I think social media needs to be redefined. What the average person thinks social media is is very different than what it actually is.
I think a lot of people think big social media platforms are actually communication platforms, they're not. They're designed intentionally to be difficult to communicate on.
That the not the purpose of them, it's in the name 'social media' they are the media, you are the social. They are creating media based on the things users post. They're not made to facilitate communication between friends, family, coworkers, etc...
They are designed specifically for users to generate monetizable content and data. They use a veneer of 'connecting the world together' so users will generate content that drives clicks and makes them money.
A true global communication platform would look nothing like the social media we have today. It would be designed around allowing people to communicate easily and freely, it would give you control over who and what you interact with and it would allow you to maintain granular levels of privacy.
Ya know...like other systems designed to facilitate communications...like say the telephone system...
Social media is as successful as it is precisely because it works so well as a communications paradigm. No popular social media platform is difficult to communicate on, they draw in so many users because they're easy to use.
My mother who can barely use Windows knows how to chat with me on Facebook. People use social media to communicate between friends, family, coworkers etc all the time. That's how all of that monetizable data gets generated.
Yes, the purpose of social media is to profit from user-generated content and data, but it still works as intended for 99% of people.
That's not quite what I meant. Sure you can chat directly fairly easy through Facebook, but communicate is more than just that. Keeping to the Facebook example, much of the 'communication' is done through user or group wall posts.
It is notoriously difficult to browse through, responses are sorted in non-intuitive ways, sometimes responses are hidden for no apparent reason, yet people regularly use it to communicate.
When people post status updates or pictures or whatever, they're trying to communicate, how many times have you gotten status or upload notifications from people you haven't talked to in years, but it never showed you your best friend's new baby pictures or something like that?
Twitter, It's designed around a character limit that strictly discourages longform communication. Yet, you get people trying to write blog posts using it, much to the chagrin of many HN commenters, and generally, the quality of most communication suffers greatly on twitter because of the inherent design.
I would argue that it feels like it works, for 99% of people. I strongly believe that "social media" is a low-quality and unsatisfactory replacement for meaningful social interaction and bonding.
I think the global reduction in in person communication is a grave risk to humanity. We used to spend so much time together, doing things together, I’m talking in the office to the roller rink. Perhaps this just shows how old I am, but I really felt like that was better for humanity. Global communication and interaction is great and all, but I really miss sitting around the backyard with friends talking
>I think the global reduction in in person communication is a grave risk to humanity.
You know, that could be.
I'll present a meta-hypothesis. Diversity is generally dangerous and global communications/global movement drives everyone closer to hazardous behavior. Without the filtering of slow tempos, things get sporty.
I think that ubiquitous global communication is the "Great Filter" that prevents intelligent civilizations from colonizing the universe. Before any intelligent species can hope to tackle a problem like that, they invent something like the internet. And once they've invented an internet, they become addicted to low latency communication and will never stray far from it, at least not in significant numbers. Even one year of latency becomes utterly intolerable once an intelligent species has been using an internet for a few generations.
I'm thinking that if you sent a dozen people to Alpha Centari, it wouldn't make any difference because that is under the threshold of people that would be required to establish a self-sustaining colony that, in turn, sends out similar expeditions in the future.
Do that sort of stunt as much as you like, it won't become something more. It's like trying to jump over a building by hopping a bunch. You can hop one time or one billion times, you won't clear the building because after each failed hop you're back to square one.
under the threshold of people that would be required to establish a self-sustaining colony
Such a small group of people, armed with current genetic engineering and future artificial means of reproduction, could bring with them enough genetic diversity and reproductive capacity to reach colonizing scale.
You can hop one time or one billion times, you won't clear the building because after each failed hop you're back to square one.
Despite the first part of my reply, this point about minimum activation energy is relevant to a lot of contexts, from escaping poverty to switching careers, from getting fit to overcoming medical conditions. This is a pretty good analogy that I might use in the future.
> I think the global reduction in in person communication is a grave risk to humanity.
I'm not sure I agree. For the most part of humanity, we have been at war, murdering each other, enslaving each other, and numerous other atrocities... Including nearly a nuclear war.
The reduction in in person communication is due to the increase in global communication... Which I think is a net benefit. Social media is a bump in the road, and my hope is that we'll overcome the likes of Twitter soon.
Text based communication is the cause. Not social media. Anytime I go to a bar, people are paying attention their friends if something is going on, watching a band, or on their phone. Stranger interaction declines heavily the more people that are there.
I've noticed this since the advent of texting. Not since the advent of social media. It's absurd to me honestly that someone would prioritize someone on their phone over the person who took the time and effort to physically be present and engage with them that day.
