kefka_p

Seems like many are just feigning lack of awareness, imo. Casual observation shows a pattern of looking the other way when bad things are happening to people they don’t like.

Car rental agencies and airlines come to mind as well. I was almost unable to purchase a ticket for my better half after we got married as we were slow to process paperwork for name changes on our credit cards. We were able to clear the matter up, with some effort, but …

Trash mods really do hurt that place. I reported a physical assault, some punk kid with an airsoft taking potshots at pedestrians, to my local sub to warn others. Turned out the guy had been at it for weeks all over town.

Three months later, somebody didn’t like a political comment I made, went through my history, reported that earlier post, and voila. Banned for threatening violence because I warned people about a criminal’s behavior. Heh.

Not just silos, going through the Dakotas and Missouri put it fairly close to Ellsworth and Whiteman, as well.

That was a poor edit on my part. My apologies.

What I meant to say was the assertion that occasionally recommending YoungTurks somehow mitigates the right-leaning bias of the site, as suggested with the statement “then it's not really a significant force in this area” is false. The site has a demonstrable rightwing bias.

Elections can and are decided by a few thousand or few hundred votes in battlegrounds. As such, the argument that it’s of negligible effect rings false to me.

I don’t need to reword the findings to make them support my assertion.

Again those findings: “We also find that, *on average*, the YouTube recommendation algorithm pulls users slightly to the right of the political spectrum”.

The whole “on average” nullifies the notion that occasionally recommending Young Turks to kids watching Anime once in a while somehow makes up for the fact that they push OANN or Newsmax even harder. That’s like saying I took one step forward so you should ignore the two steps I took backward.

Also you are ignoring the implications further down the line. If YouTube pulls neutral to the right, then it likely pushes those already right even further in that direction.

Are you familiar with the concept of network effect?

> So the indoctrination isn’t obvious? So it’s subtle? That makes it more pernicious, in my eyes.

>> No, that is not what the study found

“In my eyes” isn’t analogous to “that’s what the study found”, FYI.

“Pulls users slightly to the right”

So the indoctrination isn’t obvious? So it’s subtle? That makes it more pernicious, in my eyes.

I never said anything about a vast majority. To indoctrinate doesn’t mean convert an entire population, or even a percentage thereof. On the contrary, it refers to a process of teaching a person or group (of any size) to accept a set of beliefs uncritically. It doesn’t specify what degree of beliefs have to change, nor how rapidly, or severely.

YT recommends Fox, Shapiro, et al to kids watching anime, to adults whose sole interests are cat videos and programming tutorials. A bit different than a librarian suggesting books one might like.

And what happens if the librarian sees I’ve been checking out the likes of Mein Kampf, and makes recommendations based on that? Does indoctrination through multiple channels cancel itself out, or some? I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make there but it sounds a lot like “bad things can happen in other places so it’s acceptable if YouTube does bad things too.

One should consider the effect on those already radicalized in addition to the indoctrination of the non-radicalized when seeking to understand the political ramifications of such bias in algorithms. It’s not like they exist in a vacuum, after all.

edit: Add to that, on the topic of librarians, the decentralized nature of libraries and librarians ensures any effect of a single librarian will be limited to a local area. Don’t think we can say the same for YouTube algorithms.

The number of man hours that would be necessary to plausibly fake even a short film in Photoshop, if I had to guess. It strikes me as analogous to owning sidearms versus BMGs and rocket launchers. One of these tools makes doing bad things far easier.

Another analogy. Say somebody makes some hacking kit. Say it uses zero day exploits to compromise Windows, Mac, and Linux. Would any of us take issue with that? Would it be a different story if it was made into a push-button tool like WinNuke was in the 1990s? Or automated to the extent that somebody who can make a word doc could employ it against your systems? Is there really no feasible line of distinction here, in your eyes?

Whoa, whoa, I never claimed the technology was the “debil”. I merely asked for examples of viable, moral, unique uses of this tech.

I’ve only had time for a cursory glance at this writing, but let me thank you for sounding the horn on the on Web 3.0. It was bad enough adding Ajax calls to websites and calling it Web 2.0. At least that had something to do with http, ECMA script, html, and web-related tech.

#2 sounds really interesting! I’m not sure of the psychological ramifications, but I can’t imagine they’d be different than any other sort of prosthesis save for an inability to actually touch it.

I could see it being used in AR to conceal identity to facilitate more equitable medical outcomes, I suppose.

Thank you again for the input! I was honestly at a loss for positive applications outside of financial gain.

I haven’t seen any ads driven by deepfake, or at least I don’t think I have. That advertising bit does sound rather obnoxious though!

That is pretty neat, any sort of art does add cultural and social utility to a degree. Thanks for the heads up, because just about every mention I’ve seen published on the topic is more or less a horror story. I wasn’t being facetious in my query. Thanks again for the input!