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Titling it like that makes it seem like a YA dystopian fiction novel. The Algorithm, run by The Company, sorts teenagers into viewing demographics. Each is given a colour code and must play in The Games to secure their future careers. Many die.

YouTube: "It's just a black box, we have no idea why it's feeding children pragerU videos and we powerless to change it."

Guys, why is the algorithm giving me meta posts like this?

The algorithm is just opinion expressed in code.

"The Algorithm" is why they want to ban TikTok so much. State backed corporations like Google and Meta give groups like the CIA access and control over these algorithms. But since TikTok is Chinese owned, they don't have that access.

It's why YouTube has been forcing far right propaganda onto children for years now

in general i think the function of computers has been to beat the average person into cowed submission to their intellectual and class "superiors," present a series of systems that are so complex, alien, and totalizing that the only possible response is a retreat to a medieval mindset. the liberatory potential of the internet that its early adopters believed in turned out to be a dud. either that potential was never there, or it requires certain conditions external to it to be realized. Honestly I think we either need to teach everyone to learn to code (whether it will get them a job or not) or blow up all the server farms, anything in between is untenable.

I feel like Algorithms are still in themselves bad, at least for the vast majority of use cases. The Spotify algorithm for example isn't bad at recommending music (at least in my experience my weekly discover is full of obscure music from all over the world that I'd have very little chance at finding on my own), but it just can't help devaluing the music at the same time. It's endless, without a human touch, without context. It will never challenge your taste and makes the listener lazy. And it makes the music itself worse too, since suddenly all music needs to compete against all other music ever made, since the algorithm sees it all as worth the same amount of space and care.

The most common version of "the Algorithm" I heard invoked back in CA was "my favorite particular tech treat corporation isn't being bigoted, it's just the algorithm!"

Yes! I agree, and it drives me nuts. I have more to say, I'll edit later.

I have no idea what this is referencing but every time I hear ppl talk about the algo it's just tongue in cheek discussion about why their tiktok fyp is filled with goth girls or smth. it's rarely with any assumption that it's a fair "content free market" so to speak

what discussions have you heard?

especially when people think back to an old viral video that becomes interesting to others again

DAE le YouTube algorithm knows? 🤓

Also the algorithm does not work as intended even outside of this. The algorithms are designed to promote the content that the social media site wants. However, people with knowledge of how algorithms work can manipulate the way their account on the website is set up and the way their content is made, so that their videos are pushed by the algorithm. Thus the content that gets promoted by the algorithm is not promoted on the merits of the content itself, but on how much knowledge the content creators have about the algorithm. This leads to well made content getting low amounts of views if it's made by someone who doesn't manipulate the algorithm and their content, and mediocre content getting lots of views if the creator knows how the algorithm works.

I agree with your larger point, but I disagree in that I think "The Algorithm" does exist and has a mind of its own in the same sense of capital as a real god that occasionally gets floated around in spaces like this. In a sense you're right in that these sites are created by humans, but there are so many weird quirks that make the idea of it being ideologically driven kinda fall apart.

The most obvious example is the classic 'youtuber face'. There is no ideological reason for this to exist, but at one point someone found out you could get 16% more views if you had that face in the thumbnail and it has completely reshaped the landscape of youtube. In the same way that capital, to quote Marx, "becomes the operation of an entity outside man and above man," the "Algorithm" subsumes both those who use it and those who created it until they essentially become unthinking thralls of it (see Mr. Beast).

Idk there's probably a lot more that someone who's more well read on this topic than me could say, and maybe one day when I'm not just killing time at work I'll actually sit down and write a whole thing about it since I think a lot about this topic. There are definitely controls and levers that are pulled by both private and government interests, but I think outright dismissal of "The Algorithm" as its own "being" (for lack of a better term) is missing out on potentially insightful marxist analysis of the digital economy and how it relates to actual, tangible capital.

Also, Lanяд Skynяд

Through “visibility filtering,” Twitter, it turns out, has a variety of tools it can use to “suppress what people see to different levels,” as one employee told Bari Weiss, without outright suspending or banning it. Individual account pages used by Weiss as examples show things like “trends blacklist,” “search blacklist,” and “do not amplify,” all aimed at making it harder for users to search or discover certain accounts.

https://jacobin.com/2022/12/twitter-files-censorship-content-moderation-intelligence-agencies-surveillance

Can also be seen in the Instagram algorithm. As the article mentions, Palestinians are the canaries in the coalmine for online censorship, and the recent wave of online amplification/silencing is no different. Many of my friends went from receiving hundreds of views on their story to only getting 20 or 30 because of Palestine content.

So like, when liberals on tiktok tell me I have no plan is that manually selected? Does the CCP want me to vote for Kamela Harris? /s