Defending the indefensible
Next: Introduction to decentralised platforms
This is the last part in a four part set of posts on centralized platforms. Let’s end by building a case for defending social media platforms.
The Internet Is a Henhouse
Let’s start with an analogy to understand how online rewards all actors when they move to a more extreme worldview irrespective of style.
By now everyone’s heard a million times how a virus works, but for maximal irritation, let’s repeat.
A virus works by working its way inside the cell and replicating until the cell dies and releases a huge number of viruses attacking nearby cells. The more virulent a virus is, the better it is at spreading and the faster it can reproduce inside cells. There is a downside that if it is too virulent, the host organism gets very sick, does not move around, has less contacts with other potential hosts or even dies. This gives the virus less time and opportunity to spread.
This means that in an environment where there are lots of contacts and tightly packed suitable organisms nearby, the more virulent viruses have the advantage. And in an environment, where there are less contacts, a milder version of a virus has the advantage as the host is not so sick and can still function and move around giving the virus time to meet and greet suitable new candidates.
This is over and over observed in henhouses.
Chickens have a lot of different types of viruses in the wild but these are mostly fairly mild ones. When large henhouses are built where they live very close to each other, these viruses from time to time develop into very virulent strains that make the whole population sick or die and cause big damages to the owner. This is because the closeness favours fast spreaders.
On the Internet the model is flat - everyone is just a few hundred milliseconds away from each other. everyone is at the same distance away from everyone else. There is no fundamental structure on IP networks like in human societies (me, family, job, my immediate neighbourhood, city, country, … etc.) Naturally there are all kinds of groups on the Internet that I can belong but, on the Internet and on social media anyone can send an email or share postings with anyone else. This is enhanced by social media sites that surface the content for me that makes them most money. But social media site algorithms cannot explain or at least not fully it as same feature is present in closed groups on chat services . It is a fundamental feature of the Internet. The Internet is one large henhouse where the most virulent content wins the day whether an algorithm pushes for it or in the absence of any algorithms.
And it is not limited to new services on the Internet.
Recently publisher of New York Times explained that their business strategy is to publish opinions that their readers already have as readers like to read content that enforces their biases and increasingly dislike content that they do not align with. Publishing previously held beliefs drives up subscriptions. The newspaper follows closely what opinions users read and how long they read them and opinions segment is especially area where engagement lights up. The strategy is to increase content that matches customers’ existing beliefs and has strong emotional component.
There is a lot more talk about social media companies as a force to drive separation of opinions but it is possible that social media companies have just been the first ones where this has surfaced very visibly. Or perhaps they had the best talent that first understood the nature of the media. Now when increasingly most or all engagement happens over digital media, newspapers and political parties are following close by. Bashing big Internet companies is partly a business strategy from old media companies like newspapers to put competition into its place.
Any service where engagement or active users per day/month is the key performance metric will ultimately find that most virulent content is the winning formula. This has nothing to do with the individuals in any of those services as it is the built-in characteristic of the flat-earth model of the Internet.
Social Media is late to the Party
The view people have of the world does not reflect what the reality is like and this was the case long before social media became a thing. Hans Rosling’s book Factfulness describes this phenomenon quite well.
On many fronts the world is much better place than ever before. Child mortality has plummeted, literacy rates have jumped, hundreds of millions of people have been lifted from poverty and are no longer in immediate danger of hunger. At the same time the public opinion is stronger and stronger in the belief that world is getting worse and worse. There has never been a bigger gap between reality and beliefs. For example, the number of vaccinated children globally is over 80%, but out of European journalists only 6% knew this in Rosling’s studies. The list goes on and on. When Rosling has been telling people the facts from statistics, they have not believed him.
(As side note the fact that on global level things are getting better does mean that there wouldn’t be backwards development also. For example, in in many richer countries middle classes have gained little during last decades while a small class of people have become super rich due to globalisation.)
This gap between reality and perception has to do with the same effect that social media companies are accused of. Bad news sells so steady progress never gets reported, only catastrophes and negative news. And there is an inverse relation between activism and the well-being of the cause they support. The worse their cause fares, the stronger message activists have and more money and influence they get. In order to support the good cause, there is a temptation to select and amplify facts.
This does not mean at all those things in general are well and actions can be stopped. Quite the contrary, the fact that things are improving means that the measures used are working and it makes perfect sense to continue them.
Rosling’s studies show also a surprising fact. More educated people are more wrong about the state of the world. Education lowers your understanding of reality. This can be explained by two things. The news is mostly negative and educated people consume more of it. The commercial model of media causes a built-in bias and education leads to a greater exposure to this bias.
And for educated people it is easier to dismiss contradictory information. They have more material in their memory that supports their current world view so it is much easier for them to suppress any contradictory news. Less educated individuals have to weight in more on the actual merits of the content as they are a little bit uncertain of facts.
The most educated decision makers in politics, leaders in enterprises and journalists do not know how the world is, nor do want to find out. When the data does not match the beliefs, the beliefs win. Decisions about how taxpayers’ money is allocated and where industrial investments are made are based on this foundation.
This is the world view we acquired from newspapers, journals, TV, radio, political speeches and activist campaigns long before social media even existed. What Internet did, was to lower the barriers of entry and a flood of new actors could fill it with their self-made facts that we are enjoying today.
So, a defence for the indefensible can be built on claim that social media companies have minor impact to underlying distorted realities, because distortion already ruled the day. When the violins finally come in, expect the defence to play the classical “They did it too and I am an innocent victim anyway” symphony. A personal favourite.
Way Forward
If virulent content is a feature of the Internet and old media today, will it be forever?
We covered alternatives like ‘The Onion Rater’ that looks at world through the lens of people I know and meet regularly in real life
Communications is also moving to smaller, private messaging groups where people work in the same company or in the same project and know each other. Services can improve by limiting some features that are causing viral, negative content to spread (very little has been done in that area so far). Perhaps developing community sites where each new member gets in through an invitation and the inviter stakes their reputation on the new member. And finally open APIs allowing all kinds of innovation to tailor the experience for different kinds of users and their needs.