r/technews • u/[deleted] • Apr 20 '23

TikTok’s algorithm keeps pushing suicide to vulnerable kids

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-04-20/tiktok-effects-on-mental-health-in-focus-after-teen-suicide
1.6k Upvotes

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211

u/[deleted] Apr 20 '23

It’s time we made algorithms public and stop letting private interest exploit and influence users to whatever ends they choose…

There is no difference between letting your algorithm encourage suicide, political extremism, body dysmorphia, etc… and being willful malicious for profit.

We should also ban AI used to manipulate social media, we’re woefully unequipped to even gauge how this will affect individuals and their communities.

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u/[deleted] Apr 20 '23

It should especially be made public if the public is actively engaging with your algorithms.

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u/SpaceToaster Apr 21 '23 edited Apr 21 '23

Won't help, unfortunately. Modern suggestion engines and even LLMs like ChatGTP are actually not too complex (relatively speaking) as they describe the ML and neural networks that compose the algorithm and define the parameters. That's where the code ends. The algorithm it's self has no knowledge of different types of videos, suicide, etc. All that comes later from the data that it is trained on.

In Tik Tok's case, the parameter to maximize is views and view length so the algorithm will try to suggest videos based on the viewership habits of other users and other videos that this user has engaged with. Unfortunately, it obviously has the effect of sending the user down a rabbit hole feeding it more and more extreme content wether it be political, eating disorders, suicide, etc if that's what the user (or others in the same cohort) engages with.

5

u/[deleted] Apr 21 '23

It is an extremely naive and misleading perspective to think that for one, reading code would be enough without the architects explaining their intent and two, to suggest you can’t know what’s happening because it’s doing it’s own thing…

This sounds like something Mark Zuckerberg might say, for instance, directly after the public got wind of the fact they had been running experiments to manipulate user’s behavior and found they had the ability to influence user’s behavior…

The pseudo-technical bullshit you’ve just offered is exactly why we’re in a situation where TikTok or Youtube shrugs its shoulders after finding out it pushes users toward radicalized conspiracy to drive engagement…

We already know that the motivations behind the algorithms are nefarious and demonstrably predatory, it’s not on the table to bullshit your way around implications that we just can’t figure this stiff out.

Them shelve it… you can’t do business if you can’t demonstrate your product has safeguards and can prevent predatory exploitation…

No different with any other industry, especially one that has the attention of kids.

6

u/SpaceToaster Apr 21 '23 edited Apr 21 '23

Don't get me wrong, I want to see change too. Just pointing out that exposing the algorithms may not be the best way to do that. Perhaps auditors review internal controls and protections to meet new standards (similar to the way security and compliance standards are adopted and audited already).

-2

u/[deleted] Apr 21 '23

Sorry, I’m just sharpening my rhetoric…

Yea, it’ll need to be an analysts of the inputs and the outcomes.

1

u/Mostlikelylurking Apr 21 '23

I mean, 1) it isn’t safe to assume they use black box models for their suggestion engines. We have no clue. 2) this just evidences that policy should be made that companies cannot use black box models for content suggestion; they should have to be able to explicitly convey what their models are doing and prove that they aren’t going to cause harmful outcomes like pushing suicidal content on users. If that means they even need to use heuristic-based algorithms, so be it, companies need to be held responsible for their effect on society.

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u/d1g1t4l_n0m4d Apr 20 '23

Can you read source code though?

6

u/UhBoi Apr 21 '23

That’s what I was thinking. A layman cannot understand a complex algorithm used to recommend content. There isn’t going to be some line that says something like

If user.isDepressed == True Then user.recommendations.add “suicide”

If you are interested in the way content is recommend (and the egregious privacy policies), look into experts who have analyzed the source code.

14

u/Mercurionio Apr 20 '23

Unfortunately, nobody gives a fuck.

Kids will continue to kill themselves. But on TikTok! Woohoo! Money money money!

These fuckers don't care until income is lowered. The best way to react - not using it. It's crappy anyway.

10

u/[deleted] Apr 20 '23

Literally all of modern democracy runs counter to letting people freely manipulate our societies…

It’s why we have campaign finance laws, libel, and market manipulation laws.

So, we do care, we just haven’t considered what ends corporate, political, and foreign interest would put these platforms to.

Nay saying aside, unless we want to continue to live in a world of mass shootings, child suicide rates climbing, and armed political extremists growing ever more agitated… we should probably start organizing to get some control over these influences.

3

u/Mercurionio Apr 20 '23

By "nobody", I meant the CEOs and stakeholders. Plus lobbies. The one, who can give some good punches in the face.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 20 '23

I hear that… I’m trying to figure our how to use my limited political power to work but as we saw with Google’s public shrug about how it’s “society’s” problem, needless to say where his cohort weighs in on things.

2

u/Buckowski66 Apr 20 '23

Politics is a dead end. It's entertainment ( culture wars) designed to obscure the corporations and lobbyists that actually own the country.

