Dark underbelly of social media
Dear editor: Canadian whistleblower Christopher Wylie reveals to us the dark underbelly of social media. We discover that how we vote is not rational, as we like to believe; but it is emotional, rapid and instantaneous and involves largely unconscious processes.
And though humans are the unpredictable wild cards of every political campaign; they are at the same instant, the most reliable part of the system.
In ruthless pursuit of profit to convince advertisers to pay billions to reach targeted audiences, Cambridge Analytica used Facebook personality traits correlated to the user’s “likes,” then developed a computer model that would reverse-engineer the process using “likes” to predict personality.
In 2015, researchers showed this model was more accurate at judging and predicting political attitudes than humans.
We learned that personality traits are fluid and shift day to day and many factors influence individuals and their political choices.
Shifting everyone’s opinion is not the goal; instead, the real goal comes from the sheer size of big data that provides enough numbers which allows the inserted covert messaging to successfully shift just enough opinion to be effective. In tightly contested elections, a small shift in votes makes a big difference in outcome. Donald Trump’s election showed you don’t have to move every vote to win.
We understand there have been earnest efforts to uphold the utopian promise of social media, but increasingly it is being overwhelmed by sophisticated research behind a different kind of niche messaging, which focuses on our negative emotions with oversimplified rhetoric, out-of-context quotes or outright fake news.
We now know that politicians use outside players to do their dirty work and Facebook can not keep data safe from predatory marketers who easily harvest our personal information for all sorts of nefarious reasons.
But more importantly, we understand that the whole operating platform of Facebook itself revolves around algorithms that prioritize content to be able to generate within us a strong emotional reaction, including negative ones.
Science fiction has turned real science. To thinking men and women, this is a wake-up call.
We live in an Aldous Hukley type Brave New World of moral anarchy in a scientific age and it requires each of us to raise the bar on our understanding of this new world to better protect ourselves as we live in it. The best chance for democracy is our growing awareness about the perils of the digital age. And the hope, our millennials do a better job at it than the boomers and generation X have done.
Jon Peter Christoff West Kelowna