How Social Media Works: Intentional Manipulation

In a fascinating movie review on the Neurologica blog, Steven Novella discusses the movie The Social Dilemma. It goes into the details of how social media works and how powerful it is in doing bad things to people and societies, e.g., it can make people depressed. The bad things also include creating false realities, undermining facts and truths and sapping the credibility of experts. Dr. Novella writes:

“Also, social media lends itself to information bubbles. When we rely mostly on social media for our news and information, over time that information is increasing curated to cater to a particular point of view. We can go down rabbit holes of subculture, conspiracy theories, and radical political perspectives. Social media algorithms have essentially convinced people that the Earth is flat, that JFK Jr. is alive and secretly working for Trump, and that the experts are all lying to us.

This is where I think the documentary was very persuasive and the conclusions resonated. They argued that increasingly people of different political identities are literally living in different worlds. They are cocooned in an information ecosystem that not only has its own set of opinions but its own set of facts. This makes a conversation between different camps impossible. There is no common ground of a shared reality. In fact, the idea of facts, truth, and reality fades away and is replaced entirely with opinion and perspective, and a false equivalency that erases expertise, process, and any measure of validity

The documentary was also persuasive (again, nothing new) in arguing that this system is ripe for exploitation, by foreign powers, oligarchs, and dictators. It is an incredible amount of power to put at the fingertips of a totalitarian government. They can control what their citizens think, without their citizens really even being aware of it. It is a propagandist’s wet dream, and blows away the worst nightmares of 1984.

Social media clearly is playing a critical role in the increased polarization we are experiencing, and the rise of populists.

To anyone paying attention, none of this was new, but it is instructive to have it all laid out systematically. What I thought was new, at least to me, was the degree to which the consequences of social media are apparently by design. My prior sense was that social media algorithms were optimized to give users what they want in order to get them and keep them using their platform. But really, the manipulation goes deeper and is much more conscious and intentional. Having social media rabbit holes of conspiracy theories, for example, is not an unintended side effect of social media algorithms – it’s a deliberate feature. The industry is deliberately psychologically manipulating users (that’s us) in order to maximize attention harvesting in order to directly monetize that attention, and gather data so that the data itself can be monetized and used to further harvest our attention. This isn’t surprising, it was just way more explicit than I had imagined.”

Novella goes on to criticize the movie for having too narrow a focus on social media and not putting this in a broader social context. He also criticizes the time the film spent on discussing possible fixes as being too limited. He correctly points out that the industry needs regulation and cannot or will not do it alone because it is trapped in a for-profit business model. 

Some things that people can do include not clicking on recommended things, and sampling different sources of news and content. That avoids rewarding click-bait. Novella agrees with the film’s conclusion that a healthy and functioning democracy requires us to figure this out and try to regulate the inherent badness into something less socially divisive and toxic.