The Social Dilemma

[fragger]

Hey guys,

Check out the above documentary if you can, it's rather eye-opening. It's also pretty darned sobering, maybe don't watch if you don't want your good mood brought down. It's about the, shall we say, less favourable aspects of social media. Now I know there have been many docs about that already, but this one is different in that the people being interviewed are the ones who actually designed and created the platforms - former company presidents, lead engineers, cheif designers, programmers and so forth, not outside observers and social commentators. And it deals with different aspects of social media from those that are usually discussed.

It's not so much about the data-gathering and privacy issues, that has all been covered well enough. This is about the actual workings of the AI behind Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and all the rest, and how it subtly manipulates people's minds. That's right, the AI itself is messing with people's psychology, not because it has become sentient and evil like a HAL or a Skynet, but because it has been created in such a way that it constantly rewrites its own algorithms to get better at building up psychological profiles of individuals, for the purposes of (naturally) making money for online advertisers. It does this by analyzing a user's online clicks and likes and habits and any other kind of trackable cyber-activity to build up a psychological profile of that individual, then uses that to choose advertisements, recommendations and notifications which would most appeal to that user's psychology and thus subtly guide them toward engaging with yet more advertisers. The AI has evolved to the point where those in the business don't know themselves what it is doing anymore, nor what the algorithms which drive it have developed into, since those algorithms were created to learn, evolve and rewrite themselves as they develop. It is self-sustaining machine learning which has gotten away from those who created it and they know it. They're worried about where it might go, and where it has already gone.

The most chilling way the whole thing was described was this: Your data is no longer a commodity - YOU are. People aren't being manipulated to sell products, people ARE the products, or rather, their minds are. And it is being done in such a subtle and imperceptible way that people aren't aware of it. If they were, and if they knew the extent to which their very personalities have been digitized, it would scare the living daylights out of them.

That's bad enough, but this is where it gets truly alarming - the mind-manipulation doesn't stop with advertising. This AI profiling extends to influencing and/or exploiting people's political leanings and social viewpoints. A great deal, maybe even most, of the civil unrest taking place in the world today is being driven by social media, and AI-profiling is being used to drive that social media. In the last ten years or so, social media has gradually become more weaponized and is on track to posing one of the greatest existential threats to human society in history, as its AI-provided profiling of individuals can be subverted by a country's enemies to sow fear and xenophobia, inspire rage and intolerance, drive people apart or turn them against each other, influence elections. It is not data "hacking", it's data "hijacking". It is literally thought-control. This is no longer an "information age" - it is now a disinformation age.

The documentary also talks about addiction to social media and the havoc it can wreak on young minds. This too has been talked about before, but some of the insights offered here, backed up by statistics, are fresh and novel. When parents give a smart phone to a child as young as, say, ten, as soon as that child starts using it, that child becomes a commodity and the psychologically profiling of he or she by the AI begins. And the AI is always teaching itself, getting better at it. Essentially, that child's mind becomes a data model, to be influenced, controlled and exploited.

I consider myself fortunate that by dint of my age, I developed and retained an ability to think for myself. I was born and raised during a time when cyber-manipulation did not exist - heck, home computers didn't exist, let alone smart phones. But younger and more impressionable people are surrounded by cyber-technology from day one. They have never known a time without it, and social media has taken over the role of critical thinking for them. They become addicted to the dopamine hit of being social accepted and validated, by the earning of likes and the gathering of followers, and that makes them vulnerable to suggestion and influence. It's as seductive and addictive a drug as heroin or nicotine.

It's insidious, and more than a little unsettling. If you were averse to joining social media platforms before, you'll stay right away from them after watching this, I guarantee it. There is no way on God's green earth I would ever have anything to do with platforms like Facebook or Instagram. Google and You Tube are bad enough (I have dialled back my recommendeds and notifications on those as much as possible, and I use AdBlocker Plus).

Consider this: The people mentioned above, the former heads, lead developers, software engineers and so on, will NOT allow their children to interact with social media. Then very people who helped create it are scared to death about what it might do to their kids' psychological states. That should tell you something. The creators of social media platforms initially had the best of intentions, trying to bring the people of the world together, but now they are terrified of what it has evolved into. They have a full-blown Frankenstein complex about it.

The Social Dilemma may be on your country's Netflix. The people in it can explain it all better than I can. All I can say is that I'm glad I'm not bringing up children these days, because they would hate me for never letting them stick one toe into the rancid cesspool that is social media.

[Art Blade]

I feel completely untouched by and not connected to that problem (or the problems) described. I have never been a friend of anything telling me anything, I've been using adblocker and noscript and all that essentially from day one, I was never subscribed to any social media. My steam friends have always been a very, very small number and only people I keep interacting with (everyone else gets booted if they stay inactive except OWG members whom I interact with in this forum) and YouTube.. essentially it's to show my stuff to friends and it's fun to see whether or not other people like it, too. I don't lose sleep over likes or dislikes and such. Recommendations? I hardly ever look at them. Notifications? I am subscribed to only a handful of channels that I am actually interested in.