>I really miss sitting around the backyard with friends talking
I do as well. But it makes me wonder now, if people always have been flakey and unwilling to hang out with new people. I swear when I was a kid, asking someone to hang out or do something was easy, even if you met them one time. It's almost as if unlimited media and instant communication halts people from pursuing anything with other people unless they have something they dont.
yeah I don't get that point, its not like people are deciding to scroll facebook instead of going to their friends bbq. maybe you could make the point that people pick activites for how good of a social media post it would make.
But that's not even what this article is about, its discussing the spread of misinformation and social media being full of low information content.
Humans simply didn't evolve to live in communities as large as the ones which enabled us to really push our foot on the gas in terms of technological and civilization progress.
People look at social media but it started waaay earlier, back in old Mesopotamia.
Mesopotamic Urbanization>Ability to write>Journals>Newspapers>Radio>TV>Internet>Social Media
Social media is just the last step in the process. Each and every step of the process contributed to make humans learn about how many humans are there in the world and this somehow makes us feel less special.
When we wrap our minds around how many humans are there in the world, we feel insignificant and we feel like we don't matter at all. In a sense our sense of worth feels diluted by the immense quanity of people who are just like us.
This creates anxiety and resentment. Our brain is still the same as we had back in pre-Mesopotamic eras.
There is simply too much noise/signal. We truly need a protected class of speech/news that cannot lie by law. This is similar to standardizing currency in order to facilitate trade without risk, except for information.
One crucial difference that seems to break the analogy is that money is a utilitarian tool. It doesn't have an absolute, “true” price or way of managing it. Anything that makes people feel happy and economy grow is good, and is “true” way to run money.
Truth is not like that. It's must be absolute, and it should not be defined arbitrarily based on what improves people's well-being. (Or maybe it should, but that's going to be a different kind of truth.)
I don't think that would work. Whether or not something is a lie might only ever be known to the person who says/writes it. It could just be a mistake. Or part of the truth so incomplete as to make someone believe something that isn't true.
Human speech just doesn't lend itself to the type of formalism required for this to be possible. If you want the closest approximation, look at legal jargon, specifically for contracts: It is a set of speech standards that evolved over centuries in an effort to reduced ambiguity in transactions. As a result, it is extremely verbose to the point of incomprehensibility by outsiders, and it's still possible to deliberately misuse it without easy detection.
I understand the appeal but I don't want the government deciding what can and can't be said. Free speech is important for a free society, although we are moving away in recent years with all of the platform censorship and truth labeling.
This begs the question that truth can be formalized. Who gets to decide what is truth? That's incredible power and it's unlikely that people will agree on who gets to wield it. If some does have that power, how do we know that they won't control the "truth" to build an autocracy?
And don't forget that truth also depends on the observer. If for some reason my sensor is not calibrated properly, my "truth" will be different compared to your truth. It does not mean I necessarily lie, or that I do it intentionally.
Academia has been trying for centuries to crack this nut, and it is not easy.
That's why it's useful to distinguish between misinformation (false statements made by people who sincerely believe them) and disinformation (false statements by people who know them to be false). Philosopher Harry Frankfurter also argues persuasively for a category of bullshit statements, which are made by people who don't care about their truth or falsehood.
We'll end up with licensing of journalists, just like every fascist state. People without a license will not be limited in what they can say, but they will be limited in what they can record or distribute, especially if it crosses state lines or borders. It'll be like what authoritarians say about driving: speaking may be a right, but being heard is a privilege. Free speech will be defined down to making noise with your mouth when outside of the company of anyone who might be offended or exposed to disloyalty.
We'll be prosecuted for sending communications across state lines to mislead a child under Texas's Anti-Critical Race Theory statute.
We're nearly there already, happy to ban clearly-marked Iranian, Russian, and Chinese state media. Those actions have already been used by private media to ban US journalists by associations as weak as sharing the same opinions as enemy media outlets.
Any society that is premised on the rule of law already has to solve that problem in the enforcement; there is no rule of law without arbitration of facts relating to whether the law is upheld or not.
So, probably the courts. That's an imperfect solution, but it beats the hell out of the position that any attempt to arbitrate the truth is unacceptably oppressive.
On another level: everyone has an obligation to arbitrate the truth as honestly and ably as they're capable, in every domain they have responsibility for, first and foremost in training themselves to be more careful about their own blind spots, tendencies, incentives, and limits, and then in exercising whatever influence and authority they have.
Courts currently do a decent job at determining some truth (whodunnit) – while a lot of innocents get convicted (and sometimes death row'd, in the more backwards corners of the world), it's pretty good within its limited domain of truthseeking.
If the threat is misinformation and use of social media is the risk, then I'd expect a comparison to baseline mass media misinformation. And everyone seems to agree that there is a frightening amount of that.
