Does “the algorithm” favor authoritarians like Donald Trump?Social media feeds and AI chatbots are both driven by the same attention maximizers — what does that do to political discourse?
Does the algorithm favor authoritarians like Donald Trump? I think the answer is yes, but maybe not for obvious reasons. Because it’s true that there are certain tech leaders like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg who clearly have some authoritarian leanings. I actually don’t think that’s the big problem. The problem is the business model. Think about how a social media company makes money. It serves ads, right? So to make a lot of money, it’s got to serve a lot of ads. It’s got to hook you and keep you on the platform for as much time as possible. Okay? So what hooks people? Is it... A video about nuanced information on complex policy issues? No, that’s not hooking anybody. We are all scrolling right past that video and the algorithm picks up on that. What does hook people is playing on their animal instincts. Fear, anger, tribalism, also sex, but we can talk about porn in another video. If you have fear, anger, tribalism, okay, now go watch any speech by any authoritarian leader, whether it’s, you know, Hitler or Putin or Xi or Trump. What do you find in it? Fear, anger, tribalism. The algorithm favors authoritarians because authoritarians are good at hooking people. And the algorithm picks up on that, whether it’s driving a social media platform or an AI chatbot. So if we want to beat Trump, if we want to not just keep our democracy, but upgrade it, we’ve got to regulate Big Tech. Because as long as our digital worlds are curated through these predatory algorithms, authoritarians are going to keep winning.
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