The first thing we'd probably do with cuttlefish suits anyways is stick ads all over them. Then the company that makes them would get acquired
Of course it will be abused, and it will be abused from the outset. The powers that be already define hate speech vs dissent, propaganda vs news, terrorists vs. freedom fighters, scientism vs science, et cetera.
Big Tech and Western governments together control of the flow of information. Previously, the blue-flavored regime held that control and abused it terribly. Now, the red-flavored regime has it, and people are finally noticing. God help us if people far, far worse gain that control in the future and start defining what is unacceptable speech.
This is an easy target. Whenever you get that argument you go all: "it's a bit unsettling that you find censor-happy human-out-of-the-loop algorimhms good, but I thank you for you honesty."
Then you recall that you are a programmer: "you know what, I should definitely program an algorithm that censors all positive talk about censor-happy human-out-of-the-loop algorithms. Thanks for the idea."
The corollary is 30 ton tractor trailer changing lanes on the highway, and concluding that there's no traffic because it would prefer not to see it.
Censoring the rear view mirrors is a bad idea no matter how much you hate what you see in them.
Facebook was an effective rear view mirror, for a whole lot of us. The more savvy among us could see the storm clouds gathering on the horizon literally almost since the beginning , but certainly by late 2014/early 2015 it was plainly obvious that psyops were afoot, though even to a lot of plugged in hackernews type people the full-blown industrial scale of it all wasn't immediately obvious.
That's whats so insidious. It's the model. It's the first person perspective that facebook locks you into. It looks like reality, and it contains people you know, but it is not real.
You don't really know who wrote what, who liked what, etc. There's no global view of facebook for a user. I think that's the problem.
The first person view that you're locked into with facebook, makes it trivial to manufacture the appearance of group consensus when no such thing exists in the real world (if you have access to the backend).
The problem really is facebook, not the concept of social media all together. The problem is also that Facebook knew what it was doing. They were building a political doomsday machine from the get-go, they knew that's what they were doing, and they designed specifically to that goal for a decade with practically limitless funding.
Perhaps was my comment too hypothetical? :]
Thankfully, this sort of thing is exactly what the Internet was designed for ..
Senator Grassley also said yesterday at the very end of the Zuckerberg hearing that he hopes someone with Zuck's influence and other such platforms would do something to "reduce the cynicism people have towards Congress."
That sounded pretty scary. I get that the mainstream media (and more recently Facebook propaganda, but this is definitely a much older issue) is partly to blame for polarizing America, but asking companies to actively try to influence how people think about their governments sounds like the wrong direction to take to me. I also don't think it's any better than say Fox News trying to polarize people.
https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/meetings/facebook-social-me...
This is what many don't understand, or don't want to understand, this is why some big players are pissed at Facebook, very very pissed.
She was supposed to win, they had to help her win.
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/56638#efmAAGAA2...
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/19070
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/15092
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From:[email protected] To: [email protected] Date: 2016-01-02 22:07 Subject: RE: Happy New Year
I am thrilled at the progress Hillary is making.
[...]
2015 was challenging, but we ended in a good place thanks to your help and support.
Look forward to working with you to elect the first woman President of the United States.
Have a great New Year.
-John
I was hoping that when they started realizing the potential, they'd feel threatened and require it to cease working that way. Instead they all run PR campaigns on social media, and they probably collect data on their voters too if they can. It's just too disgusting to bear. Not just the US either, this is happening all across Europe.
At first I stopped in from time to time to get my outrage on (I never interact with them, just read) and to feel smug that I am intellectually superior to them and their followers.
But then I realized that if way back, at the very beginning of your thought process you start from a false premise, everything else can follow reasonable and logical methods. It's almost like chaos theory, small differences in the starting position can have vastly outsized differences at the end.
I've used this experience to go back and look at my "starting" positions. And I've horrified myself too. So on the whole it's been an enlightening experience.
So now I can say that I am firmly on my way to understanding them now (and myself too) even though I diagram with them vehemently.
I don't use Facebook much, but if I did, I would want to be able to tell the algorithm "take 50% of what you want to show me based on my preferences and show me the exact opposite"
The problem is that your definition of bullshit might be different than mine, so any filter you come up with will have issues.
If you think you've got yourself into a situation where you're immune to the filter bubble, that just means you've created one so comfortable that you never get prodded by anything.
I personally think you are in for a very rude awakening. This is exactly what people are trying not to do with Machine Learning. It is always, almost, about profiling you, about finding out who you are in order to offer you what you already know, to limit your horizon, to "tailor" your "experience" and the span of possibilities.
As a very technical fellow told me: "when you read three political news in a row we set a badge, you are now politically minded."
This, sadly, doesn't fit your yearning for us growing "beyond changing ourselves to fit the algorithm."
My prediction is that it will get worst before it gets any better at all.