Escape from the algorithm

I have a business idea. A (would you believe it!) tech startup idea I have no business skills or computer skills, therefore, I wanted to put it out there for anyone who wants to take it. Unlike many business ideas, this one has the potential to be good for people. Perhaps many others have already thought of my idea, in which case, let me add to the voices calling for it. Right now we’re still a year or two away from my idea being feasible, but now would be the time to start getting ready if you’re interested.

Social media companies:

1. Try to keep you online indefinitely to sell you to as many advertisers as they can. These companies try to outrage, confuse and addict you.

2. Implicitly try to transform you into something that fits consumer categories so they can sell you advertising better. Individuality is their enemy in this enterprise.

3. These companies can be run by nutcases who want to push their weird political vendettas on you.

What you need is virtual protective goggles, digital quinine, or, more crudely, an electronic condom. You need to be able to access the online world without being led around by the nose. You need whoever picks what you see to be working for you, not the advertisers.

I propose a product that goes through your news feed on social media platforms and picks out content for you. Using AI language and image models it browses your social media accounts and creates a new syntheised feed selecting relevant content, excluding unwanted graphic content of various sorts, and curating based on your interests and most importantly your stated preferences. Because it is based on subscription fees, not advertisements, it has no incentive to keep you glued to your screen or to push various sorts of content on you. It gives you a measure of freedom from algorithms that seek to addict and manipulate you by acting as an algorithmic curator you control. True, companies still have a measure of control, in that they can decide what their algorithms show to your curator, but you at least control what the curator passes onto you. Ideally, your digital curator will even be able to go to your friend's profiles and find stuff that isn’t included in the algorithmic feed to show you- or show you public content that it finds in places other than your feed which it estimates will be of interest to you.

Of course, there would be quite a lot of work to do, on the technical front:

1. Integration of AI, which can be unpredictable, is controlled by a small number of companies etc poses challenges.

2. Attempts by companies to prevent automated access to their feeds etc would need to be subverted.

3. Copyright law might prevent this product:

   1. Possible solution: Just break US copyright law, and operate out of a safe harbor.

   2. Possible solution: Have the model summarise the content, and provide a link, rather than copy the content verbatim.

   3. Possible solution: Negotiate with the companies.

There are three key ethical-social concerns I can see:

1. “Bubblification”. While algorithms controlled by companies tend to put people in bubbles, an algorithm controlled by the user might be even more restrictive.

2. The problem of creator discovery. Discovering new content is something of a ‘tragedy of the commons’ problem for reasons I won’t go into here, and this could exacerbate the problem. I think this problem is resolvable though.

3. AI biases and failures. In fairness, it’s hard to imagine these could be worse than social media algorithms which are actively working against you.