The Cost of Digital Morality. When Mark Zuckerburg launched Facebook…
By: Luke Meredith
Tags: Programming, Social Media, Ethics, Technology, Life

else delete_internet

When Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook in 2004, it was designed as a way for Ivy-league uni students to interact and share their personalities, pictures, and aspects of their lives over a (at least at the time, relatively) secure website where one user could only access the page of another if they were first invited to do so. It was the most globally-downloaded app during the smart phone boom of the 2010s, and, at least during its adolescence, was a mostly harmless web-based platform designed to make friends and share stories.

Cut to 2020, and Facebook has evolved (or devolved, depending on your point of view) into a new, digital form of cancer, the company accused of willingly circulating ‘fake news’, dangerous conspiracy theories, and hate speech throughout user groups compiled from its more-than two billion global daily users. And it’s not just Facebook; Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and many others all openly seed the web with similar content. Several of these platforms (largely Facebook and Twitter) have been weaponized in recent years by both domestic and foreign governments in order to sway national and international election results via the spread of misleading and out-right-false information regarding opposing political parties. On another front, Instagram’s implementation of filters and its algorithm’s demotion of body-positivity-based content has seen a massive uptick in children developing eating and anxiety disorders, as well a rise in self-harm and suicide for teenage boys and girls especially. Incredibly sexualised or violent videos circulate to preteens via Tiktok’s algorithm. TikTok itself has been decoded by programmers and cybersecurity experts who found (other than a slew of data collection law breaches that can only be described as malware) that the platform implements a tactic aimed at new users, whereby a user’s first post on the platform will garner a massive amount of views, likes, and shares, which drastically diminish after consecutive posts, leaving users trying to replicate their initial success to little avail. Remember, this platform is very popular with young people (its demographic lists 16–24 year olds as 41% of total users), and it’s using a business model which targets the self-confidence of said youth, gives them a false sense of success, then shortly thereafter leaves them wondering ‘why don’t people like my stuff as much anymore?’. And we as a society largely seem to accept this, albeit because to deny yourself or your child’s participation in an environment like TikTok (or Instagram, or Twitter, or Facebook etc.) is seen by parents and individuals alike as denying yourself or your children a place in modern society. These apps, and the companies that build them, prey on people’s fear of being left behind. Of being left out. Of social isolation… Go die, TikTok. Die in a garbage fire.

Just climb right in and die.

So why is this happening? Well. Tech companies do these things because the core functionality of these platforms were designed to do them, initially by accident; the code and algorithms they are built on were first designed to push content to users that it considers most likely to been ‘clicked’, and the content most likely to be clicked on has been found — via those algorithms — to be content that is most likely to cause controversy among users. The algorithms were designed to feed us what we ‘liked’; instead, they feed us what we dislike, because the algorithms have learned that controversy is the subject most likely to maintain our attention for the longest time. So why does it matter to tech companies how much time you spend on their platform, how often you click to the next page and the next? Ads! Infuriating, sometimes unskippable, revenue-generating ads! Think about it: everything you’ve ever looked at online — every search, every online purchase, every image you’ve viewed, every product review you’ve read, every location you’ve visited while carrying your smart phone — all of that data has been stored somewhere in tiny, literal bits by whatever app or program you used to access it. The online world doesn’t disappear like footsteps on a dirt path after a rainstorm… It’s all there, right where you left it. A digital footprint, if you will; even that awful blog or MySpace page you made fifteen years ago, with your unwise or downright-stupid young-person opinions, is still out there somewhere on the World Wide Web, waiting for your spouse or your employer to find. Companies like Google and Facebook collect this information in real-time, store it in vast server farms all over the world, and use that data to target your web browser or social media platform with ads specified to what it thinks you want/need. This, and not Terminators or Ultron (yet…), is Artificial Intelligence. It knows you better than you know yourself, because while you might deny — or try to repress the memory of — that late-night private-tab Google search for Brony fan-fiction, Google itself certainly didn’t. Google knows. Google remembers. Google leases that information out to other companies and then all of a sudden you’re getting ads for Bronywear popping up in your daily news feed. You were sold out, used. But do you care? Probably not enough. That’s 21st capitalism for you, yay!

If only we could program people to care less about their right to be heinous bits of dogshit.

