Social Media Algorithms Quotes

What’s amazing is that things like hashtag design—these essentially ad hoc experiments in digital architecture—have shaped so much of our political discourse. Our world would be different if Anonymous hadn’t been the default username on 4chan, or if every social media platform didn’t center on the personal profile, or if YouTube algorithms didn’t show viewers increasingly extreme content to retain their attention, or if hashtags and retweets simply didn’t exist. It’s because of the hashtag, the retweet, and the profile that solidarity on the internet gets inextricably tangled up with visibility, identity, and self-promotion. It’s telling that the most mainstream gestures of solidarity are pure representation, like viral reposts or avatar photos with cause-related filters, and meanwhile the actual mechanisms through which political solidarity is enacted, like strikes and boycotts, still exist on the fringe.

Reality is chaos, and we’ve created an algorithm that keeps us informed of as much of that chaos as possible, from the second we wake up to the second we go to bed, and then we wonder why we’re anxious.

but we have reached the point now where even the most sublime experience of Nature on Earth has devolved into just one more means to an end to getting likes on social media. People are dancing with the possibility of death just to steal a little dopamine rush to the brain which will wear off in a few seconds anyway and for a status update which will be buried by the algorithm after just 24 hours due to a lack of relevance.

We have given up our connection to context. Social media mashes up meaning. Whatever you say will be contextualized and given meaning by the way algorithms, crowds, and crowds of fake people who are actually algorithms mash it up with what other people say.

The narratives open to us are the ones based on our identities as it is these stories that are market and social media approved. They have a numbing familiarity to them. We second generation immigrants have the privilege of self-actualisation. We make sculptures, direct films, write plays, novels, memoirs and poems about not having a home, of trying to find a home, of being between two types of home, what is home, of how we all feel ugly, of the mixed relationships we enter into with white people, losing our language from a culture we had a tenuous hold of in the first place, we tell the story of being acted upon, we speak from the position of the victim. For an algorithm not

Maybe the concept of friendship is already too colonized by liberalism and capitalism. Under neoliberalism, friendship is a banal affair of private preferences: we hang out, we share hobbies, we make small talk. We become friends with those who are already like us, and we keep each other comfortable rather than becoming different and more capable together. The algorithms of Facebook and other social networks guide us towards the refinement of our profiles, reducing friendship to the click of a button. This neoliberal friend is the alternative to hetero- and homonormative coupling: "just friends" implies a much weaker and insignificant bond than a lover could ever be. Under neoliberal friendship, we don't have each other's backs, and our lives aren't tangled up together. But these insipid tendencies do not mean that friendships are pointless, only that friendship is a terrain of struggle. Empire works to usher its subjects into flimsy relationships where nothing is at stake and to infuse intimacy with violence and domination.

Create your own digital personal brand, or the search engine algorithm will do it for you.

Given how revocable and alterable these corporate-owned mediums are, we must consider, What would we do in the case of a major political event if social media were no longer at our disposal? And what about all the people we’re not connecting with in our own communities due to some people’s lack of social media use or the invisible constraints of corporate algorithms?

In the end, blaming social media and the internet for the ways we edit and split may be just another means of hiding from ourselves—a way of denying truths about who we are, about things we struggled with long before Twitter or Instagram. To assign the blame elsewhere and say the fault lies outside of us, with something out there beyond our control. Something in the algorithms, or in the stars.

To get just an inkling of the fire we're playing with, consider how content-selection algorithms function on social media. They aren't particularly intelligent, but they are in a position to affect the entire world because they directly influence billions of people. Typically, such algorithms are designed to maximize click-through, that is, the probability that the user clicks on presented items. The solution is simply to present items that the user likes to click on, right? Wrong. The solution is to change the user's preferences so that they become more predictable. A more predictable user can be fed items that they are likely to click on, thereby generating more revenue. People with more extreme political views tend to be more predictable in which items they will click on. (Possibly there is a category of articles that die-hard centrists are likely to click on, but it’s not easy to imagine what this category consists of.) Like any rational entity, the algorithm learns how to modify its environment —in this case, the user’s mind—in order to maximize its own reward.

In Germany, according to the report, more than one third of Facebook’s political groups were deemed extremist. The algorithm itself seemed to be responsible: 64 percent of people in the groups had joined at the system’s suggestion.

Sixty-four percent of people who join extremist groups on Facebook do so because the algorithm steers them there. Less than three years after QAnon appeared online, half of Americans had heard of its conspiracy theories. In reality, what social media favors is that which divides us.

On the contrary, I’m too weak for it. I mean, everyone is, but I am especially susceptible to its false rewards, you know? It’s designed to addict you, to prey on your insecurities and use them to make you stay. It exploits everybody’s loneliness and promises us community, approval, friendship. Honestly, in that sense, social media is a lot like the Church of Scientology. Or QAnon. Or Charles Manson. And then on top of that—weaponizing a person’s isolation—it convinces every user that she is a minor celebrity, forcing her to curate some sparkly and artificial sampling of her best experiences, demanding a nonstop social performance that has little in common with her inner life, intensifying her narcissism, multiplying her anxieties, narrowing her worldview. All while commodifying her, harvesting her data, and selling it to nefarious corporations so that they can peddle more shit that promises to make her prettier, smarter, more productive, more successful, more beloved. And throughout all this, you have to act stupefied by your own good luck. Everybody’s like, Words cannot express how fortunate I feel to have met this amazing group of people, blah blah blah. It makes me sick. Everybody influencing, everybody under the influence, everybody staring at their own godforsaken profile, searching for proof that they’re lovable. And then, once you’re nice and distracted by the hard work of tallying up your failures and comparing them to other people’s triumphs, that’s when the algorithmic predators of late capitalism can pounce, enticing you to partake in consumeristic, financially irresponsible forms of so-called self-care, which is really just advanced selfishness. Facials! Pedicures! Smoothie packs delivered to your door! And like, this is just the surface stuff. The stuff that oxidizes you, personally. But a thousand little obliterations add up, you know? The macro damage that results is even scarier. The hacking, the politically nefarious robots, opinion echo chambers, fearmongering, erosion of truth, etcetera, etcetera. And don’t get me started on the destruction of public discourse. I mean, that’s just my view. Obviously to each her own. But personally, I don’t need it. Any of it.” Blandine cracks her neck. “I’m corrupt enough.

