Alt Text:
An edited meme image featuring two stills from MegaMind. The top still shows Titan speaking to a the mayor, who is labelled “TikTokers getting censored by China” and saying “You have freed us!” overlaid. Titan has a US flag as a label, and is saying “Oh, I wouldn’t say freed, more like under new management.”
I think they’re referring to US talk about possibly banning tiktok.
Platform censorship is different than state censorship, and content curation is different than censorship.
It’s “I think you’ll like this” vs “I don’t want you to see this”.
Platforms can still participate in the “I don’t want you to see this”/“I want you to see this” game. Governments aren’t the only parties that benefit from looking to control public sentiment.
I never said otherwise, I just said that there’s a difference between the three things. 😊
A curation algorithm isn’t censorship, but a a biased one would be.
They are all biased, often deliberately so. Whether you think the US forcing ByteDance to sell TikTok to a US company will have a positive outcome or not, the reason the US is doing it is so they have control over the information being shared on TikTok instead of China. The method the US uses to control information is different from China but no less effective. It’s arguably more effective because the passive manipulation of information the US carries out is less transparent, making it harder to determine exactly how the narrative is being manipulated.
Okay?
Literally none of that has anything to do with there being three different things.
Showing someone videos related to ones they like is different from suppressing or promoting videos with content your company has reason to want suppressed or promoted, which is different from the government doing or compelling others to do the same.
The point I’m trying to make is that this:
Is most often a trojan horse for this:
Which is basically the same as this:
But more passive and less transparent.
Alright. I understand your point. I don’t believe there’s as much coordination as you do, but that’s fine.
Do you understand what I’m saying, which is that there are three different things? And that a person saying “as long as there’s an algorithm there’s censorship” might be conflating some of those categories? Lemmy sorts and tries to present relevant data, but I have no reason to believe that it’s engaged in explicit or implicit state level censorship or propaganda.
I think we’re pretty much in agreement, as I don’t think corporate censorship and propaganda is coordinated so much as it is aligned towards similar interests. This lack of coordination can actually be a strength though because it creates divisions that can then be levaraged by the same corporations towards their aligned interests (such as suppression of labor organizing). I believe this element of division actually makes censorship/propaganda in the US more effective - at least in some ways - than the censorship/propaganda of more autocratic regimes.
Of course US oligarchs don’t have the same tight control over the sharing of information that oligarchs in autocratic regimes do, as evidenced by the existence of platforms like Lemmy, but as long as the alternatives remain small and ineffectual it doesn’t matter. TikTok is not small and ineffectual, and by nature of it being owned by a Chinese company is free from manipulation by US oligarchs. This resulted in narratives that the US wants to suppress (such as pro-palestine/anti-israel narratives) being widely disseminated on the platform. This is the main reason TikTok is being forced to sell to a US company.
How is bias not inherent to curation? Preference for one thing over another is bias. Curation is literally showing you things it thinks you’re biased to like. These groups aren’t revealing their secret sauce for curation algorithms so we’d never know anyway.
There’s prioritizing the viewers preferences, and then there’s prioritizing the platforms preferences.
If I don’t show you a video because I don’t think you’d enjoy it, that’s different from not showing it to you because I don’t want you to see it.
User preference is a type of bias, but you wouldn’t typically call a platform “biased” unless it was putting it or some third parties preferences ahead of the users.
I wouldn’t disagree those are different reasons for not wanting to show a video but both are curations based on biases.
I guess I just have a more neutral connotation for bias than “biased against you for others’ own interests” and so I didn’t find bias to be a useful term here to distinguish the reasons behind curation choices.
Nothing really in disagreement here, just fiddling with common usage.
To me bias from a service or platform would be a bias that’s contrary to what was expected or requested.
It’s when they put their finger on the scale.
Bias, as a term, has heavy connotations of being unfair, or to have distorted results, which is why I kinda shy away from using it to describe “everything working as expected and no one would complain if they knew the details”.
If the grocer tampers with the scale so you take home less carrots than you wanted, that’s not fair, and so we would they they biased the scales.
Sounds like we agree, but I also like talking wording sometimes. :)