I'll bite, with peace and love: Do you agree that the big ad revenues enjoyed by leading "seamless communication" app provides management a powerful, personal $$ incentive to maximize provocative, emotionally energizing content, even if it's harmful?
This is the correct take, as I go into more detail in the @WIRED piece.
The negative impacts of social media have *nothing* to do with algorithms, FB, or ads, and everything to do with humans suddenly empowered to seamlessly communicate globally.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/story/why-whatsapp-became-a-hotbed-for-rumors-and-lies-in-brazil/amp …https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/1074410762637008896 …
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How does FB profit from provocative content? Certainly not directly. In the auction model, there's actually a discount baked in for highly-engaging content. To first order, FB *loses* money via its engagement-optimized algorithm. I get into it here:https://www.wired.com/story/how-trump-conquered-facebookwithout-russian-ads/ …
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The second-order revenue effect of engagement is higher usage, meaning more ad inventory to potentially sell. But it was never revenue that drove growth, it was Zuck's millenarian zeal for FB. Ad inventory didn't tap out until growth stalled due to population constraints.
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As
@alexstamos pointed out, WhatsApp hasn't made a dime for FB. Our current pickle isn't due to money-grubbing greed: it's the megalomaniacal drive to connect everyone, and the consequence of everyone being connected.
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*nothing* seems a bit strong
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Well, not strictly speaking nothing, in the same way that the sunspot cycle also has nothing to do with it (though, who knows, there might be a correlation). But far less than anyone seems to believe, again, as evidenced by WhatsApp, almost a perfect product foil to core FB.
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I agree the negative effects of social media have a lot to do with the ability of everyone to communicate seamlessly. A relevant question for the platforms is how willing are they (and have they been until now) to put work into mitigating those effects
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Well, WhatsApp pretty aggressively cut down group sharing in both India and Brazil, making it such that you could only share with something like 5 or 20 people (forget which country was which). Essentially, they rollback features to make the platform less powerful.
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It's an incremental Butlerian Jihad: they don't remove the magic box, just make it less powerful. Other than removing egregious cases of massive state or campaign-sponsored misinformation (e.g. the IRA), then dumbing down the app a bit, not clear to me what else they can do.
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The ad model is what enables the seamless global communication. If FB cost $10/month it would have a fraction of its user base, those users would be less idealigucally diverse and we’d not be talking about any of this.
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Not true for WhatsApp. It went global as a paid product.
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Though you're essentially right that apps with network effects have to be essentially free. But when people complain about ads and privacy, it's the thought that marketers or the app can manipulate people, not the reality, which is retargeters trying to get you to buy stuff.
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@mgurri makes a powerful argument for this in The Revolt of The Public from@stripepresshttp://amazon.com/dp/1732265143Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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Any advanced technology that doesn't take into account (or, better, begin with) the fact that humans en masse are seriously, perhaps ineradicably flawed and fucked up, is a technology that is going to fail—or, worse, cause tremendous harm when it "succeeds."
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Does this invalidate all attempts at technological progress? No. But techno-utopianism—the belief that technology can perfect humanity—does us no favors.
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people often resort to petty cruelty to those nearby. the internet just scaled that way way up.
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Absolutely. Messaging apps, telephones, smoke signals. All just tools for humans to communicate ideas good and bad. Don’t blame Ma Bell when a crook plans a bank heist over the phone. And Zuckerberg can’t be expected to monitor every chat in real time.
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Altered slightly: People want their views reinforced (conf. bias). People want to declare their tribe. News feed/markets in general, give people what they want (just by optimizing engagement). The problem is what we want. Historically, news was something of a scared institution
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For Serious Collective Reflection Consider a case: A Cuban Refugee spreads anti-Semitic racist xenophobic messages in socialmedia abt Europeans leading Americans to agree with it PS Books/money don't launder the Past Mute 'obnoxious persons' or call a 'sicario' Write it too!pic.twitter.com/cWXYtj9h0I
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Is what’s app data completely segregated from any Facebook data? In other words, does the fb graph NOT include what’s app data or user signals?
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