I dare to hope that search engines and social media algorithms will be optimized for truth and social relevance rather than simply showing people what they want to see; that there will be independent, third-party algorithms that rate the veracity of headlines, websites, and news stories in real time, allowing users to more quickly sift through the propaganda-laden garbage and get closer to evidence-based truth; that there will be actual respect for empirically tested data, because in an infinite sea of possible beliefs, evidence is the only life preserver we’ve got.

Instead of diversity and originality, what the majority of people on social media appear to want is more of the same. Conformity is rewarded by both the community and the system – what we “like” most drives the algorithms, which in turn feed us more indistinguishable content which we happily consume.

Exfiltrated metadata from internet service providers and social media platforms can be plugged into big data analytics and once the right algorithm is applied, can allow an adversary surgically precise psychographic targeting of critical infrastructure executives with elevated privileges. Why is no one talking about this?

Sonnet of Technology Technology is not good or bad, For it knows no ethics and principles. The prime directive of all gadgets, Is to obey algorithm without scruples. The problem is not technology, Nor is it the capitalist tendency. The real disease is human recklessness, Which is rampant in modern society. Your phone is not ruining your peace, You yourself are doing it all. A society oblivious to moderation, In time causes its own downfall. Power is power only when used with caution, If used wildly all power is poison.

Facebook Sonnet Facebook is not just injurious to health, It's now a full-on humanitarian crisis. If you think it's just a harmless bad habit, You're fanning the flames of social necrosis. Social media ought to make people social, Not make pavlov's dogs out of humanity. Yet all that facebook actually does today, Is drive society towards clinical insanity. Social media is not necessarily bad, So long as it doesn't feed on our stability. Yet facebook has devised the perfect algorithm, To learn, pump and monetize human instability. Facebook is the definition of what AI must be not. Algorithm without humanity is mental holocaust.

On social media platforms, everything we see corresponds to our conscious choices and algorithmically guided preferences, and all news and culture and interpersonal interaction are filtered through the home base of the profile. The everyday madness perpetuated by the internet is the madness of this architecture, which positions personal identity as the center of the universe. It's as if we've been placed on a lookout that oversees the entire world and given a pair of binoculars that makes everything look like our own reflection. Through social media, many people have quickly come to view all new information as a sort of direct commentary on "who they are.

Not satisfied with controlling information pipelines, the tech oligarchs have been moving to shape content as well. Controllers like those at Facebook and Twitter seek to “curate” content on their sites, or even eliminate views they find objectionable, which tend to be conservative views, according to former employees.35 Algorithms intended to screen out “hate groups” often spread a wider net, notes one observer, since the programmers have trouble distinguishing between “hate groups” and those who might simply express views that conflict with the dominant culture of Silicon Valley.36 That managers of social media platforms aim to control content is not merely the perception of conservatives. Over 70 percent of Americans believe that social media platforms “censor political views,” according to a recent Pew study.37 With their quasi-monopoly status, Facebook and Google don’t have to worry about competing with anyone, as the tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel observes, so they can indulge their own prejudices to a greater extent than the businesses that might be concerned about alienating customers.38 With their tightening control over media content, the tech elite are now situated to exert a cultural predominance that is unprecedented in the modern era.39 It recalls the cultural influence of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, but with more advanced technology.

When I was a kid people used to say one could travel the entire world just by sitting in a library and reading books. Sadly, in the age of billionaire-controlled social media functioning and governing bodies and minds based on carefully engineered algorithms, I don’t believe this is true anymore. The saying should be revised in our times to be ‘one could hate the entire world and see everyone as a villain or an enemy just by browsing through reels and social posts carefully selected to confirm one’s limited knowledge, perspective, and prejudices.’ With that in mind, we need more than ever to master the art of traveling, whether we go near or far. We need to undo the unreasonable, amplified, and exaggerated fear of strangers." [From “Can We Travel Without Being Tourists?” published on CounterPunch on March 15, 2024]

No smartphones before high school. Parents should delay children’s entry into round-the-clock internet access by giving only basic phones (phones with limited apps and no internet browser) before ninth grade (roughly age 14). No social media before 16. Let kids get through the most vulnerable period of brain development before connecting them to a firehose of social comparison and algorithmically chosen influencers. Phone-free schools. In all schools from elementary through high school, students should store their phones, smartwatches, and any other personal devices that can send or receive texts in phone lockers or locked pouches during the school day. That is the only way to free up their attention for each other and for their teachers. Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence. That’s the way children naturally develop social skills, overcome anxiety, and become self-governing young adults.

Already, when Facebook bought Instagram, it felt as though the walls of the Internet were closing in a little tighter around us users. The broad expanse of possibility, of messiness, on a network like Geocities or the personal expression of Tumblr was shut down. Digital life became increasingly templated, a set of boxes to fill in rather than a canvas to cover in your own image. (You don’t redesign how your Facebook profile looks; you just change your avatar.) I felt a certain sense of loss, but at first the trade-off of creativity for broadcast reach seemed worthwhile: You could talk to so many people at once on social media! But that exposure became enervating, too, and I missed the previous sense of intimacy, the Internet as a private place—a hideout from real life, rather than the determining force of real life. As the walls closed in, the algorithmic feeds took on more and more influence and authority.

