How the polarizing effect of social media is speeding up — The Chaos Machine

[Leigh Anderson]

Interesting book, reviewed by NPR:

When you log on to Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, you think that what you are seeing is a neutral reflection of your community, and what [your community] is talking about. When you interact with it, you think that you are getting feedback from your peers, from other people online. But in fact, what you were seeing, and what you were experiencing, are choices made by these incredibly sophisticated automated systems that are designed to figure out exactly what combination of posts, what way to sequence those posts, how to present them to you will most engage certain very specific cognitive triggers and cognitive weak points that are meant to get certain emotions going. They are meant to trigger certain impulses and instincts that will make you feel really compelled to come back to the platform to spend a lot of time on it.

From The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher

Interview and podcast:
https://www.npr.org/2022/09/09/1121295499/facebook-twitter-youtube-instagram-tiktok-social-media

[Andrew Stillman]

I would argue that confirmation bias and the allure of in-group conformity are a core part of our tribal and survivalist nature. In this regard, Liberalism (in the Classical sense) could be thought of as a technology intentionally designed to counterbalance the downsides of these innate human flaws by forcing us into power sharing relationships and exposure to diverse perspectives. Arguably the cognitive isolation that most humans experienced prior to modernity — owing to geography — was probably a far greater polarizing force than any social media algorithm of today, as evidenced by all the wars it prompted. So I think there’s reason for optimism that just as the written word and AM Radio created a period of imbalance in our collective sense-making abilities, so too can we outgrow this pimply and gangly phase of social media. That being said, I wonder if this moment calls into question the proper mode of governance of these new technologies. Given how easily hijacked we are by these algorithms, are profit motive and free market competition up to the task of bringing social media back into balance with our needs as a society? What regulatory alternatives do we have?