Fall 2021
Dear Friends and Family,
“Social Media Addiction and Manipulation” is the title of Segment 4 of the Big Tech & AI series.
My Takeaways:
Many Americans, particularly children and teens, are becoming addicted to social media. This is resulting in several consequences:
See if your takeaways are similar to mine as you read through the excerpts and possibly the PDF attachment.
Next: The excerpts in segment 5 suggest that Big Tech has the power to determine which information we can access on the internet, social media, and through much of the media as they are the biggest publisher in America. Further, they have the surveillance capability to track our movements. Is this for real?
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
“Social Media Addiction and Manipulation” is the title of Segment 4 of the Big Tech & AI series.
My Takeaways:
Many Americans, particularly children and teens, are becoming addicted to social media. This is resulting in several consequences:
- Depression, anxiety, social isolation, and a rise in suicide rates.
- Promotion of sameness by forcing people into groups of similar people with similar interests and keeping them there via information they are provided to read and listen to.
- Deepening of cultural and political divisions, far less public debate, and increased outrage, distrust, and fear.
See if your takeaways are similar to mine as you read through the excerpts and possibly the PDF attachment.
Next: The excerpts in segment 5 suggest that Big Tech has the power to determine which information we can access on the internet, social media, and through much of the media as they are the biggest publisher in America. Further, they have the surveillance capability to track our movements. Is this for real?
Happy Learning,
Harley
BIG TECH & AI – SEGMENT 4
SOCIAL MEDIA ADDICTION AND MANIPULATION – EXCERPTS
ANTI-SOCIAL MEDIA: Researchers began to notice it in the mid-2010s, a new social feature, a tick in the body politic. Americans were having trouble concentrating. Growing numbers of individuals, especially children and teens, just couldn’t seem to focus. They were acting addicted. Having addicted Americans to its platforms and services, having mined citizen’s personal data, having subjected users to endless manipulation, Big Tech now demanded Americans absorb the potential consequences: soaring rates of depression, among children and teens especially; a dramatic spike in youth suicide; and a tangible loss of meaningful human relationships, as people turned away from each other and to their phones.
The worst of it had to do with children. One study reported that older children and teens could manage a mere six minutes of studying before indulging the compulsive need to pick up their smartphones and reconnect with social media. Part of the reason for this curious behavior was the addictive design of the social media platforms and the products that displayed them, that is, the phones. But another reason, a prime reason was fear. To be precise, the fear of missing out. This, the social theorists say, is “the pervasive apprehension” – or, for some teenagers, the god-awful terror – “that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent.” If one spent more than a few seconds on social media, it becomes obvious that fear of missing out is social media’s stock-in-trade, its inevitable by-product, its very nature. And the dominant social media platforms are designed to maximize it.
Beginning in 2009, as social media’s race to gain our attention kicked off in earnest, Facebook added a new feature to its platform to permit users to express approval of other users’ posts and images. They called it the “like.” It was a public token of popularity, a way to reward others of whom one approves and a metric that could be used to assess how popular one really was oneself. Across social media sites, more time browsing led to more social comparison, and self-criticism, more fear. The social media sites practically ran on it. And the strange thing was, the more one suffered the fear of missing out, the more time one spent on social media. Isolated, nervous, depressed individuals couldn’t seem to get enough – they were addicted, as if to a narcotic.
Young girls in particular showed alarming signs of social isolation and anxiety. Boys’ depressive symptoms rose by 32% between 2012 and 2015, no small increase, girls’ signs of depression skyrocketed by 50% over that same time period. The rise in suicide is more pronounced among girls. Although the rate increased for both sexes, three times as many 12-to14-year-old girls killed themselves in 2015 as in 2007, compared with twice as many boys.
Big Tech has gained powerful control over how we communicate in America – to a degree that would have horrified the founders. Social discourse is now centered on Big Tech’s platforms, and Big Tech has no interest in promoting deliberative debate or empowering the common man. Deliberative debate requires common sentiments and loyalties, a shared horizon of interests and purposes, all of which social media has undermined. For profit. And control.
