Saturday, October 31, 2020

Regarding How Social Media Works and What It Does to the Human Mind

This 27-minute video, A Real Doctor Watches "The Social Dilemma", summarizes the key points from the longer NetFlix program The Social Dilemma. A commentator, ZDoggMD, plays key passages from The Social Dilemma and then explains them to make the points clear to his audience. 




Four key points of about five or six:

1. The real customer: "If you are not paying for the product, you are the product." People who use social media are the product being sold. Specifically, people's time and attention is sold to advertisers. The customers of social media companies are advertisers, not the millions of people who use social media. 

2. You are not paranoid, you really are being watched and watched very carefully: Social media tracks everything that people do online in great detail. All of that data is used to profile you and package your profile for sale to advertisers. The algorithms that social media use are sophisticated, powerful and used to predict with you will do next online. In time, the software will improve to the point that it will know more about you than you do, e.g., it will be able predict if you are at risk for suicide before you even know you have a problem. 

3. Social media can damage people and whole societies: Social media is intentionally designed to be addictive and vacuous to better package customers for advertisers. The rise of social media in the hands of children correlates with the rise of various kinds of damage, e.g., increased suicide, especially in teenage girls. The rise of this kind of damage to children was observed in the ~2010-2011 time period. The damage to society includes the new political polarization and accompanying hate, distrust and belief in blatant disinformation. The point is this: Polarization sells and advertisers want it for profit. That also correlates with the rise of social media. In my experience, I believe that the way social media works on the human brain, as described in the video, it causes the polarization, hate, distrust and tribal belief in disinformation.

4. Social media can be designed to be less harmful to people and societies: The owners control the product. They know exactly how and why it works, e.g., little squirts of dopamine in the brain, etc. Social media works exactly the same way a slot machine works, i.e., little squirts of dopamine reward in the brain. The science of addiction and manipulation is sophisticated and getting better all the time as the software improves. The owners are 100% aware of the damage they are causing. But in our significantly unregulated capitalist economy, profit talks and social concerns walk.


Question:
Are me or Dissident Politics a personally or socially damaging or addictive social media source?

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