The issue is not merely one of false stories, incorrect facts, or even election campaigns and spin doctors: the social media algorithms themselves encourage false perceptions of the world. People click on the news they want to hear; Facebook, YouTube, and Google then show them more of whatever it is that they already favor, whether it is a certain brand of soap or a particular form of politics. The algorithms radicalize those who use them too. If you click on perfectly legitimate anti-immigration YouTube sites, for example, these can lead you quickly, in just a few more clicks, to white nationalist sites and then to violent xenophobic sites. Because they have been designed to keep you online, the algorithms also favor emotions, especially anger and fear. And because the sites are addictive, they affect people in ways they don't expect. Anger becomes a habit. Divisiveness becomes normal. Even if social media is not yet the primary news source for all Americans, it already helps shape how politicians and journalists interpret the world and portray it. Polarization has moved from the online world into reality. The result is a hyper-partisanship that adds to the distrust of "normal" politics, "establishment" politicians, derided "experts," and "mainstream" institutions--including courts, police, civil servants--and no wonder. As polarization increases, the employees of the state are invariably portrayed as having been "captured" by their opponents. It is not an accident that the Law and Justice Party in Poland, the Brexiteers in Britain, and the Trump administration in the United States have launched verbal assaults on civil servants and professional diplomats. It is not an accident that judges and courts are now the object of criticism, scrutiny, and anger in so many other places too. There can be no neutrality in a polarized world because there can be no nonpartisan or apolitical institutions.

The media environment... has changed in ways that foster [social and cultural] division. Long gone is the time when everybody watched one of three national television networks. By the 1990s there was a cable news channel for most points on the political spectrum, and by the early 2000s there was a website or discussion group for every conceivable interest group and grievance. By the 2010s most Americans were using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, which make it easy to encase oneself within an echo-chamber. And then there's the "filter bubble," in which search engines and YouTube algorithms are designed to give you more of what you seem to be interested in, leading conservatives and progressives into disconnected moral matrices backed up by mutually contradictory informational worlds. Both the physical and the electronic isolation from people we disagree with allow the forces of confirmation bias, groupthink, and tribalism to push us still further apart.

I mean, everyone is, but I am especially susceptible to its false rewards, you know? It’s designed to addict you, to prey on your insecurities and use them to make you stay. It exploits everybody’s loneliness and promises us community, approval, friendship. Honestly, in that sense, social media is a lot like the Church of Scientology. Or QAnon. Or Charles Manson. And then on top of that—weaponizing a person’s isolation—it convinces every user that she is a minor celebrity, forcing her to curate some sparkly and artificial sampling of her best experiences, demanding a nonstop social performance that has little in common with her inner life, intensifying her narcissism, multiplying her anxieties, narrowing her worldview. All while commodifying her, harvesting her data, and selling it to nefarious corporations so that they can peddle more shit that promises to make her prettier, smarter, more productive, more successful, more beloved. And throughout all this, you have to act stupefied by your own good luck. Everybody’s like, Words cannot express how fortunate I feel to have met this amazing group of people, blah blah blah. It makes me sick. Everybody influencing, everybody under the influence, everybody staring at their own godforsaken profile, searching for proof that they’re lovable. And then, once you’re nice and distracted by the hard work of tallying up your failures and comparing them to other people’s triumphs, that’s when the algorithmic predators of late capitalism can pounce, enticing you to partake in consumeristic, financially irresponsible forms of so-called self-care, which is really just advanced selfishness. Facials! Pedicures! Smoothie packs delivered to your door! And like, this is just the surface stuff. The stuff that oxidizes you, personally. But a thousand little obliterations add up, you know? The macro damage that results is even scarier. The hacking, the politically nefarious robots, opinion echo chambers, fearmongering, erosion of truth, etcetera, etcetera. And don’t get me started on the destruction of public discourse. I mean, that’s just my view. Obviously to each her own. But personally, I don’t need it. Any of it.” Blandine cracks her neck. “I’m corrupt enough.

I don't have social media" "Oh right." He rolls his eyes. "Too good for all that." She shakes her head. "Not at all. On the contrary, I'm too weak for it. I mean, everyone is, but I am especially susceptible to its false rewards, you know? It's designed to addict you, to prey on your insecurities and use them to make you stay. It exploits everybody's loneliness and promises us a community, approval, friendship. Honestly, in that sense, social media is a lot like the Church of Scientology. Or QAnon. Or Charles Manson. And then on top of that - weaponizing a person's isolation - it convinces every user that she is a minor celebrity, forcing her to curate some sparkly and artificial sampling of her best experiences, demanding a nonstop social performance that has little in common with her inner life, intensifying her narcissism, multiplying her anxieties, narrowing her worldview. All while commodifying her, harvesting her data, and selling it to nefarious corporations so that they can peddle more shit that promises to make her prettier, smarter, more productive, more successful, more beloved. And throughout all this, you have to act stupefied by your own good luck. Everybody's like 'words cannot express how fortunate I feel to have met this amazing group of people,' blah blah blah. It makes me sick. Everybody's influencing, everybody under the influence, everybody staring at their own godforsaken profile, searching for proof that they're lovable. And then, once you're nice and distracted by the hard work of tallying up your failures and comparing them to other people's triumphs, that's when the algorithmic predators of late capitalism can pounce, enticing you to partake in consumeristic, financially irresponsible forms of so-called self-care, which is really just advanced selfishness. Facials! Pedicures! Smoothie packs delivered to your door! And like, this is just the surface stuff. The stuff that oxidizes you, personally. But a thousand little obliterations add up, you know? The macro damage that results is even scarier. The hacking, the politically nefarious robots, opinion echo chambers, fearmongering, erosion of truth, etcetera, etcetera. And don't get m e started on the destruction of public discourse. I mean, that's just my view. Obviously to each her own. But personally, I don't need it. Any of it." Blandine cracks her neck. "I'm corrupt enough.

