> My concern is that this propaganda is leading to people changing their behaviour: unaware they are being fed 'generic content' for some accidental, meaningless 'singanal' they sent, their habits/emotions/self-perception is being distorted to fit the stupidity of the average.
This is definitely happening on a global scale already.
It doesn't matter if a movie is "good", if netflix decides to feed it to everyone it will become #1. It doesn't matter is a song is "good", if spotify decides it's the next hit it will become one. &c.
It's like TV or radio on steroids, everyone listen to the same thing, read the same articles, watch the same netflix shows. Anecdata: a lot of my friends started to play chess seemingly out of nowhere, I really didn't get it until I learned there was a new netflix show about chess that made the game hype again
> As impressive as a lot of these models are, I can't help but feel like they're going to end up making an incredible amount of sterile soulless content that makes everyone's lives worse.
Eh. I’ll take a MAYBE over the past 10 years or more of the human driven social media manipulations and scams and poison. We’ve made almost literally fucking nothing of value in a decade. It’s been ads, Ponzi schemes, and a race to the bottom of tolerance.
I’ll take the democratization of content. Knowing that it will allow the good and the bad.
… so how it different from the radio or TV or “influencers” now? I have limited time to consume media and am not going to be less picky when it gets easier for people to make garbage.
> There's a growing perception, verging on conspiracy theory, that big social media companies are deliberately tuning their recommendation engines to promote this misinformation while publicly claiming to do the opposite.
I don't think that this is the perception of many people. I think that many people think (and I think so too) that social networks maximise for engagement quite deliberately. Content that is very engaging can be very good (amazing educational resources) or relatively harmless (cat videos). But, due to human nature, "engaging" videos also include divisive content, propaganda, conspiracy theories, group-think or even just stuff that is highly addictive.
The complaint, therefore, is not that YouTube etc. are actively pushing conspiracy theories—it wouldn't be in their interest to do so necessarily. The issue is that, by trying to maximise engagement, they very deliberately push all the subconscious buttons that may make us behave in irrational ways without caring for the psychological and social cost that this implies, and that any attempt of those networks to curtail the spread of problematic content will never be adequate as long as those underlying mechanisms are still the same.
> So the dynamics have always existed in previous platforms, it's just been ratcheted up to a higher level with social media.
I remember a friend saying the "optimization is killing us". The whole economy is getting better at what it does and as it happens there are many side effects.
Those with no ethics will manage to harvest the social media technology for their profit and not for society. It applies also to taxes where companies are getting master at dodging them. Liers are getting masters at lying and we have to fight to rebuke the lies (the documentary has a quote about how much more effort is required to fight disinformation than to create it)
He also argues that optimization is poison to yourself ! But that's off subject.
> All of these implicit value transmissions are harmful to audiences, but the effects tend to be distant in time or space
Well I see harmful effects now. The word "consumers" for one. Children being manipulated for profits. Over-sexualization. Creating the idea that things will make you happy, and make this one of the most popular concepts in society. Dividing people through the message of "Individuality", even though that only really means buying things your neighbor wants.
> I've always found it interesting that prior to us paying for services with our private data, we paid for it with our attention.
And now we pay with both our private data, and our attention, as both are extremely related when you want to either control, convince, or confuse someone.
“ Much of our current social polarisation and conflict is not, as The Social Dilemma suggests, between those influenced by social media’s “fake news” and those influenced by corporate media’s “real news”. It is between, on the one hand, those who have managed to find oases of critical thinking and transparency in the new media and, on the other, those trapped in the old media model or those who, unable to think critically after a lifetime of consuming corporate media, have been easily and profitably sucked into nihilistic, online conspiracies.”
...
“ The film’s first chapter makes it
sound as though social media’s rewiring of our brains to sell us advertising is something entirely new. The second chapter treats our society’s growing loss of empathy, and the rapid rise in an individualistic narcissism, as something entirely new. But very obviously neither proposition is true.”
