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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OogieBoogie · F

Will it though if its an american site?
How will this ne monisotred?
Who will police it ?
What will the comsequences be?

Its a great philosophy , but in reality it just a declaration and nothing else .😒

NerdyPotato ·

@OogieBoogie I'm assuming it will work similarly to the GDPR (cookie consent & privacy policy) and apply to anyone serving content to EU citizens, not companies located in the EU. Some US websites display a message essentially saying "this website isn't available in your country because we don't want to disclose what we do with your data", which says enough about their practices but also shows that law does apply to them.

The EU itself will enforce this (I'm assuming through a new department) and can fine companies up to 6% of their global (annual?) turnover per violation, which comes down to 7 billion dollars each time for Facebook/Instagram for example. After repeated violations, they can force internet providers in the EU to block access to a platform, making the content provider lose a considerable part of their userbase completely. I think that should be enough incentive for companies big and small to do the minimum to comply.

OogieBoogie · F

@NerdyPotato so you end up with sites unavailable in your country .

7+ billion people live on this earth.
What is loss from a few thousand compared to profits ?

Sorry , its pessimistic . I get the ideal , im just not sure itll have any impact .

NerdyPotato ·

@OogieBoogie A few thousand? The EU has half a billion out of 5 billion internet users. Not losing 10% of their user base and revenue, and closer to 20% or 30% of their profit, should be worth a few investments and changes to most companies. (Profit will drop further than income because costs won't drop nearly as much.) We'll have to see how it turns out, but I think most companies will comply rather than drop the EU market, similarly to compliance with GDPR. That message I described earlier mostly shows up on news websites that probably don't think many Europeans would be interested in local events on the other side of the world. All social media platforms did choose to comply to retain users in the EU.

OogieBoogie · F

@NerdyPotato i hope this is true ,and works.

Yes, europe is huge . It can have q massive influence .

But when you take america and all the eastern countries like japan and korea that follow american influence, that's half a million too.

Its a numbers game .

But i hope you are right.

SW-User

@OogieBoogie Nuno is Irish