> Text classification is a thing, and there are many other techniques, so it seems possible to recognize political content with some reasonable level of accuracy and show me a lot less of that.
I think you severely underestimate what constitutes classifying something as political.
You are over-thinking this. Just filtering obvious political stuff would be a massive help:
- Mentions of politicians
- Key words: Liberal, Conservative, Right-wing, etc etc
- Material re-shared from political parties/ candidates/ movements.
Just that would be a giant help. Allowing users to set their own filters would be a massive help.
None of this makes Facebook money though so it won't happen.
These organizations will strip normal news of any political connotations which is frightening because the news, although mostly a pile of noise today, is supposed to have signals to keep democracies in line by design.
Another is organisations will keep the same content (as this is what drives clicks and profitability), however change the language used to describe it.
I would say this outcome is worse, as it leads to things like newspeak, muddying of definitions, and an increase in accusations of dogwhistling (accurate or otherwise). We may already be on this path, but it would be accelerated.
If you disagree with that definition of political connotation, how do you define political connotations?
If politicians are doing things that stress you out or make you angry, would you really be better off staying uninformed? I'm not saying that Facebook is a good way to accomplish that, just that it's worth considering before you ask for technology to seal yourself off from political news altogether.
TBC, these are my personal opinions and how you view and use social media could be different. It's clearly not for me anymore.
- Me riding bikes with my friends - Not politics.
- My friend turning 50 - Not politics.
- Organizing a game night - Not politics.
- My buddy getting a new car - Not politics.
- A friend getting engaged - Not politics.
etc etc etc...
There are million things in the world which are not politics. The whole reason I used to go to Facebook was to hang out virtually with my friends and keep up with what they are doing. Unless they are actually going to a political rally, that's not politics. And if they are, I care about that too because they are doing it.
The big problem with Facebook is at some point everyone collectively decided it is their own personal soapbox so now it's filled with everyone standing on their little podiums shouting their opinions about everything from facemasks to whether it's ok to shoot people in the back.
> I have come to peace that I'll text my friends directly and that's it. Once a month or so I log on to facebook and comment on personal updates.
This is exactly what I do, because when you text people directly they are thinking of you as you, not as their own personal soapbox.
What about new terms like kraken ?
In case of online content moderation think in terms of signal/noise and context.
The same thing is benign or malicious based on the context It finds itself in.
Your filter list assumes a static context - your particular imagining of context in this case.
Obviously What’s noise for you is signal/hurtful to someone else.
Run this over N sub groups of subscribers and you have an impossible problem.
Political candidates also share names with other people. Name based filtering can silence unrelated people. See how well our no fly lists are at targeting people who just happen to have the wrong name.
For every problem, there is a simple solution that is wrong. Getting things right is often not simple.
> For every problem, there is a simple solution that is wrong.
As with most flippant axioms and generalities this catch-phrase is quite often just wrong. Often there are simple solutions that are just fine.
I used Facebook Purity for quite a while and set up simple keyword based filters and while they weren't perfect, it was a lot better than the default feed.
This is pretty much a solved problem, and it actually is pretty simple: http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html
Is LGBT political? Is support for immigration political. Is climate change political? Is COVID-19 political?
Trying to be impartial here is a fool's game.
There are important issues, absolutely. But my personal relationships with other humans are not based on their hot takes on those issues.
I would just prefer an option where I only saw content my friends actually took the time to post themselves. I don't want politics, memes, or other trendy bullshit, just their words, pictures, or even links they personally took the time to clip and paste. If I want news or entertainment, I can find that myself, but Facebook is currently the single best place for me to connect to a bunch of my friends and I'd love to see that without all the other bullshit.
Of course that's not what makes FB money so it'll never happen, which is why I just stopped using it entirely. (Well that plus the fact that it's run by a bunch of sociopaths)
I was working on a script to hide shared posts, but it broke after the last update. Maybe I need to fix it and publish it as a browser extension?
This sounds way to time consuming to me for way too little reward.
For people who just share too much, besides the nuclear option or unfriending or unfollowing, I like the 30 day mute.
A lot of people like to use Facebook as a political soapbox. That's not what I want out of it. I want to stay connected to people, hear updates, socialize, etc.
Some people push it so far that the solution of unfriending them is easy. But not everybody is so egregious that I want the nuclear option. (For example, relatives who are vocal about politics.)
Text classification is a thing, and there are many other techniques, so it seems possible to recognize political content with some reasonable level of accuracy and show me a lot less of that.
Maybe this would even go beyond making my own feed better. If enough people feel the same, maybe it would cut down on the audience size and reduce people's temptation to get on a soapbox.