Trump administration attacks Australia’s ‘opt-out’ algorithm law in rare intervention
In an extremely uncommon move, the US government has publicly criticised an Australian government policy proposal.
It wants US social media companies excluded from digital duty of care laws, which would give Australians the option to opt out of algorithmic feeds.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is in New York promoting Australian tech policies at the United Nations.
I’ve never used tiktok, but i recall some twitter engineer starting a pro algorithem debate about how people wouldnt enjoy the platform without one
I think it’d be great if people grew tired of social media and logged the fuck off
Sure, people should just log off. Honestly though, my real problem is that chronological is also just an algorithmic feed. You’ve just decided that the algorithm that drives the feed is one that takes all posts and sorts them in decending or assending chronological order. I’m sure for all the posturing by the US Feds here, there is probably enough gray area in the law that allows them to still deliver you some kind of currated feed with residual harmful effects. Since “algorithmic feed” is not a narrow enough term to identify exactly what is problematic about the current implementation, it means that the law will be vague enough to bypass. Or to argue the very nature of what is “algorithmic” in a way that makes the whole law useless.
Ultimately, the issue is the inputs to whatever algorithm is being built, not the algorithm itself. If the law stipulated that users must be allowed to opt into a curated feed where only the posts timestamps were considered when ranking them, then that really locks people into a specific design: chronological. If a law were written that said it would be illegal under massive financial penalties to use a person’s viewing history, duration of session, time spent watching individual content, likes, demographics, and comment activity when ranking the content for their feeds, then that also really narrows down the kinds of algorithms that can be implemented.
I think equating chronological feeds to an algorithm is needlessly reductive and kind of pedantic. I’m not slamming anyone that argues it, and it does have its own issues.
But nothing is imparted on the content the way it is with a weighted algorithm or any form of synthetic ranking. In fact it’s entirely outside of the application and follows naturally from the flow of time. That can’t be algorithmic behaviour in the way that people argue against.