As Elon Musk Promotes Far-Right German Party, EU Politicians Suggest Shutting Off X's Algorithm
As Elon Musk Promotes Far-Right German Party, EU Politicians Suggest Shutting Off X's Algorithm
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Shutting Off X's Algorithm
Hey EU, that's not how any of this works. First of all, you do not have any control over that -- even if you demand it be done, there's no way to verify compliance. Second, there's always an "algorithm." There can't not be an "algorithm;" that would mean it would display nothing at all. Even the choice to just display tweets chronologically is still a choice, and implemented in the form of an "algorithm."
What you do have the power to do -- and what you should do -- is simply just straight-up block X entirely.
Worked brilliantly for the Brazilian government. Lulu pulled the plug for... a week? BlueSky suddenly got incredibly popular. Musk panicked and folded on every demand. And the amount of pro-Bolsonaro/coup-posting on Twitter sank like a brick.
Realistically I think that is why banning him even as a brief show of force will be very effective. He understands pain, it’s the universal language.
Literally the only rule Musk follows is the rule of power. Legal shit means nothing, might is right. So yeah, govs should deal with him the same way before it's too late.
Oh they can turn off musk's algorithm quite easily: just ban the whole fucking site.
He's folded like origami on this already, and he'll do it again.
he folded to brazilian courts last year. but now, with trump in power, he may have more means to pressure back.
If WWIII broke out over the EU blocking Twitter and the US lost would Musk take a cyanide pill?
who knows... but the us has softer means to pressure europe
I wouldn’t call reverse chronological order with blocks accounted for an algorithm.
Twitter didn’t always have an algorithm.
Mastodon does not have an algorithm. Or am I not being inclusive enough in my definition?
to not piss off computer scientists and mathematicians with their dear word "algorithm", you may want to narrow it down with the expression recommendation algorithms.
3 spaces is the ideal indentation width.
There, that should keep them busy for a couple hours.
Even trivial sorting algorithms are still called algorithms.
An important thing to consider: Mastodon doesn't have an "algorithm" for presenting posts in your subscription feed.
That doesn't mean it "does not have an algorithm" entirely, though. There's a couple of non-trivial ones being used to recommend friends and calculate the trending posts and tags that show up on the front page, and they do actually consider likes/shares as part of scoring.
Yeah an algorithm is a series of mathematic instructions so from my armchair I'd say sort by date is not an algorithm. But to complicate things further there seems to be a sticking point with some that social media uses heuristics and not algorithms. I don't really understand the difference nor do I really care as this is all too much about semantics - /u/grue's final point is still spot on IMO. Why mess with letting a billionaire toy with the minds of your citizens? Let the USA have twitter and all that chaos to themselves.
You should take your armchair to be reupholstered or something, because sorting things is like the primary type of algorithm. Even if it's as straightforward as "sort by date", since objects in the database are not stored by date, they have to be sorted to get them displayed by date.
Huh, I stand corrected!
Wow you got out of that armchair quickly!
Yeah I try not to be an ass about being wrong
It was a joke.
Armchair analysis to standing corrected
I wouldn't say primary type, they just happen to be the primary example that theory (complexity analysis etc) is taught with. Hence also the veritable zoo of very very bad sorting algorithms that still have proper names. There's no quantum bogosort for string search.
Ah well glad to learn something
Fair enough.
The algorithm part is a sticky point for me, because it’s always been my contention that you could directly map most of the systemic issues of social media with the rise of engagement algorithms.
In other words, reverse chronological order is the only way to do healthy social media in my opinion. (Or maybe I should say, healthiest). Algorithms introduce too many pernicious incentives. They optimize everything around the worst things.
Most people love algorithms though. And it seems most people don’t want to trade algorithms away. A reason that many fall off mastodon is the lack of an algorithm.
Absolutely agreed. I'd love to say that I left Facebook and then Twitter for heroic reasons but both of them pushed me out when there was no longer a way to just get the reverse chronological. Facebook when the algos took over and then Twitter when they started forcing people to pay for Tweetdeck.
Yeah an algorithm is a series of mathematic instructions
"Mathematic" in the sense of anything that a Turing machine can understand (actually, even more generalized than that, but this is close enough). If it can be coded, it's an algorithm.