They promote sameness. They force users into groups of similar people with similar interests and ideas. And once they have performed this herding, the Big Tech platforms proceed to promote the loudest and most obnoxious voices. As outrage becomes the norm on the social platforms, researchers found that heavy social media users were taking their outrage with them into the workplace, the neighborhood, the church. For democracy, for the republic of the common person, it all added up to trouble. The social media outrage factory was the very opposite of citizens reasoning together.
Big Tech helped accelerate largely unpredicted results; deepening cultural and political divisions; declining standards of deliberative debate; and increasing outrage, distrust, and fear. To achieve lasting social transformation, the Big Tech barons wanted to control what citizens read, to control their news and their reactions. To put it another way, the Big Tech barons want to become the censors of the nations.
Source: The Tyranny of Big Tech by Josh Hawley
ADDICTION AND DEPENDANCE
According to one 2016 study, we touch our cellphones about 2,617 times a day. Seventy-nine percent of smartphone owners check their device within 15 minutes of waking up. One-third of Americans say they’d rather give up sex than lose their cellphone. There is no question about it: Our devices and the things we do on them are just as addictive as nicotine, food, drugs, or alcohol, and there is a trove of research that proves it. Consider the average teenager who spend 7.5 hours a day playing with screens and phones. Is it any wonder they are more isolated, less social, and more prone to depression than previous generations? As scary as this is, it’s even scarier that these conditions can actually be monetized by the platforms that create them. Of all the states of mind that companies and brands seek to induce, addiction is by far the most desirable. It’s not enough to get people to like a product, even to love a product. You want to make them crave it so much they can’t live without it, just as corporations did with tobacco, followed by alcohol and television.
Source: World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer (2017)
MANIPULATION: Facebook makes its own choices about what should be read. The company’s algorithms sort the thousands of things a Facebook user could possible see down to a smaller batch of choice items. And then within those few dozen items, it decides what we might like to read first. Somewhere in the distance, we’re interacting with a machine. That’s what makes Facebook’s algorithms so powerful. Many users – 60%, according to the best research – are completely unaware of its existence. But even if they know of its influence, it wouldn’t really matter. The algorithm interprets more than one hundred thousand “signals” to make its decisions about what users see. Some of these signals apply to all Facebook users; some reflect users’ particular habits and the habits of their friends. Facebook changes what its users see and read.
Facebook likes to boast of the fact of its experimentation more than the details of the actual experiments themselves. But there are examples that have escaped the confines of its laboratories. We know, for example, that Facebook sought to discover whether emotions are contagious. To conduct this trial, Facebook attempted to manipulate the mental state of its users. For one group, they excised the positive words from the posts in the News Feed; for another group, it removed the negative words. Each group, it concluded, wrote posts that echoed the mood of the posts it had reworded. As one member of Facebook’s data science team confessed:” Anyone on that team could run a test. They’re always trying to alter people’s behavior.”
Facebook has bragged about how it increased voter turnout by subtly ramping up the social pressures that compel virtuous behavior. No other company has so precisely boasted about its ability to shape democracy like this – and for good reason. It’s too much power to entrust to a corporation. The whole effort is to make human beings predictable – to anticipate their behavior which make them easier to manipulate. With this sort of cold-blooded thinking, so divorced from the contingency and mystery of human life, it’s easy to see how long-standing values begin to seem like an annoyance – why a concept like privacy would carry so little weight. Algorithms fuel a sense of omnipotence, the condescending belief that our behavior can be altered, without our even being aware of the hand guiding us, in a superior direction.
Source: World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer (2017)
HAMPERING CONCENTRATION: The research speaks to an even deeper issue: Technology is hampering the ability of an entire generation to concentrate enough to truly learn. According to data from the National Survey of Children’s Health, around 3% of the population had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in the 1990s. Today that’s up to around 11%, an alarming rise that many doctors link to the rise of digital media. Jaron Lanier, the pioneer of virtual reality, whose recent book, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, argues that social media is creating a culture of victims and diminishing diversity of thought in a way that will undermine not only our economy and democracy, but free thought itself.