No comparison against control and this is only evidence that scientists publish clickbait.
The media narrative that social media is the cause of these societal ills, especially environmental problems is laughable.
The real danger technology poses is the increased leverage of ever-increasing automation consolidating in the hands of oligarchs who using it to enrich themselves and isolate themselves from the consequences with no regard for broader impact on the planet or future generations.
Despite the problems with social media, removing it would have no beneficial effect on this trajectory towards environmental catastrophe. To the contrary, I still believe that lowered barriers to global communication and information access are generally good for society. Sure it hasn't resulted in becoming a nation of philosopher kings in the utopian ideal envisioned by those early Berkeley engineers, but the problems we are seeing are just the same old dance of populism and propaganda that have always been at the heart of large scale politics.
Don’t you think social media impacts policy though?
Take your example of automation. Wouldn’t the way to counteract this be through smarter policy (like an automation tax as an off-the-cuff example).
I think the angle of the paper is that social media makes enacting smart policy that much harder because weaponized misinformation can be used to stymie such policy.
Wasn't early Facebook all about connecting with friends and family and looking for boyfriend/girlfriend? Today I only hear something like "fake news, hate, racism, violence" etc.
I wonder what has changed? I think that it is not Facebook's management fault but the reality kicked in. Medium like Facebook is convenient for all type of content and interaction unlike Instagram for example which is more for showing off with photos and following other people's lives.
Well, I don't know how your friends and families are, but mine are quite racist and quite hateful of minorities and they were that way long before the internet.
Facebook just shows that, it doesn't change it. I think that most people (specially white, heterosexual and not poor) were simply living in a bubble of ignorance thinking the world was a much better place that it actually is and social media simply popped that bubble and showed reality for everybody to see. And now they are angry at Social media in a classical shoot the messenger reaction.
I'm 90% sure it's when they started personalizing the feeds. You only see things the algorithm thinks you're going to like, but it has a very shallow idea of you as a human being limited to your outward expression.
Then It pushes you further and further to the extremes of what it thinks you like.
People were warning about filter bubbles even before Facebook did it.
There's a lot of 'political' content on instagram. do a quick google search for 'politigram' and you'll see what I'm talking about. That being said, there are definitely per-platform affordances that may change the degree and extent to which its expressed (and, crucially, to whom).
I’m more interested in what would cause people to ignore their doctor and choose to believe whatever insane thing is on social media about, say, vaccines. There’s always been places you could go and find nonsense. But what’s different about this moment? What’s drawing people to nonsense?
IMO social media gets the blame, but it’s just the vehicle for something darker happening. Something more about widespread nativism that distrusts an educated, cosmopolitan elite.
Just because we see this on social media, doesn’t make social media the cause.
I agree with your point, but social media certainly appears to amplify the effect, regardless of what the root cause may be.
I wonder if perhaps the main problem is that social media changes the structure of human interaction by allowing those with similar ideas to congregate instead of being spread across the network in a diffuse manner.
Like in the 1970s if you believed that Aliens were here on Earth and abducting people, the vast majority of people you interacted with would think you’re a crackpot. It would be very difficult to find validation that your ideas are good.
Today you simply need to open a Facebook group for UFO conspiracy theorists and you’ve got all of the confirmation bias you need. It has never been easier to find people who agree with you.
On the other hand… have you considered that your doctor, politicians and scientists may also effected by social media in their professional advice you are supposed to take because they are an authority?
We don’t need to get into all the times doctors have been way wrong. Now those people who might know that are within your ear shot, perhaps a little less than the lunatics who just want to talk shit.
Maybe you are right, maybe it’s not social media but an extreme polarization for another reason and social media is speeding it along? Maybe that’s just what we do over time?
Either way, I can’t accept the appeal to authority you started with. I have personally be on the wrong side of a diagnosis and it’s a good thing I didn’t listen to my doctor in favor of information I discovered first on social media.
But not all social media are the same. HN for example, is the only social media that I consume completely (news feeds + comment section). Everything else I limit as much as I can.. what makes HN so much better than the others? Lack of ads? Moderation?
> Social media are interactive technologies that allow the creation or sharing/exchange of information, ideas, career interests, and other forms of expression via virtual communities and networks
Intention of the creators and, yes, moderation. The exact same HTML/CSS/JS could power a community devoted to fighting a holy war against Lizard people.
That's why I mention intention of the creators. Reddit is meant to be "the front page of the Internet", which means it needs to be enormous and serve many different communities.
"For example, the paper says that tech companies have “fumbled their way through the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, unable to stem the ‘infodemic’ of misinformation” that has hindered widespread acceptance of masks and vaccines"
The numbers on masks and vaccines show that acceptance is widespread. What are we looking for here, approval rates to rival Kim Jong Un? The worst thing that could happen to what little is left of social cohesion is an even stricter attempt at controlling information.
