The Internal Shift You Need to Help Solve the Social Dilemma

Image by Rainer Maiores from Pixabay 

When I watched Tristan Harris in The Social Dilemma documentary recently, recommended by my partner, it had a similar impact as watching Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth back in 2006. While I already had a little insight into the additive quality and manipulative effects of social media across the various sectors of our society, I learned a lot from listening to those who created today’s popular platforms as they voiced their grave concerns.
 
Through a series of interviews with Silicon Valley engineers and executives who designed the technologies they now fear, the documentary explores this topic in an eye opening way, taking us through exactly how these platforms make money. As the documentary makes evident, it’s confusing because it’s simultaneously utopia and dystopia, trapped by a business model and shareholder pressure that makes it difficult for these companies to do anything else. 
 
The answer therefore lies outside of these companies. While introducing better laws and regulations, adapting the technology and the economic incentives seem obvious answers, there is a long way to go to catch up and I’m not yet seeing the sense of urgency and scale of action to achieve this in the near future.
 
On a personal level though, there are some immediate actions anyone can take, the most important of which is an inner shift to help navigate these sometimes treacherous waters. Firstly though, it’s worth understanding just what the real issues are. For this I highly recommend watching the documentary and doing some research.
 
But given the little understood and perhaps unintended consequences of social media, I decided to include the key take outs I got from the documentary as I believe it’s one of the most important issues of our time. If you have watched the documentary, feel free to scroll past the sets of bullet points and article continues below them.  
 
To start, here is an outline of the social media business model and how it works

• The three main goals of a social media platform are engagement, growth and advertising; the first two powering the potential for the third, which is where the money is made. All three of these goals are powered by algorithms that are designed to keep the numbers going up.
• Algorithms are optimized to some definition of success, in a commercial enterprise that is usually profit, they are designed to learn/change/improve/adapt as they receive more data
• The images we look at, for how long, what we are doing at any particular time. Data comes from everything we do online being tracked/measured/monitored and stored.
• Lots of data is great for making predictions, which is great for feeding you more to increase engagement, which means more targeted adverts and feeds, which brings in more revenue. It’s not the data that is sold; it’s the predictions that attract the best advertising dollars.
• These systems know more about us than ever imagined. All that data gets fed into systems that have little human supervision and are getting better and better about predicting what we are going to do and who we are.
• “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product”. Though Jared Lanier says it’s not as simplistic as aiming to get as to spend as much of our attention as possible on these platforms “it’s the gradual, slight imperceptible change in your behaviour and perception that is the product.”

 
This leads to a number of key points around the unintended side effects regarding our self esteem created in the bid for our attention:

• Social media taps into our biological imperative to connect with other people, giving us the dopamine hit to keep us coming back for more. In effect, they are deliberately designed to be addictive.
• Edward Tufte said “There are only two industries that call their customers users: illegal drugs and software”
• Online connection, especially for the young, has become the primary form of connection, yet it’s financed through these sneaky third parties (advertisers) and we’ve put brutal popularity and manipulation (more about this in a minute) at the heart of human connection.
• We used to protect kids’ viewing, by regulating what they watched and what could be advertised at kids’ viewing times. Those protections and regulations do not exist within social media.
• This stuff is not designed by child psychologists; it’s controlling their attention, self worth and identity. In correlation with the introduction and widespread use of social media platforms, anxiety, depression and suicide have increased significantly, particularly in pre teen and late teen girls.

 
And now that these platforms have our attention, this has lead to perhaps another unintended and insidious threat, the potential and ease for manipulation:

• YouTube Recommendations’ algorithm, for example, is extremely efficient at keeping you online. It’s designed to feed you more of what you want and take you down rabbit holes that are powerful, so it’s trying to find out which rabbit hole is closest to your interests.
• A rabbit hole means that a person is caught up in going deeper and deeper into a particular subject and, at some point, making a detour to other places that are completely unrelated to the first thing you were looking at, but look and sound cool.
• Since there are many trillions of articles, videos and data in general available, and all of them are interlinked, you can spend literally days, months and years of your life researching a topic. For more on rabbit holes read here.
• MIT did a study that determined fake news spread six times faster ion Twitter than true news.
• Systems bias towards false information because it makes more money than the truth (something we have known for years through our other forms of media). The truth is often boring.
• It’s a disinformation for profit model. The system allows unregulated messages to be read by anyone for the best price. Facebook has trillions of these newsfeed posts, they can’t know what’s true and what’s not true.
• Because the platform knows so much about you (your likes, your triggers, your interests, even whether you’re introverted or extroverted etc) newsfeeds give you this sense, over time, that everyone agrees with you because everyone in your newsfeed thinks like you. Once in that state you’re easily manipulated.
• Others then think “How can they be so stupid? How can’t they see all this information that I’m seeing?” Well, they can’t, they are seeing their own unique feed.
• When that happens at scale, we’re no longer able to consume information that contradicts with the world view we’ve created, meaning we are not being objective, constructive individuals.
• “As a tool of persuasion it may be one of the greatest things ever created.”
• Shoshana Zuboff, a professor at Harvard Business School, shared that “Facebook ran an experiment using subliminal cues to see if they could get more people to vote in the mid-term elections, they succeeded. We now know we can affect users behaviour without them knowing.”
• To manipulate an election, you could go into a conspiracy theory group on Facebook, for example, and find one hundred people whose attention is gripped by the Flat Earth topic, or discussions on why we never landed on the moon, and say “give me one thousand users like that”, or one million, and you can feed those people more conspiracy theories to undermine politicians, parties or even systems of government.
• The manipulations by third parties is not a hack, they’re using tools built for legitimate advertising for nefarious purposes.

 
What perhaps struck me the most is that the inherent design of social media makes addiction and manipulation not only likely but necessary based on today’s business models. Here’s the final wrap up and conclusions:

• There’s no regulation, no rules, no competition, and the companies are acting like de facto governments saying “we can regulate ourselves”.
• Given the topics touched upon and the real world examples highlighted in the documentary that I haven’t gone into here (but everyone will recognise when they see), the technologists who created social media are perhaps not so silly to be worried about its ability to create civil war, to send democracies into autocratic dysfunction, and the failure to meet the challenges of global climate change due to its distraction, the collapse/ruin of the global economy and perhaps even an existential threat.
• It’s not that highly motivated propaganda hasn’t existed before; it’s that the platforms make it possible to spread manipulative narrative with phenomenal ease and relatively little money.
• It’s ability to create chaos, outrage, instability, lack of trust in each other, loneliness, alienation, polarization, populism, distraction, an inability to focus on the real issues; these are all issues we contend with today. Certainly its ability to bring out the worst in society is the real threat.

 
When I thought about all this, I realised my own experiences with my children and the sheer pervasiveness of YouTube, not to mention its inappropriate content and addictive nature, were just the tip of the iceberg.  
 
My kids used to watch YouTube Kids, but it was just too easy for them to interconnect with YouTube at so many turns. For those who think there are parental controls for Youtube, there are not. YouTube has one restriction mode and that is it, and it basically is an 18 and over restriction that you can click on or off, and all videos on restricted mode cannot earn money on You Tube, so it's basically only effective for porn type stuff.
 
Other than that the options are to sit with them and watch everything with them, or continuously go through and delete history, unsubscribe etc; there is also a complaint button. To block channels you have to create your own channel, and none of it is straightforward. How did we go from a society that only allowed mature content after 9pm and all content was screened to be age appropriate to this monster of a free for all?
 
My kids started to watch YouTube for EllieV and her lego building, which had mysteriously vanished from YouTube Kids for a while, and from there they discovered YouTube family channels i.e families that post fun games online, like their family navigating obstacle courses etc.
 
However, then it took a more sinister turn. The YouTube families (there are probably hundreds of them, but my kids liked to watch three or four in particular) started doing these Dollmaker videos, where they received a doll that seemed to come from a mysterious Dollmaker and took on a life of its own. Some dolls were good, some were just weird and creepy.
 
So there were my kids, age six and eight at the time, watching good clean, healthy family fun, then suddenly these weird creepy dolls turn up and the families play along like they are trying to get rid of these dolls but can't, then a member of the family gets possessed by a doll and will become a doll, and my children are wondering "is this real?"
 
I could not believe the blatant manipulation, nor the fact that I had no reliable way of allowing my kids to watch any of the content they enjoyed without falling prey to scary nonsense like that. Since then we decided no more YouTube. But its not easy unless they have zero access to devices, which they both use for listening to audiobooks and playing games for a couple of hours on the weekend.
 
I have had to go into the administrator function on our modem and block every conceivable YouTube web address I can find on their particular devices, and the devices only connect to the wifi while I download new audio books or games for them, so I am constantly having to connect/disconnect the devices. It requires a lot of hands on management to regulate their viewing, something I could rely in being regulated through TV or movie theaters.
 
