I don't understand the comments suggesting this is "guilty by proxy". These platforms have algorithms designed to keep you engaged and through their callousness, have allowed extremist content to remain visible.
Are we going to ignore all the anti-vaxxer groups who fueled vaccine hesitancy which resulted in long dead diseases making a resurgence?
To call Facebook anything less than complicit in the rise of extremist ideologies and conspiratorial beliefs, is extremely short-sighted.
"But Freedom of Speech!"
If that speech causes harm like convincing a teenager walking into a grocery store and gunning people down is a good idea, you don't deserve to have that speech. Sorry, you've violated the social contract and those people's blood is on your hands.
YouTube will actually take action and has done in most instances. I won't say they're the fastest but they do kick people off the platform if they deem them high risk.
This may seem baseless, but I have seen this from years of experience in online forums. You don’t have to take it seriously, but maybe you can relate. We have seen time and time again that if there is no moderation then the shit floats to the top. The reason being that when people can’t post something creative or fun, but they still want the attention, they will post negative. It’s the loud minority, but it’s a very dedicated loud minority. Let’s say we have 5 people and 4 of them are very creative time and funny, but 1 of them complains all the time. If they make posts to the same community then there is a very good chance that the one negative person will make a lot more posts than the 4 creative types.
Not just “remain visible” - actively promoted. There’s a reason people talk about Youtube’s right-wing content pipeline. If you start watching anything male-oriented, Youtube will start slowly promoting more and more right-wing content to you until you’re watching Ben Shaprio and Andrew Tate
YouTube is really bad about trying to show you right wing crap. It’s overwhelming. The shorts are even worse. Every few minutes there’s some new suggestion for some stuff that is way out of the norm.
Tiktok doesn’t have this problem and is being attacked by politicians?
I got into painting mini Warhammer 40k figurines during covid, and thought the lore was pretty interesting.
Every time I watch a video, my suggested feed goes from videos related to my hobbies to entirely replaced with red pill garbage. The right wing channels have to be highly profitable to YouTube to funnel people into, just an endless tornado of rage and constant viewing.
The algorithm is, after all, optimized for nothing other than advertisements/time period. So long as the algorithm believes that a video suggestion will keep you on the website for a minute more, it will suggest it. I occasionally wonder about the implications of one topic leading to another. Is WH40k suggested the pipeline by demographics alone or more?
Irritation at suggestions was actually what originally led me to invidious. I just wanted to watch a speech without hitting the “____ GETS DUNKED ON LIKE A TINY LITTLE BITCH” zone. Fuck me for trying to verify information.
One thing to consider is that conservatives are likely paying for progressives to see their content, and geeks tend to have liberal views and follow the harm principle without many conditions.
Otherwise, it really shows the demographics of the people who play Warhammer. Before my sister transitioned, she played Warhammer and was a socialist but had a lot of really wehraboo interests. She has been talking about getting back into it, but she passes really well and imagines how it would go with the neckbeards.
If that speech causes harm like convincing a teenager walking into a grocery store and gunning people down is a good idea, you don’t deserve to have that speech.
In Germany we have a very good rule for this(its not written down, but that’s something you can usually count onto). Your freedom ends, where it violates the freedom of others. Examples for this: Everyone has the right to live a healthy life and everyone has the right to walk wherever you want. If I now take my right to walk wherever to want to cause a car accident with people getting hurt(and it was only my fault). My freedom violated the right that the person who has been hurt to life a healthy life. That’s not freedom.
In Canada, they have an idea called “right to peace”. It means that you can’t stand outside of an abortion clinic and scream at people because your right to free speech doesn’t exceed that person’s right to peace.
I don’t know if that’s 100% how it works so someone can sort me out, but I kind of liked that idea
As much as I believe it is a breeding ground for right wing extremism, it’s a little strange that 4chan is being lumped in with these other sites for a suit like this. As far as I know, 4chan just promotes topics based on the number of people posting to it, and otherwise doesn’t employ an algorithm at all. Kind of a different beast to the others, who have active algorithms trying to drive engagement at any cost.
