Have we lost control of social media algorithms? David Auerbach interview 

@ChristianEconcom Yes, all my friends and family are uploading videos about what they've up to every daaynnnNONE OF THEM DO. For me RU-vid is a replacement for TV.

I'm sorry you were seduced by Joe Rogan. My shorts feed is pretty much all baseball media and the young fake-journalist guy from the Good Work channel all the time and I love it.

yeah, my sister likes to think about algorithms that way, thinks its the source of all ills in society and that we can just "fix them" just like that

It's an interesting comparison, but "we can't just stop all stock crashes" is a misleading statement. The City of New York could shut down the NYSE tomorrow. The German government could shut down the Frankfurt stock exchange tomorrow. These aren't likely to happen, but legally it's very feasible -- and all the professional traders in those cities couldn't just start a black market alternative overnight without some advance notice.

RU-vid was never properly optimized for it - the system is so old. Building from the ground up allows you to filter more efficiently and identify demographics more easily. Most of the misinformation is free - my Facebook and my TikTok are fully bias-confirming after hiding articles I didn't like, clicking on articles I did (clicking once on Britney Spears became lifelong suggestions), and so IF the information is accurate I'm ok, I've filtered out the fallacies and gotten to the truths, but if the information is inaccurate I'm currently unaware and making decisions based on that inaccurate information. Almost every story my friend has heard about and then recited back to me from TikTok has been false. It wasn't TikTok making the false content, just random users - but that led to "Did you hear that Joe Biden met with the Vanderpump Rules women at the White House?" all of which sounded absurd to me and so I took the 2 seconds that she DIDNT take to Google it to see that they had simply attended the White House Correspondents Dinner. Harmless piece of misinformation - but she spread that story to how many people before I was able to correct her - and after being corrected did she reach out to all the people she had given the false story to? Of course not - so the false story is spreading and the truth died at her. There have been sooooo many instances like this, and for much more harmful areas - her misinformation on Ukraine was saddening, her superstitious remedies are idiotic, and I was always against the TikTok ban but after spending time on there - it's absolutely disseminating harmful info and viewpoints and I don't see a good solution when the enemy is "word of mouth".

​@@ColinPoole David is correct to suggest that critical thinking and media literacy NEEDs to be taught. The guest downplayed the idea, saying that the problem is so broad and enveloping in scope that even intellectuals have difficulty with it, but he's missing the trees for the forest. Problems like your friends ability to seemingly question anything at all could be greatly (optimistically) diminished, and an excellent starting point.

@@ColinPoole I get that you're frustrated by all the misinformation that breeds on TikTok like bacteria on a warm petri dish. Still I think the solution is not banning the "petri dish," it's educating our kids properly and not blindly trusting one video on the Internet to tell you the whole truth about something. JFK was assassinated in 1963 by a guy who swallowed a lot of misinformation. Was the solution then to ban mimeograph machines so ordinary people wouldn't believe the Communists were infiltrating the White House?

You just don't understand it. You're being targeted with content, which in turn supports advertisers.

Kind of!

His web activity probably makes him an outlier of the typical left winger. He covers Trump and the GOP everyday so his search history is probably filled with right wing topics which could be interpreted by the algorithm as him wanting right wing content.

Algorithms want us to keep watching. That can mean showing you something you agree with or something that pisses you off and makes you hate watch for several hours. It's not necessarily a good thing to watch content you disagree with if it's making you anxious and irritable. As opposed to watching content from someone you respect but disagree with at the same time. It's productive dialogue vs political WWE smackdown.

I like how you said echo chamber, those only exist one side. 😂

@@bs1820 Yep, it's like intelligence, in that respect! Vote blue people, or Indie, every chance you get. Keep the republiCON fascists from the door.