The social media trap

Not long ago, an intriguing documentary released on Netflix, entitled "The Social Media Dilemma", added names and facts to a problem that is as well-known as it is ignored: the manipulation and addictive behavior related to social media.

Recently, in 2018, Facebook was hit by a scandal that caused it to lose $37 billion in a single day, because of the obtaining and fraudulent manipulation of more than 50 million data sets of users of this social network by the company Cambridge Analytica. The data obtained was used to create psychological profiles of users, and to send them personalised advertising and false news that were spread through other networks, blogs and media. An action that, it is believed, had an important influence on the elections that gave Donald Trump his victory.

The cases in which social media have played a role in the intentional manipulation of a political, health or business situation are certainly many more than those that have come to light. Nevertheless, we are all fully aware of the fake news, deep fakes, hoaxes, scandals and all kinds of disinformation that abound on the networks. Nor can we claim innocence by saying that it is not easy to distinguish truth from lies, when we take less than two seconds to share any morbid piece of news that reaches our mobile phones, often after only reading the headline.

Social networks not only influence changes of governments and create diplomatic crises. Studies are increasingly discouraging, warning of the risks of allowing young people to be exposed to everything that they see on a phone or computer screen, when they have not yet developed the judgement needed to differentiate between good and bad. “The dilemma of social networks” discusses how all this is happening here and now, in America, in Europe and in Asia. The networks have created a perverse system of data collection and analysis, and have, at the same time, managed to convince people that this data, THEIR data, is anonymous and is only used to improve the user experience. Not that it is completely untrue, but it's not true either and, it's certainly not healthy for the common good.

These supposedly nameless data bits contain an obscene amount of information about our individual likes, hobbies, hates, family, acquaintances, location, illnesses, social status and anything else that, nowadays, AI is capable of extracting from a sentence, a video, a photo, an emoji... from the thousands of messages that we publish throughout the year. "Improving our user experience" is a perfidious euphemism used to obtain complete profiles for free, to elaborate an exclusive food mix for each user. And beware, the least of our problems is personalised advertising; what should really worry us is the bubble, the particular "matrix" that the networks create for us. Feeding us what stimulates us to elicit emotional responses, either through what we like or through what we particularly dislike.

By feeding us our loves and our hates, we are slowly but surely drifting into a level of extreme polarisation. There are fewer and fewer colours left in the spectrum. The different shades of human personalities are moving towards the extremes, and soon we will see the world in black and white again, because nothing else will exist. Such is the influence of the networks. But it is not about the networks that we should be primarily concerned. We should mainly worry about those who enrich themselves and profit from them. We are called "users", but in reality, we are a product for sale, a product that can be moulded to the taste of those who pay. Do you want to provoke a political revolution, bring about a change of mentality, to replace the annoying "poor" with the innocuous "underprivileged", to change the terrible "economic crisis" into "negative growth"? Achieving all this is not so difficult when you have the tools, and these tools are the social networks.

This is how, by dint of always seeing the same news, the same approaches, the same debates, the same arguments, the same images, the same ideas... we fall more and more into the bias they represent. The marketing tactics of customer experience know that personalisation is the key.

We have lost the personal and human experience of neighbourhood shopping and the big corporations have entered into a fierce battle to tattoo their brands onto our brains.

They want our loyalty, they want to reach us in our homes, they want to be unique to us. And, therefore they spend enormous amounts to convince us that we are unique to them, and that putting our own names on their soft drink cans will make us identify with them. The strategy of personalisation seems effective, but it is not viable for 7 billion people. So, it is better to segment, to group the livestock into more manageable pens, easier to recognise and easier to reach. The social networks are the sheepdog that herds the flock until each sheep is forced into its enclosure: the white ones here, the black ones there, the ones with long coats on the right and the ones that bleat at night on the left.

This is also how biases are nurtured, which take the form of a monstrous chimera made up of unconnected scraps that suddenly form a human prototype, as harmful as it is unreal: if you like bullfighting, wear flag bracelets, go to mass and want to have lots of children, you are right-wing, a fascist in fact. Full stop. If you adopt a dog, don't wear the flag, don't go to mass and don't care about having lots of children, you're a leftist, a bloody communist. Full stop. This is the direction we're moving in, because we've given the sheepdog permission to lead us to the pen we're entitled to, all according to Holy Mother AI.

Therefore, are social media a trap? Yes!

And do social media networks manipulate us? Yes!

Is there nothing we can't do to stop this? Yes, we can, but we may not like the how. The answer is not to disconnect from the networks, although it wouldn't hurt us to do so. We need to learn to think. Think before forwarding something, think before believing something, before accepting something that the networks say is true, before defending an issue or before attacking it. Resist polarisation, because once we are divided, confrontation is the next step. Therefore, the best way to fight this form of manipulation is focus again on what humanises and unites us.

Fátima Gordillo