this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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Asklemmy
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That sounds rife for "Manufacturing Consent" possibility. Like how the platform owners can just decide what you want to see like that. Yuck..
I'm not sure if that's really how the US propaganda model works (that is, the one defined in Manufacturing Consent). It's an element of it, you're right about that, but I think ultimately the issue is that they're a for-profit information platform. And, as a result of that and the system we're in, they're affected by at least four of the five filters of bias that the authors proposed:
Mastodon, like Lemmy, can basically ignore the first two filters, and established communities which don't mind being smaller than mainstream are unaffected by the remaining two.
More referring to when websites pushes certain kinds of content against the will of its users. Youtube pushes right wing content. Twitter and Reddit on that crypto bs. Facebook pushes disinfo and terrorism. There's no benefit for doing things that way, they just do it because they can.
Ah, I see what you mean. Yeah, that is a major issue.
An interesting part of it is that I'm not use how much of that is the service working as intended (even in abstract ways, like promoting interest-grabbing things) and how much is abuse of the service (basically SEO for social media posts, using botfarms to promote content, etc.). And just to be clear, it's still a fault of the platform if it's being abused by organized think-tanks and advertisers. Whereas in Lemmy and Mastodon, the openness and customisability would communities to adjust 'the algorithm' that decides which posts to promote, or just block things that are unwelcome in their community.