So, now you see how the Anti-Vaxxer movement, or any fringe group, has a fantastic platform to spread their misinformation—faster than measles itself spreads.
I hate to single out just one group of irrational people, like the Anti-Vaxxers, because there are a variety of examples to draw from. I guess I could have just as easily chosen those looney Flat-Earthers. And don’t get caught up in which camp you fall into. My real point is demonstrating how social networks can accidentally mass-engineer the proliferation of an arbitrary set of thoughts, giving misinformed fringe groups a megaphone through which they can share their ideas.
Facebook has recently admitted that the Anti-Vaxxer movement has been growing because of its algorithm. They are making a “special case” for the algorithm to limit the spread of these dangerous ideas. That is encouraging, but clearly, the problem is the algorithm itself. How many special cases do they need to code around? What about Neo Nazis who foment violence towards minorities? Are they going to make a special case, so those messages don’t spread via its interaction-hungry algorithm?
Algorithms Cause Idiots to Multiply
Have you noticed how impossible and futile it is to have a rational conversation with someone who is irrational? I think we have all experienced this to one degree or another in our real life. For whatever reason, it seems even more likely to occur on the Internet, and also less easy to tolerate.
No description needed. Source: XKCD.com
In the previous section, I described one specific example, but there are many topics where information is “siloed” automatically by the algorithms, allowing many discussions, topics, and groups to exist in self-affirming echo chambers. Worse, the uninformed can often be swayed by bad, or at the very least, incomplete information, as these echo chambers do not introduce conflicting or contradictory information to the user. This sort of confirmation bias is a basic thing that happens in real life too, of course, but the dynamic is really pronounced on social networks, where the algorithms feed you a steady diet of what they know you’ll like.
One particularly negative aspect of these algorithms is they do not reward thoughtful debate. There are so many groups of people who are not getting the sort of information that might really help their lives, either physically or emotionally. In many of these echo chambers, it’s very rare to see any cogent arguments from an opposing side. People in these groups become further and further entrenched in their beliefs.
Hey, I just chose a random example here and I’m not taking any sides. But we all know this is the kind of stuff that happens during social media “discussions.”
This example above is a fairly lighthearted post and I think most Christians would even chuckle. But then, someone in the comments feels the need to make a non sequitur reference about “gay” people, and then the comments get all out of control. If you scroll through the comments on these posts, you’ll find that eventually even vegans join in the debate and find a way to wedge veganism into the discussion. You know those vegans. Because this post is receiving such a high level of engagement and activity, the algorithm thinks it’s worth promoting in your feed, even though that activity is mostly vitriolic trolling and bickering.
Social media encourages polarizing behavior. By showing us posts that are similar to what we’ve “liked” in the past, it plays right into our confirmation bias, or the tendency to search for and only accept new information if it confirms our preexisting beliefs. This, in turn, serves to strengthen our egoic self-identities, because we interpret what we see as confirming what we already knew.
How You Are Manipulated
Tristan Harris, former Google Project Manager and design ethicist, describes how social networks reward and encourage emotional outrage. “If you’re the Facebook newsfeed, you actually benefit when there is outrage,” Harris said, in his TED talk. “If Facebook had the choice between showing you an outrage feed versus a calm newsfeed, they would want to show you the outrage feed. Not because someone consciously chose that, but because that works better at getting your attention.”79
Sam Harris, an author, philosopher, neuroscientist (no relation to Tristan), always has a brilliant clarity of thought. He made a salient observation in a podcast when he said, “With social media, you are very likely consuming misinformation that is manipulating you, and this is bad not only for you, but for society.”
Chapter 7
Moving Forward—What Could “Good” Look Like?
“We are more than the parts that form us. “
— Patrick Rothfuss
Now that we’ve fully established that there are several aspects of social media that are broken, how can we fix it? Well, this is the chapter where I get to design my own social network. I think it’s better than Instagram and all the other ones out there. Don’t believe me? Come along with me on this little thought experiment.
How We Got Here
In order to understand how to build a better network, it’s helpful to understand how the problems of social media evolved to exist today. To do that, we’ll briefly recap a few of the more memorable milestones.
A Brief History of Social Media
1997: The first time that social media really surged to the fore, with the rise of the website Six Degrees. Six Degrees connected about one million San Francisco hippies in a very simplistic social network, which was based largely on users organizing around common interests.
2002: Friendster moved the needle a bit, especially in the dating and music arenas.
2003: Myspace introduces personalized profile pages. Tom became everyone’s friend.
2004: Zuckerberg founded Facebook. That was also the year that Flickr, the photography website, launched.
2006: 140-character limit is introduced, with Twitter.
