William Randolph Hearst (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst) did all of this first in the early 1900s. (Along with his rival Pulitzer. But the image above is clearly in Hearst's image, a fact probably lost to the modern audience)
The "problems" you state are far older than Twitter, and its best to study history and the problem of "Yellow Journalism". Over 100 years ago, people were complaining about false-outrage that manipulates the American public.
The only thing that has changed is that the American public has _forgotten_ what it was like to live in a outrage-fueled society, and we have to relearn the lessons of the past now. We need laws and society to change and recognize that all this fake-outrage is damaging ourselves, our psyche, and ultimately, our society.
The specific problems of today are utterly unlike anything older. The medium is overwhelmingly determinate of impact.
The simplistic version of this is: there are profound non-linearities introduced by lack of friction. "Superficial" differences in the role of feedback and tailored results which are noise in the case of print and broadcast media, are everything in contemporary social media.
Most particularly, the so-called "algorithm" problem is specific to contemporary social media; and it is imbedded in our society in ways that are unlike anything which has challenged it previously: as the citizen-facing sharp edge of surveillance capital, in which the origin and flow of "value" (i.e. consumer data) is all but entirely removed from public view and individual agency; and acts as a meta-filter, which is the sharp edge of social media serving increasingly as the sole mechanism whereby people receive media.
We live in a world in which what we read is ever more carefully targeted, deluded in the belief that we have agency in what we see and some defense about what it does not just to us, but to society as a whole.
Contemporary social media is stochastic mind control. And as said, it is currently performed almost entirely in service of ends very much at odds with the common good, in almost any dimension you choose to inspect.
Oh well. We had an OK run.
The USA literally started a war on false pretenses and took over the Philippines as a result of Yellow Journalism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Maine_(1889)
This included at least 15 years of harsh occupation, as the Philippine Katipunan (in the north) and Moros (the Muslims of the south) fought a guerilla war against their US occupiers, with roughly 200,000 dead from famines and war. I mean, USA occupied the Philippines until the 1940s (the seeds for Philippine independence were planted by the 20s, but WW2 severely delayed plans). But just because US Citizens have forgotten the story doesn't mean that this stuff didn't happen.
The Yellow Press has been a bane upon US society for over a century. There's letters from Ben Franklin about how he manipulated the press (ie: leaking false "scalping" stories about native Americans / British) to aid in the US Revolution. (See Henry Hamilton, a British Administrator who was widely believed to be a scalper, but proof never was offered on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Hamilton_(colonial_admin...)
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This is literally who we are as a people. Easily manipulated, outraged filled citizens who individually seem to have difficulty doing any form of critical thinking. Then a few elites get a good idea about how to manipulate the masses: be they Benjamin Franklin, William Hearst, his rival Pulitzer, or today Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey.
Its been like this for centuries, and it will continue to be like this long after you or I die.
Problem #1 is explaining to people that the outrage-filled Yellow press is a problem in the first place. Too many people yell "free speech" and "freedom", and point out these heroes of the past.
People don't even think this is a problem. So it won't get solved. If you can convince enough people that maybe we should do something about this, feel free to do so.
One thing that is happening is that social media is escalating the problem so much that its becoming visible to everyone, which in turn will increase the demand to do something about information quality (including defining what it is or is not). This seems to be already in progress.
Another thing I'm hoping for is that we can get NLU that is advanced enough to detect and elevate great quality material (both from research but also from educational perspective) that can successfully counteract "yellow journalism" and misinformation. We could combine this with NLU that can detect common techniques that take advantage of flaws in our reasoning abilities.
I'm actually optimistic this may be possible now. I also suspect it won't be necessary to go against free speach to achieve this.
We only need to look at the misinformation from 10 years ago to see how quickly "free speech" comes into play as a counter-argument.
"Obama is a Muslim" and "Obama was born in Kenya" are two pieces of misinformation. Explain what methodologies you'd do to stop these pieces of misinformation from spreading on Facebook, Twitter... or hell... Fox News / traditional media.
Any such restriction you think up with will immediately bring out the free-speech advocates. People want the "freedom" to spread these lies around for political gain.
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Its easier to use 10-year-old conspiracies because they're no longer "hot". I'm sure there are still people who believe in this misinformation today, but they're more riled up about current misinformation rather than past misinformation.
Explaining that these sources of information are not reliable, because they use techniques to manipulate public opinion. We have to discredit entire subsets of media that aren't willing to give up manipulative practices.
