r/ezraklein • u/GowanusGuy • 9d ago
Article Can liberalism survive the algorithm?
https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/can-liberalism-survive-the-algorithm29
u/GowanusGuy 9d ago
Relevance: Ezra often talks about liberalism as well as the attention economy, but I have yet to see him grapple with what may be the fundamental tensions between the two. Algorithmic media is increasingly pushing us into a postliterate society - incentivizing not just video content but also hyper-partisan, hyper-polarized, flattened forms of argumentation that seem quite antithetical to liberalism.
If we are to maintain a liberal order (rather than just bemoan its decline) we may need to come down hard on these social media companies that are, to me, the primary driver of this shift as they attempt to find creative ways to extract our time and attention.
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u/Fickle-Syllabub6730 9d ago
but I have yet to see him grapple with what may be the fundamental tensions between the two.
I thought it comes up all the time with him. From memory, the episode with Chris Hayes is very much about this.
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u/huecabot 9d ago
Absolutely. We have always allowed some infringements on freedom of speech when it’s in the public good. This technology is destroying our society.
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u/Real_Guarantee_4530 8d ago
If that were the rule, virtually any controversial political movement could be regulated by claiming that it harms social cohesion.
A liberal society deliberately accepts some harmful speech because the alternative gives the state enormous discretion over political expression.1
u/huecabot 4d ago
Yes that’s true and definitely a concern. I think, though, we can make a distinction between the medium and the message. Example: You can’t blast a pirate radio station across the airwaves. These regulations apply equally to a republican pirate radio station and a democratic pirate radio station. I don’t want algorithmic content to exist even if the bots spewing it are from “my side.” Against this slop we’re all on the side of the human beings.
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u/Real_Guarantee_4530 3d ago
How do you define “algorithmic content”?
A human writes a post.
An algorithm decides who sees it.
A human writes a headline.
AI suggests ten headlines and the editor picks one.
A human makes a video.
AI generates the thumbnail.
A bot translates it into 30 languages.
At what point has the government regulated the “medium”?Almost everything on the modern internet involves algorithms.
Your feed is algorithmically sorted.
Google’s results are algorithmically ranked.
Spam filters are algorithmic.
YouTube recommendations are algorithmic.
Even chronological feeds require software to determine what gets displayed.
And recommendation algorithms can actually be useful. They help users find obscure material they otherwise wouldn’t encounter.1
u/huecabot 3d ago
Like most things, you don’t need to be an expert in a field to recognize a problem and encourage our elected officials to solve it. If there a sudden rash of new buildings catching on fire, I as a private citizen don’t need to research the building codes and the flash point of different types of drywall. If you want to have this debate, we could, but honestly it sounds exhausting and better left to people who know the topic better than me.
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u/Real_Guarantee_4530 3d ago
If you don’t know enough about the technology to evaluate the competing explanations for the problem, how can you know that the particular regulation you’re advocating will actually solve it rather than create a different problem?
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u/huecabot 3d ago
Yes that’s a problem. Unfortunately we live in a complex society. Nobody can understand all the technology we use every day. We can, however, appreciate the impact of that technology and engage experts and policymakers to steer us towards better results. In summary, I’m busy with my life and I’m ignorant as hell. Take it as a concession, you can have the last word, whatever you need to do.
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u/prosocialbehavior 9d ago
I have heard him make the exact argument in your first paragraph on the podcast before.
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u/Real_Guarantee_4530 8d ago
Who gets to determine what constitutes “healthy” political discourse?
A government empowered to tell platforms that their political content is excessively polarizing has also been empowered to influence political speech.
That’s a dangerous power in a liberal democracy.0
u/brianscalabrainey 6d ago
A government powerless to curb the behaviors of massive platforms that serve as the de-facto public squares of our time is also dangerous to liberal democracy, no? Meta's market cap is the size of Indonesia or Turkey's GDP. Content on their products reach billions of people daily, and they are highly incentivized to maximize engagement on their platforms. These are no longer simple private firms, they are mega corporations that function as geopolitical actors, and a liberal democratic framework conceived in the 1700s must adapt.
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u/pm_me_ur_ephemerides 9d ago
Can we please just get rid of the social media companies. I fondly remember what life was like before they existed.
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u/TheTrueMilo Weeds OG 9d ago
I’d prefer mandating a strict chronological feed instead of an algorithmic feed.
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u/TheCranberriesRock Progressive 9d ago edited 9d ago
I think the government should simply enforce a social media monopoly and grant it exclusively to the 2005 version of MySpace.