Source: Don’t Be Evil: The Case Against Big Tech by Rana Foroohar (2021)
SHAPING POLITICAL OPINIONS: If Facebook were a country, it would be the biggest one on the planet. Over 2 billion people, more than a third of people living today, log in every month. It knows more about us than pretty much anyone else, barring our closest friends and family, who are, of course, right there, every day on the platform with us. When you think about that, it was only a matter of time before nefarious actors found a way to exploit that data to corrupt the democratic process. Politicians have for years been using detailed data metrics and market feedback to try to influence election results. But it wasn’t until 2016 that the general public really understood the vast possibility held by such techniques when amplified by the kind of surveillance capitalism practiced by the largest platform technology firms. While the ultimate results of that were unprecedented, the practices itself was not; media organizations have often worked closely with political campaigns. Big Tech companies – not just Facebook and Google but others like Twitter and Microsoft and Apple as well – have taken political communications to an entirely new level. Since 2012, these companies have been intimately involved in campaign strategy on both sides of the aisle.
Source: Don’t Be Evil: The Case Against Big Tech by Rana Foroohar (2021)
Research psychologist Robert Epstein began studying what he termed the “search engine manipulation effect.” Epstein found as early as 2014 that he could alter the choice of undecided voters in an election by perhaps more than 12% simply by manipulating the order of the search results – a swing that could determine a close contest. That was all hypothetical. Then came the 2016 presidential election. Epstein, a liberal Democrat, exhaustively studied Googles’ Search responses. What he found was a pronounced search bias on Google in favor of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. It happened again in 2018. In the weeks leading up to the midterm elections, Epstein determined that bias in Google’s search results “may have shifted upwards of 78.2 million votes” toward Democratic Party candidates. The evidence, Epstein concluded, showed “strong political bias.”
Google had another subtler but equally powerful lever of influence: its advertising platform. For online publishers, it was a major revenue stream, the revenue stream practically the only game in town. To be excluded from it was a financial death knell, especially for a small news site. In the spring of 2020, Google began threatening conservative-leaning websites with exclusion from the advertising platform unless they made various concessions, including suspending their comments section and revising their news stories. One prominent target was The Federalist, a conservative site frequently critical of Google. After NBC complained about The Federalist reporting, Google threatened to bar The Federalist from its advertising network. The Federalist ultimately appeased Google by eliminating its comment section, but Google’s threat was plain. It had the power to defund conservative websites.
Source: The Tyranny of Big Tech by Josh Hawley
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
SOCIAL MEDIA ADDICTION AND MANIPULATION – EXCERPTS
ANTI-SOCIAL MEDIA: Researchers began to notice it in the mid-2010s, a new social feature, a tick in the body politic. Americans were having trouble concentrating. Growing numbers of individuals, especially children and teens, just couldn’t seem to focus. They were acting addicted. Having addicted Americans to its platforms and services, having mined citizen’s personal data, having subjected users to endless manipulation, Big Tech now demanded Americans absorb the potential consequences: soaring rates of depression, among children and teens especially; a dramatic spike in youth suicide; and a tangible loss of meaningful human relationships, as people turned away from each other and to their phones.
The worst of it had to do with children. One study reported that older children and teens could manage a mere six minutes of studying before indulging the compulsive need to pick up their smartphones and reconnect with social media. Part of the reason for this curious behavior was the addictive design of the social media platforms and the products that displayed them, that is, the phones. But another reason, a prime reason was fear. To be precise, the fear of missing out. This, the social theorists say, is “the pervasive apprehension” – or, for some teenagers, the god-awful terror – “that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent.” If one spent more than a few seconds on social media, it becomes obvious that fear of missing out is social media’s stock-in-trade, its inevitable by-product, its very nature. And the dominant social media platforms are designed to maximize it.