Saying that we can and should demand higher quality for our information, just as we demand high quality for other products. We make all kinds of (life) decision based on information.
Offering an alternative, better source of information, which is transparent, has a well defined methodology, can "show you the work" if you want to see it. One where you will know people put a lot of effort into producing high quality material and went to great length to avoid common pitfalls of human reasoning. A new kind of media to improve the quality of our lives by improving the quality of our information.
Free speach is totally fine to continue existing. Traditional media can also continue to exist. That doesn't mean we have to take it seriously - nobody bans tabloids either, but we don't put much into them.
Sure. I can believe that's a step in the right process. But have you ever tried to discredit Fox News for pushing the lie that "Obama is a Muslim" ?? Or "Obama was born in Kenya" ??
Even if you point out that a certain news publication does this, no one really seems to care in my experience.
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Look, people believe Obama was not born in the USA because they _want_ to believe that their political opponents are cheating at the process. And Fox News simply delivers to them what they want.
Cater to people's worst desires and worst beliefs... you know, those beliefs that no one else is willing to discuss... and you'll become a trustworthy friend of theirs.
Similarly: people want to be optimistic about COVID19. They want to believe in a cure (that isn't that cure that liberals are pushing). So now you have Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin. Give them the optimism they so desire, and they'll believe you.
People are right to be scared and afraid of COVID19. People are right to search for a cure and have optimism. But its when these media outlets feed on these fears and pushes misinformation that things get dangerous.
The idea isn't to focus on any individual bit of misinformation. Its to throw away the whole thing, conceptually, as a bad way of getting information, as a low quality source of it. It might have to include some left-leaning media as well, or most media in general as we know it today, because unfortunately most media today is manipulative instead of informative.
The hard bit is offering a good alternative, based on a decent set of principles, that will preserve its independence. Some principles might include:
- linking and detailed referencing to existing, primary sources
- grading the quality of information sources based on levels of evidence determined by experts
- showing the work i.e. using modern tech to allow the reader to expand on the whys and details if they want to (wiki style) without necessarily getting bogged down getting the gist of it (if they don't)
- you should be able to get from a lightweight, easy-read, to-the-point news article with a video to a full blown code-available paper that is also a Jupyther notebook with the anonymized dataset included, if you click deep enough
(I'll be honest, the above list is super rough WIP at the moment - some of those might turn out to be bad ideas)
The reason why people might care now is that they are actually dying or getting maimed because they were exposed to misinformation. Between special interests pushing their narratives and solo manipulative grifters that are banking on building an audience, its hard to tell who to trust.
With a system like this, I suspect it might actually be possible to remove taboos eventually. Taboos are only taboos because we fear their effects on mass misinformation, misinterpretation and other systemic (un)intended negative effects. If we can find a new way of thinking that gains wide acceptance and is immune to those flaws, then maybe we can open up taboo topics.
No. The important thing is to _GET OTHER PEOPLE_ to do this.
My mom, or my sister's father in law, will not trust what I say if it contradicts their news sources. So there's no feasible way I (or really, anyone else) can get them to throw away their bad news sources.
- don't focus on what their news sources are saying but instead
- you focus on why the old way is bad in general (across both left and right news media).
Thats the new message. Not "your news sources are bad" but "the entire approach of most news media today is bad. here is this new media utilizing a new approach where anyone can do the work and is fully open source so harder to manipulate"
The old press was broadcast-only and had to catter to the lowest common denominator. As a result, at least some people were immune.
The new "press" is crowdsourced and tailored just for you. Social media doesn't even have to do research on what works or what doesn't on who. Natural selection by means of retweeting does all the work. You can find misinformation of all levels of sophistication, all the way to incorrect scientific papers if thats your shtick. (It will mostly be based on reading abstract conclusions in those cases without checking quality of methodology, or on whatever the funding intrests of big companies are)
This isn't new at all. "More doctors smoke Camel Cigarettes". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCMzjJjuxQI
And the Tobacco industry funded all types of scientific papers, that were published all over the place to demonstrate Tobacco's "health benefits".
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The only reason we can't find examples older than maybe the mid 1900s or so, was because doctors weren't even trusted until the 1900s. 1800s doctors were well recognized as quacks and had very little reputation among the American people. So there was no reason to use doctors as a propaganda point back then.
EDIT: I need to add clarification. I don't mean when breaking news gets onto mainstream channels. No question that happens.
