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Nearly a third of social media research has undisclosed ties to industry

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Re: Nearly a third of social media research has undisclosed ties to industry

#71

Post by dathinab »

rr808 wrote: post #49
everdrive wrote: post #34

Social media itself is a grand experiment. What happens if you start connecting people from disparate communities, and then prioritize for outrage and emotionalism? In years prior, you would be heavily shaped by the people you lived near. TV and internet broke this down somewhat, but social media really blew the doors off. Now it's the case that almost no one seems to be able to explain all the woes we're facing toda…

Its interesting that TV is regulated. You can't put certain content on there and I'm sure the governments can ultimately control things. Now todays eyeballs are controlled by Meta and TikTok and I dont really trust them at all - they have too much unchecked power.

> interesting that TV is regulated

soso, it's mostly that freely accessible channels need their content to be in a certain ~PG/age protection range (and in many countries that also changes depending on the time of the day, not sure about the US)

beyond that the constitution disallows any further regulation of actual content

through that doesn't mean that they can't apply subtle pressure indirectly.

Is that legal? no.

Anyway done for years? yes.

But mostly subtle not forced, i.e. let's say you give "suggestions" not required changes.

Except in recent years it has become a lot less subtle and much more forced. Not just giving non binding "suggestions" but also harass media outlets in other seemingly unrelated ways if they don't follow your "suggestions".

PS: Like seriously it often looks like the US doesn't really understand what free speech is about (as in some of the more important points are freedom of journalism, teaching and also showing your opinions through demonstrations and similar.). And why many historians find it good but suboptimal and why e.g. the approach to free speech was revisited when drafting the west German constitution instead of just more or less copying the US constitution (the US but also France, UK had some say in the drafting of it, it was originally meant to be temporary until reunification, but in the end was mostly kept verbatim during unification as it worked out quite well).

Re: Nearly a third of social media research has undisclosed ties to industry

#72

Post by slg »

dathinab wrote: post #67
slg wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>and then prioritize for outrage and emotionalism This isn’t inherent to social networks though. It is a choice by the biggest social media companies to make society worse in order to increase profits. Just give us a chronological feed of the people/topics we proactively choose to follow and much of this harm would go away. Social media and the world were better places before algorithmic feeds took over everything.

> This isn’t inherent to social networks though. It is a choice by the biggest social media companies and to make society worse in order to increase profits. going beyond social media it's IMHO the side effect of a initially innocent looking but dangerous and toxic monetization model which we find today not just in social media but even more so in news, apps and most digital markets

And if we want to go beyond that, we really just have to blame capitalism. What happens when you build a society around the adversarial collection of money? You get a society that by and large prioritizes making money above all else including ethics and morals.

Re: Nearly a third of social media research has undisclosed ties to industry

#73

Post by devradardev »

This is a clever approach to reduce token usage. In my experience with Gemini 3 for code analysis, the biggest bottleneck isn't just the logic, but the verbosity of standard languages consuming the context window. A targeted intermediate language like this could make 'thinking' models much more efficient for complex tasks.

Re: Nearly a third of social media research has undisclosed ties to industry

#74

Post by mikem170 »

terminalshort wrote: post #58
advael wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think by now roughly half of us grew up in a world where global reach has been simply taken for granted. I don't think it's particularly onerous to say that there should be some oversight on what a business can and can't do in the context where that business is relying on public infrastructure and can affect the whole-ass world, personally

There is oversight. Just not oversight of their UI design and algorithm, which is what people are calling for here. Regulation of the feed algorithm would be a massive 1A violation. Not sure what public infrastructure has to do with it. Access to public infrastructure doesn't confer the right to regulate anything beyond how the public infrastructure is used. And in the case of Meta, the internet infrastructure they r…

If algorithm output is protected by the 1st amendment then perhaps Section 230 [0] protections should no longer apply, and they should be liable for what they and their algorithms choose to show people.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230

Re: Nearly a third of social media research has undisclosed ties to industry

#75

Post by dylan604 »

slg wrote: post #65
everdrive wrote: post #34

Social media itself is a grand experiment. What happens if you start connecting people from disparate communities, and then prioritize for outrage and emotionalism? In years prior, you would be heavily shaped by the people you lived near. TV and internet broke this down somewhat, but social media really blew the doors off. Now it's the case that almost no one seems to be able to explain all the woes we're facing toda…

>and then prioritize for outrage and emotionalism This isn’t inherent to social networks though. It is a choice by the biggest social media companies to make society worse in order to increase profits. Just give us a chronological feed of the people/topics we proactively choose to follow and much of this harm would go away. Social media and the world were better places before algorithmic feeds took over everything.

bigMedia has been doing this longer than the socials. The socials just took the knob and turned it to 11.