2010: Instagram popped into the world with square-cropped photo feeds.
There are a lot of other social networks out there that I won’t get into. Oh, by the way, there are huge social networks in China too, like WeChat and Weibo, with hundreds of millions of users. These are worth an entire book—or several—of their own.
Back in the early 2000s, these sites were simply a great way to make new friends and discover new things. Myspace was especially fun because users could decorate their pages any way they wanted. They could share music. They could write stories. Users could basically do whatever they wanted and connect with anyone they wished, and they always had at least one friend in Myspace Tom. These sites were (and in some cases, continue to be) just plain fun and social and humans are incredibly social animals. These new social media sites made it easier and more fun to meet people with similar interests over the Internet than ever before.
These social networks gave public voices to millions around the world who wanted to say something. Having the ability to connect with others in this way was extremely liberating for those who traditionally hadn’t felt heard or hadn’t been able to find other people like themselves.
For example, when it first came out, I loved using Flickr. Flickr was really the first social network I took seriously because I was able to meet so many photographers from around the world and find inspiration like never before. Those magic moments would have been impossible without Flickr.
Over time, social network activity became more specialized. For example, my wife has neuroendocrine tumors, and she has been able to find several excellent support groups inside of Facebook. Specialized doctors even come into the group to share their latest findings with all the patients. This level of connectivity and information sharing just isn’t available in the real world.
Even though I have been very critical of Facebook and Instagram, I certainly agree that some good comes from connecting the world. So, where exactly did we make a wrong turn?
What Went Wrong?
After a lot of fragmentation in the social networking world, a significant portion of social media activity has now solidified around Facebook and Instagram. These two platforms did the best job o
f connecting people and keeping them engaged and now there are over a billion people that use these two networks on a regular basis. While the idea behind these two platforms was inspired, a few things have happened to make the end product—at least, the one we see today—a flawed and fragmented one.
The Newsfeed Is Optimized for the Wrong Things
As we discussed earlier, at a critical point a few years ago, Facebook and Instagram changed the behavior of your newsfeed. Your newsfeed used to present posts chronologically and now it has been switched to “intelligent” sharing, which shows high-engagement posts first. High engagement frequently signifies controversial content, so social media became an opportunity for fringe topics to flourish, as we discussed in the previous section.
The reason Facebook and Instagram did this is to keep you on their platforms for longer. The longer you are on the platforms, the more ads you see, and the more money Facebook and Instagram make. I’m not saying this is evil because it’s perfectly fine for corporations to make profits. However, by maximizing your screen time, they may not be doing what is best for you, the user. We’ve seen repeated instances of an increased level of anxiety and self-doubt correlated with increased usage of social media.
Decisions Are Made by Committee
Even though a corporation’s principals may have principles, it doesn’t mean those principles make it all the way out the factory door.
Social media sites start as a blank slate, imagined and designed by one or two people. Over time, more and more designers get involved, some of whom have differing goals. This can result in the implementation of a bunch of different features, not all of which align with the original design goals and some of which are Frankenstein-esque compromises made by this committee of designers. Many plans that are decided by a committee are failures, and this is why you never see a statue of a committee.
The founders of Instagram have quit, and I believe it is because they were not happy with many elements in the company. After he left, co-founder Kevin Systrom told the press, “No one ever leaves a job because everything’s awesome.” Ouch.
Wall Street Is on the Prowl
Public companies are responsible for delivering revenue growth, always, no matter what. This incentivizes short term gains over longer-term projects. The push towards incrementalism does make the bottom line look good but often leads to sacrificing investment in a broader vision or long-term strategy. Now, all that matters is the numbers and how they look today.
Momentum Is a Powerful Force
Have you ever wondered why we have ten numbers in our counting system? We use what’s called “base ten” for counting for a very complex, highly mathematical reason—it’s because we have ten fingers. Imagine, however, if we had seven fingers. How would we represent a random number, like 382?
Sometimes, a system, once created, becomes so entrenched in our society and way of life that it is almost impossible to change it. The way we count is one such example. It’s a system that works pretty well and isn’t really inconveniencing anyone, so it isn’t important that this one changes.
However, take electrical outlets as another example. When you think about an electrical plug, you probably have a very specific image in mind. I imagine a three-pronged contraption, with two of the prongs being flat-ish and one of them being round. What you imagine, though, might be completely different. Electrical outlets are not standardized around the world, so it makes traveling internationally a rather difficult experience. Electrical plugs are an example of a “system” that works well locally but doesn’t actually work that well on a worldwide level. However, there’s so much momentum at the local level that it doesn’t make sense to change the system at a global level.