> This is clearly the much more pernicious issue that 1. social media companies are massively influencing the dissemination of information on an ad hoc basis informed by personal political whims
Of course mainstream TV and print "news" has been doing this for decades, but for some strange reason people assume they're somehow "better".
I personally think it's great all this is coming out, because it shows how dangerous and manipulative large media (in all forms) really is.
> I used to be stuck in a rut of "there's no point starting to build / learn a thing because there will almost certainly never be a result of substance".
In my view, that's what people in power want to encourage, using crowed influencing dynamics [0].
There is an a loosely orchestrated effort to make people feel less powerful because that makes it easier for people in power (people with money or resources) to increase their self-interest endeavors.
This is why I don't watch the news, and take peoples opinions about the world with a grain of salt. Ideas are like viruses, the spread rapidly. The people with the most resources gets to set the tone about what the population thinks by using modern media to mold the narrative. If you don't understand your individual value, you will be swept into this mind set, whether you are aware of it or not.
> many people cannot distinguish sensationalism from fact and are thus influenced by it.
People are generally punished throughout their lives for being ignorant. But lack of comprehension is sometimes feigned. Some people test the tolerance of their behaviour.
The existence of propanda is at once a difficult problem and a profitable problem. There is no bright side to propaganda.
In cases where people are materially punished for their bad behaviour, they shut up and pay attention. I think it likely that future social-media business will require user accounts to have verified identities and users to accept responsibility by risking direct, personal financial loss for their behaviour.
People may call this tyranny, but in fact it's how society works despite their resentment.
> 1) The corporatization of social media is a big factor.
Yep. There was a time when I trusted internet/social media reviews because they weren't bought and paid for access media. But now, it's clear that they are also bought and paid for. They are now invited to press screenings and follow disney rules on release of spoiler reviews. Not only influencers but entire social media platforms are now arms of corporate PR.
> 2) Everything has become political
It's always been political. The only difference now is that ordinary people have a way of voicing their opinions. Hollywood, media, film critics, best sellers list, award shows, etc are all political propaganda. Always have been.
> He added: “The algorithms these platforms depend on deliberately amplify the type of content that keeps users engaged – stories that appeal to our baser instincts and that trigger outrage and fear.
This is rich coming from Sacha Baron Cohen who made a career out of appealing to our baser instincts. Pretty much all his films are built on outrageous scenes and mocking people.
> The fundamental problem with it, is it makes society more enmeshed (a pathological relationship dynamic). People start caring more about going with the grain, the mainstream opinion, and rejecting the troublemakers, because they don't want to be cast out too; and they self-censor more.
This is by design.
Before social media, to have your voice heard you needed to get help from either: a billionaire-owned TV Station or Newspaper or the State Sponsored Approved truth Station (in this case, the BBC but CBC and whatever official news network the party maintains in your local dictatorship will do).
Now, all you have to do is simply post it online on a property owned by some billionaire who doesn't really care (as long as it's legal he'll pocket the add revenue) in faraway California. You can guess who's mad about loosing all that control over who gets to be in the news and who doesn't...
> massive, irresponsible companies to do psychological experiments on billions of people without transparency or culpability
Exactly. While measuring and optimizing for monetization, completely ignoring and willing to sacrifice individual mental health, and society in general. The division and mass brainwashing we are experiencing do have a cost - that happens to be an external used one from the perspective of the content distribution / advertising platforms.
At this point people are openly being lied that a significant part of the population are groomers and pedophiles which 100% targets blind destructive unconditional rage and unreconcileable division. For the benefit of distraction, political division and engagement.
We need a force to limit the effects of the infinite cynicism of the people doing the brainwashing. We could at least not auto-amplify their voices.
> First there was text, both Facebook and Twitter. Then images with instagram. Now people want videos that they can consume in short bits of time en mass.