We have traded our intimacy for social media, our romantic bonds for dating matches on apps, our societal truth for the propaganda of corporate interests, our spiritual questioning for dogmatism, our intellectual curiosity for standardized tests and grading, our inner voices for the opinions of celebrities and hustler gurus and politicians, our mindfulness for algorithmic distractions and outrage, our inborn need to belong to communities for ideological bubbles, our trust in scientific evidence for the attractive lies of false leaders, our solitude for public exhibitionism. We have ignored the hunter-gatherer wisdom of our past, obedient now to the myth of progress. But we must remember who we are and where we came from. We are animals born into mystery, looking up at the stars. Uncertain in ourselves, not knowing where we are heading. We exist with the same bodies, the same brains, as Homo sapiens from thousands of years past, roaming on the plains, hunting in forests and by the sea, foraging together in small bands. Except now, our technology is exponentially increasing at a scale that we cannot predict. We are overwhelmed with information; lost in a matrix that we do not understand. Our civilizational “progress” is built on the bones of the indigenous and the poor and the powerless. Our “progress” comes at the expense of our land, and oceans, and air. We are reaching beyond what we can globally sustain. Former empires have perished from their unrestrained greed for more resources. They were limited in past ages by geography and capacity, collapsing in regions, and not over the entire planet. What will be the cost of our progress? We have grown arrogant in our comfort, hardened away from our compassion, believing that our reality is the only reality. Yet even at our most uncertain, there are still those saints who are unknown and nameless, who help even when they do not need to help. They often are not rich, don’t have their profiles written up in magazines, and will never win any prestigious awards. They may have shared their last bit of food while already surviving on so little. They may have cherished the disheartened, shown warmth to the neglected, tended to the diseased and dying, spoken kindly to the hopeless. They do not tremble in silence while the wheels of prejudice crush over their land. Withering what was once fertile into pale death and smoke. They tend to what they love, to what they serve. They help, even when they could fall back into ignorance, even when they could prosper through easy greed, even when they could compromise their values, conforming into groupthink for the illusion of security. They help.

New opportunities for New York as a high-tech hub are related to the evolution of the Internet, according to Chris Dixon: “Imagine the Internet as a house. The first phase— laying the foundation, the bricks—happened in the ‘90s. No wonder that Boston and California, heavy tech places with MIT and Stanford, dominated the scene at that time. The house has been built, now it’s more about interior design. Many interesting, recent companies haven’t been started by technologists but by design and product-oriented people, which has helped New York a lot. New York City has always been a consumer media kind of city, and the Internet is in need of those kinds of skills now. Actually, when I say design, it’s more about product-focused people. I’d put Facebook in that category. Everything requires engineers, but unlike Google, their breakthrough was not as scientific. It was a well-designed product that people liked to use. Google had a significant scientific breakthrough with their search algorithm. That’s not what drives Facebook. In The Social Network movie, when they write equations on the wall that’s just not what it is, it’s not about that. Every company has engineering problems, but Facebook is product-design driven.

Similarly, the HealthMap algorithm, which scours tens of thousands of social networks and news media, was capable of predicting the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa nine days before the World Health Organization.21b

Like me, if you’re already predisposed to anxiety, positive or negative stimulus on social media can make you feel worse, largely because of the algorithms. At its advent, all updates on apps such as Twitter were delivered chronologically and per our preferences. But now our usage data is measured and monetized, and algorithms put more emotionally weighted events in our timelines, such as engagements, births, and significant accomplishments.

the problem isn’t behavior modification in itself. The problem is relentless, robotic, ultimately meaningless behavior modification in the service of unseen manipulators and uncaring algorithms.

This book is about how to be a cat. How can you remain autonomous in a world where you are under constant surveillance and are constantly prodded by algorithms

This book doesn’t address problems related to family dynamics, to untenable pressures placed on young people, especially young women (please read Sherry Turkle on those topics), the way scammers can use social media to abuse you, the way social media algorithms might discriminate against you for racist or other horrible reasons (please read Cathy O’Neil on that topic), or the way your loss of privacy can bite you personally and harm society in surprising ways.

Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft are, too. Although some companies have declared they will never use their technology for weapons, the reality is their technology already is a weapon: hackers are attacking computer networks through Gmail phishing schemes and Microsoft coding vulnerabilities, terrorists are livestreaming attacks, and malign actors have turned social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook into disinformation superhighways that undermine democracy from within.

AI Con (The Sonnet) Everybody is concerned about psychics conning people, How 'bout the billionaires who con people using science! Con artists come in all shapes and sizes, Some use barnum statements, others artificial intelligence. Most scientists speak up against only the little frauds, But not the big frauds who support their livelihood. Am I not afraid to be blacklisted by the big algorithms! Is the sun afraid, its light will offend some puny hoods! I come from the soil, I'll die struggling in the soil. My needs are less, hence my integrity is dangerous. I am here to show this infantile species how to grow up. I can't be bothered by the fragility of a few spoiled brats. Reason and fiction both are fundamental to build a civilization. Neither is the problem, the problem is greed and self-absorption.

If you are not digitally branding yourself, be sure the search engine algorithm is doing it instead of you.

A digital personal brand is a set of posts, stories, and online activities connected by search engine algorithms.

With the advent of social media, more news intake is curated by algorithms than editors, further increasing the nationalization of . . . well, everything. The same technology that decimated local media let national polarization flourish by elevating certain influential voices (including some of the same ones in right-wing partisan media) and silencing others.2 As national media became more influential, especially on our social networks, national politics became the stand-in for all our concerns about government.

Statistics are reliable, but only as idiot demons.

Contrary to what many well-intentioned people believe, the fact that we have multiple social media platforms today has little effect on spreading genuinely diverse narratives and perspectives. Social media is not only increasingly in the hands of a few billionaires strongly connected to the ruling class (e.g., Meta acquiring some of the most popular and active platforms), but also the fact that social media platforms operate based on carefully designed and manipulated algorithms to promote the viewpoints of the ruling class in what Cathy O’Neil has called ‘weapons of math destruction’, and what Safiya Umoja Noble insightfully calls ‘algorithms of oppression’, which apply not only to racial matters, but extend to every other matter that is potentially at odds with the desires of the ruling class.

I think things like ‘cancel culture’, call-out culture and pile-ons are sometimes necessary to draw attention to things. But I don’t believe this is going to be enough for change. Social media companies aren’t built to overthrow systemic oppression; they uphold it within the very functioning of their platforms. In addition to this, billionaires are not the people who are about to hand us the tools to overthrow power structures that they benefit from. Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and ByteDance are not about to liberate us. The algorithmic functioning of social media companies simply isn’t built for marginalised people because at large they are not coded by people with marginalised experiences.

