191–200 of 204 posts
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Banning an app because it's controlled by a person or persons with ideas you don't like.
The CCP is more than "a person". The CCP is an adversarial government with a strong incentive to weaken the US. Talking about the CCP as if it were just some people with different ideas is not a good faith argument.
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Banning an app because it's controlled by a person or persons with ideas you don't like.
The CCP is more than "a person". The CCP is an adversarial government with a strong incentive to weaken the US. Talking about the CCP as if it were just some people with different ideas is not a good faith argument.
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This seems like pedantry with no purpose, if my boss asked me to create an algorithm that recommended content I'm certain that they would absolutely not mean a list of chronologically ordered content. Do I really need to specificity that I'm talking about algorithms that recommend content using algorithmically presumed user interests based on aggregated behavior data?
So, recommending content in any of all possible ways is harmful? Or are there some ways that are not harmful (eg filtering out things relating to suicide)? It's not pedantry without purpose. The logical conclusion to algorithms are bad is the outlawing of all social media and news sites.
> When she opened the TikTok app on his iPad, she found a library of more than 3,000 videos her son had bookmarked, liked, saved or tagged as a favorite. She could see the terms he’d searched for: Batman, basketball, weightlifting, motivational speeches. And she could see what the algorithm had brought him: many videos about depression, hopelessness and death. Horrific.
The algorithm doesn’t work only on searches. Or even mostly. It is largely based on engagement. Which videos do you actually watch and comment on. Almost nothing I search for is on my FYP. My FYP is almost all pranks, basketball, dancing in public, and Harry Mack. I have noticed that if I watch a video all the way through I will get more of those videos pretty quickly. If this kid watched a depression video all the w…
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The algorithm doesn’t work only on searches. Or even mostly. It is largely based on engagement. Which videos do you actually watch and comment on. Almost nothing I search for is on my FYP. My FYP is almost all pranks, basketball, dancing in public, and Harry Mack. I have noticed that if I watch a video all the way through I will get more of those videos pretty quickly. If this kid watched a depression video all the w…
Regardless, 'Motivational speeches' shows he was trying to help himself and I find that horrific. (didn't downvote you though, I understand your point)
Although TikTok should do better to demote these kinds of videos, I can't buy the conspiracy theory that this is done intentionally. Anyone who knows a bit about recommendation systems can understand that watching depressing videos will get you more in your feed. Collaborative filtering with i.e watch time as a signal will lead someone who watches them to more.
They have an algorithm that chooses what videos to show you based on types of videos you view. I'm not sure how that doesn't qualify as intentional.
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I'm amazed at how people will happily (enough) coalesce into two parties and align their views accordingly. Maybe it's just an exercise in dimensionality reduction.
It's hard to get anything done without a majority coalition. The two party system endures due to quirks of our election design that the two parties themselves are both very happy to keep in place (any change to elections that would make 3rd parties viable would cause the two current parties to lose some power).
Winner-takes-all popular elections have proven to be naive, but I wouldn't say it's a quirk. It's probably the first election format you'd try.
My point wasn't that you need a coalition as much as that people will change their views to align with their coalition.
Although TikTok should do better to demote these kinds of videos, I can't buy the conspiracy theory that this is done intentionally. Anyone who knows a bit about recommendation systems can understand that watching depressing videos will get you more in your feed. Collaborative filtering with i.e watch time as a signal will lead someone who watches them to more.
Considering the Chinese version doesn't even allow the types of content that is most promoted on the US system, and is generally positive messaging.
And Chinese filters can't be applied to the world wide version because they won't be able to compete with other addictive social media.
I still don't get how TikTok (and other "feed"-based social media) isn't regulated more strongly. We don't allow 12 year olds to buy cigarettes because they're harmful and addictive. These apps are no different, they just don't cause obvious physical diseases like lung cancer. It's clearly designed to entrap users in to addiction, but as a society we're still cool with it and it blows my mind.
We didn't have a federal law in the US for age restriction on tobacco until the 90s. As far as I can tell tobacco wasn't regulated at all until after the cigarette roller was invented (1881) and tobacco was pushed onto society in massive quantities. Even then it took 2 years for a single state to pass age restrictions on cigarettes and it wasn't until 1939 that all states had a law. Some states even removed the law b…
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Think about it a bit more clearly. Douyin in china might be entirely different than the douyin you see when you check it out with a western ip. By checking douyin.com from my device, my ip and my advertising fingerprint, I cannot have any clue how douyin behaves if I download it from a chinese phone, in china.
I clearly state that possibility in my comment and explain why I think it's unlikely. The base claim was that ByteDance was pushing sexualised content on TikTok while policing it on Douyin. This makes zero sense given that TikTok's web content was sanitised. Douyin being awash with sexualised content implies an audience for that content in China, further weakening the argument that this is some sort of targeted attac…