Executive summary: Social media platforms like Facebook etc ultimately have one purpose as a business, which is to sell your attention span to advertisers. They are not concerned with your health, and there is no regulation that compels them to restrain their behavior. They know from data that people are better consumers, specifically in that we are less critical thinkers and more inclined toward impulsive behavior, when we are in a state of mind dominated by the activation of the amygdala, aka fight or flight mode. Because a person who is in a bad mood is a better consumer of advertising, the goal of Facebook and all similar platforms is to get you in such a bad mood and keep you there while they show you ads.
To me, social media had one main draw, which was that it could enable me to interact with a vast number of people. This is consistent with a dominant paradigm in our society, the idea that you need to interact trivially with thousands of people in order to get what you need from the few that actually do matter. This is a sound theory, but doesn’t work because the algorithm has contrary goals. In my mind, posting to a facebook group that has 150,000 members should be a great way to get advice from an expert in the field, because surely out of that 150k users, if 1% have the knowledge that I need, that’s 1500 people who could potentially reply to my post with high quality advice. But what do I get instead? Almost always some asshole with something irrelevant and toxic to say. On a photography group, when I posted asking how to change a particular behavior on my camera, figuring that surely someone out of that many users would have encountered a similar scenario before, instead I just got some asshole telling me that the setting I’m in couldn’t be real because he’s never personally encountered it before, and of course personally attacking me with slurs. Not helpful. Earlier, I had posted to a car group about a particular tweak I wanted to make to my car. Instead of anyone with relevant advice, what I got was a guy loudly arguing with me that I’m morally deficient for wanting to modify my existing car instead of just buying a new car with different factory options for dozens of thousands of dollars. In both cases, the person with the helpful advice should have been there, just based on the membership numbers, but that person didn’t participate, just some troll. Why? Obviously, it’s the algorithm’s choice of to which of the myriad group members to show my post. And how does it make that choice? Is it based on the quality of that person’s posts to the group? No, it’s based on Facebook’s metric of “engagement” which is really just which users prime people more effectively as consumers. And these individuals who bullied me with irrelevant attacks meet that metric better than experts who give good advice, because they make people upset, and people who are upset oddly enough turn out to be statistically better consumers because they/we are much more likely to make an impulsive decision such as a frivolous purchase.
Where I get lost down the rabbit hole is that our whole society is based on this premise. Outrage as a manipulation technique. All good liberals know that Newt Gingrich and Fox News started the idea, but it may have gone back further in advertising. Everyone in marketing today knows the idea and has been taught it. People who are in a foul mood are better customers online, more engaged. And so the platforms are actively designed to get you in a bad mood and keep you there. The algorithms reward content not that is “thought provoking” in a positive way, but that makes you angry and irritable. It isn’t designed to promote a healthy meeting of our social needs through positive interactions, it’s designed to overwhelm our brains and shut off our empathy, activate our amygdylae and get us into fight or flight mode so that we don’t think too hard before clicking an ad.
It’s not actually good for anyone, really. It’s good for mediocre businesses who can’t sell their products to savvy consumers, really. That’s all. For everyone else, it’s really all downside without any benefit.
So that’s kind of the crux of it. The things that I want out of Facebook aren’t happening because Facebook doesn’t want them to. I want to share my photos and my stories of my travel and life, but for the most part, Facebook is only going to even bother showing them to my 3000 friends if they seem to demonstrate to a test audience that they drive amygdalar activation and get people riled up. If they don’t, the algorithm just doesn’t share the post widely, and it’s kept quiet. That’s really the same whether you’re posting to a group or your own feed.
There’s more, too, but this post I know is getting long. The short of it is that human beings have a finite capacity for social interactions, and what we don’t realize is that even trivial interactions chip away at that energy. So for example, when you “just scroll by” to preserve your energy, it doesn’t work. The very act of scrolling – of glancing at someone’s content and making a decision whether to engage further – took a hit at your social energy capacity. Scroll for hours and you get into a state of exhaustion, and that’s where they want you, exhausted and less able to make good decisions. And so from this perspective, paradoxically the algorithm is directly incentivized to show you “bad” content more, to keep you frustrated, keep you on the prowl, to lower your threshold to engage with an ad. For this reason, it’s basically impossible to scroll or browse the site at all without having your mental state damaged, and the damage is intentional on the part of the platform. They want you to be hurt.
How can I rationalize staying on a place like that? I can’t. Any excuse I give myself is ultimately just a variation of “just one more hit won’t kill me” by an addict. No, every time you go on the platform you lose a little bit of your positive energy. So, I’ve got to leave.
I could and will write more on this topic and it will be either here on whitewaterlawyer.com or in a published book at some time in the future.
