When do you think the manipulation of the internet via algorithms for political reasons began?

[Sweetpeaa]

Considering it used to be practically unbiased. I remember there was a time back in 2010/2011 where there really wasn't a political algorithm for anything you watched on youtube. Twitter really didn't have a bias either. The sites google lead you to used to be a lot more diverse as well and there really was this sense of freedom of thought and opinion.

I'm honestly trying to figure out the year it changed. We are either bombarded with right wing junk content on most social media sites or BLM/LGBT/white people are bad content on the other side of the spectrum. There is no more sense of normalcy. There is a pull in two extreme and (ridiculous) directions.

Twitter was bought by Elon Musk and it's become an arch conservative toilet and before that it had another type of bias. I remember a black woman ( an immigrant to Canada) tweeting about wanting to kill whites in her college campus years ago and it was thought of as no big deal. In all honestly as I said before, Twitter wasn't politically biased in the early 2010's and most of its content was fairly innocent. It seemed like possible around 2014 things started to descend into madness.

 

[Poppavalyim Andropoff]

30 seconds after Al Gore invented the internet

 

[The Luigi Player]

30 seconds after Al Gore invented the internet

can confirm haven't you seen his posts

 

[WeWuzFinns]

I see the manipulation as something that slowly ramped up. In the beginning the only tools for censoring was targeting individuals with intelligence services. Now we have ESG scores, debanking, refusal to mitigate DDoS, among countless other manipulation tools.


how i see it

 

[ToroidalBoat]

When search engines became crap again is when any manipulation of search results by those running search engine began. Like I said in another thread, searching used to be crap because they were full of ads. Then search engines got good. Now searching is crap...

Also have you seen "The Selfish Ledger"? Haven't seen much myself, but gist is "social engineering": through manipulating results.

Yep. By the early '00s, it seemed the internet was being taken over by ads.

Then popup blocking came, searching got good, and ad-blockers were also in.

Now it's endless Current Year with "smart" algorithms and crazy censorship.

 

[Sweetpeaa]

Whenever search engines became crap again is when any manipulation of search results by those running search engine began. Like I said in another thread, internet searches used to be crap because they were full of ads. Then search engines got good. Now searching is crap again.

Also have you heard of "The Selfish Ledger"? Haven't seen much of it myself, but the gist is about "social engineering" through manipulating search results.

One of the most peculiar things is the Jordan Peterson algorithm. He has been pushed so hard on youtube for years but the peculiar thing is videos show up for people who would supposedly have no interest in him. There is a reddit thread about it but even teenage girls get recommended his videos who are looking for makeup videos.

 

[ATI Escapee]

I personally suspect about 10 to 12 years ago. I think a few years before that, teams of real people were hired to spam ideas in various social sites. I dont think the pool of real people doing it began to dwindle until 2015 to 17 or so.

Thats is my completely uneducated guess.

 

[DiscoRodeo]

I see the manipulation as something that slowly ramped up. In the beginning the only tools for censoring was targeting individuals with intelligence services. Now we have ESG scores, debanking, refusal to mitigate DDoS, among countless other manipulation tools.

View attachment 5022118
how i see it

I have no idea what to think of said chart since theres literally no sources

When search engines became crap again is when any manipulation of search results by those running search engine began. Like I said in another thread, searching used to be crap because they were full of ads. Then search engines got good. Now searching is crap...

The 2000s thread, or technology that you miss?

One of the most peculiar things is the Jordan Peterson algorithm. He has been pushed so hard on youtube for years but the peculiar thing is videos show up for people who would supposedly have no interest in him. There is a reddit thread about it but even teenage girls get recommended his videos who are looking for makeup videos.

I don't have anything to really confirm this necessarily, but my sense is that political algorithms havn't been pushed by companies (at least not in the sense of the OP). Let me explain before coming to unnecessary conclusions;

Theres certainly things with the overton window, censorship at the edges, naughty words that you cant say online and views outside of the overton window that are considered too extreme even for corporate America-

But I think something more sinister is evident here and that the political algorithms are organic. I think that this is just a natural result of hugboxing, and the creation and splintering off of people into seperate subcultures. "If you like cottagecore, you'll surely like anti urbanism- if you like anti-urbanism, youll like X, etc".

Gun enthusiast? AI believes theres a higher chance youre more libertarian, so it will base things off of social media data to cater ads to you, pages, communities, etc.

I dont think that any of this is planned by corporate America, and it really just tries to catch up with current trends- such as with the gay beer and "oh crap, only poor urbanites drink bud and most are gay, so we'd better become gay too"

If youre talking Jordan Peterson, that actually is pushed because its Canadian content and you are in Canada

 

[ToroidalBoat]

The 2000s thread, or technology that you miss?

The "has search gotten worse" thread.

(edited the post to quote that other post)

 

[DiscoRodeo]

The "has search gotten worse" thread.

(edited the post to quote that other post)

Word, what you said there is relevant for censorship and search engines applying more engineering to their programs.

I mean, they always have. Search engines only briefly operated on the premise of "if X site gets more hits, it gets higher in the search engine" and the ones that did got out competed by Google.

