two-major-studies-125000...
2 replies →
> 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.