Re:Neal Stephenson Explains His Vision of the Digital Afterlife
by jdietrich on Saturday May 25, 2019 @07:11PM
(#20012075)
>How is this any different from turning our perception of what's real over to mechanical turk systems like newspapers and TV news?
Accountability. Someone is ultimately responsible for every newspaper article and every TV program. If a national newspaper decided to publish a piece of paid foreign propaganda, someone would have a lot of explaining to do, possibly in a court of law.
There's no such accountability for algorithmically-driven systems. It's not our fault that our platform keeps promoting propaganda, it's just a quirk of the algorithm; we don't really know why our algorithm is doing this and we're not going to let you review the source code.
I don't know what the possible solutions might be, but there's clearly a problem. Social media companies have largely abnegated responsibility for what goes on their platform and their platforms can't function without that abnegation of responsibility.
Accountability. Someone is ultimately responsible for every newspaper article and every TV program. If a national newspaper decided to publish a piece of paid foreign propaganda, someone would have a lot of explaining to do, possibly in a court of law.
There's no such accountability for algorithmically-driven systems. It's not our fault that our platform keeps promoting propaganda, it's just a quirk of the algorithm; we don't really know why our algorithm is doing this and we're not going to let you review the source code.
I don't know what the possible solutions might be, but there's clearly a problem. Social media companies have largely abnegated responsibility for what goes on their platform and their platforms can't function without that abnegation of responsibility.