Re:YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking al...
by swader999 on Wednesday September 29, 2021 @12:11PM
(#28695710)
All your points are true but they don't lead to the conclusion that censorship is the answer. The problem is the attention algorithms create an echo chamber with little room for distasteful alternatives. The quack content is on page 1 getting all the money from anyone on a particular rabbit hole. There shouldn't be this rabbit hole, the quack content should always be on page 12. And in the earlier days of Google before the heavy focus on personalisation, this is the way it worked.
Re:YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking al...
by colechristensen on Wednesday September 29, 2021 @06:05PM
(#28700594)
>the quack content should always be on page 12.
The problem is that the content is engineered to take advantage of humans and google and becomes the thing on the first page. You might be yearning for the old days of less effective SEO. It's a hard problem how to moderate away though algorithm design or manual intervention things which pull on the strings of human weaknesses.
Is an algorithm designed to de-prioritize content you don't like any better than a human selecting content for removal?
Content distributors are then on a knife edge with moderation, and how to moderate fairly is incredibly difficult. Youtube doesn’t want to be the vaccine conspiracy clearing house so at some point they decided to just ban it all. Making money from peoples attention brings this problem and moralizing won’t make it go away.