Indeed. It’s nothing that hasn’t been done before already by traditional media. But social media can do it far more effectively by tailoring their message and leading individuals down a particular path that works for them. They have billions of examples to run experiments on to figure out the best methods.
It’s true that I am taking a pessimistic stance, and it’s possible we will somehow avoid the worst outcomes. But I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better, as I haven’t seen any proposals, legal or otherwise, for improving matters.
We are very far from general purpose AI, but the advances in machine learning for optimization problems are alarming. And what seemed like natural limits like the ability to process language no longer look like limits. Apply this to a massive database like Facebook has and the consequences are frightening.
The social media giants have invested billions of dollars into exploring the collaborative potential of social media. I think they are making one key mistake as they have had very limited success with it. They are all focused on what can be accomplished by collaborating as opposed to the benefits an individual experiences while collaborating, how it can fulfill certain basic needs that will motivate us to be better people in general as well as being far more productive. If the relationships are there people will collaborate! I call it fertile ground, because the environment has to be right for this to happen.
I don’t agree with every one of the author’s assertions, but it’s more on-point than not.
As technology, social media is neutral. But in the hands of profit-seeking business, it prioritizes engagement, and nothing engages more than anger and fear.
This is a necessary limitation of human nature. As long as it remains true, engagement-driven social media will be inherently destructive and a major net negative.
OP is way too optimistic. FB keeps touting that they’ve spent $13B in the past five years on trying to keep crap off the platform (hint: they don’t quite phrase it that way). Funniest part to me is that if my product was so fundamentally broken that I had to pour that kind of money down the drain to pretend to be fixing it, I wouldn’t be touting that fact!!!
Last year, we were exhorted to join something called EverythingSocial, which would let us post something and have it automatically reflected to multiple SM platforms. One of our guys repsonded thus (verbally, on the spot, though when I asked, he said he had written it down during the exhortation):
What about the fact that social media is a massively destructive and divisive blight on the face of the earth that’s responsible for the fracturing of societies, a major cause of tween and teenage depression and suicide, and needs to either be purged, or utterly redesigned from the ground up to more appropriately sync with human psychology, and that corporate requirements for us to engage with it are irresponsible, unreasonable, and an invasion of personal privacy, especially when these sorts of ‘social status’ competitions are used as a driver?
I think an important conversation to have when designing a social media platform would be to lay out a series of premises both bad and good relating to human behavioral traits and be mindful of those. An example mighty be. " how do we control big mouth idiots" Instead of controlling bad behavior go into competition with it. We should never underestimate the huge influence our ego has over our daily activities. I have belonged and still belong to several internet groups that are very positive influences. Some of things I have noticed are that if a person finds a safe place where they get some acknowledgement and respect they will become loyal to that place. Once they start to value the group as a source of identity reinforcement they also become more open to others ideas and compromise. A value system needs to be in place. I have seen total ass holes transform into wonderful people, I see this all the time.
I have kind of a theory on how social media might be transformed into a healthier more positive and productive environment. Introducing a new concept to an uninterested public would be a challenging task at best. My theory is to create a new genre for a series of books and writers with a common theme. The common theme would be " Collaborative stories". You would still have the boy meets girl, the suspense, action etc but with one difference. The stories would always revolve around social media collaborations. This would demonstrate with the use of attractive relatable characters how good behavior pays off. I actually have been working on a series of books I will never finish( I am a lousy writer) but one of them is called the advocate. She is a personal assistant to a C.E.O for a large corporation. She forms an unlikely partnership with a kid from the ghetto. ( hard core) As the story plays out it demonstrates how communication can benefit and enrich all involved. This is heavily condensed of course but the idea is to establish some basic premises on behavior and then demonstrate how it could work.
Keep in mind that SM has an additional meta-problem, in that they do not want to be considered “publishers”, since that makes them responsible for bad content (whatever “bad” means in any given instance). So they wind up defining ToS and then trying to ONLY pull stuff that fits those. Which means users get creative, so ToS evolve…it’s another arms race.
The only logical endpoints are either no moderation (==chaos, 100%, count on it) or they become publishers, at which point their business model probably fails because they cannot hire enough folks to keep up with the idiots.
Some of us are watching this game very closely. The current trying to be middle-of-the road does not seem sustainable.