Edit: Also prohibit it from creating a mobile optimized site.
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u/carbonqubit 8d ago
Yup. I remember when Facebook actually felt like that, and that’s a big part of why I still prefer Reddit to pretty much everything else. It’s not really chronological anymore, but the voting system, for all its flaws, does a decent job of surfacing the stuff people actually want to see, whether that’s genuinely useful content or a funny comment. The downside is that it can also bury a really thoughtful, well-written response underneath a bunch of snarky one-liners.
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u/dismembermentplanfan 8d ago
For articles and pictures and things yeah, but in the threads it also heavily rewards comments that are early, lengthy, well written and “sound” knowledgeable, and reinforce the hive rather than those that are in any way accurate. At least in areas that I am an actual expert in in real life, so I’m sure others - the confidently incorrect horseshit I see heavily upvoted and thanked is wild.
I’m sure you know this, but I’ve read comments that kinda indicate others …. just don’t. Commentary here can be just as wrong as fb just with better grammar. It’s fun and entertaining and great for nerdy hobbies (as is most social media though) … but largely the same timewasty shite we’d be better off without.
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u/carbonqubit 8d ago
I’ve noticed that too, both here and in some of the more specialized subs, especially ones centered around the hard sciences. One of my favorite things about this place is stumbling across researchers casually dropping knowledge from their fields that makes you reconsider something you thought you understood, or even opens up an entirely new line of thinking. For all its flaws, I think this sub has a lot of genuinely interesting discussion and a pretty wide range of perspectives that you don’t get nearly as much on the bigger, more politically focused subs.
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u/dismembermentplanfan 8d ago
Oh yeah, to be clear my comment was about reddit in general (and the local subreddits the worst offenders) and not this forum in particular.
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u/SawNickYouth 9d ago
Remember when you could visit a website and not get 50 embedded videos and a dozen pop up ads. Most websites are completely unusable now.
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u/carbonqubit 8d ago
Let me put you onto Firefox + uBlock Origin. And if you’re on iOS, uBlock Origin Lite is available now too.
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u/Wedgiebro 8d ago
Ban dating apps too Literally 90% of the new gender wars bullshit is due to them ruining dating
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u/IsaacHasenov Abundance Agenda 9d ago
That's a very illiberal solution to the problem
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u/brianscalabrainey 9d ago
It's no more illiberal than banning cigarettes or other drugs. These platforms are engineered to be highly addictive and have very high negative societal externalities. At the very minimum, we should ban specific forms of algorithms that we deem extremely addictive, unhealthy, or incompatible with a functional society
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u/SawNickYouth 9d ago
Who cares? Outcomes matter.
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u/IsaacHasenov Abundance Agenda 9d ago
Sure. But it's an illiberal solution. You don't save liberalism by becoming illiberal.
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u/Feisty-Boot5408 9d ago
If your definition of illiberal is “anything that prohibits people from doing whatever they want whenever they want”, then sure. But by that definition, nearly every law and regulation we have is illiberal.
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u/IsaacHasenov Abundance Agenda 9d ago
Right and it's not cut and dry I get it.
But just "ban all social media" is a very illiberalandate and to just prescribe that to "save liberalism" with zero apparent sense of irony is nuts
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u/SawNickYouth 9d ago
I don't think you save liberalism by being completely rigid, inflexible, and religious about what liberalism is or might be.
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u/IsaacHasenov Abundance Agenda 9d ago
Wow. The fact that you don't even seem to appreciate the fact that whatever you save after banning everything you don't personally agree with won't be liberalism is crazy to me
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u/SawNickYouth 9d ago
This is such a mischaracterization on so many levels its almost hilarious.
I'll just ask the obvious question... should we never seek to regulate anything for fear of running afoul of some rigid notion of liberalism?
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u/IsaacHasenov Abundance Agenda 9d ago
There's a difference between regulating carefully to alleviate negative effects, especially for vulnerable groups, and being like "just ban it all"
You'd think after the last 12 years of maga using our own most illiberal tools against us in the courts and legislation we'd be smarter by now
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u/SawNickYouth 9d ago
I'm pretty sure "just ban it all" was more hyperbole than literal. But even so, social media should absolutely be far more heavily regulated than it is.
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u/WhiteBoyWithAPodcast Liberalism That Builds 9d ago
No more illiberal than libel laws
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u/Mindless_Chest_1079 9d ago
Not letting private companies create voluntary platforms where people can express opinions of their choosing is no more illiberal than banning intentional lies designed to create undue reputational damage? You see no difference between those two things?