Where google really succeeded is that it posted the most relevant results. I don't know their exact criteria, but do know that it was something along the lines of hits + shares + time spent on a site, with perhaps minor additional operator curation. This was stuff we can all basically agree makes sense, and if not- google would have never grown and we'd be using another site to search for things instead (maybe clusty?).

They started with curation on political issues in the 2010s basically, but even then Id separate search engine manipulation vs algorithms basically ruining the web because I consider most algorithmic stuff to be ironically user generated, and user reinforced rather than enforced from above.

It wasn't Google hiring blue haired yuppies that spelt doom there, but target predicting that a teenaged girl was pregnant before even her family knew and spamming her with baby ads in her online store interface.

Everything from that moment is user generated, and all the fracturing, prejudiced communities, and hugboxes have just been said algorithm forming around peoples cultural decisions also translating to their political ones as well.

 

[Angry Alt Right Nerd]

The problem is search engines were always going to be gamed and filled with shit as the internet became filled with people. Even if Google changed nothing about their algorithm since 2000, anarchy will not bring you the kind of internet you seek.

 

[The Internet Dick]

Twitter was bought by Elon Musk and it's become an arch conservative toilet

No, Twitter hasn't magically transmogrified into a bastion of conservatism, although pinning the State Affiliated Media label on NPR was funny as hell. Re Elon Musk, I don't think Musk fully understands just how powerful the people are who he's pissed off. Twitter was a major agitprop organ of the Left. Now it isn't.

Without being psychic, I can predict with certainty the world's richest man is about to find himself in all kinds of regulatory trouble, and that's just for starters. He'll be lucky if he doesn't get himself arrested and end up alone in a cell on a dark and stormy night with the guards asleep and the camera out of order.

 

[Soup Sammiches]

I'm going to guess some time around ARPANET.

 

[Rome's rightful successor]

Silicon Valley's reaction to Trump becoming president. If you want to go earlier occupy wall street.
You could also make the argument that they supported the new atheism movement,
YouTube always pushed the atheist content creators up in front even back then, reddit even had r/atheism as one of the automatic subreddits for new users for a time.

 

[Syaoran Li]

At the latest, I'd say it began shortly after 9/11 with stuff like the Patriot Act and all of the increased surveillance and security measures that came with it.

 

[Toolbox]

No, Twitter hasn't magically transmogrified into a bastion of conservatism, although pinning the State Affiliated Media label on NPR was funny as hell. Re Elon Musk, I don't think Musk fully understands just how powerful the people are who he's pissed off. Twitter was a major agitprop organ of the Left. Now it isn't.

Without being psychic, I can predict with certainty the world's richest man is about to find himself in all kinds of regulatory trouble, and that's just for starters. He'll be lucky if he doesn't get himself arrested and end up alone in a cell on a dark and stormy night with the guards asleep and the camera out of order.

Why haven't they done it already? There has been ample time, they've saber rattled, yet nothing has happened. Elon hasn't even done anything to really change Twitter, he may have removed some of the algorithm bullshit that pushed the message directly down the throats of people internationally but he hasn't stopped the legions of bullshit pushers engrained within the site that are the real damaging part. Even with all of the actual employees he's fired or replaced there still remain those willing to do whatever to uphold their status quo. Twitter still serves its purpose to them.

 

[Timmy Jolsen]

It's been that way every since the government realized enough people were using the internet that it would be a worthwhile endeavour to use it for the purposes of social engineering. Can't say first hand since I was shitting in a diaper and drinking boob juice at the time, but I'm guessing that was some time in the late 90s/early 2000s. It's gotten worse and harder to avoid, but it's not new.

 

[WitchfyndeGeneral]

It began in 2017 post-Trump. The events that would occur in the next 5 years promoted the left-wing collective elite to start memory holing inconvenient facts and then changed the algorithms to focus on useless topics or leftists political content in order to suppress right-wing content or facts that would benefit any right wingers. I saw beforehand between 2017-2022 that most of the recommended videos on Youtube have now become the useless nostalgia for the 1990s 2000s nonsense or breadtube content that obviously no one except deranged leftists want to see.
The amount of censorship since 2017 was disturbing. I never expected most of the internet to become a censored shithole where algorithms promote cringy socialist/collectivist bs.

 

[Fraiser crane]

Internet 2

 

[William Tyndale]

I did a pretty deep dive on this a few years ago. It happened in 2009 when Reddit hired a democratic operative to basically be a shadow ceo. I don’t remember his name but he was well connected and high up in the Democratic food chain. I think that’s around the time democrats realized how powerful internet control was. And yes, Reddit is dogshit, but it wasn’t back in the day and it was very powerful at that. (My first 500+ upvoted comment was a witty slur about Arabs) It still is in some regards but the people still there are what you’d expect as redditors. If you can control the political board of the “front page of the internet” then you effectively control the entire narrative. That was the beginning. It just snowballed from there.

And for the record I haven’t been on Reddit in 5+ years so don’t assume I’m still a redditor.