Die Social Media, Die !!!!
The Sins of the Malgorithm
It's mostly the Malgorithm's fault, combined with the paradigm of hardly anybody making the effort to read and understand authoritative publications. There is a lack of critical thinking among the majority of the populace. The untutored gut feel trumps hard facts and the literal truth. It is why the unenlightened don't speak the same language or recognize or acknowledge the truth. It is why we have science-deniers, anti-vaxxers and flat-earthers. It is why there is tribalism, fragmentation, and online internecine warfare between folks. We have abandoned cooperation at a large scale, in favor of the bias bubbles in the echo chambers of partisanship, hypocrisy, alternate facts and lies.
Our social fabric is ripped and torn and the frayed edges represent a threat to democracy as well. Social science pedagogy has identified the main three of the many connections that used to bind us together as a functional society. The first is social capital which is extensive social and personal networks with high levels of trust in those networks and between diverse networks. The second factor is an interlocking group of strong institutions (including governments, but also on a personal level like family, service clubs, churches, workplaces, communities, teams, unions and stable, non-transient neighborhoods). The third factor of social cohesion is shared stories. For example, the COVID pandemic brought about the concept of zoom towns, where remote workers moved from big cities to bucolic small towns, driving up the prices so that the locals couldn't afford to live in their home town anymore. It is straining the services, changing the nature of the town with little to no shared stories between the townsfolk and newcomers.
The Malgorithm of social media played a lot part in creating the current situation. Prior to 2009, Facebook showed a users timeline from newest to the oldest solely to people in their own networks. Then they introduced the Like and Share buttons. That was the thin edge of the wedge of social disintegration. Like and Share buttons produced metadata about the type of articles that were emotionally charged one way or another. Research showed that those types of posts that generated positive or negative emotions were the most likely to be shared. Sharing was made easy. With sharing, ad revenues rose. The algorithms then took over. Or rather it was the malgorithms. Rage brought in advertising dollars and tribalism. One of the engineers at Twitter who had worked on the “Retweet” button later revealed that he regretted his contribution because it had made Twitter a nastier place. Algorithmically not showing the normal tweets was profitable. Anger, rage, narcissism and fake news was.
It changed us. Instead of tweeting about our ham sandwich for lunch, it became all about our personal brands. The goal was to create a post that went viral. The serotonin and dopamine highs for achieving that was better than winning at the slot machines. And a personal brand was the ideal vehicle for promulgating personal biases and beliefs.
Building a personal brand meant stretching the truth. You couldn't believe what you saw on social media any more. Wannabe rappers would have profile pictures taken at luxury car dealership showrooms. Dishonesty became the norm. Along with it, came mob dynamics. Even if you weren't particularly moved one way or another by someone who posted something outside of your tribe, you would jump in to pillory and troll the poster to show tribal loyalty and for approval from the mob. And the Malgorithm would make sure that as many of your mob saw the post, and your reaction. The share button became the weapon of choice. With mob dynamics, it is not enough to disagree with someone. They must be punished, humiliated, totally routed and even destroyed because they were your enemy, simply because they were not part of your mob and its biased belief systems. This biased belief system creates the type of parents who attack teachers and school boards when their precious little darling comes home with something in math or science that these parents disagree with. With math, fundamentalist Christians disagree with set theories and multiple infinities because there supposedly is only one infinity. And science teaches that dreaded evolution. And yet the parents couldn't pass a Fifth Grade exam, as demonstrated by Jeff Foxworthy's show, "Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?" several years ago.
The Malgorithm of social media did something else. It dumbed down America. Kim Khardasian's or Kanye West's antics became the virality of the day — not the important socio-economic events that were harbingers of bad times. But social media also weaponized the inane. There was a call for the banning of Sesame Street by certain demographics when Bert and Ernie came out as gay. They were puppets for crying out loud. But what it did was erode trust in our collective networks and institutions. The lies of Donald Trump were believed by millions because of the virality due to the Malgorithm and the mob dynamics that it created. That is why Trump was banned from Twitter. And if you don't believe that America was dumbed down, take the case of Marjorie Taylor Greene. If I were American, I would be highly embarrassed of having Marjorie Taylor Greene in Congress. She typed Marshall Law instead of Martial Law. Instead of Gestapo Police, she uttered Gazpacho Police. According to her, fake meat was grown in a peach tree dish instead of a petri dish. In the more civilized days, party whips would have muzzled her. Not anymore. There are folks that are proud of this partisan stupidity. This is the end of American Exceptionalism.
The most insidious effect of the Malgorithm is that it engenders confirmation bias. If you believe for example, that immigrants are taking your jobs, you can easily find "evidence" of it due to algorithmic spreading of anti-immigration bias. Whereas the truth of the situation is that you probably couldn't even qualify for the jobs that the immigrants get in America. (I know of at least two American companies who are setting up shop in the Cayman Islands because of the difficulty of hiring computer engineers and bringing them into the US to alleviate the skills shortage).
Because the bonds of social cohesion have been loosened, we have lost our respect for one another. The Malgorithm too, bears some responsibility for that. When someone disagrees with you online, the first impulse is an ad hominem attack against the person, and not in the thesis of what you disagree upon. Karens are called Karens because of the way they act without respect and with full unwarranted entitlement. And we call them Karens to denigrate them.
So how can we slay the brutal beast called the Malgorithm? I outlined that in my previous article below. We decentralize the internet and social media using edge computing. Read about it here:
We put back the content into the owners hands. We have to fix the internet and social media. Already there have been calls to have a share button that works only twice. If you want to spread something, you will have to work by retyping it again. That would get rid of the morons re-sharing junk. They couldn’t be bothered to type it out.
Edge computing will keep the content close to home. Nobody can harvest and monetize your private data if it sits on your own server and the public isn’t invited to your personal stuff. There will be no malgorithms to show you content that will inflame you and radicalize your biases. You will be networking with friends and family and not with the moronic public. You will let the crazies do what they want in their own asylum and you won't have to listen to the lies and drivel. It will bring back the social in social media. And it will end our slide into stupidity, authoritarianism and maybe oblivion. So mote it be.