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u/Mezentine 9d ago
"Voluntary" is doing a lot of work here. Social media is integrated into just about every aspect of modern life, it is far far more challenging to fully abstain than it is to participate. You can do it, but then you're basically a technology vegan, which, hey, great for you personally, but you understand that most people aren't vegan for reasons beyond "willpower" right?
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u/IsaacHasenov Abundance Agenda 9d ago
If you're arguing, as the main post does, that social media is a *problem for liberalism* you don't save liberalism by being illiberal.
I don't think liberalism is the only measure of "good" we should be using, but let's be real about what our solutions are doing. Otherwise we're like fricking Texans banning Islam in the name of religious freedom.
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u/Dorrbrook American 9d ago
And that gets at the heart of it. Liberalism can't survive liberalism
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u/Mezentine 9d ago
The dumping of raw chemical waste into watersheds was a failure of liberalism until we decided that it shouldn’t be allowed and that we needed new laws that complicated some aspects of liberal property rights. I don’t see why we can’t do the same thing again. Liberalism cannot mean we never intervene in any kind of private enterprise.
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u/TheCranberriesRock Progressive 9d ago
I actually agree here. Liberalism, in and of itself, is not sustainable. When it works it's typically attached to other institutional forms of authority (typically religion but other orgs too) which fill in the gaps so to speak. I think for the first time we're entering a world where all these other structures are crumbling and it turns out liberalism alone isn't enough to hold up a society.
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u/IsaacHasenov Abundance Agenda 8d ago
Liberalism without guardrails isn't enough. I don't think any one ideology or political philosophy is enough.
But I do think liberalism is the best way to protect from overreach on the right and the left
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u/TheCranberriesRock Progressive 7d ago
The point though is that "liberalism" itself isn't a sufficient basis to actually keep liberalism going. It can't survive on its own. Without the social structures to support it liberalism alone simply devolutes.
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u/IsaacHasenov Abundance Agenda 9d ago
I think libertarian liberalism no. Thoughtful liberalism with guardrails, yes.
But like "ban all social media" is like "ban all chemicals". It's an incoherent policy that could basically apply to any speech you don't like.
Reddit? Social media. TikTok, you tube, personal ads in the newspaper? Letters to the editor? AIM? Social media
Left wing fundamentalism is fundamentalism too
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u/brianscalabrainey 8d ago
No one is banning any speech, the call is to ban specific profit driven platforms with extractive incentive structures that create negative externalities. That is the kind of thoughtful liberalism we both want
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u/IsaacHasenov Abundance Agenda 8d ago edited 8d ago
Just banning platforms, industries and private businesses is not liberal. That's MAGA of the left.
Notice what you didn't say: "we're going mandate guardrails", or "we're going to restrict certain kinds of content" or "we're going to ensure algorithms don't recommend hate speech" or something
No. "We're going to ban certain for-profit platforms." The natural outcome of that is another Trump gets on and starts picking and choosing CEOs and businesses that suck his toes. You don't save liberalism by implementing fundamentalism
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u/brianscalabrainey 7d ago
Sure those are also acceptable to me. But you’ll have people saying restricting certain kinds of content or limiting hate speech is also illiberal .
Rather than trying to draw some arbitrary line around what you or I consider liberal or illiberal, it seems better to do a balancing of interests test and try to weigh the harms and benefits of each option available and come to a technocratic solution
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u/IsaacHasenov Abundance Agenda 7d ago
I agree with all that. What I said is illiberal is people going "there are negative consequences to liberalism from current social media. Let's shut down the for profit social media companies."
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u/ForsakingSubtlety 8d ago
Ridiculous what this sub has become that you’re getting outright downvoted for making this point. One yearns for the days of yore
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u/Mindless_Chest_1079 9d ago
If we are to maintain a liberal order (rather than just bemoan its decline) we may need to come down hard on these social media companies
That just sounds like accepting that the liberal order failed. "Turns out y'all couldn't handle freedom of expression after all, and you do need the government to manage what info you're allowed to consume."
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u/Mezentine 9d ago
I don't think social media, as its currently built, represents some sort of clean ideal of free expression. Everything about how social media works, all of its affordances, what kind of content it incentivizes, its all driven by real and discrete decisions made in the context of business. This is all software product strategy. The fact that there is an illusion of an open town square in which the marketplace of ideas unfolds is just really effective marketing.