If we try to standardize happiness… a kind of uniform container for human experience… people themselves will become more standardized.

It's easy to sneer that insta is all cats, brunch, selfies, and beach yoga, but social media is one of the most powerful tools for self education we've ever had. If your social media is boring you don't blame the tool, or the algorithms. If you're choosing to be spoon-fed, you can't complain that everything tastes the same.

Social media has flooded our consciousness with caricatures of each other. Human beings are reduced to data, and data nearly always underrepresent reality. The result is this great flattening of human life and human complexity. We think that because we know someone is pro-choice or pro-life, or that they drive a truck or a Prius, we know everything we need to know about them. Human detail gets lost in the algorithm. Thus humanity gives way to ideology.

Sonnet 1106 When an expert doesn't know something, They say, "I don't know", without tricks. But an armchair intellectual knows it all, Tiktok and Insta are their clinics. An expert's worth remains the same, with or without Tiktok and Insta. Armchair intellectuals are here today gone tomorrow, with the tiniest algorithm change of social media. My work will continue, with or without social media. My work will continue, with or without internet. My work will continue, with or without electricity even, so will the work of every expert sapiens. Instant popularity vanishes just as instantly, Today you are relevant, tomorrow you are gone. Make a real contribution that isn't overshadowed by the next big tech revolution.

He set up a simple program, which he called Algo Transparency, to find out. The program entered a term, like the name of a politician, in YouTube’s search bar. Then it opened the top results. Then each recommendation for what to watch next. He ran huge batches of anonymized searches, one after another, over late 2015 and much of 2016, looking for trends. What he found alarmed him. When he searched YouTube for Pope Francis, for instance, 10 percent of the videos it displayed were conspiracies. On global warming, it was 15 percent. But the real shock came when Chaslot followed algorithmic recommendations for what to watch next, which YouTube has said accounts for most of its watch time. A staggering 85 percent of recommended videos on Pope Francis were conspiracies, asserting Francis’s “true” identity or purporting to expose Satanic plots at the Vatican. On global warming, the figure was 70 percent, usually calling it a hoax. On topics with few established conspiracies, the system seemed to conjure them up. When Chaslot searched Who is Michelle Obama, for instance, just under half of the top results and almost two thirds of watch-next recommendations claimed the First Lady was secretly a man. Surely, he thought, whatever his disagreement with his former colleagues, they would want to know about this. But when he raised concerns privately with people he knew at YouTube, the response was always the same: “If people click on this harmful content, who are we to judge?

To users, for whom the algorithm was invisible, these felt like powerful social cues. It was as if your community had suddenly decided that it valued provocation and outrage above all else, rewarding it with waves of attention that were, in reality, algorithmically generated. And because the algorithm down-sorted posts it judged as unengaging, the inverse was true, too. It felt as if your peers suddenly scorned nuance and emotional moderation with the implicit rejection of ignoring you. Users seemed to absorb those cues, growing meaner and angrier, intent on humiliating out-group members, punishing social transgressors, and validating one another’s worldviews.

Extraordinary technology brings extraordinary recklessness, Because the human mind hasn't matured like technology has.

A White House briefing memo encouraged the companies to develop a “radicalism algorithm” that would digest social media and other sources of surplus to produce something comparable to a credit score, but aimed at evaluating the “radicalness” of online content.

Tech is supposed to lift you up. If you're crippled by it, that's your own screw-up

Unleash the potential of Facebook's vast landscape. From algorithms to engagement, our eBook guides you through the art of turning 'likes' into thriving profits.

Unleash the potential of Facebook's vast landscape. From algorithms to engagement, the eBook guides you through the art of turning 'likes' into thriving profits.

Social media algorithms are usually “adaptive,” which means they constantly make small changes to themselves in order to try to get better results; “better” in this case meaning more engaging and therefore more profitable. A little randomness is always present in this type of algorithm

When an algorithm is feeding experiences to a person, it turns out that the randomness that lubricates algorithmic adaptation can also feed human addiction. The algorithm is trying to capture the perfect parameters for manipulating a brain, while the brain, in order to seek out deeper meaning, is changing in response to the algorithm’s experiments; it’s a cat-and-mouse game based on pure math. Because the stimuli from the algorithm don’t mean anything, because they genuinely are random, the brain isn’t adapting to anything real, but to a fiction. That process—of becoming hooked on an elusive mirage—is addiction. As the algorithm tries to escape a rut, the human mind becomes stuck in one.

Negative emotions such as fear and anger well up more easily and dwell in us longer than positive ones. It takes longer to build trust than to lose trust. Fight-or-flight responses occur in seconds, while it can take hours to relax. This is true in real life, but it is even more true in the flattened light of algorithms.

The idea is not to ban innovation, but to adapt it with human welfare.

In October 2018, Sri Lankan civil leaders gave Facebook’s regional office, which oversees South Asia’s 400 million users from India, a stark presentation. Hate speech and misinformation were overrunning the platform, seemingly promoted by its algorithms. Violent extremists operated some of its most popular pages. Viral falsehoods were becoming consensus reality for users. Facebook, after all, had displaced local news outlets, just as it had in Myanmar, where villages were still burning. Sri Lanka might be next. Separately, government officials met privately with Facebook’s regional chiefs in Colombo. They pleaded with the company to better police the hate speech on their platform. These posts and pages violated the company’s own rules. Why wouldn’t Facebook act?

People with toxic mindsets will only see toxic content on social media because the algorithm wants to satisfy their toxic minds with more toxicity.

