Coming up: upload your ID to verify your Australian citizenship
(but props to Australia for trying to regulate it nevertheless)
Damn, first legitimately good thing I’ve seen come out of that country in a while as far as legislation is concerned.
I would probably use facebook much more if my feed was only my friends and followed pages. Their loss on insisting on this I guess.
Over fucking due.
I’d like to shut off fhe algorithms forcing me to see right wing transphobia on facebroach
Easy: get off of it.
If your family is that important and refuses to move: call them occasionally.
Every second you spend on it is another cent given to meta
Am I the only one who thinks big tech won’t do jack shit other than nod and smile and install a user button that doesn’t actually change anything at all?
They are so NOT going to turn this off. This – the ability to manipulate users by controlling exactly what they see – is the sole reason they are in business. It gets them ad revenue, data to resell, and massive, uncontrollable political power.
And they’re just going to let a user turn that highly individualized control off and turn themselves into a less monetizable, more ad immune user one by one because some govt told them to? The same governments that have been telling them not to do this or that for decades now?
Lol, pull the other one.
Tbf they already do that. Google’s had a button to turn off ad personalization that’s never worked since like, 2014 or something
Huh, TIL. Thanks. Not even remotely surprised.
Should’ve done this instead of garbage age verification.
Unrelated to algorithms but I opened Roblox yesterday after not playing for a long while and I found that they’ll give you a ‘free item’ if you do an age check
Disgusting, coercive bullshit just so kids can give their biometric data to American companies. Funny how the eSafety Commission managed to completely forget about the privacy rights of children, let alone those of adults, just so they can rush through their age verification legislation like the world depended on it.
I am SO uncomfortable with the idea of handing images of my id over.
We didn’t need to hand our IDs over
IDs don’t belong on computers.
They aren’t? I mean they are, but not for social media verification.
Like the government knows all my financial details for tax purposes. It knows my healthiness because we have public health care in Australia. It knows my criminal history as well as what I look like through police records. But it definitely doesn’t have my ID for social media verification purposes
Yeah, but you’ll upset the stupid 'Muricans if you tell them what’s actually happening, rather than what they want to think is happening
I love the idea of a company selling my id to some ex.
Age verification took away the need to regulate it so it’s safe for kids. Now it’s not safe for anyone.
Remember when people would post event flyers to facebook and everyone subscribed to the group would see it?
Now it’s like trying to withdrawal your pay from a poker machine instead of an ATM.
Exactly. I do believe that the algorithm does more damage than anything that age verification will address and it impacts all of us.
Nothing is a low bar, and that’s all age verification is going to address.
Keep your eyes peeled on horrible surveillance bills c-34 and s-209 in Canada
Nice.
Someone please tell them they can already do that. It’s called the Fediverse.
I wish people were more open to simply not using products they dont like. Its inconveniencing, sure, but if you fundamentally disagree with the platform youre on, just get off. Maybe also get off, while youre at it
Yup. I’m with you there.
Hmm, honestly. If you didn’t like it, just block it and replace.
Reality: social media will be made unavailable in all Australia.
How good would that be!
How to get me to move to Australia 😂
When I was on TikTok, I tried to stick to the “following” feed only, but it was very hard not to check the “for you page” (algorithmic feed), because the app is so good at knowing how to dazzle the user. It also defaulted to showing the algorithm when the app is reopened.
I only know a handful of other people who used the app, but they described the same problem: they follow people, but then they just use the algorithmic feed instead anyway.
All this to say that there are ways to present a choice to the user in such a way that users will not engage with that choice.
This was my first thought as well.
The vast majority of users couldn’t care less about “the algorithm”, and probably think it’s a good thing.
The people who need this aren’t interested.
I’ve been saying this for a while.
Of course, our right wing nut jobs won’t vote for it because they need rage bait to get votes (and normal people don’t post rage bait).
If this passes, Australia will turn sane again
Interesting how a vast majority of the right wingers I know, including my dad, don’t research anything at all, and only rely on algorithms to give them right wing rage bait.
My dad for example said to me that “all these foreign exchange students are getting $50k grants for entering the country on MY taxes” after hearing it on TikTok, then I did the most minor research and found that it’s only for one of the states (I think either QLD or WA, can’t remember which though). I rebutted his claim by stating that it’s state legislation and has no basis in taking other state taxes nor much federal tax, and he gave me a long winded explanation basically just to say that I don’t know what I’m talking about.
Apparently getting force fed slop on TikTok and instagram reels makes you a prolific researcher, while actually researching makes you a bum or something.
AI makes you a researcher these days.
Every dumbfuck who never finished school and has no training is delighted it can make them seem smart.
I’ve literally had arguments with customers who have told me the “facts” based on my own code logs and explain API’s to me and what they do, in products I’ve been maintaining for years.
The biggest problem is that there is no incentive for AI to say they’re wrong
Will be able to turn off - meaning on by default. It should be off by default.
The greens I think want it to be opt in.
However, it’s better to pass something and improve it later
At the moment, it’s a shit show
PSA: on youtube, you can turn off the algorithm by turning off watch history, so you will only see your subscriptions page, but also related videos under the current video you’re on. I spend less time there now, and enjoy the content I do watch much more.
If you’ve still got cookies on, the related videos are based in your algo. If you open a new private window and watch a few videos your front page will update to reflect what you’ve seen.
How in the world do you “switch off algorithms”? Even sort by new or purely random content is still an algorithm. Not to mention, if you switch to something like sort by new, that’s even easier to manipulate. Just have bot accounts flood the feeds with whatever propaganda they want to push.
This is a good idea in spirit, but until I see the actual legislation, I feel like this could very easily end up in the category of geriatric politicians completely failing their attempts at legislating tech.
Read the article.
This was what came to my mind as well, however Google does let you turn off your history for YouTube and when you do that (as I do) it just shows a blank page when you go there, so that’s one way it can be done.
Nobody does it because everybody likes to pretend they don’t like the crack until they have to go without. I do it on principle because YouTube has single-handedly changed a particular member of my family, one of the most innocuous people in the world, to someone who has loathsome opinions. I hate it a lot and don’t want that for myself. I am on no social media that serves up anything based on your previous clicking behavior.
and when you do that (as I do) it just shows a blank page when you go there, so that’s one way it can be done.
I think it also only suggests videos based on the one you’re currently watching too, or maybe your current session.
I also mostly do it out of principle because I used YouTube a lot before watch history was even a thing, and I don’t care for the shitty front page suggestions it disables anyway.
On Youtube you can just click on subscriptions and it only shows content from channels you’re subscribed to. If you make some effort to curate the channels you’re subscribed to, there will be some pretty good content there.
To me, this should be the default page with the recommendation algorithm being an “explore” option to find some other channels to subscribe to.
The big problem with social media is you have millions of people competing with each other to grab attention. If the goal were instead to convince people to subscribe to their channel, people might actually put some effort into creating better content instead of trying to be the first to get out their hot take on whatever is going on. If they adjusted their interface to start up on the subscription feed, and have an explore feed which show maybe ten channels that have had a lot of subscriptions recently, it would probably solve a lot of problems with shit shit tier troll content dominating social media.
It makes good headlines
Algorithm off implies a lot of parameters about the user which could be disabled. Right now there are thousands of parameters being used to curate content to you. With it off you could get true random content which in theory should allow for you to not get sucked into the dopamine trap.
So what does that mean? No posts? Sort by newest? (Wouldn’t be too bad actually)