Also, I've been aware of the fact that "you" and not "your data" is what companies are dealing in, but still they do take your data along with you. Commercials, advertisements? I stopped watching TV and listening to the radio about 20 years ago because already back then it was too much for my taste and I didn't want that nonsense to melt my brains away.

I'm glad that I can think on my own and that I'm not dependent on "social" media. I don't even own a smart phone. Younger people may look at me and consider me strange but that I can live with. I much rather live by myself and just a handful of true friends to hang out with than becoming a gregarious zombie remotely controlled by some greedy companies and their wicked AI.

[PZ]

I'm much like AB, but I do a bit of social media. However, I give deliberate false information which would hot help the hijackers in any way. For instance, one of the platforms asks where I went to school and I replied "The school of hard knocks". I do not give away any of my information online (except to you gents), and any time I do anything of significance that could potentially reveal my data I use a VPN to encrypt all Internet traffic so even my Internet provider does not know what I am doing.

It is disturbing how data collecting has exponentially increased in the past 10 years or so.

[fragger]

Well, my recommending of this documentary was not intended as a warning to those of us here at OWG, since I'm well aware that nobody here is a social media addict. I'm recommending it as a way of becoming aware of the harm social media is doing to society in general, which goes beyond mere privacy issues to attacking the fabric of society itself, and in ways which many people never considered nor are even aware. That in turn affects us all. I recommended the show to be a "know your enemy" exercise. I know I don't have to tell you guys to be careful.

I also know that all of us here are wise enough and mature enough not to fall into the patterns of behaviour that unscrupulous companies rely upon to make their zillions. But a whole generation of people is growing up without knowing any better, having been profiled and subtly influenced since childhood, and they will be running the world someday. The major internet companies now generate the greatest profits ever seen in all of human history. They're not going to give that up for the sake of protecting kids from their own phones.

But there is something which should be borne in mind, which is that as much as you try to guard yourself against nefarious cyber-activity, if you have used the internet at all during the last ten years or so, some of who you are has been catalogued. You don't have to be a habitual user of popular social media platforms for this to happen. Even if you use online media which is not typically recognized as "social", such as Google or You Tube, some of your psychological makeup has been profiled by AIs - by what videos you have watched or uploaded, what comments or replies to comments you have made (and to whom), what links you have clicked on, what searches you have made, which sites you have visited - and that data is being worked upon by an AI right now. It is simply impossible to remain 100% anonymous online today. You can take all the precautions you can - it still won't safeguard you completely (even VPNs cannot always completely guarantee anonymity, although they can make you exponentially more difficult to track, and some will indeed cover your tracks completely, but that is largely dependent on what you do or don't expose yourself to). At least a portion of your psychology will be profiled in some way, and if you have been online anytime since about 2010, at least some of it already has been. The best you can do is try to minimize your footprint as much as you can, but nobody can use the internet today without giving out something about themselves. That's the nature of the beast, and it's part of what this documentary deals with - that you are never completely insulated from online scrutiny, and haven't been for about a decade. Staying away from the likes of Facebook et al will certain make it harder or even impossible for those companies to manipulate your thinking, but the cyber-profiling of you will continue regardless based on your activity just about anywhere else on the net - and that is cause enough for concern.

As I said in my first post, it is insidious, and if people knew just how much is known about them, it would alarm the *bleep* out of them. Remember, this documentary was not produced by conspiracy crackpots - much of the commentary is from the people who helped make the platforms and other industry insiders. They are aghast at what social media has become and are casting about for ways to fix it.

The real concern in all this is that even though people like us may know how to protect ourselves, increasing numbers of people don't - and they have the potential to affect our lives as well as their own. It's no longer a case of it just being "their problem". When you look at the civil unrest, the radicalization, the social divisions, the political tribalism, the breakdown of families, the threat to democratic governments, and the societal norms being turned upside-down or even destroyed, the effect of social media is everybody's problem. It is very, VERY serious, for all of us. Distancing yourself from social media won't necessarily protect you from the effects of it, and that is what needs to be understood, I think.

All I can say is see the documentary if you can. It describes what's happening better than I, since I can't here provide demonstrations, graphics and insider experience. I also really think that some of the insights provided are quite important to understanding what is happening in the world today. Education is your best defense.

[Art Blade]

Maybe I should have started my post with a "thank you, that stuff is interesting and alarming."

So here we go, thanks for pointing out that documentary. It certainly is quite something if the inventors distance themselves from what their "child" (project) has turned into and to admit that it has grown beyond their own understanding.