Sure, some information shared on social media is misinformation. Some information coming from mainstream media is misinformation, too. In some cases, the authorities will spread misinformation. After all, some of the "evidence" used to argue that masks are ineffective came from the CDC itself.
With the politicization of everything, even facts can not be considered neutral anymore. For every verifiable fact, there's a set of other verifiable facts that may be omitted to achieve the desired effect. Fact-checks are used for propaganda. When consuming information, always keep your salt dispenser at hand.
Yes, and as much as I dislike political correctness, I sometimes wonder if it's a response, perhaps even a necessary response, to the accelerating politicisation and polarisation brought on by the web. If all events and even facts must be framed according to a simplifying narrative then I wonder if the human mind/brain is doing something similar in order to operate stably? This could be the origin of the ego -- a set of unacknowledged fears and desires which shape a personal story or set of goals through which we attempt to organise our lives.
It seems many people have a completely unscientific view of reality in that they have absolute certainty in what they believe to be true.
I think there are people who are looking for North Korea level approval ratings on things. If you have zero uncertainty in what you think is true then anything contradictory is naturally "misinformation".
> contributing to phenomena such as “election tampering, disease, violent extremism, famine, racism, and war.”
Sorry, but what are you talking about? The holocaust happened before social media, segregation and slavery happened before social media, religious extremism has been going on for at least 2000 years and its latest incarnation like in the middle east happened before social media. We had 2 world wars before social media, election tampering? Did you forgot about the Gore vs Bush fiasco before social media? I could go on all day, what are you talking about?
This is the best we had had it on all those fronts today after social media. You are making no sense. The first "cross-disciplinary" change we need is more historians combating this type of unbelievable childish ignorance and lack of perspective of reality.
It sure feels thought provoking to read an article or a paper that essentially predict how the future will unfold, or what we need to do to prevent something from developing in the future. And yet, the future is inherently unpredictable, and these exercises in predicting fail more often than not. Even if there is something that could be predicted becomes the reality, the degree of expression of that reality could not have been predicted.
This might be an unpopular opinion but I am getting very tired of academics thinking they can comment cross discipline and journalists somehow think it is worthy of writing an article about. This scientist isn't bringing any interesting, new ideas to the table, they are just repeating the same talking points pushed by mainstream "liberal" politicians.
> My sense is that social media in particular — as well as a broader range of internet technologies, including algorithmically driven search and click-based advertising — have changed the way that people get information and form opinions about the world. And they seem to have done so in a manner that makes people particularly vulnerable to the spread of misinformation and disinformation.
This is such an unbelievably shallow take. Much of the "truth" mainstream liberals have been pushing in the past year has turned out to be false. In the past, before the internet and social media, the media lied to the public all the time. It was probably easier because regular people didn't have a good way to spread primary information quickly. The media got most of their information from government press conferences and, if the government didn't like what an organization was saying, the government would stop inviting those journalists to those press conferences. There's a whole book about it, it's called Manufacturing Consent. That type of information control is no longer possible now that everyone can livestream from their phones to millions of people and the establishment is mad about it. Now they are trying to wrestle back control of information by writing think pieces about the dangers of "algorithms" and threatening tech giants with anti-trust action.
Its ironic because I feel like these people are the reason social media is a threat to society. They want to use it to manipulate the public like they always have and are willing to go to great lengths to do so.
Im not saying that it is, that is just the perspective that I believe this article is being written from. American conservatives are concerned about censorship, American liberals are concerned about "misinformation and disinformation". This article is firmly on the diss/misinformation side of the debate
I never said that they cant, it's more that people are writing articles about their opinions when they are bringing nothing new to the table. Why doesn't vox write articles about a grocery store clerk or trucker's opinion on social media and society? Why does some biologist somehow know more about this stuff than other people who aren't sociologists? This is why conservatives think academics are snooty and elitist
I think a lot of people think big social media platforms are actually communication platforms, they're not. They're designed intentionally to be difficult to communicate on.
That the not the purpose of them, it's in the name 'social media' they are the media, you are the social. They are creating media based on the things users post. They're not made to facilitate communication between friends, family, coworkers, etc...
They are designed specifically for users to generate monetizable content and data. They use a veneer of 'connecting the world together' so users will generate content that drives clicks and makes them money.
A true global communication platform would look nothing like the social media we have today. It would be designed around allowing people to communicate easily and freely, it would give you control over who and what you interact with and it would allow you to maintain granular levels of privacy.
Ya know...like other systems designed to facilitate communications...like say the telephone system...
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