I will testify under oath with evidence that Reddit, the company, has not only turned a blind eye to but also encouraged and intentfully enabled radicalization on their platform. It is the entire reason I am on Lemmy. It is the entire reason for my username. It is the reason I questioned my allyship with certain marginalized communities. It is the reason I tense up at the mention of turtles.
Since media (that you define by the trophes of unsubtantiated news outlets) couldnt sensibly refer to a forum like reddit or even facebook, this makes no sense.
Honestly, good, they should be held accountable and I hope they will be. They shouldn’t be offering extremist content recommendations in the first place.
I think there’s definitely a case to be made that recommendation algorithms, etc. constitute editorial control and thus the platform may not be immune to lawsuits based on user posts.
Back when I was on reddit, I subscribed to about 120 subreddits. Starting a couple years ago though, I noticed that my front page really only showed content for 15-20 subreddits at a time and it was heavily weighted towards recent visits and interactions.
For example, if I hadn’t visited r/3DPrinting in a couple weeks, it slowly faded from my front page until it disappeared all together. It was so bad that I ended up writing a browser automation script to visit all 120 of my subreddits at night and click the top link. This ended up giving me a more balanced front page that mixed in all of my subreddits and interests.
My point is these algorithms are fucking toxic. They’re focused 100% on increasing time on page and interaction with zero consideration for side effects. I would love to see social media algorithms required by law to be open source. We have a public interest in knowing how we’re being manipulated.
Yeah, social media algorithms are doing a lot of damage. I wish there was more general awareness of this. Based on personal experience, I think many people actually like being fed relevant content, and are blind to the consequences. I think Lemmy is great, because you have to curate your own feed, but many people would never use it for that very reason. I don’t know what the solution is.
I used google news phone widget years ago and clicked on a giant asteroid article, and for whatever reason my entire feed became asteroid/meteor articles. Its also just such a dumb way to populate feeds.
I agree. It’s important to remember the only “conspiracy” is making money and keeping people on the platform. That said, it will cause people to go down rabbit holes. The solution isn’t as simple as “show people content they disagree with” because they either ignore it or it creates another rabbit hole. For example, it would mean that progressives start getting bombarded with Tim Pool videos. I don’t believe Tim is intentionally “alt right” but that’s exactly why his videos are the most dangerous. They consist of nothing but conservative rage bait with a veneer of progressiveness that allows his viewers to believe they aren’t being manipulated.
I just would like to show something about Reddit. Below is a post I made about how Reddit was literally harassing and specifically targeting me, after I let slip in a comment one day that I was sober - I had previously never made such a comment because my sobriety journey was personal, and I never wanted to define myself or pigeonhole myself as a “recovering person”.
I reported the recommended subs and ads to Reddit Admins multiple times and was told there was nothing they could do about it.
I posted a screenshot to DangerousDesign and it flew up to like 5K+ votes in like 30 minutes before admins removed it. I later reposted it to AssholeDesign where it nestled into 2K+ votes before shadow-vanishing.
Yes, Reddit and similar are definitely responsible for a lot of suffering and pain at the expense of humans in the pursuit of profit. After it blew up and front-paged, “magically” my home page didn’t have booze related ads/subs/recs any more! What a totally mystery how that happened /s
The post in question, and a perfect “outing” of how Reddit continually tracks and tailors the User Experience specifically to exploit human frailty for their own gains.
Edit: Oh and the hilarious part that many people won’t let go (when shown this) is that it says it’s based on my activity in the Drunk reddit which I had never once been to, commented in, posted in, or was even aware of. So that just makes it worse.
Yeah this happens a lot more than people think. I used to work at a hotel, and when the large sobriety group got together yearly, they changed bar hours from the normal hours, to as close to 24/7 as they could legally get. They also raised the prices on alcohol.
So now anyone who says things is going to be held accountable for crazy people being crazy?
What a lovely world we live in. That’s worse than what CNN kept saying about the joker after that one mass shooting at the theater that happened to be showing “The Dark Knight” at the same time.
So now anyone who says things is going to be held accountable for crazy people being crazy
Nope, that’s just you being melodramatic. The judge has acknowledged there is grounds for the case to be argued so it won’t he dismissed. That’s all. They haven’t been found guilty of anything. They’re not being lined up and shot.
What would you prefer we did to determine if a company is culpable? Just ask you because you read a headline?
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