I think it's about knowing what people are interested in and having an algorithm that can control what people see and to try to nudge them to be more/less interested in certain things.
Eugene Wei's article [0] helped me see how TikTok uses more of an interest graph, whereas many of the other platforms use more social graphs. By this, I think he means that TikTok cares much more about knowing what people are interested in than knowing to whom they're connected.
> But what if there was a way to build an interest graph for you without you having to follow anyone? What if you could skip the long and painstaking intermediate step of assembling a social graph and just jump directly to the interest graph? And what if that could be done really quickly and cheaply at scale, across millions of users? And what if the algorithm that pulled this off could also adjust to your evolving tastes in near real-time, without you having to actively tune it?
I think the fear is that the algorithm can be tweaked to nudge people towards things that the platform, or in this case, the CCP, want them to want.
For example, if I see you watching videos about the book 1984, and I want you to be less interested in things that promote fear of a totalitarian government, and I also know that you feel really afraid of your home getting robbed, I can have the algorithm show you more videos about homes getting robbed so that you boost your feelings of fear of neighbors and therefore you may even want to have a stronger government to protect you from your neighbors.
Sure, but it’s much more effective when the messaging is targeted to an individual (or, small cohort of similar individuals) based on their interests (known, at a granular level, because of what they watch for how long etc)
Is mainstream media designing a user-specific content feed that is adjusted to your specific preferences? Your argument sounds similar to the one used against arguments of an encroaching police state: sure it has been done before but not at this scale or with this level of sophistication.
Yes, now just imagine if mainstream media could create millions of TV channels specifically designed for each human being instead of broadcasting one channel to millions of human beings?
Eugene Wei's article [0] helped me see how TikTok uses more of an interest graph, whereas many of the other platforms use more social graphs. By this, I think he means that TikTok cares much more about knowing what people are interested in than knowing to whom they're connected.
> But what if there was a way to build an interest graph for you without you having to follow anyone? What if you could skip the long and painstaking intermediate step of assembling a social graph and just jump directly to the interest graph? And what if that could be done really quickly and cheaply at scale, across millions of users? And what if the algorithm that pulled this off could also adjust to your evolving tastes in near real-time, without you having to actively tune it?
I think the fear is that the algorithm can be tweaked to nudge people towards things that the platform, or in this case, the CCP, want them to want.
For example, if I see you watching videos about the book 1984, and I want you to be less interested in things that promote fear of a totalitarian government, and I also know that you feel really afraid of your home getting robbed, I can have the algorithm show you more videos about homes getting robbed so that you boost your feelings of fear of neighbors and therefore you may even want to have a stronger government to protect you from your neighbors.
[0]: https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/8/3/tiktok-and-the-sorti...