The perils of social media

For the last decade or so, much of humanity appears to have willingly submitted itself to the neural slot machine of social media. We scroll. We sigh. We scroll some more. Somewhere along the way someone came up with the term “doomscrolling”, which at least has the virtue of being honest about what we’re doing.

It works much like a slot machine. Pull the lever just one more time. Maybe there’s something good down there. A message. A like. A photograph of somebody’s lunch. A stranger saying something so spectacularly stupid that you simply must spend the next twenty minutes explaining why they’re wrong.

Modern applications have turned gamification into something approaching a dark art. Tiny bursts of dopamine, carefully timed notifications, infinite feeds and little red badges screaming for attention. None of this happened by accident.

“But hey”, I hear you say, “it’s free”. Sure. And the cheese in a mousetrap is free too.

You may not be handing over money for a subscription. You create the content yourself, free of charge, while advertisements hover discreetly around the edges. It seems like a pretty good deal. Except the currency is your attention.

And attention, in an economy where everyone desperately wants a piece of it, is valuable stuff. You may think you have this under control. We all do. But to paraphrase Emperor Palpatine, your feeble skills are no match for the dark side of social media.

On the other side of the screen are armies of designers, psychologists, data scientists and algorithms armed with an impressive amount of information about what makes you tick. They know what keeps you scrolling. They know what makes you click. Better still, they know what makes you angry. Anger is excellent for engagement. Show someone a pleasant photograph and they might smile and move on. Show them something outrageous and suddenly they’re hammering away at the keyboard, arguing with a complete stranger named PatriotEagle1973 until two in the morning.

Everybody loses. Except the platform, because your rage fits beautifully into the business model. Psychologists call part of this “negativity bias”: our tendency to pay more attention to bad things than good ones. Evolution probably had sensible reasons for this. The caveman who ignored the suspicious movement in the bushes didn’t get to pass on his relaxed attitude toward danger. Unfortunately, the suspicious movement in the bushes is now a notification on Twitter.

“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.”
— Edward O. Wilson

Our attention is already stretched painfully thin by an absurd abundance of information. Then comes FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) standing behind us with a whip whenever we consider putting the phone down.

Most applications are lit up like Christmas trees: badges, vibrations, sounds, banners and icons all politely informing us that somewhere, something has happened and we are apparently required to know about it immediately.

The curious thing is that no sinister hacker in a Guy Fawkes mask had to break into these systems and make them addictive. The companies themselves built them this way. Entire teams are paid very good money to make sure you come back, which you do. Which is either brilliant product design or a fairly depressing commentary on the species.

This makes guarding your sources of information increasingly important. Your inbox is essentially a todo-list that everyone else has permission to write on. Social media is much the same, except people are also competing to decide what you should think about today.

Start the morning by opening your feeds and you immediately surrender the agenda. Before breakfast, you can be angry about American politics, worried about a war three thousand kilometers away, annoyed by somebody you went to school with in 1987 and strangely invested in the opinions of a man you have never met. It’s deceivingly easy to start the day by being overly reactive, which kickstart the slippery slope.

Then there is the considerably darker problem of deliberate disinformation. Consuming information online now requires more than simply reading it. You have to ask who wrote it, why they wrote it, where the information came from and who benefits if you believe it. Why place your trust in an anonymous “content creator” with a webcam, funny shirt and suspiciously strong opinions when multiple professional journalists and independent sources tell a different story?

The democratic internet was a beautiful dream: everyone gets a voice. Unfortunately, everyone includes propagandists, conspiracy theorists, intelligence agencies, bored teenagers and people trying to sell you cryptocurrency. Not to mention people who listen to hiphop music.

The Obama campaign demonstrated how effectively social media could be used politically. The Trump campaign, with Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica orbiting around it, showed how much darker and more sophisticated the machinery could become. Christopher Wylie’s Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America provides a disturbing look behind that particular curtain.

Then came Covid-19, and suddenly the information war wasn’t an abstract academic problem anymore. Medical advice, rumors, conspiracy theories and outright fabrication traveled around the world faster than the virus itself.

Now in 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is being fought not only with tanks, drones and soldiers but with memes, hacked networks, propaganda and disinformation. Cyber warfare against Ukraine had already been underway for years. The HermeticWiper malware appeared just before the Russian invasion began, another reminder that modern wars start long before somebody drives a tank across a border.

Subtle message in Nevada.

But spectacular cyberattacks are only part of the story. The more subtle weapon is influence. Social media provides direct access to enormous populations, and misinformation doesn’t need to convince everybody. It only needs to confuse enough people, deepen existing divisions and make everyone slightly less certain about what is actually true.

A coordinated campaign, a few thousand fake accounts and some well-designed memes can accomplish things that once required entire government propaganda departments. Facebook alone has around 2.9 billion active users. A decade ago, that number would have represented a staggering proportion of everyone using the internet.

Smartphones have placed the network permanently in our pockets, and the amount of time we spend connected keeps increasing. Humanity has never experienced anything quite like this before. We have built a global information machine involving billions of people and then, with admirable confidence, decided to test it directly in production.

Surprise, there may be side effects. Social networks are beginning to respond more aggressively to disinformation, hate speech and geopolitical manipulation. A few days ago Facebook temporarily changed its hate-speech policy to allow certain posts calling for violence against Russian invaders, shortly after Russia banned Facebook. Instagram has now been banned as well. Interesting times for influencers.

Perhaps there is a lesson buried somewhere beneath all this noise. The ability to judge the reliability of information is becoming one of the essential skills of modern life. Not merely knowing how to find information (Google solved much of that problem many years ago), but knowing what deserves your attention in the first place.

Because your attention is still the price. The platforms want it. Advertisers want it. Politicians want it. Propagandists want it. Trolls want it. Everybody gets a little piece if you let them. So learn to examine sources. Learn to recognize manipulation. Learn when not to click. And perhaps most importantly, learn the increasingly valuable art of critical ignoring. Sometimes the smartest response to somebody being wrong on the internet is to close the app and go outside. Don’t worry, the argument will sadly still be there when you get back.