What do Facebook/Meta, Instagram, and TikTok have in common? They are all unscrupulously stealing your personal information and using it to make billions at your expense.
This isn't a matter of regulating free speech, which, as you all know, is a constitutionally guaranteed right in America. Nor is it a matter of giving up social media as a way to communicate.
There is only one solution to this problem: We need to pressure Congress to regulate the business models that allow these companies to profit off the most extreme and dangerous content on the web.
You may be wondering what advertising revenue has to do with dangerous content. It's simple: The more salacious the content, the longer people's eyes stay glued to the page, and the longer people look at a page with an ad, the more money the social media outlet makes.
Why is this a problem?
If you’re not paying for the product, the product is you. The real transaction here isn’t you receiving enjoyment in the form of a free temporary distraction created by a media company at great expense, but rather, that media company renting your eyeballs to its advertisers. — Investopedia
How it works
Social media uses your personal information to target you for exploitation. Some of the exploitation may seem harmless — like placing ads on your account pages for things they know you're interested in. But here's where it gets tricky.
Let's say I'm trying to understand a particular political issue to decide how to vote. It's essential that I get facts instead of misinformation that might confuse me and cause me to vote against my self-interests.
For this exercise, let's take the example of Obamacare. Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, provided healthcare to millions of people who couldn't afford it otherwise.
Unfortunately, Republicans who wanted to make the Black president look bad decided to make up lies about the Affordable Care Act, rename it Obamacare to slap the label of the Black president on it, and then tell people it would hurt their ability to get the care they need. In other words, they lied.
What about the right to free speech?
The right to free speech gives us the right to say what we think. I would even argue that, typically, most people can decide for themselves what to believe. But there's nothing typical about an algorithm that has access to everything you've ever done online and uses that information to determine precisely which salacious and untrue social media posts might intrigue you. Herein lies the rub.
Algorithms take millions of bits of data and massage them instantaneously to determine how best to keep your attention. That's why every Facebook page is different. The algorithm knows everything about you, which gives the algorithm an unfair advantage.
If a person knows everything about you, they know what arguments will appeal to you. A good communicator might persuade you to change your opinion. But algorithms don't persuade; they manipulate. The difference is enormous.
When you are persuaded, you are an active participant in the conversation, and you make a conscious choice as to whether or not to change your mind. When you are manipulated, you don't even know what's happening.
Algorithms manipulate you. It's that simple. Do you think the people who invaded our Capitol on January 6th knew they had been manipulated? Of course not. They believed the election was stolen. They believed it because a president told them it was true. The same president who told them the election was stolen also told them COVID was a hoax — and they believed that too. Some believed it to such an extent that even when lying in a hospital bed dying because they couldn't breathe, they insisted it wasn't from COVID.
You can't beat an algorithm
Our brains cannot compete with a computer algorithm. Nobody's brain works fast enough or well enough to outsmart an algorithm — it's not a fair fight.
Granted, individuals can spread misinformation on social media without relying on algorithms (or bots that fool people into thinking they're getting the truth from a person just like them). And yes, we still had a few crazies before the advent of social media, but most people saw through the nonsense.
What we are seeing today is historically unprecedented — it is the deliberate manipulation of millions of people for nefarious political purposes.
If you're on social media, you're a target
Without the added influence of the targeted manipulation only possible via algorithms, many people who bought into the lies about the stolen election would have seen it right through it. That's because they would not have been intentionally primed to be suspicious of the government. They would not have been fed misinformation specifically targeted to them by a machine programmed to tap into their limbic systems, making it almost impossible to resist reading disinformation repeatedly.
When people hear something often enough, they begin to believe it. So you can imagine the power of a computer algorithm that distributes disinformation non-stop throughout the internet via bots that appear to be individual people.
We've given social media companies a lot of power
This is the power we have given social media companies. It's no accident that one of the top people at Facebook is a political operative from the Republican Party, formerly the George W. Bush Administration. His name is Joel Kaplan, and he was the subject of a WIRED article titled "The Fixer."
"One person described Kaplan as 'Washington dark matter,' exerting gravitational forces but strangely hidden."
While Zuckerberg has always claimed that Facebook is not political, Joel Kaplan most decidedly is.
Most think the influence network he has assembled will be a formidable obstacle for leaders of the techlash. Having spent $20 million last year, Facebook is now running the second-largest lobbying effort by a public company in the US, only shy of Amazon. David Cicilline, the Democratic representative who has led the push for antitrust legislation, describes the salvo as “an armada of lobbyists descending on Capitol Hill.”
It's time to take social media’s power away
You might think throwing $20 million at a lobbying effort is the political equivalent of an algorithm, and there is nothing we can do to compete against it. But there is. We have a weapon more powerful than money — we have the power of our votes.
We can vote into office more people like David Cicilline, Katie Porter, and Sheldon Whitehouse — all of whom have worked tirelessly against special interests on behalf of the American people. And we can vote out the people who collect checks from lobbyists whose only goal is to promote billion-dollar businesses.
It's up to us — we can do it. After all, we got rid of Trump, didn't we?
Note: I have wanted to write about this for a long time. I was prompted to do it today by a short YouTube video interview of a 60 Minutes segment with Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology. He knows more about this than just about anybody, so check it out:
(Special thanks to Patrick Jones for sending this video to me :-)