Algorithms gonna get you!
If you look closely, you may find “social media maven” written on thousands of profiles on Linkedin, including mine.
In my case, I spent the better part of the last decade evangelizing and working on helping companies, brands, governments, NGO’s, celebrities, C-suite and common folk- like you and me, use social networking platforms for connecting with their audiences.
My initial ‘delight’ around people connecting with people of similar interests, shared joys, and pasts on common newly discovered contexts changed when “invite only” platforms turned open creating what we now know as “social media”. The gates that were initially there, was pulled down as MAU (monthly average users) and engagement ratios were pulled down to create the monetization models.
Soon, the “like farms”, the “Blue Tick Influencers” and the phenomenon of viral content which today is creating mental health issues among growing number of the connected youth, started indicating the strength of algorithms, that increase joy of having thousands of “likes”, hearts, comments, and the herd mindset created by trolls hounding people into a corner for behaving in a certain way versus another.
I had at various points of time, shared my skepticism on this phenomenon on various posts, and had also opined that these platforms should come up with their own regulations, as I continue to believe that those who work on these platforms, at least at the startup stage, genuinely believed that they were using tech to “make the world a better place”.
Here, where I argue for rules of self-censorship for social media. And then here, I questioned the feeding of algorithms, and the addictive behaviour of social media, and finally here, where I ask popular digital platforms, to start sharing easy to follow rules and take responsibility for the algorithms they are training.
Cut to present, 2020 is being called the Year of Digital Transformation. Almost, anything that can go online has, as staying home to stay safe from #Covid19, is the widely enforced cure-all. What that has meant is making digital tools- voice, video, text, email, memes, apps, not just acceptable but an imperative for survival. And yet, the flip side, the murky ‘click-bait’ copy, the phishing scams, and the horrendous social media coordinated riots, fueled by clips of atrocities shared on mobile video sharing platforms, and equally appalling counter measures either by the authorities or rival groups, has become common place.
It’s in this context, that “The Social Dilemma”, a Netflix documentary dramatizing the way #Algorithms harvest behavior information and push out content for engagement using #MachineLearning which now stupefies the same people who designed these lines of codes, becomes relevant.
Some quotes seem relevant! “It’s not the tech, it’s the business models” -seems to exonerate Silicon Valley as they seem to be held at ransom by Wall Street. But, Shoshana Zuboff, author of Surveillance Capital, calls it out as “A market for Human Futures”, where predictive analytics can enable marketers to create a need for chocolate ice cream in winter, or allow foreign powers to push for regime change or adopting a new way to make the planet green. The addictive nature of these platforms is described thus- “Only two industries consider their customers to be users- Hard illegal drugs and software.”
So what’s the way forward? As I wrote in another blog- With great power comes great responsibility. If you do want to build tech to make the world a better place, resist the urge to profit from it. Profit instead from wiping tears off the faces around you and generate ‘real’ smiles instead of ‘emoji’s.
Communicator 