“If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product. … Our attention is the product being sold to advertisers.” — The Social Dilemma
For anyone who can and hasn’t done so already, we highly recommend watching The Social Dilemma on Netflix. Former social media and tech industry executives, designers and engineers sit down and illuminate the darker side of internet services meant to keep us connected.
The Social Dilemma reminds us that while social media and social networking sites are a great way to stay connected with friends and family, they are also businesses seeking to make a profit. In order to make money, sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pintrest, YouTube, Google, etc. have to keep our attention for as long as possible so they can show us more ads. The best way to keep our attention? Show us stuff we like — or think we do.
The artificial intelligence behind such sites keeps track of what we interact with online: What grabs and holds our attention? What posts or ads do we linger over? What content engages us (comment, like, react, retweet, etc.) the most? And once the AI has an idea of what keeps us on that platform longer, it shows us more and more of that content.
This leads to echo chambers and rabbit holes. In the echo chamber, we only see content that reinforces our beliefs. Or, if we disagree with it, we’re shown only the most absurd examples. This is how our politics becomes so polarized: Everything we see makes us believe that all the “rational,” “sane,” “normal” people think like we do. It becomes increasingly difficult to see how someone can believe something different.
Then there’s the rabbit hole. Once the algorithms figure out what kind of content will snag and hold your attention, you’re going to start seeing recommendations for similar content (memes, posts, tweets, etc.) or ads. Recommended video and autoplay features are specifically designed to lead you down a rabbit hole. Watch a video that lightly touches on a conspiracy theory? The recommended videos will slowly show you more and more extreme conspiracy theories and propaganda, until you’ve been desensitized to the outlandishness of the claims — like boiling a lobster.
There are many takeaways from The Social Dilemma, but perhaps most important is this: Social media is a for-profit business. And ultimately, everything you see, hear, interact with on those platforms has been carefully curated to make the platform and its advertisers more money. Social media has become one of the primary ways we share information, but the AI technologically that moderates our individual online experiences has no concept of “truth”; it makes no distinction between what is real and fake. As one featured commentator put it: “AI cannot solve the problem of fake news. … They don’t have a proxy for truth that’s better than a click.”
When you don’t pay for an online service, that service’s obligation is not to you, the user. Its obligation is to the advertisers. As annoying as paid subscriptions to news services can be, that payment gives you a stake in that news source. It is now accountable to you, the reader. Next time some “news” pops up on your Facebook or Twitter feed, ask yourself: Am I this source’s customer? Or its product?