If the great challenge to democracies today is the emotional pull of populism and the way in which it is amplified by sections of the media and the algorithms of social media, then centrists must find a way to break through with an emotional appeal of their own.

six reasons why email is the best: My company AppSumo generates $65 million a year in total transactions. And you know what? Nearly 50 percent of that comes from email. This percentage has been consistent for more than ten years. Don’t believe me? I have 120,000 Twitter followers, 750,000 YouTube subscribers, and 150,000 TikTok fans—and I would give them all up for my 100,000 email subscribers. Why? Every time I send an email, 40,000 people open it and consume my content. I’m not hoping the platform gods will allow me to reach them. On the other platforms, anywhere between 100 and 1 million people pay attention to my content, but it’s not consistent or in my control. I know what you’re saying: “C’mon, Noah, email is dead.” Now ask yourself, when was the last time you checked your email? Exactly. Email is used obsessively by over 4 billion people! It’s the largest way of communicating at scale that exists today. Eighty-nine percent of people check it EVERY DAY! Social media decides who and how many people you’re seen by. One tweak to the algorithm, and you’re toast. Remember the digital publisher LittleThings? Yeah, no one else does, either. They closed after they lost 75 percent of their 20,000,000 monthly visitors when Facebook changed its algorithm in 2018. CEO Joe Speiser says it killed his business and he lost $100 million. You own your email list. Forever. If AppSumo shuts down tomorrow, my insurance policy, my sweet sweet baby, my beloved, my email list comes with me and makes anything I do after so much easier. Because it’s mine. It also doesn’t cost you significant money to grow your list or to communicate with your list, whereas Facebook or Google ads consistently cost money.

TikTok considers videos you like or share, how long you watch videos, comments you post, and even the types of content you create. They also consider your device type, the location you’re in, language preferences, and more—all these factors are processed by TikTok’s recommendation engine and weighted based on how much you care about each specific factor. The algorithm learns each user’s consumption patterns and adjusts their feed’s content based on how those consumption patterns change over time.

Books on the “best seller” lists do not always contain the best information relevant for you! Only reading books on the best seller lists or purchasing the “popular” products means replacing social media algorithms for society promoted algorithms. Always dig deeper, if you wish to get closer to the truth!

Before it took over the world, social media was once a niche itself, an obscure hobby. That sense of disconnection slowly changed and dissipated as the Internet became inextricable from “real life.

Or perhaps social media belongs in the category of vice industries, with tightly regulated limits meant for the safety of individuals who might otherwise abuse it. After all, so many users are addicted.

In September 2020, a Daily Kos/Civiqs poll reported that over half of the Republicans surveyed believed either partially or mostly in QAnon’s theories . . . at least the theories they were aware of. Because tumble further down the QAnon rabbit hole, and you’ll find Satanic Panic–esque, flagrantly fascist beliefs that not every subscriber even knows about (at least not at first): theories about Jeffrey Epstein co-conspiring with Tom Hanks to molest hordes of minors, Hillary Clinton drinking the blood of children in order to prolong her life, the Rothschilds running a centuries-old ring of Satan worshippers, and beyond. But QAnon quickly grew to encapsulate much more than stereotypical far-right extremists. Take a soft turn to the left, and you’ll find a more outwardly palatable denomination of conspiritualists whose paranoias might be slightly less focused on Hillary Clinton worshipping Satan and more on Big Pharma forcing evil Western medicine on them and their kids. These believers wield a slightly different glossary of loaded terms, some co-opted from feminist politics—like “forced penetration” (which conflates vaccination with sexual assault) and “my body, my choice” (an antivaxx/anti-mask slogan purloined from the pro-choice movement). Because social media algorithms track people’s keywords in order to feed them only what they’re already interested in, a sprawling spiderweb of customized QAnon offshoots was able to form.

I don’t have social media.” “Oh, right.” He rolls his eyes. “Too good for all that.” She shakes her head. “Not at all. On the contrary, I’m too weak for it. I mean, everyone is, but I am especially susceptible to its false rewards, you know? It’s designed to addict you, to prey on your insecurities and use them to make you stay. It exploits everybody’s loneliness and promises us community, approval, friendship. Honestly, in that sense, social media is a lot like the Church of Scientology. Or QAnon. Or Charles Manson. And then on top of that—weaponizing a person’s isolation—it convinces every user that she is a minor celebrity, forcing her to curate some sparkly and artificial sampling of her best experiences, demanding a nonstop social performance that has little in common with her inner life, intensifying her narcissism, multiplying her anxieties, narrowing her worldview. All while commodifying her, harvesting her data, and selling it to nefarious corporations so that they can peddle more shit that promises to make her prettier, smarter, more productive, more successful, more beloved. And throughout all this, you have to act stupefied by your own good luck. Everybody’s like, Words cannot express how fortunate I feel to have met this amazing group of people, blah blah blah. It makes me sick. Everybody influencing, everybody under the influence, everybody staring at their own godforsaken profile, searching for proof that they’re lovable. And then, once you’re nice and distracted by the hard work of tallying up your failures and comparing them to other people’s triumphs, that’s when the algorithmic predators of late capitalism can pounce, enticing you to partake in consumeristic, financially irresponsible forms of so-called self-care, which is really just advanced selfishness. Facials! Pedicures! Smoothie packs delivered to your door! And like, this is just the surface stuff. The stuff that oxidizes you, personally. But a thousand little obliterations add up, you know? The macro damage that results is even scarier. The hacking, the politically nefarious robots, opinion echo chambers, fearmongering, erosion of truth, etcetera, etcetera. And don’t get me started on the destruction of public discourse. I mean, that’s just my view. Obviously to each her own. But personally, I don’t need it. Any of it.” Blandine cracks her neck. “I’m corrupt enough.

We are not resting because social media has stolen our ability to exist without it. A perfect plan to keep us distracted and addicted. The algorithms guiding our every move, putting unnecessary pressure on many to post, retweet, hashtag, and grow their platforms obsessively.

Any skilled con artist knows the key to deceiving your mark is to get them to believe your scheme was their idea. Translation: The key to getting people to follow you is to convince them they aren't following anyone at all. With the rise of social media empires and their spooky digital algorithms, these powerful forces now have direct access to our flows of consciousness every time we slide our thumbs across our phones. What we are led to believe are just ads, news links, retweets, and random digital flotsam are, in reality, mass behavior modification techniques intentionally designed to influence how we think, feel, believe, shop, vote, and live.

Any social media application or platform should have a psychology test when signing up for a new account. That will detect people who are dangerous and who might have an influence to make others dangerous. People who will use social media for bad ,evil and wrong intentions. People who are not mental stable. Also people who can be easily influenced by bad advices. Then run an algorithm on which information those people can see. Put a disclaimer on some accounts of those who have a bipolar disorder or who are psychopath.