Attaching a tiered status system where status might be based on citizenship and other desirable traits could reduce the need for moderation. Algorithms and feed back could be used to establish status.
As you earn higher status by meaningful contributions you gain access to conversations and people you wouldn’t normally have access to unless they were playing around in the lower access levels.
People have a need to talk about themselves and their experiences. This lights up the pleasure centre of their brains more than discussing facts or other people. 30-40% of conversation is self-centred and this rises to 80% on social media. Accordingly, some of the future of social media will look like its past: TMI, here is a picture of my lunch, this is how I feel about whatever.
Social media had, maybe still has, enormous potential to increase connectivity and improve society. But the gatekeepers were sometimes more interested in harvesting data and selling advertising. Though they were not always straightforward as to the details and made it difficult to opt out; even still they were more visible than many of the unknowable others who wanted data for various other reasons.
Social media can absolutely play a role in healing. New insights into depression, for example, suggest a new app might help improve a quarter of those so diagnosed. There is little doubt big tech has a sophisticated understanding of AI and psychology. They acquired the talent, technology and tradecraft to do so in a purposeful way since their technology greatly reduces some barriers (sometimes there for a reason though) to doing meaningful research. They might understand these things better than anyone else. Heed their hopeful words. Watch what they do, but also what they let their loved ones do. Legal guidelines and guardrails will always significantly lag new innovation.
Still there is room for optimism. I hope you are right and the many potential benefits of technology are emphasized and encouraged; that the downsides are realized and addressed in ever increasing practical, pragmatic and humane ways.
You are right on the money and this is the key to the whole thing. I always reflect back to Maslows hierarchy of needs. Self actualization is a big one and the closer we get to that the better we behave as human beings. We will sacrifice a lot to hold on to an identity that we have come to love. Sometimes when helping others we find ourselves, The experts are attempting to create collaboration groups, instead they should be concentrating on creating safe positive environments where ideas tend to thrive.
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I witnessed something more than 50 years ago in a nightclub. I think I was the only one that is aware of it because I am a people watcher. We had a little short kind of plump guy, he looked a bit like Ferdinand that hung out there. He dressed and styled his hair like Tom Jones. Not very many girls would dance with him but he always managed to get a few dances in each night. Once a week we held a dance contest and it was considered kind of prestigious as it attracted dancers from a pretty large radius and had a good pot. One particular evening another club put up a bigger pot and attracted all the good dancers, not much competition at the Amberlite that night. So the little short guy won the dance contest at the Amberlite. Now he has prestige. I distinctly remember him floating around the room the rest of the evening and in the following days. I can’t remember how many times I heard him telling a girl how he had won the contest at the Amberlite. It didn’t take long before the magic started, the extra weight seemed to be melting off of him, his dance routine was rapidly and unmistakably becoming more refined, Within a month he was the guy to beat! Within a year he had gotten a job as a professional dancer and not long after that he became a choreographer. It all started with that one dance contest where he had no competition. The neuro chemicals gave him more energy, more focus, more confidence, and elevated him to an entirely different level of being. I have lots of stories like this from social media that play out over a longer period of time but are equally dramatic in different ways. I really believe when we find something that works repeat it.
I think the dark side of that story is that social media has the potential to give each individual that level of confidence through individually tailored feedback, regardless of how ridiculous or harmful their ideas are. All that matters is if those ideas can generate “likes” because that’s the business model.
And social media isn’t fostering intelligent discussion, where bad idea (or good ones for that matter) can be challenged and refined.
I’m not sure why you think the “idiots” would fade into the background. Social media is based on a popularity contest model, and telling people what they want to hear is more popular than telling them the truth. And anger causes more engagement than nuance.
I don’t necessarily hold the pessimistic view that others here do. I think there’s largely a generational gap on knowing how to deal with social media, suggesting that we can adapt to it. Honestly, a whole lot of the problem is people who were raised to trust what they see in print or in videos. Younger people seem a lot better at this, having grown up in this world.
We have historically always adapted to these society upending changes, and I don’t think social media is different. But I don’t foresee social media ever becoming enlightened. It’s just more that we’ll get better at discounting the bullshit.
What I am concerned about is the damage before that happens.