Countries weigh laws to lessen power of mighty algorithms

""I think it's more powerful to say, 'Hey Facebook, you have a lot more transparency than we do'," and force the company to reveal more about how its systems work, she said.""

Facebook not only has more transparency, it is manipulating it's users daily lives for the purpose of making MORE $.

"I think if we just say, 'we are going to regulate algorithms', that is so amorphous," Haugen told AFP in an interview last week.

The whole insurance, actuarial business is built on "algorithms" as is the stock market.

Putting facebook et al on the same footing as newspapers and other media with the same liability for what they publish will deal with a lot of the problems, it forces the people most able to do it to take responsability for dealing with the problem. Make the CEO or owner where one person controls the company, personally liable will have positively magical effect.

Make them stop mining your web activities and the problem goes away.

I'm tired of seeing ads based on prior searches that are no longer relevant, on almost every occasion I have for using the web. Researched online sites for local shoe stores, about two weeks ago, and that same day went to a local store to buy a pair. Now I can't get rid of the pointless ads. Two months ago, I searched for a travel destination in the Caribbean because I can't return to Japan for the foreseeable future. Booked the 6 weeks in three countries and now I'm totally inundated with ads for travel to those same countries, and with the same airlines I'm using for the trip.

Try it with anything. It's disgusting. Why would you want to see ads for a product you've already bought?

Algorithms have no power and are not mighty, only the people who developed them or afterwards abide to them, have power and are mighty. So leave them alone, they are only like a strategy, a theory, and they are not even physically existent. And that on the other hand means, you can’t even forbid or destroy them. For example, watch your washing machine. It has an algorithm, that takes your water, your time, and spits out cleaned clothes, so it’s mighty and powerful when it is about cleaning clothes. You can’t change it much, but of course only you can start and interrupt it, not the algorithm itself. And can you make it less powerful or mighty? Almost not at all. Even if you destroy your washing machine , the algorithm lives on in all other washing machines, activated or still waiting for sale at the electronics dealers. So it’s ambivalent, you can wash by hand without algorithm, use it , interrupt it or destroy a single instance, but you cannot delete or decrease the power of that algorithm at all. It’s nowhere and also everywhere, but not physically.

Right-wingers are always claiming that these algorithms are biased against them. In reality, the algorithms are unbiased, in that they can only act within the parameters of their directives, and have no free will too operate outside of it.

If platforms are required to take responsibility for the content posted on the platform, they will be required to have human intervention, and humans are biased.

Instead, what will happen if platforms are forced to take responsibility for the content posted on the platforms, is that they will become ultra-woke, not allowing ANY content that is even remotely at risk of causing them liability.

So we'll all have to move to the dark web.