Social Media: Their Profit, Our Loss

Commercial social media measures its success by user engagement and user retention. It doesn’t matter for them how much their tactics damage us or the society we live in. But what do engagement and retention mean? How they do trick us? And what can we do about it?

Every time we like, comment or share a post in social media we are engaging with the platform. Every time someone else interacts with our post or comment, we get a hit of dopamine. Dopamine gives us motivation to keep chasing an outcome. In this case, we crave for social connection and social validation. We are social beings, our species evolved to thrive in groups. Our brains are hardwired to crave social connection and validation. This is not undesirable, this craving kept our ancestors alive. The problem is when this craving is used to manipulate us.

Every time we come back to social media for more, they count it as an increase in our retention. They measure not just how many times we come back to their platform but also how long we stayed each time. They know how many hours we spend daily.

They optimize their platforms to increase our engagement and retention. And how do they do that? By unlocking and manipulating what moves us most, what motivate us most: our passions.

Social media platforms don’t allow us to choose what we see. Yes, we choose who we “friend” or “follow”, but we don’t choose the content in our timeline, what we will see first. Every time they show us a piece of content, we are unknowingly a part of an experiment. The experiment tests how we react to that content, have we clicked to see more? have we liked the content? have we shared it? have we commented? But the main questions of those experiments are:

They keep fine tuning our timeline. Optimizing our interactions to increase their opportunities to show us more expensive ads based on the profiles they have on us.

Initially, they select basic, plain content that relates to our passions, and we are pleased to see it. This will keep us in their platform for a while, and that would be alright, but they want even more profit. So they start showing content that will generate more engagement, and what causes more engagement than showing how our passion is under threat?

And they keep increasing the stakes. Showing even bigger threats to our passions, regardless if they are truth or just a plain lie. The only thing that matters is if the content performs well. There is no consideration for our well being, or the impact on how we interact with people in our daily life, or the repercussions for our society. They only care about their profit. Their profit, our loss.

Observe how we evaluate people that disagree with us: they never have a valid point, they are not misinformed, they are not in a context that would justify their opinions: they are just plain evil. Trying to take our freedoms and harm people for no reason. How are we not “engaged”?

All this outrage is fabricated and it erodes trust in our community. Yes, there are some bad apples in society but is everyone that disagrees with us the personification of evil? Is everyone that has a different background coming to get us?

This is social polarization. Commercial social media has a key role in this process because of their reach, and because of how they create groups around the content. This creates an echo chamber effect where questioning the message in the group is not just frowned upon but its considered a valid reason for attacks. The group keeps reinforcing their beliefs without questioning them.

Over time the group becomes our identity, and any questioning of its core beliefs feels like a threat to ourselves. All threats must be eliminated. Could we be more “engaged”?

Yes, we could. In later stages, the group can even go against the initial passions that justified the group. The group cohesion is more important than being true to their values. At this stage we start cutting ties with people from outside the group — it doesn’t matter how close they were. They made a different choice and must be cut from our life. The brainwash is complete. But look at the upside: we can’t be more “engaged” than that. Our entire day is consumed with content (and ads) and we are easily manipulated to buy whatever their targeted ads are selling (including political ads disguised as content).

It doesn’t matter if we are concerned about gun rights, abortion rights, homicide statistics, or increased social inequality. We are being manipulated. Every interaction we have with commercial social media is recorded and analyzed in real time, using big data and machine learning models. We are the product (by consuming their ads) and their free workers (by participating in their experiments and generating free content for them to boost or bury).

There are problems in society but addressing them requires us to be able to talk about them, to analyze the data around the problems, to discuss different solutions promoting effective actions to implement long term solutions. This requires that we regain our ability to have reasonable discussions with people that we disagree with.

We got into this situation in the last 20 years, while the first social networks were created in the ’90s, they were not as noxious as they became in the following decades. We can do something about them.