What I mean is the use of a single tweet with maybe 1 or 2 likes here or there to reflect public sentiment on different issues. All any news station had to do was fish through the pile of tweets about any given topic to find something they wanted to show on air and then act as if it represented a large segment of people. I watched it happen over and over for years.
Twitter created the ability to engineer the perception of public sentiment already with bots, but when main stream news joined in things went downhill much, much faster.
Hyperbole. But not by much.
The media began showing Tweets because Twitter had reached a sufficient audience size. The real problem is the audience size.
Stroustrup famously said [1]:
> There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.
I'd paraphrase this about communication platforms (including social media, Reddit, forums, etc):
> There are only two kinds of communication platforms: the ones where people are reactionary, argumentative, tribal, incendiary, conflict-seeking, virtue-signaling and just downright mean and the others too small for that not to have happened yet.
[1]: https://www.stroustrup.com/quotes.html#:~:text=%22There%20ar....
But I would pinpoint it to the inflated value of impressions. My experience (but i can not back this up) tells me that ad sellers tend to over estimate the impact of an impression, which makes the value chain completely inflated, and skews the business model. If ads were worth less (and, according to me, closer to the real value), less money would go round, and creating value for the end user would become more a necessity.
But I might be wrong, obvs.
Silicon valley just optimized it and turned it in to a science.
I'm sure various social scientists and historians could link it other issues. Advertising and selling goods in and of itself doesn't really explain how people just fall in to utter bullshit beliefs, does it?
No, social media is not the root problem - it showed us who we really are.
> The worst bit is that social media is becoming the primary source of news for most people today. The results have been nothing short of catastrophic.
There is good news - people are figuring out the effects of social media. Your post is one example - you see there are issues, you have "woken up." The "Social Dilemma" on netflix is another example, that deprogrammed a lot of people. Frances Haugen's testimony to congress, another. Slowly and surely, people will build "immunity" to "mind viruses." Humans fought this battle and won [1], but the war will go on as long as humans and media coexist.
Maybe people here are too young to remember how toxic, argumentative, irrational and judgmental everything else was that came previously: forums, mailing lists, Usenet, you name it.
Sure products can influence user behaviour but they can't totally change it. And if none of them (as you assert) "improve accuracy, increase thoughtfulness, paint nuance" ask yourself why: is it because all the platform providers are wrong? Or simply that's what users want?
Personally I've never liked Twitter. Of all the platforms I find it dominated by people who like the sounds of their own voices. I've described it as a "write only" platform. Even calling it "social media" seems like a stretch as there are no relationships, just people you follow and a news feed.
I'm in agreement humans are flawed, but why should we allow billionaires, who mostly want power and wealth, to decide how to referee our public discourse?
To me, these companies are run by humans and used by humans, so like drinking and driving, speed limits, personal safety, and all other kinds of laws: we need guardrails against bad actions.
We need some rudimentary policing, for as Hamilton stated: "if men were angels, no government would be necessary"
Of course they never achieved the same technological pace. Also, nowadays, when you think of newspapers, you think mostly of quality publications, writing considered, contextualised pieces.
But even nowadays, there are plenty of crappy tabloids chasing ad revenue (clicks?), with no regard for information and only about the shock factor. And in the past it was much worse, since the whole cesspit of attention-grabbing was contained in newspapers and pamphlets.
Tech changes, humans don’t.
1) in the Renaissance, literacy was much lower, books were scarce and expensive, and writing was often made in Latin, like the original bibles and Newton's Principia Mathematica. Therefore, print had MUCH less reach than social media.
2) the attentional cost of a book is vastly greater than a tweet. Tweets are designed to be simple and read in seconds; books are often complex and take weeks to digest.
3) due to 2, I feel Twitter's discourse evolves and devolves much, much faster into extremism and bullying and bad behaviors. It takes a long time for book disses to reach their target, not so for Twitter.
I could go on, but suffice to say, social media is an exponential notch above printed media in it's potential misuse and damage to society.
Not as fast as a tweet, but low cost, sub-book media has existed as long as the printing press was around. The classic books we study today are the equivalent of the criterion collection dvd sets.
This is a very unique perspective. It's one I don't share, and neither do the majority of Americans[1]. The economic and cultural forces shaping journalism make it so that it's vanishingly rare to find pieces that meet (my personal bar for) "considered, contextualized pieces". It's been a decade since the world of blogs/independent publishing has been an infinitely better source for that type of writing than traditional media has.
