It's Time to Protest Social Media
“Orwell warns (in 1984) that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision (in Brave New World) no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.”
It was the third straight day I’d failed to live well. I was lost in my Instagram and Twitter feeds before lunch. There was tension in my group chats, and I was arguing with friends via texting. They found my positions as out of touch as I found theirs. Whenever I called these same friends to talk we understood each other, so firing off opinions about half-remembered articles and half-formed ideas isn’t the best way to discuss things that matter. On Facebook people I knew to be compassionate and serious were posting toxic comments.
By happenstance, I’m near the end of Jaron Leneir’s book, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. A computer scientist and musician who worked on the creation of the internet, Leneir is regarded as the founding father of virtual reality. Now he refers to social media as “BUMMER”, an acronym that stands for “Behaviours of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent.” He writes:
“Facebook and other BUMMER companies are becoming the ransomware of human attention. They have such a hold on so much of so many people’s attention for so much of each day that they are gatekeepers to brains.”
Most of us think “BUMMER” products are free, and that we’re the lucky customers who get to use them. The sad truth is that advertisers are the customers of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube (Google), and we’re the product. Our habits and behavior are collected and sold, and hugely profitable companies thrive because of the amount of time we spend on their carefully manipulated platforms. The more we scroll and click, and the more ads we see, the more money they make, enabling them to keep making matters worse.
This dynamic has produced what design ethicist Tristan Harris calls “the attention economy,” where companies like Facebook, Instagram (owned by Facebook), Twitter, Google and Snapchat fight to grab and keep user attention. They employ teams of software engineers whose job is to make their products as addictive as possible. The same psychological strategies used to keep people sitting at slot machines are used to keep us scrolling apps.
Mounting evidence suggests that social media use is contributing to an increased risk of anxiety, depression, self-harm and suicide. This is especially true amongst adolescent children, and most true of adolescent girls.
Nearly everyone broadcasts a happy, successful life on the internet. Even people who understand intellectually that everyone does this often end up dissatisfied about their own messy and ordinary lives. People on social media who accurately observe this often post images meant to capture “real” qualities - photos without makeup, or admissions of anxiety and sadness. But this too can be calculated and exploited. Getting off apps altogether is the most effective way to be “real.” How often do you end a session of scrolling social media feeling refreshed, energized and compassionate toward others?
I’ve gone off social media before, and each time I left I began feeling slightly better about myself, and about the world - more compassionate toward others, less certain about my opinions, and more certain about the intrinsic value of human beings.
But, like a recovered opioid addict stashing a bottle of pills in the couch cushion just in case, I deactivated my accounts instead of deleting them, giving myself the chance to change my mind, and of course I did. But the current moment in America, paired with Leneir’s arguments, has me convinced that social media is not only damaging the health of its users, but it’s undermining the health of our society and our world. For me, it’s time to leave for good.
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The algorithms powering social media don’t care about what’s true or helpful. They care about capturing user attention. And the algorithms have discovered that the “stickiest” content tends to be whatever enforces your own viewpoint while making other viewpoints seem ridiculous or even dangerous. Content that aligns with what we want to believe convinces us we’re right. Content that contradicts our viewpoint can make us lash out at people, even the guys or gals we usually enjoy talking to in person. All of this can keep us glued to their apps and networks.
Algorithms have identified an unfortunate quality of our evolved ape minds and are now ruthlessly exploiting it. Your YouTube feed demonstrates this clearly. If you’re a libertarian, how often do you find objective, nuanced YouTube videos about the excesses of the free market? If you’re a liberal progressive, how often do you find videos that present consevative viewpoints in a charitable way? If you admire Donald Trump, how often do you see content on videos that have anything negative to say about him?
Algorithms drive users deeper into their political and ideological silos. It’s not that the engineers want to activate our tribal tendencies, and make us unable to relate to one another, they want to optimize clicks, shares, scrolling and engagement. Social media has become an outrage machine, rewarding provocation and drowning nuances.
