Alt Text:
An edited meme image featuring two stills from MegaMind. The top still shows Titan speaking to a the mayor, who is labelled “TikTokers getting censored by China” and saying “You have freed us!” overlaid. Titan has a US flag as a label, and is saying “Oh, I wouldn’t say freed, more like under new management.”
How is bias not inherent to curation? Preference for one thing over another is bias. Curation is literally showing you things it thinks you’re biased to like. These groups aren’t revealing their secret sauce for curation algorithms so we’d never know anyway.
There’s prioritizing the viewers preferences, and then there’s prioritizing the platforms preferences.
If I don’t show you a video because I don’t think you’d enjoy it, that’s different from not showing it to you because I don’t want you to see it.
User preference is a type of bias, but you wouldn’t typically call a platform “biased” unless it was putting it or some third parties preferences ahead of the users.
I wouldn’t disagree those are different reasons for not wanting to show a video but both are curations based on biases.
I guess I just have a more neutral connotation for bias than “biased against you for others’ own interests” and so I didn’t find bias to be a useful term here to distinguish the reasons behind curation choices.
Nothing really in disagreement here, just fiddling with common usage.
To me bias from a service or platform would be a bias that’s contrary to what was expected or requested.
It’s when they put their finger on the scale.
Bias, as a term, has heavy connotations of being unfair, or to have distorted results, which is why I kinda shy away from using it to describe “everything working as expected and no one would complain if they knew the details”.
If the grocer tampers with the scale so you take home less carrots than you wanted, that’s not fair, and so we would they they biased the scales.
Sounds like we agree, but I also like talking wording sometimes. :)