Naturally, independent publishing is also where you go to find the absolute worst of analysis and reporting, to a degree that traditional media would never stoop to. The core problem is that of discovery, finding the subset of high-quality sources in the acres of chaff that is the modern news environment.
It turns out that aggregators like Twitter are amazing for this, for those with the mental maturity and cognitive ability to use them with discipline. It's not very difficult to start with a trusted core of intellectually honest follows, then iteratively (and hyper-selectively) add high-quality accounts/author that you find through your existing follows. You have to be okay with a sparse feed to start, and you have to be disciplined enough to recognize perspectives that are high-quality even if you disagree with them, but it's an extremely straightforward path towards a much better media diet than the vast majority of people.
Note that this process doesn't disadvantage traditional media; it just fails to give it an undue advantage. Traditional publications and individual journalists within them can be treated like a source like any other, that can be compared to In practice, this is nominal only: in my experience, the incentives of the industry are such that 99% of them fall massively short of the basic quality and intellectual honesty bar. (Seriously, try it: start checking the sources and reading the papers cited by every article you read from eg the NYT and see how long you maintain confidence in modeling them as basically intelligent people telling you what's basically the truth).
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/355526/americans-trust-media-di...
The effects of social media on our collective attention span legitimately scare me. Our attention spans are shrinking with each generation, and the effect has gone parabolic in the last 15 years. Look at old movies, and notice the longer length of cuts compared to movies today. Now look at the infinite feed on TikTok.
What happens when the minority of the population that actually does their civic duty of informed voting can no longer pay attention to important issues?
What happens when people can't think about any topic beyond a sound bite or meme?
What happens when no one has more than 1000ms of patience to question whether they're looking at a deepfake?
Climate change? Holding politicians accountable for corruption or abuses of power?
I think we need to take a good look at where we're headed.
[1] - "Behave" by Sapolsky [2] - The Willpower Instinct
From that I recall they explain that the reward system responds to feeling of novelty because it's good for survival, f.e. you can find food or water source in a new location or maybe notice a hostile animals there. So, it's a behaviour caused by evolution. Twitter, Facebook, etc. just exploited it. And they admitted it:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/09/facebook-...
I actually think there is a great opportunity here to fix this problem as SM has made it painfully obvious and visible to everyone, while also democratizing the entire process. (Democratizing manipulation and outrage isn't necessarily the best thing in the world though, but we can at least start thinking what causes it and what can be done to improve things)
I wonder what the mods found objectionable. Its a general news event, so this kind of commentary seems relevant. Social media CEOs are facing this problem everywhere and they seem unable (or unwilling?) to fight it.
Those are indeed elementary factors, but I think that Twitter's effectiveness stems from how it enables tribal thinking and actively nourishes it with its algorithmic ranking.
It's one gigantic outrage machine, and few things are as addictive as outrage.
But as CTO, the new CEO seems to have focused on increasing engagement and growing audiences. Unless that changes, expect the problem you describe to get bigger.
I think Silicon Valley made a major misjudgement thinking geeks with products with billions of people won’t be taken over by politicians with decades of power game experience. It’s not even a fair game. These are literally the biggest power players in the world, Zuckerberg and Dorsey didn’t stand a chance.
I believe that free publishing, or many-to-many media, is crucial for the future of our society. If anything, it is still not easy enought to get ideas out there and discussed (unless you have enough reach).
To phrase it a bit provocatively, I believe radical democracy is a good thing, even if many of the plebs are stupid.
People are dying because of social-media-amplified misinformation: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1460368038859919361.html
By providing simple rules of information flow: small amount of content, retweet, followers) and rewards (likes), they've created the most efficient engines for finding and spreading novelty at the expense of everything else.
There are no incentives to improve accuracy, increase thoughtfulness, paint nuance. Fact checking gets lost in the wind.
The environment is essentially one designed for brain viruses, where whether you click RT (after thinking around 5 seconds about it) determines the Rt. The most superficially convincing, novel looking and emotion inducing content wins. You can get your misinformation in two flavors: deliberate disinformation by grifters, or accidental misinformation, sometimes by real experts who (like everyone else) make a sensational mistake that gets super amplified.
The worst bit is that social media is becoming the primary source of news for most people today. The results have been nothing short of catastrophic.
The new CEO has quite a bit of work in front of them.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146