The results of the 2020 presidential election. The alleged dangers of the COVID vaccine. Disinformation continues to have a significant effect on almost every aspect of our lives, and some of the biggest sources of disinformation are the social platforms that we spend a large part of our lives using—Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. On these platforms, conspiracy theories and hoaxes are distributed at close to the speed of light, thanks to the recommendation algorithms that all of these services use. But the algorithms themselves, and the inputs they use to choose what we see in our feeds, are opaque. They’re known only to senior engineers within those companies. or to malicious actors who specialize in “computational propaganda” by weaponizing the algorithm. Apart from hoping that the companies will figure out a solution, even if that goes against their financial interests, as it almost certainly will, is there anything we can do?
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