I acknowledge my vulnerability. When I open YouTube I see a mix of basketball highlights, self-help content, and political content I agree with. I realize that my view of politics and of the world has been shaped to some degree by algorithms designed to make YouTube more money. There’s nothing new about the manipulation of humans through propaganda. But our addiction to social media platforms has made us more vulnerable to manipulation than people have ever been before.
Chamath Palihapitiya, the former vice president of user growth at Facebook, said this about the products he helped create:
“The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works.… No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem—this is not about Russian ads. This is a global problem.… I feel tremendous guilt. I think we all knew in the back of our minds—even though we feigned this whole line of, like, there probably aren’t any bad unintended consequences. I think in the back, deep, deep recesses, we kind of knew something bad could happen.… So we are in a really bad state of affairs right now, in my opinion. It is eroding the core foundation of how people behave by and between each other. And I don’t have a good solution. My solution is I just don’t use these tools anymore. I haven’t for years.”
Yes, social media performs useful functions . But are they worth the personal and collective suffering that come along for the ride? If we want to make progress and initiate positive change in our world, we have to understand that these platforms are undermining us.
The example from Lanier’s book most relevant to the present moment is about political manipulation on a massive scale. My motivation in using the following example isn’t to make a political point about Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, or the Black Lives Matter movement, but to exemplify how destructive social media has become. The current moment isn’t about choosing between black lives and blue lives, or hating Trump or admiring him, or progressivism vs. conservatism. The true battle is between free thought and human dignity vs. calculated mass manipulation. Whatever your political viewpoints are, read the following example with that thought in mind.
Lenier outlined the progression of the Black Lives Matter movement from 2013 until the 2016 election. He supported the movement, but also understood how issues tend to progress on social media, so he was worried. (Reminder: he uses the acronym BUMMER to encompass social media and YouTube.)
“The slogan ‘Black Lives Matter’ initially struck me as remarkably knowing and careful, for instance. Not a curse, not a swipe. Just a reminder: our children matter. I suspect that a lot of people got the same impression, even though many of them would come to ridicule the same slogan not long after. ‘Black Lives Matter’ appeared and gained prominence during the typical honeymoon phase of BUMMER activism, and, as always, that early phase was hopeful and felt substantial. BUMMER was giving black activists a new channel to influence and power. More money and power for the BUMMER companies, for sure, but also more empowerment for new armies of BUMMER users. Win/win, right? But during that same honeymoon, behind the scenes, a deeper, more influential power game was gearing up. The game that mattered most was out of sight, occurring in algorithmic machinery in huge hidden data centers around the world. Black activists and sympathizers were carefully cataloged and studied. What wording got them excited? What annoyed them? What little things, stories, videos, anything, kept them glued to BUMMER? What would snowflake-ify them enough to isolate them, bit by bit, from the rest of society? What made them shift to be more targetable by behavior modification messages over time?
“The purpose was not to repress the movement but to earn money. The process was automatic, routine, sterile, and ruthless. Meanwhile, automatically, black activism was tested for its ability to preoccupy, annoy, even transfix other populations, who themselves were then automatically cataloged, prodded, and studied. A slice of latent white supremacists and racists who had previously not been well identified, connected, or empowered was blindly, mechanically discovered and cultivated, initially only for automatic, unknowing commercial gain—but that would have been impossible without first cultivating a slice of BUMMER black activism and algorithmically figuring out how to frame it as a provocation.”
This should be kept firmly in mind by anyone with a cause they’re passionate about on social media. I’ve been this person many times through the years, and I have to admit that the posts I thought might help produce positive change were probably giving these platforms the data they needed to strip a cause I cared about of nuance, and make those I was trying to persuade all the more appalled by it. Leneir again:
“BUMMER was gradually separating people into bins and promoting assholes by its nature, before Russians or any other client showed up to take advantage. When the Russians did show up, they benefited from a user interface designed to help ‘advertisers’ target populations with tested messages to gain attention. All the Russian agents had to do was pay BUMMER for what came to BUMMER naturally. “Black Lives Matter” became more prominent as a provocation and object of ridicule than as a cry for help. Any message can be reframed to incite a given population if message vandals follow the winds of the algorithm.