Here’s another example that I like—the measurement of time. At one point, someone did actually try to change how time was measured. Many years ago, Swatch, the watch company, tried to popularize a new way of measuring time, by bringing time to the metric system. They based their measurement units on base ten, instead of the confusing 60 seconds, 60 minutes, and 24 hours. Swatch called the unit for their new system of measurement “beats.”
Beats is a terrible and confusing name, but let’s just talk for a minute about how good the actual idea was. Each day contained a thousand beats. There were no time zones—220 beats was the same whether or not you were in New York or Berlin. However, someone in Berlin might be eating breakfast at that time, whereas someone in New York might be deep asleep in the middle of their night. Scheduling would be easy. I could send a note to a friend in Sydney and say, “hey, want to catch up between 100 and 300 beats?” She wouldn’t have to do any sort of translation to her local time. It was a genius system that solved a lot of problems with our current system of measuring time, which is a mess. Let’s not even bring up the havoc that Daylight Saving creates.
However, you probably haven’t heard of beats. That’s because better and more efficient systems don’t always win. Sometimes we get stuck with what we have. This is my big worry with Instagram. The current system is broken, and no one seems terribly concerned with making it better because it has so much momentum. It doesn’t appear to matter that even though the current metrics are increasingly useless and untrustworthy.
It Can Work: Lessons from the One-Time Panacea of Google+
Well, the social network Google+ is dead now. Before it was shut down Google+ was the most beloved social network for many creatives, especially photographers.
When it launched, Google+ felt like an optimistic gathering place for all sorts of creatives: painters, chefs, dancers, photographers, performers, etc. It was as if we were getting together in a Parisian salon during one of the most artistic periods in history. If you’ve seen Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, with so many different types of creatives gathering and sharing ideas, then you’ll know what I mean.
At some point, I had over eight million Google+ followers. That was pretty cool because I was able to share my message of positivity, love, and creativity quite widely! There were many other photographers and creatives on the platform spreading the same message to tons of their followers. We all got quite caught up in the zeitgeist of it all.
Look at the tremendous growth in the social network from the beginning of 2011 to the end of 2013.
It was a great time, creatively, for so many of us. The platform helped to fuel our internal fires. I got to meet so many amazing creatives. I was also invited to speak at many Google (now known as Alphabet) events, meet the management team, hang out with Sergey Brin on many occasions, see secret stuff at Google X, and more.
I even got a message from Mark Zuckerberg one day, asking if I wanted to come over and spend the day with him at Facebook. He was curious why so many photographers were over on Google+. I’ll tell you the same thing I told Zuck. Here’s what made Google+ work as a social network:
Google+ was more focused on passions rather than a friend/family network.
The way photos were displayed worked. Photos on Google+ were big, beautiful, and ad-free.
Google+ was blazingly fast.
The platform had a great discovery mechanism for finding new creatives to follow. It was very easy to follow new people because of the simple features in the user interface (UI). For example, you could just hover over someone’s name or profile photo, and there was a “Follow” button there—you didn’t have to click into their profile.
Video chats worked, and folks used them. Google+ developed these live video broadcasts called “Hangouts,” where creatives could all get together in a 10-way video chat and share ideas and creations.
Even better, creatives could take that 10-person hangout and share the stream online, live, with millions of people.
Best thing of all? No ads on Google+.
I mean, how amazing does that sound? And that was way back in 2013.
Then, Google decided they didn’t want to be in the social networking business. That was a real bummer because they had some
thing great going. After one of the VPs, Vic Gundotra, left, the writing was on the wall. Google sent the social network out to pasture for five years, until they finally announced in 2018, they were shutting it down. They rescued the best bits of it and launched a robust Google Photos product.
Why did they ultimately shut it down? I have a good theory on that.
More than 10 years ago, when I used to work in big corporations and before I became a full-time artist, I came to understand organizational dynamics. I learnt that plans sometimes go astray in execution and it’s never entirely one person’s fault. Such is the nature of corporations.
I firmly believe that what took Google+ off track was hesitation about whether or not Google wanted to play the social game or not. Google’s mission has always been to organize the world’s information. So, social networking was sort of an experiment. Google has many experiments going on at any one time, and they kill experiments quite frequently when they aren’t going well.
Here’s my logical argument against their decision to get out of social networking. Based on some recent Google Assistant demos, I believe Google has an interest in developing the ultimate Artificial Intelligence (AI). They thought that building a “social network” might be incongruent with the task of building the ultimate AI, which I don’t believe is true. That was a double-negative, so let me be clear: I believe that investing in a social network is congruent with building the ultimate AI.
Under the Influence- How to Fake Your Way Into Getting Rich on Instagram Page 18