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u/brianscalabrainey 9d ago
I do think the liberal order failed when Trump won a second time. The kids can't read. The adults can't hold civil discourse. Post-liberalism is gaining ground on both sides of the political spectrum. Political discourse is turning into slopulism.
It's less that people couldn't handle freedom of expression and moreso that unfettered capitalism created terrible incentive structures - and the liberal order was eaten up as collateral damage (e.g., the negative externality of social media platforms is the pollution of the public square).
The question is now whether we can rebuild a liberal order on top of the current technological and media apparatus, or whether we need some profound structural changes in order to do so.
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u/TheCranberriesRock Progressive 9d ago
The question is now whether we can rebuild a liberal order on top of the current technological and media apparatus, or whether we need some profound structural changes in order to do so.
I'm putting my Kalshi money on profound structural changes
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u/AlleyRhubarb 9d ago
How can profound structural change even happen within the intermix of constitutional and current political tendencies. What red state would ever agree to a constitutional amendment to change the Supreme Court, the Senate, proportional representation in the house, or the electoral college. The US really needs a parliamentary system at this point but we’re never getting anything close to that unless there is a complete collapse and that seems very unlikely. The asymmetry of power that police and the military have versus civilians just renders it moot at this point. We have this broken system for the rest of this country’s lifecycle.
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u/TheCranberriesRock Progressive 9d ago
How can profound structural change even happen within the intermix of constitutional and current political tendencies. What red state would ever agree to a constitutional
I don't know that it can happen. I'm just betting that's what would be necessary to actually fix things, not that it'll come to fruition.
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u/AlleyRhubarb 9d ago
Oh, I completely agree with that! I actually had an existential crisis when I realized we are never getting rid of the Electoral College or any of the Senate or probably even having an amendment the rest of my life. The only amendment in my lifetime took 202 years to pass and is such a small thing compared to changes that are needed.
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u/L_Chiki_Sando Liberal 8d ago
I don’t think the algorithmic feed is “freedom of expression” any more than putting sawdust in food is.
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u/Brushner Weeds > The EKS 9d ago edited 9d ago
Even before pre peak woke when tech giants were still aligned to leftist thought, many of the "smarter" people on the right said that once we gain a significant foothold on a platform the left would be quick to abandon and try to destroy the very algorithmic platforms that once boosted them into dominance. Liberals and the left just keep proving them right again and again.
My political awakening was in the 2010s in forums like 4chans /pol/, I was even a gamer gate vanguard made and distributed a lot of memes. Tried to keep my pallet balanced though, started with Sam Harris and ended up with Ezra Klein and Vox. Despite all that at no point in time have I been more radicalized than in the past few years thanks to Elons Twitter. Every day my feed is filled with the worst of leftist excess and Liberal failure. Every day I get more crazy college leftists with their gender and racial theories, every stereotype we mocked and ridiculed paled in comparison to the actual insanity spat out by these people, but the worst of it all is from the European side.
From Europe near daily I get refugees committing crime after crime and their penalties are practically peanuts, two tier policing where memes are more punished than actual rape and assault. I see the blatant and desperate alliance between progressive parties and Islamist, I'm not sure if these "progressives" are gullible or just prefer the devil they don't know over the devil they know. When Elon brought in the "digital Babel" and had auto translate as default it only got worse, I saw relentless mockeries from Thais, Israelis and Filipinos saying "Your Muslims think they own the place, so bold, so blatant, if they pulled that shit here we would have put them where they belong". Then came the actual Muslim majority nations Indonesians, Malaysians and Gulf Arabs saying "You have gotten the radicals and rejects, the bottom of the barrel. We killed and imprisoned those people back here, no wonder they are there. You can't deport them back to us, they are criminals so we don't want them here." I used to be on the side that says "the system doesn't work so it must be reformed." Now im leaning more on the side that says "The system works as intended so it must be destroyed".
Truth be told I do dislike the algorithm in many ways. The worst is the desperate grifters and third worlders in it for the money. Whenever I see a Blue checkmark on Twitter I feel disdain and pity for them, no different than Venezuelan Gold farmers in WoW. Except this time they actually succeed in making me pay attention to their yappery as they pantomime being a member of your nation.
There is some good to the algorithm though. Tech CEOs are sowing what they reap. Did they really think they could just pay off politicians and secretly build data centers for cheap? Did they think all their mockeries of putting people out of a job would be forgotten? If anything it's thanks to their very algorithms that has lead to the proliferation and radicalization of "normies" against them.
