Question 1: Social media & new technologies Flashcards
Describe the Great Hack
- Increased speech and amount of output, audience, cheaper
- Trying to persuade people like old electioneering
- New things
- Algorithms and echo chambers, troll farms,
- Anonymity - aloneness
- Addiction business model
- Data harvesting - get inside your head - loss
of privacy - psy-ops and social control (China)
- Determine personalities as it determines how we vote
- Is it really a democracy if they are influencing our every thought without the knowledge of most people?
- Not just reaching them, but all of their friends too
List some quotes from The Great Hack
“Comes back at you as Targeted messaging to change your behaviour”
“Find those few [persuadable] people and bombarding them with ads”
“These are considered a weapon” weapons grade techniques” - needed permission from the British government (SCL first used as a military technique)
“We can’t have a fair election because of Facebook”
“It’s about stoking fear and hate to turn the country against itself - divide and conquer”
“These platforms which were created to connect us have now been weaponised and it’s impossible to know what is what”
Describe Johann Hari’s thoughts
- Stolen focus
- We as a culture no longer have the focus we used to
- Mind wandering is an essential part of healthy thinking
- More interruptions to people’s days due to phones notifications
- Social media is a key factor in our loss of concentration span.
- The more often you pick up your phone and the longer you scroll, the more money they make
- We have downgraded” our capabilities as a species
- Stealing our collective focus - not based on individuals
- Promotes more influential language e.g. hate language as people are more likely to respond
Describe what the Rabbit Hole podcasts were talking about
Getting distracted and following the algorithms
List some quotes from the Rabbit Hole podcasts
“You would see a video from the site of the protesters, and then it will recommend another video from the site of protesters. So you would only see the site of protesters. If you start with the side of the police, you would only see the side of the police.”
“Then you had only one side of reality. You couldn’t see both sides.”
“So what you’re looking for in Caleb’s watch history are the clues for how he, over time, takes on more and more radical beliefs.”
“It was really the first culture war where the internet itself became the primary weapon.”
“It couldn’t just keep showing people more and more videos about the things that they were interested in. It had to show them new videos on new subjects, new topics featuring new people. It had to actually expand their tastes, including things they didn’t even know they’d want.”
“And I did feel very connected with these people.
I was like, you know, if only Lauren knew how I was, we’d be friends.”
“YouTube’s overall viewing time was ratcheting up so much that in 2016 they reached this milestone of a billion hours a day being watched on YouTube.
“So every day on YouTube, people collectively around the world are getting up and watching 114,000 years worth of videos.”
Describe the content from the Ron Deibert lecture
Ron Deibert mounts a compelling argument for why you’d want to wipe your smartphone clear of social messaging apps, calling them “cesspools of hatred, racism, intimidation, and ignorance.”
- Conspiracy theories about covid
- ‘Infodemic’ - overabundance of information - hard to find reliable information
- YouTube twitter reddit - not a violation of their policies so allowed untruths to be propelled online
- Gradually moved to remove disinformation
- Speed of spreading of videos meant that these movements were ineffective
- Fake news is a virtual war - coming at us from different directions
- Media is always biased
- Manipulation - need to make critical consumers
- Framing our reality or shaping our reality?
- Do users fully understand what they are accepting (terms) when they download apps
○ Use of language
- Governments influencing people’s voting decisions
- If you want to understand Facebook go into it as an advertiser not a user - can choose their demographics
- “Thanks to their attention seeking algorithms, social media platforms propel sensational and extreme content by design, using methods that are refined to tap into deep-seeded cognitive traits, social media feed on our emotions, biases and other mental short-cuts, creating roadblocks to effective reasoning and rational public discourse”
Describe the content from the Tik Tok Boom documentary
- First Chinese app to challenge silicon valley
- Dominates American market
- “We call making recommendations based on your interests, machine learning distribution”
- Created separate Chinese version of the app to keep Chinese rules and then for the rest of the world
- “TikTok is a blow up overnight kind of place”
- Adjusts what videos it shows you based on how you interact with videos on your FYP
- “Anyone can basically go viral on this app”
- Have to disguise political comments as make up videos so they don’t get taken down e.g. about China
- Shadowbanning - TikTok ensure people can’t see videos it doesn’t want spread
- Trump trying to ban TikTok only made it more popular
Describe the content from the Mirror Mirror documentary
- Todd Sampson
- “have allowed tech companies to harvest our attention”
- ADHD is increasing with phone use
- Issues with TikTok challenges
- Parasocial relationships - one-sided relationships, where one person extends emotional energy, interest and time, and the other party, the persona, is completely unaware of the other’s existence
- Over time they give you stuff that is slightly more radical so people are pushed down the rabbit hole
Describe the content from the Van Badham podcasts
Conspiracy theories are not a new phenomenon.
But the internet and, recently, the pandemic have turbocharged the dissemination of misinformation and disinformation.
A disturbing number of people are now getting sucked into online conspiracy cults.
One of the most prominent is QAnon, whose believers think a cabal of Satanic worshipping paedophiles operate a global child sex trafficking ring, and conspired against former U.S. President, Donald Trump.
Van Badham spent a year undercover in the online conspiracy community researching her book, QAnon And On She spoke to Paul Barclay.
Recorded on May 14 at the Queenscliffe Literary Festival.
Van Badham - writer, theatre-maker, podcaster, and novelist.
QAnon is a far right-wing, loosely organized network and community of believers who embrace a range of unsubstantiated beliefs. These views center on the idea that a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles—mainly consisting of what they see as elitist Democrats, politicians, journalists, entertainment moguls and other institutional figures—have long controlled much of the so-called deep state government, which they say sought to undermine Mr. Trump, mostly with aid of media and entertainment outlets.