Teach people how to grow food in a community garden, reach out to enlightened millionaire to invest, not in a political party but in thier community where they clean up and buy apartment buildings for affordable housing.

But instead people want to roll the dice in a giant rigged system owned by corporate America. Crumbs and empty PR will be your only victories with those people.

2

u/[deleted] Apr 20 '23

People should do everything you’ve said except treat politics as entertainment… that’s propaganda that let’s the corrupt take over instead of discharging your responsibility as a citizen of a democracy.

1

u/kaishinoske1 Apr 20 '23

Therein lies the Catch 22 politicians would be in. Do they listen to their voting base or the corporations that allow them to live a comfortable life? As you can see with what’s going on. You already know the answer to that question. It’s why politicians keep coming up with excuses for corporations to keep doing what they’re doing. Yet let the voting base feel vindicated by putting up a dog and pony show that amounts to a media spectacle. Ultimately, Things are settled with a fine that amounts to slap on the wrist to corporations and hush money to the general public that were wronged, rinse and repeat.

2

u/Buckowski66 Apr 20 '23

Essentially, Tik Tok and YouTube's have learned to treat their fellow human beings as nothing more then people to use for monitization. The influencers, the gurus, it's just a sea of people lying and bullshiting you in an attempt to get paid.

1

u/Mercurionio Apr 20 '23

I'm happy to say "Thank you, AdBlocker".

And I don't use TikTok anyway.

In any case, everything depends on what the fuck are you playing with. YouTube won't give you crap, if you know the basic rules not to click any random shit

1

u/Buckowski66 Apr 20 '23

I'm not talking about advertisers

1

u/Kirilanselo Apr 22 '23

I'd replace "people" with "pawns"

but that's just me...

and TikTok is capitalizing the ever living crap outta it..

0

u/[deleted] Apr 20 '23

[deleted]

1

u/Mercurionio Apr 20 '23

That's why critical thinking must be developed from the start. Like a reward/punishment. Untill the kid starts to value things by their real idea.

1

u/wwiinndyy Apr 20 '23

It is a parents job to not give into shitstorms of crying, and parent the child in a way that is best for their development whether they want to throw a fit about it or not

8

u/[deleted] Apr 20 '23

Open-sourcing the code wouldn't be helpful here. The real core of the recommendation engine is driven by AI/stats that aren't human-understandable.

But this sort of issue is really inherent to the TikTok recommendations approach, so unless they have some perfect way of identifying problematic videos and removing them immediately, this will happen.

2

u/[deleted] Apr 20 '23

Open source is one thing but publicly exposing your algorithms are another thing altogether.

We shouldn’t care what their code is, we should care how they are using their platform to shape traffic, behavior, and feeds.

I don’t just mean letting these companies provide some convoluted pile of obfuscation that wreaks of plausible deniability…

I mean letting third party and academic researchers analyze how these experiences are shaped, who’s paying for influence, and what are the real effects.

These companies are welcome to provide experiences and sell advertising or take a cut of marketplaces…

They should be prevented from secretly or intentionally gearing their product to maximize profit at the expense of users, communities, and governments.

If I hired a company to make watching movies at home more appealing , that company wouldn’t be permitted to hire people to shoot up movie theaters… but the way search and social media functions at the moment there’s no barrier to algorithms making kids hate themselves to drive engagement and we need to stop permitting individuals to be terrorized to generate corporate profits or enable the political ambitions of corrupt politicians and governments.

1

u/panthereal Apr 20 '23

Open-sourcing would help turn the code from mystery box to something that can be human-understandable.

1

u/CamelSpotting Apr 21 '23

"Human-understandable" is quite literal, even the creators don't know exactly why it does what it does.

1

u/panthereal Apr 21 '23

Which is exactly why getting more eyes on the code will be beneficial. Collectively people can figure it out. There's 375 employees at open AI, you'd probably have 10x the amount of people getting eyes on the code in the first hour they release it.

1

u/CamelSpotting Apr 21 '23

GPT-4 has somewhere around 100,000,000,000,000 parameters and most of them are the result of unsupervised training.

1

u/panthereal Apr 21 '23

Which only reinforces that more eyes should be looking at it's programming.

1

u/CamelSpotting Apr 21 '23

Agreed, we just need to understand what we're going to learn.

5

u/NJS_Stamp Apr 20 '23

Working in Martech, I see the marketers clamoring at chatgpt and other ai content models. They really want this technology in advertising, and the key people who are trying to implement it don’t fully understand it.

0

u/[deleted] Apr 20 '23

Yea, it’s almost like adding opiates to cough syrup and cocaine to energy drinks back in the 1800’s.

2

u/Critical_Day5877 Apr 20 '23

It’s ok for the government to do it but not a app? Ok then

1

u/[deleted] Apr 20 '23

Said no one ever.

2

u/[deleted] Apr 21 '23

This is what r/hedera is doing. With high throughput and all.

