“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

– Political scientist and Nobel laureate Herbert Simon.

In 2014 Facebook researchers published results of a massive experiment involving 689 000 people. They showed how they could make you feel angry or happy by algorithmically changing what you see in your news feed [4, 8, 9]. The study concluded: “Emotions expressed by friends, via online social networks, influence our own moods, constituting, to our knowledge, the first experimental evidence for massive-scale emotional contagion [via the Internet]”. Their paper caused quite a scandal and raised lots of questions. Can this be used to hijack your attention to make you spend more time on the platform? Can this be used to get you to open up your wallet? Can this be used to influence your vote?

In fact, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and other social media are in the business of stealing our attention for resale to advertisers and political technologists. They collect your phonebook, your email, your location history, your clicks, likes and posted content to build a predictive model of your behavior [4]. That model lets advertisers forecast when someone is most likely to buy stuff they don’t need to impress people who don’t care. It predicts the content most likely to get an emotional response from you, to maximize time spent on the platform. It lets political actors identify people with certain views to engage in pre-emptive oppression, make tailored propaganda, pit people with differing views against each other [2]. This is subverting democracy and moving us one step closer to a digital Gulag George Orwell could scarcely imagine.

“Hold on”, you might say. “I’m smarter than that. I’m not falling for this and can’t be manipulated that easily!”. Unfortunately, work done throughout the 20th century by leading psychologists, advertisers, neuroscientists, political technologists, sociologists; from the father of propaganda Edward Bernays [12] to prof. Elizabeth Loftus of University of California [10], suggests that we, humans, are much more gullible than we believe. Our views and even memories can be shaped if we are unaware of our own biases and techniques for exploiting them.

In 2018 it became known that a company called Cambridge Analytica (CA) amassed large amounts of data through a personality quiz on Facebook called “This is Your Digital Life”. 270,000 people took the quiz, but the data of some 50 million users was harvested without their explicit consent via their friend networks. CA then used it to psychologically profile people and deliver pro-Trump material to them, with a view to influencing the outcome of the 2016 presidential election in the U.S. [14]. CA wasn’t shy about their achievements, claiming they have impacted elections in Ukraine, Italy, Czech Republic and many others; about 200 elections all around the world [15].

On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a bot

How do you know if people in social networks are real? A 2018 study by the Pew Research Center found that about 66% of links to popular websites in Twitter are posted by automated accounts, not humans. This suggests that a significant portion of social media activity is driven by bots - programs that simulate human behavior.

By following, commenting, liking, re-posting and sharing content, bots can influence the algorithms responsible for determining the topics you see, potentially shaping public opinion. Those bots are used by governments, companies and wannabe “influencers” willing to impress you with their follower count. Borrowing terminology from French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, commercial social media are a desert of the real. Here, life is simulated, faked, re-edited, re-created into a Matrix-like mirage [17, 18, 20].

Moreover, due to commercial mining and hacker attacks, your sensitive details, including full name, messaging history, approximate wealth bracket, phone number, home address, GPS location history, information about your children, friends, partners may end up in the hands of criminals and be used for fraud, stalking, blackmail or worse.

Sounds unlikely? In 2021, 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries had their data leak in a massive security breach [1]. Facebook/Meta chose not to notify us individually to limit the legal/PR fallout. In 2018, 200 million profiles built by Apollo through merging user data across LinkedIn, Twitter, Salesforce, and other sources leaked [5]. Outside of breaches our data is openly sold by data broker companies, such as Equifax, Experian, CoreLogic, LexisNexis, RocketReach, and hundreds of others [19].

You may have received calls from fraudsters wanting to lure money out of your pocket and pretending to be your bank manager, the delivery guy or the police. You may have been wondering why they chose you, how they learned your name and other details. You now have a clue.

If you think about it, social media is a weird place. How many of us would pin our phone numbers, pictures of our friends and children, reports of our daily movements to a street bulletin board for any random stranger to see? How many of us would continue to update that board daily, for free? Yet everyday millions of people voluntarily give up details of their private lives for corporations to profit, political actors to exert better control and criminals to commit better fraud. Clickbait, disinformation, propaganda and advertising disguised as entertainment keep us polarized and keep us coming back for more [3].

