Technology

Yes the CSAM attack is a problem, but there are already tools to automatically flag potential CSAM, we just need to integrate them. Unfortunately social media is a natural monopoly, and there are corporate entities that currently make up that monopoly, and that is causing a lot of social problems. The only way to combat those problems is to create something that displaces those monopolies.

Like facebook released a report that compared different personal feeds, one that creates an algorithmically generated mix of all the crap that facebook currently shows you and selectively ignores friend updates, versus one that just gives you just your friends' updates.

They found people stayed on the site longer with the algorithmic feed than the simple friends feed, and they inperpreted that as meaning people like the algorithm better. Of course they ignored the fact that maybe people like seeing the updates they asked for and then getting on with the rest of their day because they are sated.

Facebook doesn't care about that, they want retention, so they interpret retention as user "desire" to justify pushing this algorithm on them. There's a whole spiel here about how capitalism operates on addiction but this comment is long enough already.

It's enough to say that these algorithms contributed to a genocide in Myanmar because facebook established themselves as the de facto internet in that country. They knew the algorithm was exacerbating racial tensions, but also turning down the genocide dial would make them less money, so they kept it turned up.

I think it's worth creating an alternative where people have control of their own feeds because the algorithms are open source, and it's worth working hard on. The information ecosystem is maybe one of the most important things we need to fight things like climate change. Like the stakes are more than just our personal comfort.