Does Information Filtering Grant the Power to Control People and Money? Yes, It Does
August 15, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
I read an article which I found interesting because it illustrates how filtering works. “YouTube Starts Mass Takedowns of Videos Promoting Harmful or Ineffective Cancer Cures.” The story caught my attention because I have seen reports that the US Food & Drug Administration has been trying to explain its use of language in the midst of the Covid anomaly. The problematic word is “quips.” The idea is that official-type information was not intended as more than a “quip.” I noted the explanations as reported in articles similar to “Merely Quips? Appeals Court Says FDA Denunciations of Iv$erm#ctin Look Like Command, Not Advice.” I am not interested in either the cancer or FDA intentions per se.
Two bright engineers built a “filter machine.” One of the engineers (the one with the hat) says, “Cool. We can accept a list of stop words or a list of urls on a watch list and block the content.” The other says, “Yes, and I have added a smart module so that any content entering the Info Shaper is stored. We don’t want to lose any valuable information, do we?” The fellow with the hat says, “No one will know what we are blocking. This means we can control messaging to about five billion people.” The co-worker says, “It is closer to six billion now.” Hey, MidJourney, despite your troubles with the outstanding Discord system, you have produced a semi-useful image a couple of weeks ago.
The idea which I circled in True Blue was:
The platform will also take action against videos that discourage people from seeking professional medical treatment as it sets out its health policies going forward.
I interpreted this to mean that Alphabet Google is now implementing what I would call editorial policies. The mechanism for deciding what content is “in bounds” and what content is “out of bounds” is not clear to me. In the days when there were newspapers and magazines and non-AI generated books, there were people of a certain type and background who wanted to work in departments responsible for defining and implementing editorial policies. In the days before digital online services destroyed the business models upon which these media depended were destroyed, the editorial policies operated as an important component of information machines. Commercial databases had editorial policies too. These policies helped provide consistent content based on the guidelines. Some companies did not make a big deal out of the editorial policies. Other companies and organizations did. Either way, the flow of digital content operated like a sandblaster. Now we have experienced 25 years of Wild West content output.
Why do II — a real and still alive dinobaby — care about the allegedly accurate information in “YouTube Starts Mass Takedowns of Videos Promoting Harmful or Ineffective Cancer Cures”? Here are three reasons:
- Control of information has shifted from hundreds of businesses and organizations to a few; therefore, some of the Big Dogs want to make certain they can control information. Who wants a fake cancer cure? Like other types of straw men, most people say yes to this type of filtering. A B testing can “prove” that people want this type of filtering I would suggest.
- The mechanisms to shape content have been a murky subject for Google and other high technology companies. If the “Mass Takedowns” write up is accurate, Google is making explicit its machine to manage information. Control of information in a society in which many people lack certain capabilities in information analysis and the skills to check the provenance of information are going to operate in a “frame” defined by a commercial enterprise.
- The different governmental authorities appear to be content to allow a commercial firm to become the “decider in chief” when it comes to information flow. With concentration and consolidation comes power in my opinion.
Is there a fix? No, because I am not sure that independent thinking individuals have the “horsepower” to redirect the direction the big machine is heading.
Why did I bother to write this? My hope is that someone start thinking about the implications of a filtering machine. If one does not have access to certain information like a calculus book, most people cannot solve calculus problems. The same consequence when information is simply not available. Ban books? Sure, great idea. Ban information about a medication? Sure, great idea. Ban discourse on the Internet? Sure, great idea.
You may see where this type of thinking leads. If you don’t, may I suggest you read Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. You can find a copy at this link. (Verified on August 15, 2023, but it may be disappeared at any time. And if you can’t read it, you will not know what the savvy French guy spelled out in the mid 19th century.) If you don’t know something, then the information does not exist and will not have an impact on one’s “thinking.”
One final observation to young people, although I doubt I have any youthful readers: “Keep on scrolling.”
Stephen E Arnold, August 15, 2023
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