“Meanwhile, racism became organized over BUMMER to a degree it had not been in generations. I wish I didn’t have to acknowledge this heartbreak. A lot of what goes on at a user-to-user level in BUMMER is wonderful if you look at it while ignoring the bigger picture in which people are being manipulated. If you can draw a small enough frame to include only the stuff that people are directly aware of on BUMMER, then it often looks exquisite.”
So the sad truth is that much of our well intentioned online activity through social media is working against the causes we want to support. Rather than creating positive change, or persuading others, it’s driving people farther apart. And it gets worse. Lenier goes on to point out that BLM, which began as such a simple and positive movement to effect change, was cynically hijacked as a way to help elect Donald Trump:
“BUMMER makes more money when people are irritated and obsessed, divided and angry—and that suited Russian interests perfectly. BUMMER is a shit machine. It transforms sincere organizing into cynical disruption. It’s inherently a cruel con game. Black activists have every reason to feel good about their immediately perceptible interactions on BUMMER; there is genuine beauty and depth on that level. This other behind-the-scenes game doesn’t make the visible game invalid. The only way in which looking at the whole picture matters is in observing and understanding the ultimate results. Activists might feel confident they are getting their message out, but it is indisputable that black activists have severely lost ground politically, materially, and in every way that matters outside of BUMMER. As usual, after an algorithmically prompted catastrophe, many of the people who have been betrayed and used like fools can only praise BUMMER. One example of Component F in the 2016 U.S. election was an account called Blacktivist, which was run by the Russians. A year after the elections, the true power behind Blacktivist was revealed and reporters asked genuine black activists what they thought about it. Some, fortunately, still had access to outrage. One activist reportedly said, ‘They are using our pain for their gain. I’m profoundly disgusted.’ That is an informed, reasonable statement, and a brave one, for it is not easy to accept that one has been tricked. People tend to rationalize. For instance, a civil rights attorney told the same reporter, ‘If someone is organizing an event that benefits accountability and justice, I don’t really care what their motives are or who they are.’ This is a typical rationalization from someone who does not look outside the frame of familiar experience at the larger picture where the game of BUMMER is played out. At the end of the day, BUMMER moneymaking caused black social media to unintentionally elevate a new tool optimized for voter suppression. As if there weren’t enough voter suppression tools out there already. As if gerrymandering, inaccessible polling stations, and biased registration rules weren’t enough. A lot of potential Hillary voters were infused with a not-great feeling about Hillary, or about voting at all. Were you one of them? If so, please think back. Were you seeing any information customized for you before the election? Did you use Twitter or Facebook? Did you do a lot of online searches? You were had. You were tricked. Your best intentions were turned against you.”
However you feel about the particular issues in this example is beside the point. This is merely one of countless similar examples across the political spectrum. Since the rise of social media our world has become increasingly extreme and polarized, and many democracies are showing signs of shifts toward authoritarianism. The unavoidable question is this: Can fervent support of a controversial issue on social media contribute to positive change?
No, social media doesn’t care if we move to the left or to the right, or if there is more or less suffering on earth. It cares about clicks, behavior modification and ad revenue, no matter what the ultimate outcome might be. Lenier suggests that we shouldn’t use social media until it’s a subscription based service that doesn’t rely on data collection or ad revenue.
Until that day comes we’d be better off replacing time spent on social media with other activities. Reading worthwhile books is anti-BUMMER. Many podcasts haven’t yet been subsumed by dark business models - their ads aren’t targeted, and they offer long-form discussions that reach far deeper into subjects than click-bait articles or YouTube clips. Carefully chosen news websites that hire investigative journalists will provide more valuable content than algorithms. Subscribing for a few dollars a month to podcasters and bloggers helps free them from the BUMMER business model.
We can be certain that the lies, evasions, insults, exaggerations and oversimplifications commonly found on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube won’t get us anywhere we want to go, and that abandoning social media is compatible with positive change. In the 60s, civil rights marches were somehow organized without Twitter, or even cell phones, and the movement was never hijacked or driven into the ground. If they could do it, so can we.