Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
The author is an insider working in Silicon valley Tech scene. He built a startup and sold it to Google so he knows inner working mechanism of engineers and business people.
There are several points bought up in the book that hit me one of which was people pay Facebook are called advertisers, but the author believes they should be called manipulator.
Everyone who is on social media is getting individualized, continuously adjusted stimuli, without a break, so long as they use their smartphones. What might once have been called advertising must now be understood as continuous behavior modification on a titanic scale. They seize the moment when you are perfectly primed and then influence you with messages that have worked on other people who share traits and situations with you.
Behaviour modifications by social media is statistical. The explanation of being statistical can be applied to the concept of risks, chance in clinical trials as well. I find the explanation here very clear and well-thought out.
“Even at their best, social media algorithms can only calculate the chances that a person will act in a particular way. But what might be only a chance for each person approaches being a certainty on the average for large numbers of people. The overall population can be affected with greater predictability than can any single person. Since social media’s influence is statistical, the menace is a little like climate change. You can’t say climate change is responsible for a particular storm, flood, or drought, but you can say with certainty that it changes the odds that they’ll happen.”
Based on information in clinical studies, we can tell patient something like you have 90% chance of saving your tooth if you have this treatment, but we cannot tell if they will be in 90% or 10% group. That’s the difference between information for individual and population.
On negative feelings
Social media makes more money when people are irritated and obsessed, divided and angry. They will spend more time on the platform arguing and trashing. The more you interact with the platform, the more data they will siphon from you, the better their targeted ad. No wonder they proudly advertise that they can make people sad.
Education and disinformation
Lanier highlighted several studies demonstrating that education level has nothing to do with the ability to discern fake news. Then he asked questions that resonate with me. “Isn’t the whole point of education supposed to be that it diminishes people’s susceptibility to dangerous nonsense?”
On the importance of context.
Social media is full of one liners, quotes, pictures that are misleading. Speaking through social media isn’t really speaking at all. Context is applied to what you say after you say it, for someone else’s purposes and profit This changes what can be expressed. When context is surrendered to the platform, communication and culture become petty, shallow, and predictable.
On shared reality
Not only is your worldview distorted, but you have less awareness of other people’s worldviews. This is because what you see in your feed is different from others. Little by little, this has profound effects on society. We, essentially, live in a different worlds even though we might sit right next to each other. Social cohesion is greatly affected by it.
In the the book Homo Deus, Yuval Harari said that people feel bound by democratic elections only when they share a basic bond with most other voters. If the experience of other voters is alien to me, and if I believe they don’t understand my feelings and don’t care about my vital interests, then even if I am outvoted by a hundred to one, I have absolutely no reason to accept the verdict. Democratic elections usually work only within populations that have some prior common bond, such as shared religious beliefs and national myths. They are a method to settle disagreements between people who already agree on the basics.
Democracy may cease to function because more and more people no longer share common reality.