Censorship by Algorithm Does Far More Damage Than Conventional Censorship
The problem I see here is that there is no alternative to an algorithm. What do you expect Twitter to do? Twitter&#x27;s users want to see the content that is most interesting to them, and to do that Twitter <i>has</i> to design algorithms to achieve that. Maybe that algorithm is literally just &quot;Here&#x27;s everything anyone you follow has posted chronologically&quot; - but that&#x27;s got problems, firstly <i>obviously</i> you&#x27;re more interested in what some people have to say than others so you&#x27;re going to have a low average value reading all the tweets, secondly it&#x27;ll incentivize people spamming the timeline because they know their tweets will be buried by other tweets if people aren&#x27;t reading live and that will damage how much influence they have. So, I don&#x27;t think Twitter using such a simple algorithm would be good and I think a competitor would likely beat it with a better algorithm. So a state where Twitter doesn&#x27;t use algorithms is likely to tend to a state where twitter is bankrupt and some other company <i>is</i> using algorithms.<p>I think it&#x27;s pretty clear you need <i>some</i> algorithm. Ok, so maybe the line we draw is that we don&#x27;t make value judgements on the content and only prioritize by meta data. Ie, your algorithm looks at engagement, reach etc. This is <i>basically</i> what Facebook did, and what they found was that it was much easier for people to produce highly engaging content by playing on peoples fears, misrepresenting information, and all the classic &quot;click bait&quot; tricks. High value content is expensive and time consuming to make, and since it doesn&#x27;t get rewarded by the algorithm it gets priced out of the market. So sure, it&#x27;s possible to draw that line, but again, I don&#x27;t think that that&#x27;s actually a neutral position, we <i>know</i> the type of content that benefits from content neutral algorithms. And remember - engagement at the end of the day is just a way of measuring what impact the content of the article is having, you&#x27;re saying you want to promote content that is &quot;engaging&quot; as opposed to other priorities that you might have such as &quot;truthful&quot; or &quot;High quality&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s difficult not to think that what we&#x27;re actually seeing is that the beneficiaries of the previous algorithms - the voices that were raised up by the facebook style algorithm are simply angry now that the algorithm has changed and not to their benefit. The author cites how popular their facebook pages used to be, but that wasn&#x27;t a neutral algorithm either - they were just happy when the algorithm was rigged to benefit them rather than harm them.