AIM Framework glossary
Visibility Restriction Principle
Canonical definition
The Visibility Restriction Principle holds that an arrangement delivering information to Individuals unasked restricts what it delivers to what bears on the recipient's own Appetitive and Intrinsic circumstances. The restriction falls on unsolicited delivery alone, and an Individual who goes looking can find what they seek. It is the constraint Observability Governance imposes at the point where content is pushed rather than sought, and it is specifiable on rates and thresholds rather than on Belief content (Belief Multipolarity Principle), because the question it asks of a piece of content is whether the recipient stands in any relation to it and not whether it is true or acceptable. Which content clears that question is settled by the Coupling-Decoherence Content Qualification Gate, on the Coupling Strength a claim carries and the Decoherence Time of the domain it belongs to; content failing the Gate is reclassified by delivery mode rather than suppressed.
Explanation
There is a difference between what you go and find and what turns up in front of you without your asking. The Visibility Restriction Principle governs only the second. An arrangement that pushes information at people restricts what it pushes to things that bear on their own lives, their circumstances, their needs, what they are engaged in, and leaves everything else where it is, retrievable by anyone who wants it. That is why the Visibility Restriction Principle is neither paternalism nor censorship. Nothing is taken away from anyone. What is limited is an act the arrangement performs rather than an act an Individual performs, and the test applied is not whether a claim is true or acceptable but whether the person receiving it stands in any relation to it. A claim about a distant dispute pushed into a million feeds reaches a million people who cannot check it, cannot act on it, and will count each restatement of it as further evidence. The same claim, looked up by someone with a reason to look, does none of that. (Framework-Specific Principle).
Epistemic status
Framework-Specific Principle.