Yes, it is concerning how young people these days are raised not only by their parents but by mobile phones and the internet, also that all those crackpots and conspiracy fanatics that we try to stay away from as far as possible want to have a say in everything those young people are thinking and doing. And unfortunately, they are easy prey. Actually, it's not only about young people but everyone who isn't concerned and isn't informed at least to some extent.

However, I think that the general public is thinking, "so what, can't change data mining, don't mind those adds, and I'll try to do my own thing anyway. The internet isn't all that bad, look at wiki and news and any kind of research options just a click away.. we don't live in the days of paper encyclopaedias and phone books any more."

[Dweller_Benthos]

I've heard of the film, but haven't seen it, as I don't have Netflix, because, well, it tracks you lol. Well, that's not the only reason, mostly I don't want to spend more money on TV.

Everything tracks you. Always has, the only difference now in the electronic age is that it can be done faster and more thoroughly. The only fix is to turn off those services entirely and that won't happen. There's no way to regulate them, and you know for sure the tons of money they make are going towards influencing the governments to allow it to keep happening. Yes, it's scary the amount of influence they have and the huge impact they can have on everything from what dish soap someone buys to who they vote for, and there's no putting the genie back in the bottle at this point.

Speaking of TV, the show The Orville had an episode where they visited a planet where every person had a badge that showed their likes and dislikes from the global social media platform, and if a person had too many dislikes they were blocked from certain businesses or treated as a pariah by everyone else. Criminals were judged by it, and if the dislikes counted up too high, the death penalty was invoked. It seems ridiculous, but how far are we from that nightmare scenario?

[BinnZ]

I think, D_B, we are pretty close to that reality at this time.

I agree with fragger that this is an alarming thing, happening on the net. We should be aware of it, not because we may defend ourselves, but because we may deal with it. We will deal with it.

What alarms me the most is that the AI has grown out of hand. It's algorithms independently developing themselves, not paying attention to ANY regulation or governing body, BUT money and people with influence. Because that's all that is influencing the AI; the ability to gather attraction.
We know how people gathered attraction in the past...

This AI thing is pulling away the power of our democratic societies, handing it over to the most horrific of all daemons; money making. 

I agree we should all be aware with it, and, fragger, although I haven't yet watched the doc, I think you did well explaining your concerns.

Remember Cambridge Analytica? How they allowed bad actors to manipulate elections, how they made Brexit a fact? Smart people with power and money can manipulate beyond borders. No political power that is established and represented by people can do anything about it. It's the beginning of chaos and anarchy and by that the worse ingredient we can use in this godforsaken planet where everything burns, melts and gets blown into shreds.

[fragger]

D_B, there was also an episode of the series "Black Mirror" which was written along similar lines - it was set in the future, where a person's accumulated likes and dislikes dictated their social status. Sometimes I too think we're not far away from that.

On a different tack, according to some studies an alarming number of people no longer get their news from actual news sites or print media, but from their social media feeds (it is claimed that most people in the US now do, about 60%). And what many of those users don't realize is that the AI will tailor a user's news feed based on their personality profile, not on what is "trending", what is most relevant, or from what is the most objective or reliable source. They assume that what they see on their feeds is the same as what everybody else on the platform sees, but it isn't. So this gives them a sense that those who hold opposing views must be stupid or ill-informed, by thinking, "how can anyone possibly have a different view when they see what I'm seeing here?"

A similar example to this, which was demonstrated in The Social Dilemma, is how the auto-fill function in Google's search window operates. In the US, say, a person in one state might enter in the search window, "climate change is...", and the top Google auto-fill will be "...a hoax". But to another person in another state, the top auto-fill appears as "...destroying the environment". Google's auto-fill doesn't provide the most common response to a search query across the entire platform, but will auto-fill depending on not just the user's profile, but also what the user's geographical location is and what the prevailing attitude to the query in that location may be. What this is doing is subtly convincing the user that since the top auto-fill mirrors their view, the majority of people must also share that view, otherwise it wouldn't be the top auto-fill selection. So they count themselves among those who "know the truth", and anyone who disagrees must be ignorant, ill-informed, or (ironically), brainwashed.

These are just a couple of examples of the sort of thing I call "insidious". It is influencing people without them being aware of it, giving them a false sense of being in possession of the truth, and anyone who disagrees is "stupid". And this effect, being constantly applied to a couple of billion users, means that people are becoming less and less aware of what the truth of anything really is. It is giving them the "truth" as they already believe it to be. It also reinforces attitudes of "us and them", and that can't be anything but detrimental to society.

[Art Blade]

before, we had the same amount of idiots as now. Only now, they are being mass-manipulated via social media and all the stuff mentioned above and therefore kind of organised as in brought into line. Which is the really frightening part when it comes to mass-related things like the "public opinion," anything that requires a "majority," especially with regard to elections.

[nex]

I only use Whatsapp to communicate with my wife and my staff.
Whatsapp is more cost-effective for my staff to use instead of texting, my wife
only uses it to keep me informed when she's on the road.