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The Folly of Left/Right Filters

Feb 1, 2022

Medium and the debilitating concept of left and right

Photo by Yogendra Singh from Unsplash

I wrote a while back about how Facebook and Twitter have made a core mistake in their political algorithm which filters all content, and all users, into the debilitating concept of left and right, leading to media silos. In previous articles, I’ve written about the 3 common world views in America, and they aren’t even the only ones. Many others have written about how politics have become extremely partisan, and how much more consistent party identity aligns with believes about a given set of issues. All of this is due to the mistake of those sorting algorithms, which create silos on 2 extreme ends of a single dimension — party affiliation. And worse, party affiliation based on American notions of 2 party rule.

A simple way to fix it is to stop filtering people based on the broken idea of left/right. What a reductionist load of shit that entire idea is. If you are pursuing “engagement” so you can sell clicks, reads, or ads, then it makes sense to only show people what they want to see. It’s not even good for that. The simplest adjustment would be to gauge individual user interests, on individual issues, instead of filtering everything through an absolutely moronic left/right false dichotomy. Then you could have someone who’s media silo shows them content that doesn’t align cleanly with party identity. You might for example, get a pro-life reader, who is also anti-gun. That used to be a thing. It is increasingly less so, and the the reason for that isn’t a mystery. It’s the social media, and Medium publication sorting algorithm producing remarkably consistent messaging machines aligned along party silos. It’s the ultimate algorithm driven echo chamber, and hit has to stop.

A FAR better approach, at least for society and for mental health, would be to not even filter based on preferences, but filter based on something healthy. I suggest a measure of extremism, and inflexibility. Simply, don’t boost the extremist expressions, and don’t boost the hard-line expressions. It’s true, that would likely reduce the spread of Republican posts. That would be great, thanks. It would also halt a lot of what Republicans complain about from “the left” (which really just means Democrats , while “right” just means Republicans… life as understood by a 2 horse race…)

How do we stop this madness? In Medium, I clicked on one right wing-ish article, and now I’m inundated with right wing shit posts about “right” issues, and “leftists” and screeds against “woke” —ARGH. If this is what Medium is going to be, then I’m all the way out. How do we fix this?

We need to talk about whether “engagement” is the right metric for measuring all of this. But if we are going to measure and optimize for it, at least we can stop with the brain damage inducing left/right filtering. It’s literally destroying the world.