Beginning in 2009, as social media’s race to gain our attention kicked off in earnest, Facebook added a new feature to its platform to permit users to express approval of other users’ posts and images. They called it the “like.” It was a public token of popularity, a way to reward others of whom one approves and a metric that could be used to assess how popular one really was oneself. Across social media sites, more time browsing led to more social comparison, and self-criticism, more fear. The social media sites practically ran on it. And the strange thing was, the more one suffered the fear of missing out, the more time one spent on social media. Isolated, nervous, depressed individuals couldn’t seem to get enough – they were addicted, as if to a narcotic.
Young girls in particular showed alarming signs of social isolation and anxiety. Boys’ depressive symptoms rose by 32% between 2012 and 2015, no small increase, girls’ signs of depression skyrocketed by 50% over that same time period. The rise in suicide is more pronounced among girls. Although the rate increased for both sexes, three times as many 12-to14-year-old girls killed themselves in 2015 as in 2007, compared with twice as many boys.
Big Tech has gained powerful control over how we communicate in America – to a degree that would have horrified the founders. Social discourse is now centered on Big Tech’s platforms, and Big Tech has no interest in promoting deliberative debate or empowering the common man. Deliberative debate requires common sentiments and loyalties, a shared horizon of interests and purposes, all of which social media has undermined. For profit. And control.
They promote sameness. They force users into groups of similar people with similar interests and ideas. And once they have performed this herding, the Big Tech platforms proceed to promote the loudest and most obnoxious voices. As outrage becomes the norm on the social platforms, researchers found that heavy social media users were taking their outrage with them into the workplace, the neighborhood, the church. For democracy, for the republic of the common person, it all added up to trouble. The social media outrage factory was the very opposite of citizens reasoning together.
Big Tech helped accelerate largely unpredicted results; deepening cultural and political divisions; declining standards of deliberative debate; and increasing outrage, distrust, and fear. To achieve lasting social transformation, the Big Tech barons wanted to control what citizens read, to control their news and their reactions. To put it another way, the Big Tech barons want to become the censors of the nations.
Source: The Tyranny of Big Tech by Josh Hawley
ADDICTION AND DEPENDANCE
According to one 2016 study, we touch our cellphones about 2,617 times a day. Seventy-nine percent of smartphone owners check their device within 15 minutes of waking up. One-third of Americans say they’d rather give up sex than lose their cellphone. There is no question about it: Our devices and the things we do on them are just as addictive as nicotine, food, drugs, or alcohol, and there is a trove of research that proves it. Consider the average teenager who spend 7.5 hours a day playing with screens and phones. Is it any wonder they are more isolated, less social, and more prone to depression than previous generations? As scary as this is, it’s even scarier that these conditions can actually be monetized by the platforms that create them. Of all the states of mind that companies and brands seek to induce, addiction is by far the most desirable. It’s not enough to get people to like a product, even to love a product. You want to make them crave it so much they can’t live without it, just as corporations did with tobacco, followed by alcohol and television.
Source: World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer (2017)
MANIPULATION: Facebook makes its own choices about what should be read. The company’s algorithms sort the thousands of things a Facebook user could possible see down to a smaller batch of choice items. And then within those few dozen items, it decides what we might like to read first. Somewhere in the distance, we’re interacting with a machine. That’s what makes Facebook’s algorithms so powerful. Many users – 60%, according to the best research – are completely unaware of its existence. But even if they know of its influence, it wouldn’t really matter. The algorithm interprets more than one hundred thousand “signals” to make its decisions about what users see. Some of these signals apply to all Facebook users; some reflect users’ particular habits and the habits of their friends. Facebook changes what its users see and read.
Facebook likes to boast of the fact of its experimentation more than the details of the actual experiments themselves. But there are examples that have escaped the confines of its laboratories. We know, for example, that Facebook sought to discover whether emotions are contagious. To conduct this trial, Facebook attempted to manipulate the mental state of its users. For one group, they excised the positive words from the posts in the News Feed; for another group, it removed the negative words. Each group, it concluded, wrote posts that echoed the mood of the posts it had reworded. As one member of Facebook’s data science team confessed:” Anyone on that team could run a test. They’re always trying to alter people’s behavior.”
