YouTube and Facebook, In Short
Why these two are the worst
Facebook and YouTube have created penny-in-the-slot propaganda machines that not only offer to change people’s minds in exchange for money, but have learning intelligences that makes sure that users stay stuck, “engaged,” no matter what the content. And the types of content that work best are conspiracy theories and divisive lies.
Conspiracy theories take advantage of people’s generally poor understanding of how the world works and their lack of agency to lump together unconnenected phenomena into large, comprehensible patterns. This then allows people to apply a single, simple (wrong) analysis to a much more complicated set of situations and gives them a sense of agency.
Divisive lies work to confirm people’s sense of their own rightness and to add a spurious but fascinating twist about how others don’t agree, in bad faith ways. Often that works by emphasizing how it’s particularly relevant to the audience — “What you didn’t know about the people you trusted, who are working to destroy you!”
Sometimes Facebook (including Instagram) or YouTube will act
directly for sales — Natalie will be looking at a car website with a Facebook pixel on it, Facebook will see that and feed her and her husband car ads on Facebook or Instagram.
indirectly for sales — Facebook will know that Natalie’s children are getting ready to leave home and will feed her content about campus rape and adverts for mace kits and whistles.
just to get people “engaged” — whether that’s feeding them stories that will excite them through agreement (filter bubbles) or engage them through curiosity (rabbit holes: your teachers hate you, becomes the government is out to get you, becomes join with our fine people to oppose them).
The more they know about you the better they can sell you to the advertizers and propagandists who want to shift you slightly to their way of doing things. They want your location, your friends, your interests, your feelings, your attention span, all of those are trivial on the app, but also across your phone they want to know your battery life, the alignment of the phone, the brightness of the screen. And they want to track you off site, too. Plus remember, Facebook is its own biggest client — so they are ALWAYS trying to make you think they are right and good, when it’s clear there are significant negative network effects.
Here’s some things that we need to demand from the social media sites even before we get to specifics:
(By specific I mean “remove Holocaust Denial groups that you left up for 5 years when you know about them and you have still left up 6 months after changing your standards to explicitly exclude them.” )
Algorithm: We need algorithmic transparency (what’s it doing) and accountability (who is responsible?). So, if it’s driving yoga devotees to antivaxx sites — and it is — which lie about the science in a way that endangers public health — and they do — then Facebook is an accessory to murder. The first person who can say “my sister died because she added antivaxx to her yoga beliefs because of Facebook” should be suing Mark Zuckerberg. There’s a direct line. Ditto Palestinian rights / Neo Nazism / Antisemitic attacks, ditto unemployed blue collar workers, former military employees, NRA members / QAnon / coups, ditto small business owners / Climate Denial / flooding.
Ads: We need transparency and accountability for advertizing. Who is paying for what material to reach whom, and — quite aside from the free speech of users — who is responsible for their amplification? i.e. there’s a clear distinction between letting climate deniers have a private group and letting them pay to promote lies on your platform, with impunity. Not the comments section, not the OpEd, not the news, *any ad, and doubly for political ads on the NYTimes or Fox says what it’s for, who has paid for it. Unlike other media sites, YouTube and Facebook properties can whisper lies to those who won’t recognize them as lies, without the scrutiny of those who would call them out.