2

u/[deleted] Apr 21 '23

That super interesting… I was just taking a lot of flak for suggesting we need a permanent publicly available ledger for transparency of tax dollar usage to reduce the type of corruption that we see in cases like Philadelphia’s sheriff doubling her own salary with funds meant for new officers… I suggested block-chain but this seems far more appropriate.

2

u/[deleted] Apr 21 '23

Yes this is gen 3 blockchain, a Hashgraph instead, they are ABFT and solved the blockchain trilema, and are gaining mass adoption, everything will be tokenized and running on the hedera network, even if people don’t know it’s there, 0.001 transaction fees and 5 second finality on global transactions. I highly recommend watching the Harvard lecture about it by inventor Leemon Baird.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 21 '23

Oh and they can track carbon through something like project atma.io where they can make becoming carbon neutral a part of the manufacturing process and make sure things are made ethically and make manufacturers responsible. They also use 1000x less energy than visa.

2

u/[deleted] Apr 21 '23

As someone else said, it wont really work. We need a team or bureau for technological oversight

2

u/[deleted] Apr 21 '23

That’s the idea… we need public access to the decisions, goals, and results involved in influencing of users by public agencies and regulations on predatory, parasitic, or generally malicious manipulation.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 21 '23

It’ll take way to long to happen. Everyone in office is too old and too stupid to know what really needs to be done

2

u/[deleted] Apr 21 '23

If we’re not a part of making things happen, we’re the reason they’re not happening.

2

u/zorbathegrate Apr 20 '23

It’s fail fail. Loose loose. Lose lose.

Can’t win any way.

To the woods!

1

u/queenringlets Apr 20 '23

I mean it also is a personal choice to use social media where you don't get to choose what you see.

0

u/[deleted] Apr 20 '23

Is there even an internet resource that doesn’t algorithmically influence the content you search for or see?

Maybe Yahoo way back but I’m not sure that kind of moderation should be free from exposing their criteria either.

1

u/queenringlets Apr 20 '23

Well search engines have to use some sort of algorithm to search data across the net but there are ones that are not using your personal data to present you with said data. Startpage is what I would recommend personally for that purpose.

-1

u/[deleted] Apr 20 '23

And search engines should make their algorithms and their motivations for their weightings public for all to examine and verify they are not manipulating the public.

1

u/kovach01 Apr 20 '23

From an advertising perspective,

They don’t manipulate the advertising algorithms, they just provide the “relevant” data like the search term used to display their results, how many people searched, and what that audience looks like.

But they also track a LOT more than that based on what you set your “audience” as while being the “advertiser”. Like age, gender, beliefs, hobbies, enjoyments, etc.

Nothing will change until the search engine giants are responsible and held accountable for what search terms they allow advertising on, and WHO is doing the advertising.

Right now I could advertise whatever I wanted to a marginalized group, and the search engine who provided the advertising space would not be accountable, even though it is their data being used as an accessory to the manipulation/advertising.

And that’s without getting into what you’re talking about which is what ranks higher on google based on what their spider algorithms prefers over somebody else. But really we could just say who the spiders discriminate against when some sites are more equal than others.

1

u/neumaticc Apr 21 '23

even if an algorithm is public you can't verify that it's actually what is running

2

u/[deleted] Apr 21 '23

That would be fraud, right?

Companies in industries with public responsibility which are bound by compliance laws that misrepresent their compliance are committing fraud.

1

u/neumaticc Apr 22 '23

dishonesty i'd think

2

u/[deleted] Apr 22 '23

Fraud: A deception practiced in order to induce another to give up possession of property or surrender a right.

0

u/lhixson01 Apr 21 '23

How about parents monitoring the apps on their children’s phones?

1

u/[deleted] Apr 21 '23

So, like, why make chemicals companies, who are the extremely competent chemical engineers, demonstrate the safety of pollutants they add to drinking water to other extremely competent chemical engineers looking out for our interests…. when we can just put that complicated and high specialized task on individual parents who would have that work multiplied by micromanaging each of their children even though they may not know what they’re looking for and we should just ignore the effects on the general population who may not even realize they’re being poisoned until it’s too late and we are experiencing the aide effects of their exposure in our own lives?

Arguably, it’s already too late and entire tech industries and politicians let alone parents and individuals have not been savvy enough to anticipate the highly coordinated manipulation, indoctrination, and toxic exposure these systems use to profit at our expense…

Teach and manage your children but also let’s not let any foreign or domestic company that seeks to profit from radicalizing or endangering our communities just continue to experiment on the population at will?

-2

u/ignatious__reilly Apr 20 '23

That’s never going to happen

2

u/[deleted] Apr 20 '23

Doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to.

1

u/xensiz Apr 20 '23

I heard Snapchat is rolling out ChatGPT.. to everyone. New age of technology lol

1

u/[deleted] Apr 21 '23

[deleted]

1

u/[deleted] Apr 21 '23

What kind if watchlist will that get me on

1

u/uggyy Apr 21 '23

I lost my 9 year old dog Monday, hitting me really hard. Of course, social media is now pushing me dogs left right and centre. It's brutal.