The Anti-Intellectualism of Social Media Design
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T [email protected] shared this topic
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I feel enlightened now that you called out the self-reinforcing nature of the algorithms. It makes sense that an RL agent solving the bandits problem would create its own bubbles out of laziness.
Maybe we can take advantage of that laziness to incept critical thinking back into social media, or at least have it eat itself.
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Thanks!
I feel enlightened now that you called out the self-reinforcing nature of the algorithms. It makes sense that an RL agent solving the bandits problem would create its own bubbles out of laziness.
You're totally right that it's like a multi-armed bandit problem, but maybe with so many possibilities that searching is prohibitively expensive, since the space of options to search is much bigger than the rate that humans can consume content. In other ways, though, there's a dissimilarity because the agent's reward depends on its past choices (people watch more of what they're recommended). It would be really interesting to know if anyone has modeled a multi-armed bandit problem with this kind of self-dependency. I bet that, in that case, the exploration behavior is pretty chaotic. @[email protected] this seems like something you might just know off the top of your head!
Maybe we can take advantage of that laziness to incept critical thinking back into social media, or at least have it eat itself.
If you have any ideas for how to turn social media against itself, I'd love to hear them. I worked on this post unusually long for a lot of reasons, but one of them was trying to think of a counter strategy. I came up with nothing though!
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@[email protected] @[email protected] I have a lot to say on this subject but unfortunately do not have the time right now to write out anything worth reading! I will return perhaps tomorrow.
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As well as the algorithm, there are also structural things.
For example tweets limited to 160 characters favor simplistic solutions, which the far right provide. An endless stream of random unrelated nuggets of ideas create a fugue of confusion, perfect for injecting disinformation. Ruined attention spans can only grasp simplistic solutions. Video-based media means surface appearance matters more than substance. And so on.
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Yeah I really couldn't agree more. I really harped on the importance of other properties of the medium, like brevity, when I reviewed the book #HashtagActivism, and how those too are structurally right wing. There's a lot of scholars doing these kinds of network studies and imo they way too often emphasize user-user dynamics and de-emphasize, if not totally omit, the fact that all these interactions are heavily mediated. Just this week I watched a talk that I thought had many of these same problems.