Facebook has bragged about how it increased voter turnout by subtly ramping up the social pressures that compel virtuous behavior. No other company has so precisely boasted about its ability to shape democracy like this – and for good reason. It’s too much power to entrust to a corporation. The whole effort is to make human beings predictable – to anticipate their behavior which make them easier to manipulate. With this sort of cold-blooded thinking, so divorced from the contingency and mystery of human life, it’s easy to see how long-standing values begin to seem like an annoyance – why a concept like privacy would carry so little weight. Algorithms fuel a sense of omnipotence, the condescending belief that our behavior can be altered, without our even being aware of the hand guiding us, in a superior direction.
Source: World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer (2017)
HAMPERING CONCENTRATION: The research speaks to an even deeper issue: Technology is hampering the ability of an entire generation to concentrate enough to truly learn. According to data from the National Survey of Children’s Health, around 3% of the population had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in the 1990s. Today that’s up to around 11%, an alarming rise that many doctors link to the rise of digital media. Jaron Lanier, the pioneer of virtual reality, whose recent book, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, argues that social media is creating a culture of victims and diminishing diversity of thought in a way that will undermine not only our economy and democracy, but free thought itself.
Source: Don’t Be Evil: The Case Against Big Tech by Rana Foroohar (2021)
SHAPING POLITICAL OPINIONS: If Facebook were a country, it would be the biggest one on the planet. Over 2 billion people, more than a third of people living today, log in every month. It knows more about us than pretty much anyone else, barring our closest friends and family, who are, of course, right there, every day on the platform with us. When you think about that, it was only a matter of time before nefarious actors found a way to exploit that data to corrupt the democratic process. Politicians have for years been using detailed data metrics and market feedback to try to influence election results. But it wasn’t until 2016 that the general public really understood the vast possibility held by such techniques when amplified by the kind of surveillance capitalism practiced by the largest platform technology firms. While the ultimate results of that were unprecedented, the practices itself was not; media organizations have often worked closely with political campaigns. Big Tech companies – not just Facebook and Google but others like Twitter and Microsoft and Apple as well – have taken political communications to an entirely new level. Since 2012, these companies have been intimately involved in campaign strategy on both sides of the aisle.
Source: Don’t Be Evil: The Case Against Big Tech by Rana Foroohar (2021)
Research psychologist Robert Epstein began studying what he termed the “search engine manipulation effect.” Epstein found as early as 2014 that he could alter the choice of undecided voters in an election by perhaps more than 12% simply by manipulating the order of the search results – a swing that could determine a close contest. That was all hypothetical. Then came the 2016 presidential election. Epstein, a liberal Democrat, exhaustively studied Googles’ Search responses. What he found was a pronounced search bias on Google in favor of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. It happened again in 2018. In the weeks leading up to the midterm elections, Epstein determined that bias in Google’s search results “may have shifted upwards of 78.2 million votes” toward Democratic Party candidates. The evidence, Epstein concluded, showed “strong political bias.”
Google had another subtler but equally powerful lever of influence: its advertising platform. For online publishers, it was a major revenue stream, the revenue stream practically the only game in town. To be excluded from it was a financial death knell, especially for a small news site. In the spring of 2020, Google began threatening conservative-leaning websites with exclusion from the advertising platform unless they made various concessions, including suspending their comments section and revising their news stories. One prominent target was The Federalist, a conservative site frequently critical of Google. After NBC complained about The Federalist reporting, Google threatened to bar The Federalist from its advertising network. The Federalist ultimately appeased Google by eliminating its comment section, but Google’s threat was plain. It had the power to defund conservative websites.
Source: The Tyranny of Big Tech by Josh Hawley
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| 4l_big_tech_addiction_and_manipulation_--_segment_4.pdf |