Social media has damaged society. If you ask most people to pinpoint the problem, they will focus on social media content. The real problem is that social media distorts our perceptions of the public sphere. By targeting users with droves of content meant to resonate specifically with them, it causes us to create a false mental model of society. 카지노사이트 We should push for transparency in targeting. Platforms need to clearly disclose the demographic characteristics of the exposed population when targeting us with any piece of narrowly distributed content.
Social media has profoundly damaged society. If I wrote those words a decade ago, few people would have agreed, but it is a widely shared belief now. Just last year, the Aspen Institute commissioned a six-month study that drew even darker conclusions. The report concluded that the misinformation and disinformation propagated by social media create “a chain reaction of harm,” acting as a “force multiplier for exacerbating our worst problems as a society.”
If you ask most people to pinpoint the problem, they will focus on social media content, telling you we need to crack down on offensive and divisive material. They will rattle off a list of content maladies that cause societal problems, including hate and harassment, misinformation and disinformation, and the torrent of outright lies that conflict with scientific, medical, and historical facts. If they are professionals in the field, they might tell you that America needs Section 230 reform.
Those professionals are referring to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which provides immunity to social media platforms regarding content posted by third parties. Some argue the regulation protects free speech on the internet, and it should not be weakened. Others counter that Section 230 shields social media companies from assuming responsibility for the damaging content on their platforms, and it should be eliminated.
A worrying distraction
Personally, I worry that focusing on content alone distracts from the core problem of social media.
I say that because offensive and divisive content has always existed. Social media reduces belief in science and medicine, weakens trust in longstanding institutions, drives acceptance of ridiculous conspiracy theories, and damages faith in democracy. But no matter how far back you go in human history, you will find the same hate, the same disinformation, and the same deluge of deliberate lies. Awful content has existed my entire life, but it did not polarize society the way we see it doing today. Something is different now, but it is not the content. 바카라사이트
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Social media has profoundly damaged society. If I wrote those words a decade ago, few people would have agreed, but it is a widely shared belief now. Just last year, the Aspen Institute commissioned a six-month study that drew even darker conclusions. The report concluded that the misinformation and disinformation propagated by social media create “a chain reaction of harm,” acting as a “force multiplier for exacerbating our worst problems as a society.”
If you ask most people to pinpoint the problem, they will focus on social media content, telling you we need to crack down on offensive and divisive material. They will rattle off a list of content maladies that cause societal problems, including hate and harassment, misinformation and disinformation, and the torrent of outright lies that conflict with scientific, medical, and historical facts. If they are professionals in the field, they might tell you that America needs Section 230 reform. 온라인카지
Those professionals are referring to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which provides immunity to social media platforms regarding content posted by third parties. Some argue the regulation protects free speech on the internet, and it should not be weakened. Others counter that Section 230 shields social media companies from assuming responsibility for the damaging content on their platforms, and it should be eliminated.
A worrying distraction
Personally, I worry that focusing on content alone distracts from the core problem of social media.
I say that because offensive and divisive content has always existed. Social media reduces belief in science and medicine, weakens trust in longstanding institutions, drives acceptance of ridiculous conspiracy theories, and damages faith in democracy. But no matter how far back you go in human history, you will find the same hate, the same disinformation, and the same deluge of deliberate lies. Awful content has existed my entire life, but it did not polarize society the way we see it doing today. Something is different now, but it is not the content.
So what is the problem with social media?
Having spent much of my career studying how software systems can amplify human abilities and enhance human intelligence, it is clear to me that social media does the opposite. It distorts our collective intelligence and degrades our ability to make good decisions about our future. It does this by bending our perceptions of the public sphere.
Building mental models
We humans are decision making machines. We spend our lives capturing and storing information about our world and using that information to build detailed mental models. We start from the moment we are born. We sense and explore our surroundings, and we test and model our experiences. We keep building these models until we can accurately predict how our own actions, and the actions of others, will impact our future.
As an infant you surely dropped a toy and watched it fall to the ground. Do that many times with the same result and your brain generalizes the phenomenon. You build a mental model of gravity. Experience your first helium balloon, which defies gravity, and your brain has to adjust, accounting for rare objects that behave in different ways. Your mental model gradually becomes more sophisticated, predicting that most things will fall to the ground and a few will not.
This is how we come to understand the complexities of our world and make good decisions throughout our lives. It is a process that goes back hundreds of millions of years and is shared among countless species, from birds and fish to primates like us. We call it intelligence.
For intelligence to work properly, we humans need to perform three basic steps. First, we perceive our world. Next, we generalize our experiences. Finally, we build mental models to help us navigate our future.
The problem is that social media platforms have inserted themselves into this critical process, changing what it means to perceive our world and generalize our experiences. This distortion drives each of us to make significant errors when we build mental models.
Social media and the public sphere
No, I am not talking about how we model the physical world of gravity. I am talking about how we model the social world of people, from our local community to our global society. Political scientists refer to this as the public sphere and define it as the arena in which individuals come together to share issues of importance, exchanging opinions through discussion and deliberation. It is within the public sphere that society develops an understanding of ourselves — our collective wisdom.
The public sphere of course does not represent a singular view. It encompasses the whole spectrum of views, spanning a range of cultural and political perspectives from mainstream to fringe. That spectrum represents our common reality. It embodies our collective sense of what views and values our society holds at each level, from the hyperlocal to the more distant. By forming an accurate model of society, we the people can make good decisions about our future.
Social media has distorted the public sphere beyond recognition. Each of us now has a deeply flawed mental model of our own communities. This damages our collective wisdom, but it is not the content itself that is most responsible. We must instead blame the machinery of distribution.
A dangerous middleman
We humans evolved to trust that our daily experiences build a real representation of our world. If most objects we encounter fall to the ground, we generalize and build a mental model of gravity. When a few objects float instead to the sky, we model those as exceptions — rare events that represent a tiny slice of the world.
But social media has inserted itself between each of us and our daily experiences, moderating and manipulating the information we receive about our society. The platforms do this by profiling us over time and using those profiles to target us with selective content — custom curated news, ads, and posts that do not represent our society as a whole. And this happens without us fully realizing it.
As a result, we all feel like we are experiencing the public sphere every day, when really each of us is trapped in a distorted representation of the world. This causes us to incorrectly generalize our world and build flawed mental models of our own society. Thus social media degrades our collective intelligence and damages our ability to make good decisions about our future.
A world full of helium
Even worse, the warped public sphere we each inhabit is not random. It is custom-curated to target us with the information that will most likely resonate. This gives most of us an overinflated impression of the prevalence of our own views and values, and an underdeveloped sense of the prevalence of conflicting views and values. This dynamic amplifies extreme perspectives and drives polarization, but even worse, it destroys our collective wisdom as a society.
I am of course not saying we should all have the same views and values. I am saying that we all need to be exposed to a real representation of how views and values are distributed across our society. That is collective wisdom. Social media has shattered the public sphere into a patchwork of smaller and smaller echo chambers, while obscuring the fact that these silos even exist.
As a result, if I happen to have a fringe perspective on a particular topic, I may not realize that the vast majority of people find my view to be extreme, offensive, or just plain absurd. I will now build a flawed mental model of my world. I will incorrectly assess how my views fit into the public sphere.