Recently a Chinese copy of twitter, Weibo, decided to implement similar functionality, but their ability in machine learning is very limited, so their lame work has only promoted paid members and threads. In the first week of its introduction, most users has noticed that there's roughly 50% less threads were read by other users.
Actually I think theres's big future for this kind of censorship, if performed well, can be hard to detect and hard to test(think about A/B testing). So I disagree with 'subtle', it's just our enemy get smarter.
I've been infuriated by Facebook because I have a local events group on high priority in my feed, but FB has decided I only want to see about one post in five. So I miss a lot of news I want to see.
Meanwhile I still get porn posts on the various technology groups I read, even though I keep asking not to see similar content.
I'd have no objection to a good AI editor curating my feed. But FB has a very bad AI editor making bad choices for reasons that ignore my interests, and I really don't want that at all.
The difference is completely in the eye of the beholder.
But a huge centralized curator that decides what everybody reads is something people feared for centuries. It does not really matter if its intention is benign.
Does switching it from "top posts" back to "most recent" still fix it, or is even that filtered? They clearly want you to use their "curation," but a bit of fast scrolling and skimming still does a much better job.
Actually I think theres's big future for this kind of censorship, if performed well, can be hard to detect and hard to test(think about A/B testing). So I disagree with 'subtle', it's just our enemy get smarter.