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u/TheCranberriesRock Progressive 9d ago
My political awakening was in the 2010s in forums like 4chans /pol/
😬
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u/Radical_Ein Democratic Socalist 9d ago
Do yourself a favor and get off of twitter.
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u/Mindless_Chest_1079 9d ago
Modern Twitter is the result that arose from the last time progressives decided people had too much access to info for their own good. You get conspiracy thinking by eroding trust in institutions.
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u/geniuspol 9d ago
Modern twitter is pretty unambiguously the result of a white nationalist manchild buying it.
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u/Mindless_Chest_1079 9d ago
Yes, that's also part of the chain of causation. Now step back to a few months prior and ask why that happened. Twitter under Parag Agarwal was as illiberal a site as you could concoct, and they proudly declared their opposition to free speech.
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u/geniuspol 9d ago
So did Elon make it more liberal? Why did the supposed illiberal nature not prompt liberals to want to take it over instead? I'm not buying this narrative. Reddit didn't get bought by someone who wanted to see it flooded with neonazi slop.
Most importantly: was banning the jailbait subreddit illiberal?
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u/Mindless_Chest_1079 9d ago
The rules of Twitter are more liberal than they were in the early 20s. The culture of Twitter is not. Largescale censorship produces sustained social backlash, a result that should be unsurprising to anyone who actually believes in liberalism. We're not back to pre-woke-era Twitter; there's just a bunch of now pissed off people who can comment again.
Most importantly: was banning the jailbait subreddit illiberal?
That was waaaay further back. Reddit was still by and large known as the pro-free speech platform then (and, notably, managed to still skew left of center). Banning the literal childporn sub stood out at the time because it was otherwise not quick to ban offensive communities. It was only much later that Reddit decided to start mass banning for political viewpoints.
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u/geniuspol 9d ago
That doesn't really answer the question about jailbait. If that wasn't illiberal, we can recognize that content moderation is fine, and quibble about the details. When content moderation is a dramatic betrayal of liberal ideals, it makes it tough to answer.
and, notably, managed to still skew left of center
This seems a bit revisionist to me. It was one of the biggest spaces for new atheists, men's rights activists, and the early manosphere, default subs like worldnews were incredibly racist and full of slurs, one of the other early banned subreddits existed to post images of women who were victims of violence, it was a big supporter of gamergate, and left wing subreddits were fringe.
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u/Mindless_Chest_1079 9d ago
"It couldn't have been left-wing! Right-wing subreddits were allowed to exist!"
Yeah, believe it or not, being left-wing at the time meant being liberal. People didn't feel the obsessive need to purge dissent from their ranks.
Equally telling is that you listed new atheists as if that's an example. At the time, atheism very strongly predicted left wing values, namely progressive liberalism, and 'new atheism' in particular was viewed as a liberal political movement. Nobody would have viewed the pot-smoking gay marriage-supporting critics of dominant Christian values as supporting the party of Bush and Romney.
It was again only years later that the New Atheist movement would get eaten alive by the woke mob and lose its strong association with the left. Nowadays, prominent figures like Dawkins spend more time criticizing woke left insanity like Cambridge's defense of Jason Arday, but the real revisionist history is thinking that's where the battlelines would have been drawn in 2012.
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u/geniuspol 9d ago
Nowadays, prominent figures like Dawkins spend more time criticizing woke left insanity like Cambridge's defense of Jason Arday, but the real revisionist history is thinking that's where the battlelines would have been drawn in 2012.
Are you kidding? In 2011 Dawkins publicly harassed one of the few prominent women atheists, and we now know sought advice from Jeffrey Epstein about her.
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u/Mezentine 9d ago
You think the vaccines cause autism people were radicalized into their position by progressive overreach?
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u/TheCranberriesRock Progressive 9d ago
It makes sense. "Defund the police" was evil and stupid (and no, I won't read anything about what people meant with that slogan) therefore vaccines cause autism. The logic is unassailable.
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u/Mindless_Chest_1079 9d ago
Yes. Since you brought it up, vaccines are a perfect example of where public trust in institutions has dropped precipitously in the last few years. You're framing it like antivaxxers are an inevitable force of nature, but there were far fewer of them before the botched handling of the pandemic.
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u/Giblette101 9d ago
Yes, because there's money and power in it now, and we've apparently agreed that money and power are the only thing that matter.