In 2020, the Australian government — with all the grace and glory of an impatient old man chucking a tanty at a smartphone and calling it ‘bloody useless’ because he can’t login to Gmail due to absolutely no fault of the phone and rather his inability to remember his own goddamn email address — introduced legislation to force Facebook and Google to pay Australian news media outlets for the news they collect and share via their respective news aggregators. Facebook’s response? Rather than pay for the news articles with the literal billions-upon-billions of dollars in profits Facebook makes each year — articles written by Australian journalists working for Australian news media companies — the financially-enormous American company simply threatened to block all Australian news on its platform. This law is therefore useless when it comes to protecting the copyright of new media publishers, and devs should probably think about how their products will ultimately affect other businesses when putting their ideas in practice. See, as developers, it’s our duty when designing apps and programs to avoid these sort of issues by building something that won’t debase or misuse its customers, whether that be users or content-contributors/creators (I’m looking at you, YouTube). But ask yourself: If someone offered you a 20 million dollar investment on your startup, with the same tried-and-tested business model aimed at generating profits by manipulating users, by exploiting them on a psychological level, would you really think twice? Or would you just go with the status quo, because you have to make the investors/shareholders happy because they’re actually the people in charge, not you, and you don’t want to lose everything you worked so hard to create because you need money to buy a new Samsung Galaxy every twelve days because planned obsolescence is absolutely the new normal? Sigh. It would be abnormal not to take the money. That’s why web devs are web devs, right? It’s a job we enjoy, but we’re also chasing that billion-dollar idea. If the Zuck came across that luck, maybe I can too! At the very least, we can pretend on the surface to push back against the current business model plaguing the tech industry, just enough to be able to say that we tried to make a change. That we tried to make the world a better place. But unless enough people vie for real change, these giant companies will continue to churn out shit-sandwiches, and we the people will continue to eat them.

Buy me, I’m innovative.

Social media users enjoy the controversy. But it’s not their fault. They are programmed by the very programs they use on a daily basis. They enjoy the endorphins they’re hit with when they get a like on their fifteenth selfie of the day, or a positive comment confirming their own bias that “Kevin is the best politician in the world!’ in a Facebook group dedicated to “Kevin, the best politician in the world!’, their ideas bouncing around an echo chamber, never to be questioned or disputed because to do so makes the opposition not just a person who thinks differently, but a person who is wrong and should be hated. Social media promotes the segregation of ideas, demotes civil discussion, devalues critical thought. Its users are addicted to being seen, being heard, being acknowledged, reasons be damned! They are encouraged to ‘like’ and ‘tag’ their friends, their employers, their universities, because it generates revenue for their friends and their employers and their universities; revenue in the form of publicity for industries, and self-worth for individuals. Social media, while on the surface seems like just another free and easy way to communicate, is below the surface an industry beyond comprehensible wealth and power, built on a business model that defines us — human beings — as products to be collected and sold. It’s a system that has conquered traditional capitalism, one now strategically reorganised year-after-year by CEOs and CTOs and advert-agency psychologists and shareholders who all think two superyatchs aren’t enough superyatchs for one person to own, in order to give you, the average consumer, near-zero choice in whether or not you wish to keep participating. Don’t want to own or be a sucker to a smartphone or a tablet anymore? Think a moratorium is in order? A digital cleanse? That’s okay! All you have to do is go fuck yourself, because at the current rate it won’t too be long before paying for groceries, checking your bank account, watching TV or even unlocking your own front door will become so difficult in the absence of digital technology that you will — not by free choice, but by design — be compelled to rejoin the future because the future is now (woohoo!) and Apple just added an extra megapixel to its new model’s front-facing camera and AppleCare is a bargain this year at only 42 cents less than the cost of four month’s rent but you actually have to assemble the entire device yourself now because factory workers in communist China demanding a livable wage are bad for the environment. Like it or not, these companies are in control, they own you, and they know it. Consequently, our economy is now starting to trickle up, not down, where it’s hoarded by a handful while the rest of us fight each other for a dime. Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon…. These companies and more all take what they need — vis-a-vie our precious data, the analytics of our very lives — and leave us with the inability to separate self-worth from the amount of attention we receive in the online world and/or an addiction that bleeds us to feed the cycle. This is what our future holds, this is how it was designed to be, and until there is real change users will continue to chase that dragon until it burns them dry, always wanting just ’one more like, please…’

Resources/References:

1. University of Oxford, “Social media manipulation rising globally, new report warns”, July 20, 2018.

2. “Shock reason why you need to delete TikTok immediately”, July 4, 2020, www.news.com.au/technology/online/social/shock-reason-why-you-need-to-delete-tiktok-immediately/news-story/1f877f00aaf1e296fdcb89960a9fe59c

3. Orlowski, J., Coombe, D., and Curtis, V., “The Social Dilemma”, January 26, 2020.

4. Zuboff, Shoshana “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”, 15 Oct, 2019.

5. Barrett, Jonathan and Kaye, Byron. “EXPLAINER-Facebook, Google battle Australia over proposed revenue-share”, Sep 1, 2020, lawfinance.yahoo.com/news/explainer-facebook-google-battle-australia-064724818.html

6. Segall, Laurie “The Weaponization of Loneliness”, Dec 9, 2019.