Re: Nearly a third of social media research has undisclosed ties to industry

#77

Post by dathinab »

slg wrote: post #72
dathinab wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This isn’t inherent to social networks though. It is a choice by the biggest social media companies and to make society worse in order to increase profits. going beyond social media it's IMHO the side effect of a initially innocent looking but dangerous and toxic monetization model which we find today not just in social media but even more so in news, apps and most digital markets

And if we want to go beyond that, we really just have to blame capitalism. What happens when you build a society around the adversarial collection of money? You get a society that by and large prioritizes making money above all else including ethics and morals.

yes but it's more complicated

like if you look at original reasoning why capitalism is a good match for democracy you find arguments like voting with money etc. _alongside with what things must not be tolerated in capitalism_ or it will break. And that includes stuff like:

- monopolies, (or more generic anything having too much market power and abusing it, doesn't need to be an actual monopoly)

- unfair market practices which break fair competition

- situations which prevent actual user choice

- to much separation of the wealth of the poorest and richest in a country

- giving to much ways for money to influence politics

- using money to bare people from a fair trail/from enforcing their rights

- also I personally would add in-transparency, but I think that only really started to become a systemic issue with globalization and the digital age.

This also implies that for market wich have natural monopolies strict regulation and consumer protection is essential.

Now the points above are to some degree a check list of what has defined US economics, especially in the post-Amazone age (I say post Amazone age as the founding story of Amazone was a mile stone and is basically the idea of "let's systematically destroy any fair competition and used externally sourced money (i.e. subsidization) to forcefully create a quasi monopoly", and after that succeeded it became somewhat of the go-to approach for a lot of "speculative investment" founding).

Anyway to come back to the original point.

What we have in the US has little to do with the idea of capitalism which lead to the adoption of it in the West.

It's more like someone took it is twisting it into the most disturbing dystopian form possible, they just aren't fully done yet.

Re: Nearly a third of social media research has undisclosed ties to industry

#78

Post by Zigurd »

slg wrote: post #72
dathinab wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This isn’t inherent to social networks though. It is a choice by the biggest social media companies and to make society worse in order to increase profits. going beyond social media it's IMHO the side effect of a initially innocent looking but dangerous and toxic monetization model which we find today not just in social media but even more so in news, apps and most digital markets

And if we want to go beyond that, we really just have to blame capitalism. What happens when you build a society around the adversarial collection of money? You get a society that by and large prioritizes making money above all else including ethics and morals.

It's the combination of software that is infinitely malleable, and capitalism. Successful entrepreneurs in software want liquidity. So no matter how benevolent they start out being, they eventually lose control and the software gets turned into an exploitative adversary to satisfy investor owners.

This is fine if you can refuse the deal. Lots of software and the companies selling it have died that way. But if you've made a product addictive or necessary for everyday survival, you have the customer by the short hairs.

The technology underlying Bluesky is deliberately designed so that it's hard to keep a customer captive. It will be interesting to see if that helps.

Re: Nearly a third of social media research has undisclosed ties to industry

#79

Post by Aurornis »

slg wrote: post #65
everdrive wrote: post #34

Social media itself is a grand experiment. What happens if you start connecting people from disparate communities, and then prioritize for outrage and emotionalism? In years prior, you would be heavily shaped by the people you lived near. TV and internet broke this down somewhat, but social media really blew the doors off. Now it's the case that almost no one seems to be able to explain all the woes we're facing toda…

>and then prioritize for outrage and emotionalism This isn’t inherent to social networks though. It is a choice by the biggest social media companies to make society worse in order to increase profits. Just give us a chronological feed of the people/topics we proactively choose to follow and much of this harm would go away. Social media and the world were better places before algorithmic feeds took over everything.

> Social media and the world were better places before algorithmic feeds took over everything

Some times I feel like I'm the only one who remembers how toxic places like Usenet, IRC, and internet forums were before Facebook. Either that, or people only remember the past of the internet through rose colored glasses.

Complain about algorithmic feeds all you want, but internet toxicity was rampant long before modern social media platforms came along. Some of the crazy conspiracy theories and hate-filled vitriol that filled usenet groups back in the day makes the modern Facebook news feed seem tame by comparison.

Re: Nearly a third of social media research has undisclosed ties to industry

#80

Post by irishcoffee »

devradardev wrote: post #73

This is a clever approach to reduce token usage. In my experience with Gemini 3 for code analysis, the biggest bottleneck isn't just the logic, but the verbosity of standard languages consuming the context window. A targeted intermediate language like this could make 'thinking' models much more efficient for complex tasks.

Almost like… a simplified set of instructions you would give a computer that get distilled down into machine code that executes on bare metal!
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