Does anyone else feel like Instagram "moderation" is, well, basically a lost cause?
The core issue with it is the algorithm. There's nothing inherently "incorrect" about 99% of the stuff I see on there but it clearly influences my mind over time regardless, it's just a bad information diet.
Yes. "You are what you eat" also applies to information diets. Consume simplistic, small-minded information, produce simplistic, small-minded thoughts. One of the key takeaways from Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" is how political and economic forces on 20th century mass media shape and constrain its contents; you will rarely come across content that runs antithetical to the interests and ethos of advertisers or providers of capital, which all provide funding to mass media outlets and thus enable their existence. Further, the government, with a monopoly on access to privileged or authoritative knowledge, is able to supply the mass media with information germane to its own agendas.
Messages will evolve according to the conditions of the medium that carries them; similarly to how biological organisms either adapt and thrive or fail according to the constraints of their environment, there exist selective pressures that determine, ultimately, what content is promoted and thrives according to the whims of the social media algorithm. "The medium is the message," and the predominant message of social media is short-form brainrot. The need to publish "content" on a regular, daily, or even live-streamed 24/7 basis incentivizes the production of quick takes, short videos, and soundbytes instead of slow, deliberative, measured thoughts that may take months, years, or longer to assemble into a literate medium. The latter form of content is actively selected against in a social media environment; thus, the proliferation of groupthink and stupidity.
It's amazing to me how little moderation they do for Ad content. My Instagram ads are constant crypto scams. Maybe there just isn't the same incentives to moderate companies paying to scam your users, as opposed to free users posting their political views
I was noticing the big blue app doesn't let you report a fake profile unless the impersonated person has a real profile. What kind of narcissist designs a "report fake profile" feature that assumes everybody on earth has an account? Every time I report fake profiles I get the automated response that they looked into it and it's legit. Did it twice today.
As people move on to other apps, scams and fake content on "classic" fb seems to still be reaching boomers and people in other countries. As usual, I do not get the impression anyone at meta cares.
The standard techie response for how to solve this problem is to get someone internal at meta to escalate. Otherwise known as not a solution to the problem. My experience doing this is that internal people handling such tickets are actually not very bright and your internal contact needs to repeatedly push back at people who want to close tickets with no action.
Interesting that they go to Twitter to complain about censorship on other apps.
Given we have an election in less than a month hardly surprised that their moderation systems are erring on the side of caution.
Especially with so many well-funded, state sponsored actors using LLMs to sow division as we've seen so often on Twitter recently.
They're not erring on the side of anything. They removed a post containing two "Grinning Squinting Face" emojis but left one up telling all gay people to "get in the ground".
The state-sponsored actors (with the US being one of those states) are censoring people and also using LLM bots as well to gaslight them.
Democracy cannot work without freedom of speech, and I would argue anonymous freedom of speech. Block bots, not people.
> anonymous freedom of speech. Block bots, not people.
As we're hearing more and more from the large tech companies, this is a hard line to walk. How do you identify what's a bot as they become more indistinguishable from humans? Apparently identity verification and/or remote attestation, both of erode the idea of anonymous freedom of speech.
Whether one believes them is another question.
I just wanted to throw out there that having an informed electorate was one of the reasons there is the Electoral College. We can blame LLMs, etc. now but low-information, easily-swayed voters has always been an issue.
Can you elaborate on this? It is my understanding that electors are not allowed to change the vote based on anything like being more informed or something similar. Is this wrong? Or did the mechanics of the election change so much over time?
Originally the idea was you would vote for people who would do the actual voting. A nice idea, but obviously not workable for many reasons, especially since communication rapidly improved so that candidates could be known widely enough that the actual voters could be somewhat informed. (However, I believe the electors still can change their vote from what they promised, but forget ever doing anything in politics again.)