Social Dilemma
The Social Dilemma, a Netflix “documentary-drama hybrid,” does an impressively good job describing visually, dramatically, and in simple, understandable terms to a non-techie audience (e.g., your Facebook-addicted elderly relatives) the dangers posed by global social media networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube upon ourselves and our society. The entertainingly educational 90-minute movie shows how largely unfettered machine learning algorithms on these sites manipulate and addict you with one goal: keep you engaged as much as possible (whether enthralled or enraged matters little), clicking and tapping, so they can charge advertisers more for a larger user base, and they gain ever more data on your behavior, preferences and emotional triggers to sell to advertisers and to fine tune your targeted, individualized manipulation and addiction in an endless spiral. As the modern saying goes, if you’re not paying for social media, you’re the product, not the customer.
The Social Dilemma relies upon expert insiders–some of them responsible for creating the algorithms that learn to hook you–and fictional families to explain and dramatize how the relentless, amoral pursuit of growth by social media giants led to giant social problems, such as enabling mass manipulation by advertisers and propaganda peddlers on an unprecedented scale, connecting and emboldening conspiracy theory cranks and bad actors around the globe, giving foreign adversaries cheap-n-easy direct access to US voters for disinformation campaigns, and offering authoritarian regimes tools for surveillance, control and even genocide. It has never been easier to grow the ranks of flat earthers, climate science deniers, anti-vaxxers, Qanon believers, white supremacists, and angry mobs than now when Facebook/Twitter/YouTube algorithms lead susceptible users down dark rabbit holes of misinformation, successfully increasing engagement as “outrage machines.” The docu-drama spends a lot less time on detailed solutions to these urgent problems, though it does touch on a bunch of tips for average users at the end (e.g., turn off notifications, limit your screen time, delete the phone app, or simply delete your account). I highly recommend checking it out on Netflix (whether you already subscribe or just want to try it for a month) for your own education and awareness. As a target for manipulation, you should learn how it works so you can recognize and fend it off.
Confronting Misinformation
I first read Scientific American in the late 70’s, when my step-dad subscribed to it. I later subscribed myself, first in paper then digital, before more recently getting it as part of my Apple News+ subscription (along with Wired, Motortrend, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, and many others…not a bad deal). The November issue focuses on Confronting Misinformation: How to protect society from fear, lies and division…quite timely given the rising tide of misinformation in recent and current campaign seasons.
With The Social Dilemma still on my mind, one of the November SciAm features in particular caught my eye: Trolling for Truth on Social Media, by Joan Donovan, a social scientist faculty member at the JFK School of Government at Harvard University. Her article harkens back to a simpler time in the late 80’s and early/mid 90’s, long before your senior relatives had even heard of the Internet, when going online meant you were at college (.edu) or work (.com or .gov), or later at home with a dial-up modem commandeering your only phone line, when we early adopters shared files, software, technical info, homework and perhaps some dialog in usenet groups and early email accounts, but not personal data, and we certainly didn’t buy anything online. Many viewed the rapidly expanding Internet clad with the newly accessible World Wide Web as a public tool for information and democracy…hello world, you’re welcome! Dr. Donovan traces our online history from those naively idyllic beginnings into the modern digital economy, first driven by porn (like VHS in the 70’s), later by more general sales sites, eventually by social media giants who figured out how to convert users’ personal data into a marketable commodity, for sale to other corporations, political organizations, and even governments. Agencies in the latter figured out how to use social media to surveil and manipulate people in other countries, and even their own citizens. Dr. Donovan describes some of the tactics used by these good and bad actors, for good or ill.
While I enjoyed the walk through the digital history of the last few decades and learned some tricks of the trade, I awaited the punch line at the end, when she speaks to how those who still care about truth and public access to it might fight back against the online flood of dis/misinformation around the world and here in the US. It starts by losing our naïveté and “dispatching with the ideology that technological platforms are democracy in action.” By design, social media and misinformation incentives are “weighted in favor of disinformers,” given “novel claims travel far and fast,” racing past and drowning out boring old truth. If such harmful incentives are inherent in the current design of social media, a redesign is in order, i.e., design to incentivize truth over dis/misinformation, or at least to achieve a better balance for a more “equal-opportunity media ecosystem.” Our “techno-nostalgia” and era of laissez-faire attitudes toward the Internet and the global media/information companies that use it must come to an end if we are to rescue truth on social media for our own social and democratic health.
Moonday 