We have no idea what content is most viral on YouTube, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, or X – because they refuse to share basic data.
On the DSA’s Birthday (Oct 4th) we’ve led a “mass data access request” along with @mozilla and DSA40 Data Access Collaboratory, where a series of ~20 orgs requested daily data on their top 1,000 most-viewed posts in EU Member States. Every single one refused.
Join us in demanding platform transparency.
Posted on mastodon: https://chaos.social/@algorithmwatch/115620980818833875
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
- 0 users online
- 108 users / day
- 435 users / week
- 1.32K users / month
- 4.54K users / 6 months
- 1 subscriber
- 4.49K Posts
- 113K Comments
- Modlog
I mean, they’re not going to let you take a look at the algorithms of the timelines.
Knowing what are the top posts allows us at least to know what those algorithm are pushing. It’s not much, but it’s the bare minimum of accountability.
My guess is they don’t want data scientist types to find trends pointing to the possible “moderation” of viral posts of a certain political potency, not to make them more popular, but to suppress or wholly censor something impactful from being spread further. Censorship. I mean censorship.
It just wouldn’t surprise me if posts that started being shared at an explosive rate for insert highly-affecting thing here were quietly “turned off” for many an audience’s algorithm at some point by meddlesome human hands. The public having this data could reveal that or other types of manipulation when compared to other platforms, in aggregate, etc.
But idk, not a data doctor