Good news for people who hate the feed algorithms here.

The European Union is working on a draft law to protect its citizens against manipulation through targeted ads and content. In this proposal, content providers may no longer take sensitive personal details into account to control what you see, including medical issues, sexual orientation or religion, and any kind of personalization will be forbidden for minors.

Platforms must also provide transparency about the goal of an algorithm, such as retaining your attention, and offer multiple algorithms, one of which must not be based on your behavior at all, for example purely chronological.

If this proposal is put into law, SW will have to bring back the full uncensored feed for European users, and knowing them, they'll then probably give it to users in the rest of the world too, or those could use a VPN to get access to this feature.

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Classified · M

It feels like this could take years though. 😅

NerdyPotato ·

@Classified it probably won't be accepted and enforced within 3 months indeed. All the details need to be ironed out and those are complicated. Take blocking and muting for example: that's technically also personalization and thus not allowed according to the headlines, but I hope it comes with an exception for that. And what about notifications? I don't want to miss out on those that apply to me, and definitely not want one for every action performed by anyone on any post.

Of course big platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter and going to try everything in their power to stop this because they profit from the current manipulation. And once all lawsuits are settled and every detail is covered, companies need time to design new algorithms, figure out how that will change their income and make plans to deal with that, implement, test and debug them, add a way to switch, write descriptions that don't make the company look bad, etc.

So it is indeed very unlikely this will go into effect this year, and probably not in 2023 either. But this is promising for 2024 or 2025.

Classified · M

@NerdyPotato That's still quite fast in my opinion. I would expect it later still. I hadn't even thought about the opposition from big social media companies yet.

HootyTheNightOwl

@Classified You're probably right, given how long it took the EU to approve a Covid vaccine...

Classified · M

@HootyTheNightOwl That was exceptionally fast actually, compared to every other vaccine

HootyTheNightOwl

@Classified It was billed as "slow" over here...🤣

Classified · M

@HootyTheNightOwl UK was faster?

NerdyPotato ·

@Classified it was approved for all EU countries in little over a year, while some vaccines can take as long as 10 years.

Classified · M

@NerdyPotato So compared to that it's extremely fast

HootyTheNightOwl

@Classified Yes... https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2021/01/08/why-does-the-eu-take-longer-than-the-uk-to-approve-a-covid-19-vaccine