I also thought of a good friend of mine saying one day during our lockdown that she’d “swallowed the red pill”. I vividly remember that she had then spent the best part of the night way down deep in a rabbit hole, over her head in conspiracy theories about COVID19. Ever since, through her, I have become more aware than ever of the conspiracy theories that exists and the lack of trust and fear they perpetuate.
 
It is easy to see the division and polarization that is happening; vaccines are a case in point. That I might question the efficacy of a vaccine all too often results in an automatic and derisory label of being an anti-vaxxer.
 
Knowing how sublimely our immune systems work when supported by the right diet and lifestyle, the fact that my kids had twenty vaccines by the age of four as a matter-of-course should be something I’m encouraged to investigate and question; it seems like a lot of intervention for burgeoning little bodies. But instead there appears little objective welcome on either side of the debate, there is however a lot of anger and fear.
 
So what is the answer?
 
The advice of the technologists is to uninstall apps that are wasting our time, turn off all notifications on anything that is not timely/important right now, and not to accept recommendations on Google search but to scroll down and choose your own and to think twice, three times, before hitting emotion buttons, likes and shares.
 
Reflecting on these recommendations, these were actions I’d already taken some time ago.
 
I don’t generally tend to participate in media of any kind, except when using it as a tool, because I know I can lose hours of my life. I know there is as much misinformation out there as there is information (although this documentary has perhaps taught me there may well be a much greater proportion of misinformation), and I only want to be sifting my way through all that when I’m actively interested in learning about something.
 
Even knowing this I still catch myself checking for new email or messages often.
 
The key question I began to ask myself with my device is “Am I using it as a tool? Or am I letting it demand my attention and manipulate my thinking?”
 
But why is it that I had come to those conclusions already I wondered?
 
Well, in part, I had learned the lesson about not engaging in media decades ago when I was self employed. Because it’s designed to be sensational and pull me in, I decided it was a time waster. I want to stay positive and focused on my own goals in life, not pulled into dramas I have no direct control over.
 
The other thing that has really helped me navigate the fears (of 2020 in particular), which are being fed by and prayed upon by social media in my opinion, is quite simple. It is an internal shift, the practice of observing my thoughts.
 
This has allowed me to notice when I’m thinking things that are putting me in a fearful state, which then empowers me to take action to bring myself back into balance. It’s like the game of hot and cold, the more fear I feel the colder/further I’m getting from my truth. The warmer/closer I am to my truth, the more peace I feel.
 
Examples would include topics like vaccines, or government conspiracy theories. As I sit here typing this I am aware through others that tomorrow is the date banded about online by which New Zealand would come under martial law, and a separate theory that it is also the day on which we will plunge into darkness as planet Earth shifts on its axis.
 
Now, if you are reading this it means we are past the date and we will either be in apocalyptic chaos or, well, we will be trucking along in the more chronic kind of chaos already well outlined in here. I do know someone though who is stocking up their food reserves just in case, and who urged me to do so because they do genuinely care about me.
 
How do I navigate situations that? I can feel the tension and fear in my body rise when these conversations are broached. I have to take some time to myself afterwards and really sit with the feelings and sometimes do a little research to figure out whether there is something I need be concerned about or not.
 
I wish to remain objective, and I know that to do so I have to work hard at creating space between me and the hype. So when a documentary comes along like The Social Dilemma, I have the head and heart space to take it in.
                           
To achieve this I meditate daily. As I discuss in Meditation – the Cornerstone to Your Success, it’s a practice of noticing when I’m thinking and letting those thoughts go, in short I become the observer of my thoughts rather than completely swept up by them.
I also make sure I take regular walk in nature to clear my head, practice yoga for my mind and body also, go for a swim to help me defrag, and so on. Actively making regular space in my calendar for these things gives me space on the inside.
 
Making that internal shift gives me perspective, keeps me objective, able to explore alternative views, and helps me maintain focus on the bigger picture of not just my own life, but life here on Earth.
 
As Jared Lanier wisely comments in the The Social Dilemma, even if only a small percentage of people change their social media habits as a result of the documentary, it’s at least creating space to have a conversation about how we navigate our future. Will you make the internal shift and join the conversation?
 
If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Your Answers Are Within, What Do You Want The Prevailing Global Culture to Look Like?, Stand in Your Own Truth and How to Be True to You When Life Pulls You in Different Directions. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.
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