How social media and global networks impact our lives

When the Internet got introduced into our lives as a new source of information and news in 1990s it was perceived as yet another platform of a free speech. It was moderated very similar to press and TV channels, and had a limited number of contributors as having own web-site required certain level of commitment and investment. With Web 2.0 we got new possibilities for contributing content. It could be added through browser and readers of the established news channels got a way to comment. New platforms to create and publish own content by amateur journalists and writers started popping up: LiveJournal, Reddit, Wikipedia and such. It was mind-blowing, but still understandable concept: people write and publish their thoughts, other people can read them in news feed and comment. 

Then things started changing dramatically as platforms like FB figured out their monetizing system and realized that they want to keep people on the platforms as long as possible as their users' time become a commodity of their advertisement business. And when money talks, moral principles get silent. FB and YT started applying algorithms to what their users will see next in their feed to keep them scrolling, watching, reading, liking and commenting as long as possible. We do not know how those algorithms work. When we find out through rare internal leaks or based on experiments and analysis done by interested groups, they already change. Majority of users don’t even realize they are being tricked. Those they do, are pretty good about forgetting it. Those that know and don’t forget, learned how to ignore that piece of knowledge. Only small number of people make a choice to stop and leave.

So what we have as a result, massive number of people across the world getting information and news  provided to them by algorithms using unknown rules. The only certain thing about these rules, they want users to keep scrolling and tapping 'next'. 

If we think about it though, we can guess what are the main principles of these algorithms. The first thing comes to mind, that they probably should be showing users what they will like and are interested in. To do so, they need to collect enough information about their users to make these predictions with a higher probability. And oh yeah, do they collect enough data about us… No one has doubts about that anymore - they collect every little bit of data on people that is technically possible. You read the post? Collected. You commented? Collected. You stopped scrolling for a second on a picture? Collected. Oh, and that comment you posted is also being parsed and analyzed for your party affiliation, emotions, hormone levels and who knows what else… Similar things are being tracked on your search and browsing history. 

So, we got an idea of the extent on data collection. But it’s not the point. What happens with readers when they don’t know how their news feed is being compiled? Or even more. When they don’t realize that their feed is being compiled?  We think that information we are getting are real news and posts from people we know or people we chose to subscribe and that represents a real world context that surrounds us outside of our houses in our communities we live. Wrong, wrong, and wrong. People you are reading posts from are not necessary from your community as they can pretend. They can be from the other side of the country. Or from the other side of the world. And they can have intentions to disinform you. Second, not all people from your community or even from your circle that you identified in the platform as people of your interest are represented in your feed. Their posts might be filtered out and you won’t know about it. And third, posts that you are getting may not be about real life at all. Here comes notorious fake news from sources that you didn’t subscribe for and if it was your choice, you would never see them. But if an algorithm decides that it will keep you on a platform, you will see it. You know, when money talks… 

We are fed with information that is picked and filtered by algorithms pretending to be from reliable sources and represent concepts that we like and agree with. People are not seeing other side of things, not hearing different opinions, but instead only getting a reassurance that everyone around them thinks the same as them. It’s giving us wrong perception that our opinions are the only ones that are right and are supported by outnumbered majority in our communities. Consequently, when we go into reality and start hearing a different opinion from real people in a line to get a real cup of coffee, we readily dismiss it as wrong as we didn’t see any support for it in our virtual social reality.

Oh, I want to remind you here that we are social animals and we evolved living in tribes and we are very much subjects to social rules like social confirmation, peer-pressure, crowd behavior and such. We are constantly monitoring people’s opinions around us and compering them to our principles. We change and tune our opinions to comply with majority. When we have a skewed impression of what real world around us represents, and all of a sudden hear a different opinion, we get scared and start fighting for our “the only right“ opinion. 

It will take years before we will fully understand how social media and social networks play with our minds and behavior. And it will take even longer for us to figure out how to deal with that. The government will start regulate them. It will get a backlash and resistance, but move the situation in the right direction. We will start making decisions on a personal level and abandon those platforms and try to protect our kids from them. It’s a whole different topic how to teach our kids to deal with this phenomena. We will create new types of social networks closer representing our reality because we will get tired of fake and artificial sense of community. 

It will all come. But at the high cost of unrest period, rising suicide statistics among teens and a long exhausting battle with the big tech.