087 - Newsfeeds

"Newsfeeds, now with 50% less News!"

-potential new TLDR for social media platforms.

As predicted in the first months of this year, the closing of information ecosystems and increasing saturation levels of corporately curated bias are well underway. Silicon Valley is severing ties with News.

It is telling that a colleague sent me that article (which I bypassed the paywall for) since I didn't encounter it in my "Newsfeed". The irony of removing news from newsfeeds is thick indeed.

Closed information ecosystems are easier to control and farm for data, attention, and up-selling of services. This places a heavy incentive on organizations to move in that direction and accelerate in that direction according to how quickly their competitors move that way.

Regulators could slow, halt, or reverse this in theory, but in practice, they are taking much of their advice from the same people leading that charge. So long as OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and other similar companies hold seats at the regulatory table that isn't likely to change. Foxes are architecting the hen house.

Of course, my own posts are subject to the exact same nonsense. Half of them with the highest levels of engagement also reach the smallest number of people, often 10 times less in spread. The spread is also subject to no rational pattern but instead appears to rely on opaque and correlative (not causal) criteria because that is what ML systems do.

I named the paper on the subject "Automated Bias and Indoctrination at Scale... Is All You Need" as a tongue-in-cheek poke at what the industry is doing, juxtaposed with the naming schemes they favor.

The critical magnitude of this is likely to become extremely obvious in 2024, as the bad actors best able to utilize generative AI win elections by flooding each platform with the next generation of optimized social engineering. This shift opens many new doors for corruption and potent levers to sway elections. Confidence in US news has been crashing and burning, but nature abhors a vacuum, and the void that news leaves behind will no doubt be filled by the bad actors flooding and controlling each platform.

The train to Dystopia (off a tall cliff) is boarding, and will soon leave the station. There is still time to halt that process, but not much. "Regulatory Capture" is nothing compared to "Country Capture".