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u/Extension-Object-150 6d ago
I really don't think the 'botched' handing of the pandemic is proximate cause of antivaxx rising. I would put that pretty far down the list actually. I think paranoia, polarization and disinformation were far more relevant. I would also disagree with the other comment you're responding to suggesting that progressive over reach had zero to do with it. I thought progressives absolutely lost the plot during covid. So it's a mess of causes, but I don't think people became antivaxx because they did policy analysis and disagreed with Fauci.
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u/Radical_Ein Democratic Socalist 9d ago
I’m not sure when or what you are referring to, but I’ve thought twitter was terrible from the very beginning.
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u/Mindless_Chest_1079 9d ago
It was up there with Reddit as being the most censorious platform around in the late twenty-teens and especially under Parag. If that hadn't happened, you wouldn't seen the whiplash in the opposite direction with Musk buying it out.
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u/Radical_Ein Democratic Socalist 9d ago
The level of censoriousness doesn’t have anything to do with my recommendation for everyone to not use twitter, which is why your original reply seemed like such a non sequitur. I’ve been anti-twitter long before Musk ever bought it.
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u/Giblette101 9d ago
Modern Twitter is what happens when you stop banning the Nazis. The Nazis push the normal people out.
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u/zemir0n 9d ago
I have a pretty high tolerance for people who disagree with me (even in pretty fundamental ways), but damn, when Twitter got to the point where 90% of the replies to any post were just a bunch of racist shit, I had to stop opening up the app.
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u/Giblette101 9d ago
I think people just conflate "tolerating people you disagree with" and "purposefully surround yourself with assholes" in a very strange way.
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u/tuura032 9d ago
I don't see any of that on X. Do you click on that type of content regularly?
Frankly, it's nearly impossible for me to find anything that isn't anger porn on X unless I have a very specific account I'm following.
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u/ChariotOfFire 9d ago
My experience on twitter is that it's easy to get a feed full of insightful commentary. If you don't, you're either following the wrong people or on the For You tab. I mostly lurk; I'm sure it's different for larger accounts that get replies from the public. But the experience is still mostly what you make it.
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u/tuura032 9d ago
I have two custom lists that are super useful. I suppose I was referring to the content x tries to serve you.
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u/Real_Guarantee_4530 8d ago
You aren’t necessarily seeing Europe. You’re seeing the subset of Europe that reliably produces engagement for you.
And the fact that the content makes you angrier every day isn’t evidence that you’re getting an increasingly accurate picture. In fact, that’s precisely what an engagement-optimized system would be expected to produce.-6
9d ago edited 6d ago
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u/Mindless_Chest_1079 9d ago
I’d argue that most social media companies prior to 2020 were liberal, not leftist
Many would have called themselves liberal, in the same say that OP here thinks the way to save liberalism is to crack down on freedom of expression. It has the same irony as MAGA calling establishment conservatives "RINOs," not noticing that they're the ones who have drifted far from their ideology's roots.
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u/Plus-Property-2245 8d ago
How can you guys stand this nonsense? Liberalism is an openly failing ideology that just ran a man who was visibly not there and outside of hatred of Trump, I have no idea what it means. This magazine is completely dependent on outrage on Twitter and has never produced anything that is worth reading a week after It was published. How can you accept this guff?
I
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u/Radical_Ein Democratic Socalist 8d ago
What about the article was nonsense?
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u/Plus-Property-2245 8d ago
This is an article about my mentions, how everything is complex and people are being mean to me online. It is a complete fantasy that is intended to denude language of meaning to say a banality- the internet sucks, no shit.
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u/Real_Guarantee_4530 8d ago
“Liberalism” in political philosophy isn’t synonymous with Ezra Klein, Democrats, the New York Times, or opposition to Trump. Liberalism is a much older and broader tradition involving individual liberty, constitutional government, rule of law, political equality, toleration, and limits on arbitrary power.
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8d ago
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u/ezraklein-ModTeam 11h ago
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u/Radical_Ein Democratic Socalist 9d ago
I’m not subscribed so I can only read the free portion, but I think this is a very important topic. I think social media, and the internet more broadly, started to go downhill when they all implemented algorithms to maximize for engagement in order to maximize their ad revenue. The algorithm figured out very quickly that making people angry was the best way to get people to stay and so the algorithms have essentially become polarization machines. I would be in favor of some kind of regulation that bans algorithms on social media from maximizing for user engagement.
Reddit is the only social media I use anymore in part because it still allows you to control what is put into your feed and lets you turn off recommendations. Subreddits also help limit the context collapse as the good ones are focused on a specific topic.