this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2025
106 points (97.3% liked)

Technology

65819 readers
4909 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
technopagan@lemmy.world
L4s@lemmy.world
106
Facebook is constantly experimenting on consumers — and even its creators don’t fully know how it works. (www.sauder.ubc.ca)
submitted 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) by Tea@programming.dev to c/technology@lemmy.world
22 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 
  • Users of social media platforms like Facebook are part of constant marketing experiments
  • Because algorithms are driven by AI and machine learning, it’s impossible to know how social media companies are choosing what to show — and not show — different groups of people
  • Because there is no “random assignment”, marketers can’t fully tell if one ad might work better than another one.
  • In the process, groups of social media users can be excluded from important messages
  • Algorithms are so precise, they can target people down to an individual level
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] RecallMadness@lemmy.nz 5 points 16 hours ago

I had an idea a while ago on how you could lightly regulate social media platforms.

Require them to:

  • Group users into cohorts of a size greater than X. ie, individual level targeting isn’t allowed. The higher this number the better.
  • make available to users the cohort they are in
  • publish openly every single cohort and their size
  • make it possible to view feeds as if you were in a specific cohort.

Will this stop them funnelling customers into rabbit holes? No, probably not.

But it would make “targeted indoctrination” harder as they would have to try and indoctrinate multiple people at once. And it would make it more transparent just how many people are being fed propaganda or whatever you want to call it.