>This is one of the side effects of an open web, and one I feel we should live with in the interests of freedom. The only alternative of which I am aware is to police speech through some kind of authority.
I strongly believe this is nor correct. You can mitigate a lot of this stuff through better design, without censorship. Most important point: Open Web is the idea that people can find info they're looking for, not that anyone on the web can bombard everyone else with information. Modern social media is optimized for the latter. Algorithms chose for you, and they chose badly, and you have no control over it.
Jaron Lanier has a lot of talks about incentives and why current social media is bad for you. His hypotheses seem plausible.
That just means the person writing the algorithm becomes the authority. As we recently saw with Amazon's hiring practices, algorithms have bias as well. Granted, a better designed system might not have made this mistake, but since humans designed it, can it ever be perfectly unbiased?
Without actual censorship (which I'm against) the offending material still exists, but would only be found by those who seek it. I do like that approach personally, but I don't think it would be enough to satisfy many people who prefer to eradicate offensive speech through authoritarian measures.
The algorithms don't choose badly. They actually choose very well. It's just their optimization function is different -- their optimization goal is more clicks and more ad revenue, not the society's good.
Click-based revenue model encourages pretty dark sides of humanity.
I strongly believe this is nor correct. You can mitigate a lot of this stuff through better design, without censorship. Most important point: Open Web is the idea that people can find info they're looking for, not that anyone on the web can bombard everyone else with information. Modern social media is optimized for the latter. Algorithms chose for you, and they chose badly, and you have no control over it.
Jaron Lanier has a lot of talks about incentives and why current social media is bad for you. His hypotheses seem plausible.