Thread · 5 tweets · 11 Jul 2022

I've just been looking at amplification as the flip side of gatekeeping: it's deciding that a given audience gets to see given information. There's the organic kind (people repeat it around them) and the editorial kind (via recommandation algorithm or direct human decision).

Any specific amplification can result in cascades (eg. with an epidiological model), but the two are distinct. Looked at this way the issues are about the concentration of gatekeeping power (a tiny number of companies makes these decisions at huge scales) and...

...there are feedback loops between those companies' editorial amplification and their design of affordances for organic amplification.

I would add: the issue is emphatically not about terrible content (though that is a part of it). Rather it is about how we collectively decide what information rises to prominence. Editorial monoculture is more worrying than bad content.

Essentially, since we are epistemically social (but convinced of the contrary), the effects from gatekeeping concentration (editorially) and industrialisation (organically) are likely negative for our collective problem-solving abilities.