The future

I believe that with recent progress in AI we’re entering a new era. The information we willingly give up to media companies will be used to train neural networks to manipulate us more efficiently and subtly than ever before. These models will be literally hacking minds by exploiting individual psychological biases to achieve commercial and political goals set out by the sponsor [6, 11, 13]. Mainstream social networks are likely to get flooded with bots that go beyond plain likes, writing entire posts illustrated with generated images.

Facebook is already experimenting with offering you “imaginary AI friends” [21]. One can imagine a few ways likely to be used for monetizing this innovation. One is a pay-to-play model - charging for access once a “friendship” is established. Another is having an “imaginary AI friend” manipulate you to buy sponsored products. Finally, the user data collected this way can be packaged and resold. They target mainly children and young adults.

To retain independent and original thought in the 21st century, we must learn to keep the propagandists and advertisers out of our minds, no matter how hard they knock on our doors of perception. We need communication tools that help build genuine human connections across space and borders. Free from surveillance and manipulation. With complete control over what data is stored about us, how it’s deleted and who gets to see it. Facebook isn’t one. TikTok isn’t one. None of the mainstream social media services fit the bill.

If you’d like to chat, drop me a good old email. The address is in the About page.

So what can you do about it?

If you’re willing to limit social media noise without quitting just yet, there’s a smaller step you can take. Uninstall the app from your smartphone and browse from your computer, with the News Feed Eradicator browser extension installed. It removes the most addicting part of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social networks - the feed - and replaces it instead with an inspirational quote.

• Chrome Store Link
• Firefox extension

Feeling curious about how exactly companies manipulate us for fun, profit and politics? Have a look at this documentary with prof. Shoshana Zuboff of Harvard University:

References

[1] After Data Breach Exposes 530 Million, Facebook Says It Will Not Notify Users https://www.npr.org/2021/04/09/986005820/after-data-breach-exposes-530-million-facebook-says-it-will-not-notify-users

[2] Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal

[3] Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization. Andrey Mir, 2020, https://www.amazon.com/Postjournalism-death-newspapers-media-after/dp/B08KTV9ZT2

[4] The Big Data Robbery. A documentary by professor Shoshana Zuboff. https://thoughtmaybe.com/the-big-data-robbery/

[5] Sales intel firm Apollo data breach exposed more than 200 million contact records. https://securityaffairs.com/76878/data-breach/apollo-data-breach.html

[6] Mark Zuckerberg promises to make your Facebook and Instagram feeds even worse. https://mashable.com/article/facebook-instagram-meta-algorithm-recommended

[7] Meta Platforms - Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_Platforms)

[8] Facebook reveals news feed experiment to control emotions. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-users-emotions-news-feeds

[9] Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1320040111

[10] Speaking of Psychology: How memory can be manipulated, with Elizabeth Loftus, PhD. https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/memory-manipulated

[11] AI can now learn to manipulate human behaviour. https://theconversation.com/ai-can-now-learn-to-manipulate-human-behaviour-155031

[12] The Engineering of Consent. Edward Bernays, 1955 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2573471-the-engineering-of-consent

[13] AI’s 6 Worst-Case Scenarios: Who needs Terminators when you have precision clickbait and ultra-deepfakes, IEEE Spectrum, 2022 https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-worst-case-scenarios

[14] Cambridge Analytica: Facebook row firm boss suspended https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-43480048

[15] Cambridge Analytica: The data firm’s global influence https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-43476762

[16] Bots in the Twittersphere: An estimated two-thirds of tweeted links to popular websites are posted by automated accounts – not human beings https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2018/04/09/bots-in-the-twittersphere/

[17] Jean Baudrillard: Welcome to the Desert of Hyperreality https://en.dialektika.org/news/anniversaries/jean-baudrillard-welcome-desert-hyperreality/

[18] Rediscovering the value of being versus appearance https://en.dialektika.org/philosophy/rediscovering-the-value-of-being-versus-appearance/

[19] It’s shockingly easy to buy sensitive data about US military personnel (Note: Brokers don’t have a special preference for the US military. In principle, anyone can be affected.) https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/11/06/1083002/sensitive-data-about-us-military-personnel-data-brokers/

[20] What is the Matrix? The Matrix, 1999. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5b0ZxUWNf0

[21] Meta’s plan to attract young users hinges on cringe-worthy AI chatbots https://www.engadget.com/metas-plan-to-attract-young-users-hinges-on-cringe-worthy-ai-chatbots-173459484.html