Many at the company seemed almost unaware that the platform’s algorithms and design deliberately shape users’ experiences and incentives, and therefore the users themselves.

Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” the researchers warned in a 2018 presentation later leaked to the Wall Street Journal. In fact, the presentation continued, Facebook’s systems were designed in a way that delivered users “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform.

Tips on Web Design and Site Marketing Web content is king, which is why we have devoted an entire chapter to it later in this book. It is what draws visitors and ultimately what converts them to customers. So, try to make your web content as engaging as possible. Make sure the content is interactive, unique and educational. Ensure that visitors have the option of plugins while encouraging them to visit as many pages on your site as possible if they want to obtain vital information. The images you use on your website should be both enticing and descriptive in nature. In today’s world, social media is all pervasive. In order to encourage visitors to share your web content, you can include icons of social media platforms on your website. In some select cases, consider integrating social media feeds, like Facebook or Instagram, onto your website so that they can automatically show the latest postings. A "Call-to-Action" can help convert visitors to your site into customers. Always try using a very clear and concise "Call-to-Action" language. Understand what type of conversion you are looking for, and try to provide multiple levels of conversion. For example, a plastic surgeon may provide Schedule an Appointment as a call to action, which will attract only the segment of web visitors who have reached their decision stage. By adding conversion points for visitors who are at earlier stages of their decision making, like signing up for a webcast or your newsletter can help you widen your conversion points and provide inputs to your email marketing. To raise the average amount of time a visitor spends on your website and to minimize the bounce rate, ensure that your website offers a user-friendly and attractive design. This way you will increase the number of links you have on your website and boost its SEO ranking (Tip: While Google’s algorithm is not public, our iterative testing shows that sites with good usability analytics metrics like time on site and bounce rate play favorably in Google’s algorithm, other things remaining constant). Ensure you observe due diligence when designing a website that will enable visitors to navigate in different languages. For example, you may need a lot more space for your menu, as there are languages that use up more space than the English language.

Both Google search results and Facebook’s News Feed algorithm are based on showing us what they think we want. The

The only morality of the algorithm is to optimize you as a consumer, and in many cases you become the product. There are very few examples in human history of industries where people themselves become products, and those are scary industries – slavery and the sex trade. And now we have social media. — Christopher Wiley, Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower and author of MindF*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America.

Let’s suppose an algorithm is showing you an opportunity to buy socks or stocks about five seconds after you see a cat video that makes you happy. An adaptive algorithm will occasionally perform an automatic test to find out what happens if the interval is changed to, say, four and a half seconds. Did that make you more likely to buy? If so, that timing adjustment might be applied not only to your future feed, but to the feeds of thousands of other people who seem correlated with you because of anything from color preferences to driving patterns.

Because the stimuli from the algorithm don’t mean anything, because they genuinely are random, the brain isn’t adapting to anything real, but to a fiction. That process—of becoming hooked on an elusive mirage—is addiction. As the algorithm tries to escape a rut, the human mind becomes stuck in one.

Because the stimuli from the algorithm don’t mean anything, because they genuinely are random, the brain isn’t adapting to anything real, but to a fiction. That process—of becoming hooked on an elusive mirage—is addiction.

Even when the readers are real, not fake, algorithms are routing them to particular content, so their choices aren’t really independent. The measurements aren’t valid, by definition. You can’t tell someone where to go and then claim that you discovered something new because you learned where that person went. This is yet another ubiquitous problem that’s as hard to see as air.

All you need is a social media account: start posting extreme and crazy shit, and let the algorithm do the rest.

Compliance is about the promise of safety and reassurance sold to us by powerful entities during times of vulnerability. Gangs, governments, demagogues, social media algorithms & religions seduce us with misleading untruths and comforting fables. They want us to join their narrow worldview in exchange for obedience and turning a blind eye to our own internal voice of reason & compassion. They just need our Compliance.

Unsolicited measurements from a system that can’t ever speak to our individual value, and in fact prefers to group us by category and filter us through an algorithm so they can serve us up to advertisers. The immediacy of this whole process makes the false equivalency plainly obvious.

Today’s equivalent is probably ‘get an engineering degree’, but it will not necessarily be as lucrative. A third of Americans who graduated in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths) are in jobs that do not require any such qualification.52 They must still pay off their student debts. Up and down America there are programmers working as office temps and even fast-food servers. In the age of artificial intelligence, more and more will drift into obsolescence. On the evidence so far, this latest technological revolution is different in its dynamics from earlier ones. In contrast to earlier disruptions, which affected particular sectors of the economy, the effects of today’s revolution are general-purpose. From janitors to surgeons, virtually no jobs will be immune. Whether you are training to be an airline pilot, a retail assistant, a lawyer or a financial trader, labour-saving technology is whittling down your numbers – in some cases drastically so. In 2000, financial services employed 150,000 people in New York. By 2013 that had dropped to 100,000. Over the same period, Wall Street’s profits have soared. Up to 70 per cent of all equity trades are now executed by algorithms.53 Or take social media. In 2006, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. It had sixty-five employees, so the price amounted to $25 million per employee. In 2012 Facebook bought Instagram, which had thirteen employees, for $1 billion. That came to $77 million per employee. In 2014, it bought WhatsApp, with fifty-five employees, for $19 billion, at a staggering $345 million per employee.54 Such riches are little comfort to the thousands of engineers who cannot find work. Facebook’s data servers are now managed by Cyborg, a software program. It requires one human technician for every twenty thousand computers.

You have to remember that social media is constantly feeding you a false representation of the world

Algorithms in our search engines and social media platforms shape what we receive based on our previous preferences and choice, confirming our natural inclinations to read things that confirm our beliefs rather than challenge them.

