Social Media is a Drug

We Have To Talk

Today’s topic is Social Media, not just our usual “friends” but everyone. This is going to be a recurring topic here because the impact of tech and social media is so vast and has become so utterly corrupt and anti-social that a single thread here cannot and will not come close to examining it, let alone plan against it, and plan we must.

3 instances prompted this piece today. The first one is the new Netflix Film “The Social Dilemma”, secondly, a great piece of investigative journalism by Popular Info on Facebook’s willingness to support right-wing propaganda, and lastly, Monday’s whistleblower 6,600-word internal memo from a fired Facebook data scientist detailing how the social network knew leaders of countries around the world were using their site to manipulate voters — and failed to act. I am going to briefly highlight these for you to dig into.

“Social Media is a Drug” - Dr. Anna Lembke, Stanford University, Medical Director of Addiction Medicine

Watch “The Social Dilemma” - seriously. It features prominent developers, Ethicists, Medical Doctors and leaders from Silicon Valley and it offers very valuable insights into the core of what is Social Media, the psychological manipulation, the very premise of monetizing and the genuine ethical and moral problems they cause.

The film features interviews with former Google design ethicist and Center for Humane Technology co-founder Tristan Harris, his fellow Center for Humane Technology co-founder Aza Raskin, Asana co-founder and Facebook's like button co-creator Justin Rosenstein, Harvard University professor Shoshana Zuboff, former Pinterest president Tim Kendall, AI Now director of policy research Rashida Richardson, Yonder director of research Renee DiResta, Stanford University Addiction Medicine Fellowship program director Anna Lembke, and virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier.

The premise, or rather the idea we have been sold to justify social media’s existence and pervasiveness into our lives - we allow you into our lives because of the lie you told us - is that they are good for us. Google’s initial claim was “Don’t be Evil” , Facebook’s initial claim was “It’s free and always will be” - Nokia, back in the days was “Connecting People” - all these tag lines are based on psychological tricks that make us believe that the intention of these companies are positive - they are good for us, they are the good guys, they aren’t out to hurt us - when the exact opposite is true. 

For the past 10-15 years we have witnessed the intense negative impact these companies have had - I say negative and by that I mean the facts that the tech industry, and thus also social media, only interest is making money. Or used to be in any case, I have a gut feeling that the heads that are running the show, have ulterior motives based on their own deep psychological character flaws ( greed, power, influence ) - for example, when Facebook went from perfecting the psychological manipulation of its users to stay on their platform for as long as possible because engagement equals money, to wanting to affect real time political landscapes, such as US elections, Brexit, the Myanmar genocide, which they have, the game well and truly changed. 

Of course, the defense is that they are merely platforms that allow players to change real time real life political landscapes, but I don’t buy that. “Buy”, being a key word here. When Client A, let’s say the Trump campaign, offers Facebook vast sums of money PLUS the reassurance for the continued safety and existence of their monopoly via executive power and then Facebook facilitates the change of the political landscape, it goes beyond corruption and bribery. The “excuse” of, “Well they paid for it so they get our service“ doesn’t ethically hold up. Now, these tech companies have Ethicists working for them to steer the ship away from being the brutal capitalistic machines they are to “do good” Tristan Harris, for example, but they are largely ignored and serve the same purpose as the Green Team at H&M - it’s Green Washing, or Good Guy Washing - or rather, it’s a lie to make you feel better. 

If something is a tool, like a bicycle for example, it is just sitting there, waiting to be used. If something is not a tool, it is demanding things from you. It is seducing you, it is manipulating, it wants things from you. We moved from a tool based technological environment to an addiction and manipulation based technological environment. - Tristan Harris

Facebook exits by exploiting a deep seated psychological vulnerability of acknowledgement and the inventors, creators, knew this - they are the pusher man to us junkies. - Sean Parker ( Facebook Former President )

Please do watch that film, it really has some incredibly good insight from people far far smarter than myself with genuine inside knowledge of how these anti-democratic, anti-social machines work and what they are doing to us.

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The second piece of news, or information, is the continued investigation by Judd Legum’s, Popular.Info into how corrupt and anti-democratic Facebook is. It is wonderful work that I urge you to look into, read, share and support. Essentially, Facebook is not only allowing and profiting but actively lying about their efforts to suppress right-wing manipulation on their site.

