Carl T. Bergstrom
This time in my course Calling Bullshit, we spent more time than ever before talking about AI, algorithms, etc.
Sadly, our final exam in my course it was last week. Otherwise, the first question would have been to discuss the highlighted claim below, "moderation is best implemented by algorithmic choice."
https://www.getrevue.co/profile/jackjack/issues/a-native-internet-protocol-for-social-media-1503112
Andrew Perfors
@ct_bergstrom You are exactly right: it's a complete mistake to assume that the only harms of speech are felt by people who see the speech.
What so many people don't get is even people who aren't on twitter or social media at all are affected by the stochastic terrorism it inspires and the misinfo it spreads. The people working at Boston Children's Hospital, which had to shut down because of terrorist threats provoked by the twitter account LibsOfTikTok, are a great example of the former; all of the people who died preventable deaths from covid are an example of the latter.
I remember when Elon took over twitter I tweeted about how terrible it would be, and people said I could just block a bunch and I'd be fine. But that wasn't the point: I wasn't worried about myself, I was worried about the integrity of the information system. See example tweet below.
Anyway, I wish I'd been wrong to worry :(
Carl T. Bergstrom
BUT, and it's a huge caveat, the ability to choose what I see is not the same thing as moderation. Dorsey makes the usual tech bro mistake of assuming that we can only be harmed by the speech that we see.
That's simply untrue. In my view, a healthy platform on which its members feel safe and allowed to flourish can't afford to host hate speech, period.
Telling Black Twitter, LGBTQ community, etc. etc. to simply filter out the bigots is a failure right off the bat.
Carl T. Bergstrom
I've been a strong proponent of this idea not only in platform design but also as a potential regulatory requirement for existing social media platforms.
I would love to see Facebook, Twitter, etc, opened up to the use of third-party algorithms instead of the platform default. Require this, and immediately big competitors all enter with their versions. The open source community follows. Small for-profits meet needs of niche markets. Etc.
Carl T. Bergstrom
I initially intended just to put this up as a sort of Rorschach exercise, but people keep asking my thoughts.
I think that Dorsey has got the right solution to the wrong problem.
By algorithmic choice, he seems to be referring to letting people individually choose the algorithms that control the content that they see. (And if I read what is below correctly, he's implicitly saying that his Twitter should have let you leave your feed in chronological mode.)
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