I do not believe this problem can be fixed, nor do the companies involved have the incentive to do so beyond whatever minimal amount is necessary for PR purposes.
The reductionist, reactionary mode of thinking now rears its head in my real-world interactions. I wouldn't care as much if people kept that stuff on these social platforms that I spend next to zero time on, but I can't help but roll my eyes when my friends speak in "hot takes" as if I'm handing out certificates for internet points.
A cryptographer once mentioned attacking the PGP WoT by uploading a shadow WoT that has different keys with the same emails/names and signing-graph structure. Similar to what you note-- the real problems come when some bona fide WoT user fucks up and accidentally signs a key from the shadow graph. Even if it's just a single accidental signature before the shadow WoT is spotted and cleaned up, the admin would probably want to quickly go out of band to actually fix the original WoT at that point-- otherwise perhaps the shadow admin got to the user first. :)
(And of course if the shadow graph were uploaded incrementally over a wider period of time, the problems probably become a bigger pain in the ass.)
The problem you mention is in the same category. But rather than being hypothetical, it is real and probably as bad an instance as someone could design given current technology. To make the WoT attack above comparable, I'm imagining a Debian user accidentally signing a shadow key, then receiving messages from that key that convince them Debian keyring is in fact the shadow key ring and they should use their permissions to destroy Debian.
Edit: and I guess in keeping with the analogy, the purpose of the propaganda emails is to generate as much outrage in the recipient as possible, so that they may spend more time reading the entire email on the off chance they also spend one or two seconds extra looking at the ad in the email signature about a special on a nice pair of designer pants.
This is actually what’s happening with the partitioning of the information streams in the US. Even if everyone had identical brains, everyone operates on partial information of the world. If you provide left wing material to one group, and right wing material to the other group, they’ll polarize exactly as you’d expect, even being identical people existing in the same world.
The problem isn’t balanced across the political spectrum, though - it just so happens that the right wing has a faultier take on reality than the left wing, but there’s no reason that couldn’t flip in the near future.
Now, however, the perceived social benefit of those same takes is huge, as they can go viral online and rack up major internet points. This translates to real life interactions. Those relationships we would have preferred to maintain by keeping our mouths shut are now under attack because we inadvertently use our internet takes IRL.
(Just a hypothesis…)
These companies are just trying to increase their engagement metrics, like how long users are on the site, or how many ads they see on average. This was true before they started using ML, but maybe less obvious. What these companies found was that human nature, in general, gets addicted to outrage and gossip. They are just supplying that to us.
It's not very different than tobacco companies. They found an addictive substance, that is not good for us, and are trying to get it out as much as possible. The problem is people 'want' this product, despite its negative effects.
That's why these companies can't fix their product. It's like asking "How can we make tobacco healthy?". We can't.
Taken together, it results in a lot of negative externalities that get ignored at every level.
The algorithmic approach to the feed reminds me a model I work every day with: human perception.
Because there is an "algorithm" put between sensory perception and perception/awareness - and because the signal is highly processed - aaand the way processing is done is not available to our conscious awareness - you get all kinds of strange behaviours.
Where you cannot control how stimuli are processed and perception formed, you are for all intents and purposes manipulated, or at least denied control.
Unfortunately, any SM algo has to fit the same purpose - alter our perceptions and influence our behaviours. Guess I should delete my FB now...
This is interesting. Because if you have joy, you might be like "maybe I should just put this FB down and continue enjoying my life." But if something angers you, it activates you to stay on and hold on, instead of taking it easy which can lead to logging off.
The web has a platform diversity problem.
I don't think so. I think most harms of social media can be traced to how the people who actually pay for or make money off the service perceive value.
The common rhetoric that "harmful messages which trigger engagement are amplified by social media algorithms" is probably correct, but to think this is anything close to the root cause of the spread of "harmful ideas" on social media is ignoring the reality of social networks before algorithmic feeds.
Notably, the most popular current examples of places where harmful ideas are spread (4chan, Gab, Parler, ...) are platorms that eschew algorithmic curation entirely. I don't believe hyperlinks to those platforms are being promoted by the mainstream platforms' algorithmic feeds, people find these places by themselves.
Social media can be harmful mostly because it facilitates mob mentality once again. Centralized idea distribution platforms (newspapers, television) gave society a rest from undesired mob mentality, but now we have more freedom of association than ever. I suspect the best way to avoid it is to add more artificial curation in between human interactions, not less.
[1] suketk.com/feeds-considered-harmful
If one of the harms you're thinking of is spreading misinformation, we saw that before filtered feeds (email forwards) and we still see it with chat. In places where group chat is the primary form of social media you see this problem just as with FB in the US.
An argument like yours is the same argument used against wearing masks: “yeah, but it’s not 100% effective!”
I haven't heard anyone express a liking for the FB feed algorithm but I remember a commentator mentioning that FB beat all the other social networks of the time because it turned the noise down tremendously. You weren't bombarded by that those people who posted once an hour and that was big for the average user.
People just decide to be bad sometimes. The perfect feed algorithm doesn't exist.
Worse than that voting mechanisms reward bad behavior. They discourage replies for fear of lost karma and as a convenience to those can’t be bothered to use words whether for cowardice or ignorance.
My suspicion is that FB and Twitter are actually tuning their algorithms to dampen anger nowadays--I'm almost certain Youtube is (with terrific results).
I see reddit as a window into what algorithm-free social media looks like. It's not pretty. And reddit is one of the biggest sites, bigger than twitter IIRC. It's not a good influence on society.
I actually wish journalists would freak out a little less about Facebook/Youtube's problems and turn a bit more firepower on reddit.