What you are describing is the continued fall to smaller and smaller bits of stimulation and information. I’m worried about the consequences of this on the human mind and humanity in general. Our tech is gradually eroding our ability to focus on anything for more than a few seconds. I don’t want a future that is some weird mix of Idiocracy and getting the Black Shakes from Johnny Mnemonic. We need people that aren’t easily manipulated by ads and disinformation campaigns and that can think long and clearly about something.
> polluting your internet experience with injected, paid for, content
You're really understating the problem here. It's not injected content, or paid for content that's really a problem. It's that state of the art social engineering has been used to create platforms in which the ability to manipulate people and their attention, beliefs and behaviors is sold at scale.
> Well, one of the points of the book is that you really can't summarize complex information. And that television is a medium of summary or reductionism – it reduces everything to slogans. And that's one criticism of it, that it requires everything to be packaged and reduced and announced in a slogan-type form.
Tweets anyone?
> My own feeling is that that is true – that it's very important to improve the program content – but that television has effects, very important effects, aside from the content, and they may be more important. They organize society in a certain way.
Sounds applicable today to social media, in an uncanny way ...
> The seemingly insurmountable problem is to get people to consume content that challenges their preconceptions, as opposed to having them validated repeatedly in exchange for a dopamine hit.
very well put, sir. people are addicted to information that confirms their beliefs. very good observation indeed. well played, mr zuckerberg, well played.
>We have seen demonstrable evidence for over twenty years now that if you build a way to more easily inform yourself on reality, facts, historical accuracy, etc that people would rather use that system to justify their own preconceptions and biases than seek out truth that might influence their beliefs.
I'm fairly certain the problem is the systems are written to reward those behaviors. It's technically not hard to solve that, but modern social media companies have this baked into their business model.
(Yes, I have a scheme in mind that solves it, sorry not sharing :-)
> 3. Do recommendations drive viewers to increasingly extreme content?
> As I’ve explained, we actively demote low-quality information in recommendations. But we also take the additional step of showing viewers authoritative videos about topics that may interest them. Say I watch a video about the COVID-19 vaccine. In my Up Next panel, I’ll see videos from reputable sources like Vox and Bloomberg Quicktake and won’t see videos that contain misleading information about vaccines (to the extent that our system can detect them).
When my parents watch 30 consecutive videos that mention that you can't trust the mainstream media, what good is suggesting to them a Bloomberg video?
My parents aren't on FB or any other social media. But over the last 10 years they have gone off the deep end after watching more and more insane videos on Youtube. It started with hours of Ron Paul videos. Then Alex Jones videos. Who knows what cretins it offered up after that.
They've stopped talking to me recently. It's because I've gotten the "Kill Shot" after they've explicitly told me not to. I'm apparently going to die from the covid vaccine within the next 6 months to 3 years... On my last phone call, they've told me that 300 old money families (who are all also insane environmentalists) have hatched and are executing a plan to depopulate the planet to 500 million... as told on the "Georgia Guide Stones".
The US Government also has mind-control devices that are convincing people to get the shot. They told me the mind control devices were first used during the Iraq War, because it convinced so much of the Iraqi Army to surrender en masse.
Also, all of our technology comes from the wreckage of crashed UFOs, most famously the Roswell UFO. My Dad thinks I'm naive for not believing this.
Both my parents have college degrees. My Dad has a masters in an engineering field. They were once relatively un-political and rode out the Great Recession without any harm. Maybe they just didn't handle retirement well. But I have a decade of nearly daily emails from them... "Watch this! [youtube link]". When they are gone, I'll have documentation of their decent into madness, with hyperlinks all going to 1 domain. I'm sure YouTube is doing all they can.
That's true of all media. Doesn't matter if you pay for it or not. Even netflix. Even this post.
What is the "documentary" trying to achieve? Change behavior.
Who is behind the social media campaign?
"Ask HN: What do you think about “The Social Dilemma”?"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24468533
> That distinction made the insidiousness much more clear than the former statement.
Just as insidious are "documentaries". They are just as sneaky and agenda driven as facebook algorithms.
reply