Social Media – Warning!
Dearest Father in Heaven,
I am so worried about the latest developments in computer technology. It seems we have created a new Tower of Babel, building our tech to levels higher and higher – so high we are losing control of the process of building. It is Frankenstein time. Did You ever know we would ascend to these heights (or descend into the abyss)? Please help me to communicate in this short blog what has been voiced by so many in the tech fields, but ignored by more. Amen.
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In case you can’t tell from my other musings, I am a Luddite; I don’t like technology that takes away jobs and messes up our minds. I deliberately trashed my TV several years ago. I live in an apartment that is totally electric – no gas or solar or coal or wood-burning fuel. The choice of fuel is the landlady’s, not mine, but I limit the use of electricity as much as possible: I use no air conditioning, keep my thermostat at 60⁰F for most of the winter, and turn lights out when I leave the room.
I have learned to live with a computer and a smart phone because for some purposes, it is the only way to communicate. (My local newspaper no longer delivers paper copies during the week; some friends communicate largely by text, so I respond in kind; sometimes the only way to secure paper copies is to open an email or website and print out what I want.) (Yes, yes, I know: As one friend pointed out, I am using the internet to criticize technology!)
I resisted social media for many years. But about two years ago, I finally opened a Facebook account to try to catch up with old friends. I got hooked. But over time, more and more “docu-ads” popped up between postings from friends. It seemed I had to scroll and scroll to find genuine entries. When one day porn (hard-core, not just a photo) popped up in the middle of a series of wildlife photos, I knew it was time to trash Facebook. Naturally, Facebook did not want to let me go! I had to complete a series of steps (which were hard to find) first, then had to wait an extra month to de-activate my account.
One day, on my library’s “New Non-Fiction” shelf, I spotted a book about social media: The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of how Social Media Rewired our Minds and the World, by Max Fisher, 2022. (Hatchette Book Group, NY, NY.) The title reminded me of Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, 1977. (Wm Morrow and Co.), which I’m writing about in another musing. So I checked out Fisher’s book.
Fisher conducted an extensive series of interviews with people who are or have been employed in the social media industry. This includes Facebook, X/Twitter, Google, YouTube and several others. Included also are interviews with social media critics. Fisher also had access to a number of documents relevant to his research. I will be quoting and summarizing some of the arguments from his work. However, I suggest you read the whole book!
First, social media’s main aim is to generate more users, user activity, and therefore more and more effective ads, resulting in increased revenue. By now, most of us realize that math-generated calculations called algorithms direct us to ads or other postings that in turn point the viewer to similar ads. Longer watch time leads to more ad revenue.
As we view or read more and more of the same types of content that have shown what we already like, groups become more polarized – right-wingers will be directed into deeper and deeper rightist posts, and left-wingers will be directed to deeper and deeper leftist posts.
This escalation in polarization can lead to mob mentality and eventually to sectarian violence. Fisher documents how groups in several countries, from Myanmar with its Buddhist-Moslem clashes fueled by a Buddhist leader’s posts, to racist or sectarian violence in Germany, Mexico, Sri Lanka, Russia, India, Indonesia, and even more countries, (including the U.S.). The progression starts with a rumor, then more and more extreme posts. (Mander’s book proves the same happens with violence in TV. With Mander, I agree that this progression is due to the nature of technology itself, [emphasis mine] not just what may be an innate human inclination to fight.)
To conclude, I am going to include here a long quote from Fisher, p. 107 about what he calls “machine learning,” which is to me the most frightening (so far) result of social media’s technology. All of us are aware of algorithms by now, but this development takes us into a Frankenstein-like dimension. This began innocently with a need to filter spam, which had grown to unwieldy levels, using Artificial Intelligence.
With machine learning, engineers could do something better than write a program for catching spam. They designed a program that would guide its own evolution. They fed this program huge sets of spam and non-spam emails. The system then automatically built thousands of spam filters, all slightly different, and tested each on the sample emails. Then it built a new generation of spam filter based on the best performers and repeated the process, over and over, like a botanist identifying and cross-breeding the hardiest plants. It was evolving, and at warp speed, until it produced a variation of itself so sophisticated and powerful that it could do what no human-designed filters could: proactively identify and block almost all spam. There is no way for an overseer to pop the hood on such a spam filter and see how it’s working, because they’d be looking at a machine that, over time, was designed by machines, too complex to understand. (emphasis mine) But who cares? Those machines handily defeated the spammers, saving the web from disaster.
Google, Facebook, and others hoovered up the top names in the field of machine learning. Many got a version of the same assignment [as other AI experts]. Rather than identify spam, they would build machines that would learn precisely what combinations of text, images and sounds would best keep us scrolling. (Ibid, p. 107-108, emphasis mine)
So, here we have machines building machines. Otherwise known as artificial intelligence, or AI. Pretty scary, huh?
On an individual level, social media has what may be even more insidious trends. In a February 13, 2023 PBS News Hour, Lindsey Tanner, Associated Press, reported that 60% of teen girls reported sadness or hopelessness during the COVID-19 pandemic. After 30 years of collecting data, researchers have never seen anything like this finding. 30% of the girls said they seriously considered attempting suicide – up 60% from a decade ago. The conclusion? – “…isolation, online schooling and increased reliance on social media” are the causes. (emphasis mine)
To top it all off, in a recent study of child pornography offenders, Fisher’s assistant Amanda found that “the majority talked about following links, originally from legitimate [whatever “legitimate” may mean here] pornographic sites, and then chasing more and more deviant material.” (Fisher, op. cit., p. 292)
I can think of little that tops child sexual exploitation in infamy.
I hope this blog brings the horrible state of social media to many people’s attention, so that we can stop feeding the machine more and more fuel. One hopes that these destructive tendencies can be leashed. Some leaders in the tech industry have seen the dangers of AI, but many more seem to be smitten with its capabilities. I am not optimistic that wiser heads will prevail.
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Dearest Lord,
I think all of this is of the devil. He loves violence, as it leads to death, which is his main aim. Satan would like to dissolve all Your creation into nothingness. I know You will not let him succeed. However, we do not know when You will intervene. I pray it will be soon. Amen.