I think they should bring out personalized, customizable and curatable blocking/block-lists for both accounts and topics, and perhaps content sentiment as well.
E.g. I want to follow Star Trek celebrity actors for their Star Trek/culture/movies/good content, but not for their incessant anti-Republican and Trump-bashing content. Yes, sometimes I'll miss stuff because AI/ML isn't perfect. But we don't want to "desensitize" people by forcing them to internalize beliefs not their own because they want "some" of the content posted by the people they follow.
Ads and "engagement" have a huge negative externality that comes with all these online tools, which is why these platforms never go in the direction of enabling and giving tools to the users to drive their own experience.
I believe that you are asking for a more isolated filter bubble here. This is nice when itβs all positive but never engaging with opposing viewpoints is a serious problem. Polarization and atomization make it hard to cooperate as a society.
If you have a "no liberals" filter, you'll get a worse bubble. But if you implement it as a "no politics" filter, you can get all the benefits without directly affecting bubbles.
"No politics" is a tricky problem, though. 'Politics' is less of a category and more of a spectrum. Is COVID politics? Climate change? Minimum wage research? BLM? But at least you could filter out the rhetoric and mindless other side bashing which are hardly politics anyway.
E.g. I want to follow Star Trek celebrity actors for their Star Trek/culture/movies/good content, but not for their incessant anti-Republican and Trump-bashing content. Yes, sometimes I'll miss stuff because AI/ML isn't perfect. But we don't want to "desensitize" people by forcing them to internalize beliefs not their own because they want "some" of the content posted by the people they follow.
Ads and "engagement" have a huge negative externality that comes with all these online tools, which is why these platforms never go in the direction of enabling and giving tools to the users to drive their own experience.