The Enlightenment emphasized ways of learning that weren’t subservient to human power hierarchies. Instead, Enlightenment thinking celebrates evidence-based scientific method and reasoning. The cultures of sciences and engineering used to embrace Enlightenment epistemology, but now they have been overridden by horribly regressive BUMMER epistemology. You probably know the word “meme” as meaning a BUMMER posting that can go viral. But originally, “meme” suggested a philosophy of thought and meaning. The term was coined by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Dawkins proposed memes as units of culture that compete and are either passed along or not, according to a pseudo-Darwinian selection process. Thus some fashions, ideas, and habits take hold, while others become extinct. The concept of memes provides a way of framing everything non-nerds do—the whole of humanities, culture, arts, and politics—as similar instances of meme competition, mere subroutines of a higher-level algorithm that nerds can master. When the internet took of, Dawkins’s ideas were in vogue, because they flattered techies. There was a ubiquitous genre of internet appreciation from the very beginning in which someone would point out the viral spread of a meme and admire how cute that was. The genre exists to this day. Memes started out as a way of expressing solidarity with a philosophy I used to call cybernetic totalism that still underlies BUMMER. Memes might seem to amplify what you are saying, but that is always an illusion. You might launch an infectious meme about a political figure, and you might be making a great point, but in the larger picture, you are reinforcing the idea that virality is truth. Your point will be undone by whatever other point is more viral. That is by design. The architects of BUMMER were meme believers.

What happens when the seeker finds? When an adoptee or another seeker has identified her long-lost kin, what does she do with that information? No chart or browser extension can answer this question, nor can algorithms predict how the people she’s identified will react to being found. This is when some seekers prowl the Internet, looking for clues into whether they want to know these strangers in all but blood. It is, of course, breathtakingly easy to figure out your father’s career on LinkedIn, his political leanings on Facebook. Social media makes it possible—once you’ve discovered who your father is—to learn what he is.

Religious leaders preach to the poor and downtrodden and enslaved, telling them that they deserve the kingdom of heaven—basically, an open “fuck you” to the corrupt elites of the day. It’s a message that’s easy to get behind. Today, appealing to the hopeless is easier than ever before. All you need is a social media account: start posting extreme and crazy shit, and let the algorithm do the rest. The crazier and more extreme your posts, the more attention you’ll garner, and the more the hopeless will flock to you like flies to cow shit. It’s not hard at all.

From the point of view of the algorithms, you are no longer a name, but a number: the number of followers, likes, clicks, or other measures of how much you contributed to the BUMMER machine, moment to moment. Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle879-881). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.

the advertising business model. Advertising would allow search to be free, music to be free, and news to be free. (That didn’t mean that musicians or reporters got a piece of the pie, for the techies considered them replaceable.) Advertising would become the dominant business in the information era. This didn’t feel dystopian at first. The original ads on Google were cute and harmless. But as the internet, the devices, and the algorithms advanced, advertising inevitably morphed into mass behavior modification. This is how BUMMER was born. As often happens with people, we forgot that we made a choice. Now we feel helpless. But the choice remains, and we can remake it.

A global system that links 2.2. billion people across hundreds of countries, allows every user to post content indiscriminately, develops algorithms that favor highly charged content, and is dependent on a self-service advertising system that precisely target ads using massive surveillance and elaborate personal dossiers cannot be reformed at the edges.

That means that a BUMMER company can build a model of you in software— and control what you see in a manipulative feed— by running programs exclusively on their own computers. Those computers are placed in super-secure locations you’ll never visit. Their software is super-hyper secret. Every other kind of file has been breached by hackers, but not the search or feed algorithms of the big BUMMER companies. The secret code to manipulate you is guarded like crown jewels. Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle1277-1280). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.

What matters to young people will matter on social media. After all, that’s where they get most of their information these days. They don’t even have to be looking for vegan information: it will be pushed towards them by the relentless algorithms (as opposed to the rather less relentless Al Gore), often while they’re browsing for something completely different.

Humanovator (The Sonnet) Chatgpt pampers plagiarism, Facebook pampers conspiracy. More and more innovations are becoming catalyst of catastrophe. Note, I didn't mention the birdie, Very mindful, very demure. Facebook can still be repaired, but once a MAGA, always a sewer. Innovation that outlives its usefulness, is no longer innovation but carnivoration. Innovators not in touch with soil-n-roots, are predators of the concrete jungle. The golden age of startups is behind us, today it's mostly filth, fraud and smut. Amidst the crowd of trust fund termites, be the humanovator to humanize the world.

Chatgpt pampers plagiarism, Facebook pampers conspiracy. More and more innovations are becoming catalyst of catastrophe.

Tech is supposed to help us host life, not hold us hostage.

Algorithm that generates deceit is a bug.

Ultimately, it’s the algorithms of social media that serve as accelerants for violence. By promoting a sense of perpetual crisis, these algorithms give rise to a growing sense of despair. Disinformation spread by extremists discredits peaceful protesters, convinces citizens that counterattacks by opposition groups are likely, and creates a sense—often a false sense—that moderates within their own movement are not doing enough to protect the population, or are ineffective and weak compared to the opposition. It’s at this point that violence breaks out: when citizens become convinced that there is no hope of fixing their problems through conventional means. Fueled by social media, they come to believe that compromise is simply not possible.

Like the Soviet leaders in Moscow, the tech companies were not uncovering some truth about humans; they were imposing on us a perverse new order. Humans are very complex beings, and benign social orders seek ways to cultivate our virtues while curtailing our negative tendencies. But social media algorithms see us, simply, as an attention mine. The algorithms reduced the multifaceted range of human emotions—hate, love, outrage, joy, confusion—into a single catchall category: engagement. In Myanmar in 2016, in Brazil in 2018, and in numerous other countries, the algorithms scored videos, posts, and all other content solely according to how many minutes people engaged with the content and how many times they shared it with others. An hour of lies or hatred was ranked higher than ten minutes of truth or compassion—or an hour of sleep. The fact that lies and hate tend to be psychologically and socially destructive, whereas truth, compassion, and sleep are essential for human welfare, was completely lost on the algorithms. Based on this very narrow understanding of humanity, the algorithms helped to create a new social system that encouraged our basest instincts while discouraging us from realizing the full spectrum of the human potential.