No?

No. Free speech =/= unfettered, unmoderated speech, and it never has in the history of the US. No society operates that way.

No. Speech is zero sum. Democratic societies always have to create prioritization mechanisms and institutions to not let public debate degrade to chaotic shouting matches.

1. It’s unavoidable. You are demanding something that is impossible. Every decision requires a value judgement, especially decisions that attempt to avoid a value judgement. In this case, we should value truth and accuracy.

2. The platform shouldn’t be responsible for these decisions. We should democratically determine how we prioritize speech in a crowd d public sphere, just like every democratic society has done for hundreds of years. Pretending that every society has always allowed infinite, unfettered speech in public forums is ahistorical and also a little stupid. Society would be chaos, just like corporate-controlled digital public spaces are today.

3. Finally, no, there is such a thing as truth and a lie. Sometimes it’s complex, but that doesn’t mean it is impossible to determine. Democracy only works when strong, trusted, public, unbiased institutions mediate information between experts/information producers and the public. The introduction of digital media infosystems without institutional mediation is breaking down our publics’ access to true, relevant information and damaging our ability to solve problems politically.

I’m going to move past your ridiculous strawman and just say that that is not how algorithm design happens. You are just not engaging with reality. Every design choice is evaluated on its effects on user behavior. To insist that we refuse to evaluate whether algorithm design degrades the user experience by forcing lies into their feed is absurd.

And then it surfaces content that is highly engaged, like sensationalized misinformation. Content-neutral decisions never have content-neutral effects.

The town square can only accommodate a limited amount of speech. Democratic societies have always had an active role in deciding what kind of speech is prioritized and what mechanisms should be used to do so in a way that’s fair and non-censorious. If you go to a public hearing, is it just a crowd of people shouting over each other? Do you only get to hear from whoever is shouting loudest? No, obviously that would be unproductive and stupid. The digital town square isn’t different.

Your statement also weirdly puts this design choice in its own category than literally every other that a company makes when designing algorithms. They don’t work from first principles to decide what inputs should feed an algorithm. They test changes and look to see if it results in desired outputs. But for this one aspect, you expect them to design in a black box and not respond to what the actual effects are to platform. It’s just not really engaging with the reality of how these get built and optimized.

No algorithmically-curated content feed can be content neutral. Every design choice affects what you see and comes with unintended curatorial effects. It’s an oxymoron.

If a book can be ruined by spoilers then it’s poorly written book.

If it was for something important like eg depositing checks, it doesn’t seem odd that they’d have a human verification process

It often works exactly as OP described. “Automated” products will use humans for cognitive tasks up until machines can be trained on their results.

It’s humans + domesticated animals > the rest

Got it! Thank you for your responses. I need to do a deeper dive into fungal reproduction it sounds like.

Fungi get graded on a curve then compared to animals/plants when measuring total organism mass then. It’s a little like saying all banana trees are the same organism since they’re all asexually reproduced with the same dna.

Indeed—the details of what I don’t understand are included in my questions :) appreciate your contribution tho!

Seems like burden of proof that it’s the same organism would need to be higher than just matching DNA. Isn’t it possible for a fungus to reproduce in ways that multiple organisms would have the same DNA?

How old are you bud