Facebook has permitted a large network of Facebook pages and groups — with names like Trump's Deplorable Army, To The Death Media, and One Angry Conservative — to spread disinformation about voting in the 2020 election to millions of people. The network operates by funneling traffic to Conservative Brief, an obscure right-wing website. Conservative Brief does not engage in any original reporting. Instead, it distorts reports from mainstream sources to sow doubt about the legitimacy of the upcoming election.

This is a fascinating piece of journalism that exposes the financial ties between Facebook and the people behind this right-wing surge of madness, how Facebook is complicit and what that means for us.

Right-wing websites have gained huge audiences on Facebook, often by violating the platform's rules. In July, Popular Information exposed how five large Facebook pages controlled by Mad World News, a notorious outlet that exploits fear and bigotry for profit, posted dozens of links each day to The Daily Wire. The scheme allowed the Daily Wire, a website founded by right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro, was able to expand its audience by millions. 

Popular Information proved that there was an undisclosed financial relationship between The Daily Wire and Mad World News, which Facebook acknowledged violated its rules. Facebook said that, in response, it was "temporarily demoting Mad World News." That punishment lasted about a month, and now Mad World News' toxic content is freely circulating across the platform.

Facebook decided to let The Daily Wire, which is well-connected at the company, off with a "warning." The Daily Wire, which produces no original reporting, was the top publisher across all of Facebook in July, generating more engagement than CNN, Fox News, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. 

This is the article that I am quoting here, by all means, do yourself a favour and get into this work.

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“I Have Blood on My Hands”: A Whistleblower Says Facebook Ignored Global Political Manipulation

Lastly, this one pretty much floored me yesterday and I am not quite done figuring out the scope of this whistleblowers report. Regardless of that I wanted to share this with you because it not only cements the anti-social, disruptive intent of Facebook ( the important question here is, again, money, are they being paid to do this or is this a long-term egoistic investment to position themselves as a global political power ) but also the crimes committed.

I’ve found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry, and caused international news on multiple occasions. I have personally made decisions that affected national presidents without oversight, and taken action to enforce against so many prominent politicians globally that I’ve lost count.

These are some of the biggest revelations in Zhang’s memo:

• It took Facebook’s leaders nine months to act on a coordinated campaign “that used thousands of inauthentic assets to boost President Juan Orlando Hernandez of Honduras on a massive scale to mislead the Honduran people.” Two weeks after Facebook took action against the perpetrators in July, they returned, leading to a game of “whack-a-mole” between Zhang and the operatives behind the fake accounts, which are still active.

• In Azerbaijan, Zhang discovered the ruling political party “utilized thousands of inauthentic assets... to harass the opposition en masse.” Facebook began looking into the issue a year after Zhang reported it. The investigation is ongoing.

• Zhang and her colleagues removed “10.5 million fake reactions and fans from high-profile politicians in Brazil and the US in the 2018 elections.”

• In February 2019, a NATO researcher informed Facebook that "he’d obtained Russian inauthentic activity on a high-profile U.S. political figure that we didn’t catch." Zhang removed the activity, “dousing the immediate fire,” she wrote.

• In Ukraine, Zhang “found inauthentic scripted activity” supporting both former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, a pro–European Union politician and former presidential candidate, as well as Volodymyr Groysman, a former prime minister and ally of former president Petro Poroshenko. “Volodymyr Zelensky and his faction was the only major group not affected,” Zhang said of the current Ukrainian president.

• Zhang discovered inauthentic activity — a Facebook term for engagement from bot accounts and coordinated manual accounts— in Bolivia and Ecuador but chose “not to prioritize it,” due to her workload. The amount of power she had as a mid-level employee to make decisions about a country’s political outcomes took a toll on her health.

• After becoming aware of coordinated manipulation on the Spanish Health Ministry’s Facebook page during the COVID-19 pandemic, Zhang helped find and remove 672,000 fake accounts “acting on similar targets globally” including in the US.

• In India, she worked to remove “a politically-sophisticated network of more than a thousand actors working to influence" the local elections taking place in Delhi in February. Facebook never publicly disclosed this network or that it had taken it down.

This is just the tip of the iceberg not only in regards to this report but more so, the core issue I have with Facebook, Google, Amazon and the entire culture in Silicon Valley. On the surface level it is entirely driven by greed and lust for money. However, at this point I am coming to the conclusion that this toxic culture of mostly white men in California has much more sinister motives. Power. Real actionable power and that should be a big warning to all of us. Since we have allowed Silicon Valley to determine our tangible present tense and our future shit has genuinely hit the fan. It’s time we talk and plan against this.