Manipulating Opinion or the Outrage Machine: Can it be Tamed?

I saw this theatlantic.com/magazine/ article  and put it aside because I was busy that day. Today I read it and highlighted it on my timeline for possible discussion because it is a hugely important issue.

The authors ask, " (W)hat would happen to American democracy if, one day in the early 21st century, a technology appeared that—over the course of a decade—changed several fundamental parameters of social and political life? What if this technology greatly increased the amount of “mutual animosity” and the speed at which outrage spread? Might we witness the political equivalent of buildings collapsing, birds falling from the sky, and the Earth moving closer to the sun?"

There is no question social media have changed the world, especially the part of it that is constantly connected to Facebook, Twitter, and the other big social media drivers of public opinion in the 21st century.

The authors Jonathan Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell reference the sociometer theory in this article by Leary which"reviews research evidence that supports three central predictions of the theory—that acceptance and rejection influence state self-esteem, state self-esteem relates to perceived social acceptance, and trait self-esteem reflects people's perceptions of their general acceptability or relational value."
They point out that "(s)ocial media, with its displays of likes, friends, followers, and retweets, has pulled our sociometers out of our private thoughts and posted them for all to see.'

We know from many disturbing studies this is particularly problematic for teens in terms of social media depression, vulnerability to cyberbullying, and a host of other issues young people have online.

However, a shocking "2017 study by William J. Brady and other researchers at NYU measured the reach of half a million tweets and found that each moral or emotional word used in a tweet increased its virality by 20 percent, on average."

The article goes on to provide a brief history of how Facebook and Twitter developed its functions, including, shares, retweets, and likes, which collectively has had the unintended (I hope) effect of substantially increasing the toxicity of the social media environment, causing "fake news" to flourish, and making outrage flourish,

The good news is there may be a way back. The authors point to three helpful approaches in particular:

"(1) Reduce the frequency and intensity of public performance. If social media creates incentives for moral grandstanding rather than authentic communication, then we should look for ways to reduce those incentives. One such approach already being evaluated by some platforms is “demetrication,” the process of obscuring like and share counts so that individual pieces of content can be evaluated on their own merit, and so that social-media users are not subject to continual, public popularity contests.

(I pointed out in my Facebook post this has already been done on Instagram for example.)

(2) Reduce the reach of unverified accounts. Bad actors—trolls, foreign agents, and domestic provocateurs—benefit the most from the current system, where anyone can create hundreds of fake accounts and use them to manipulate millions of people. Social media would immediately become far less toxic, and democracies less hackable, if the major platforms required basic identity verification before anyone could open an account—or at least an account type that allowed the owner to reach large audiences. (Posting itself could remain anonymous, and registration would need to be done in a way that protected the information of users who live in countries where the government might punish dissent. For example, verification could be done in collaboration with an independent nonprofit organization.)

(3) Reduce the contagiousness of low-quality information. Social media has become more toxic as friction has been removed. Adding some friction back in has been shown to improve the quality of content. For example, just after a user submits a comment, AI can identify text that’s similar to comments previously flagged as toxic and ask, “Are you sure you want to post this?”

I applaud all of these, but also wonder what our role as consumers of social media could be. Some of the things I have done and seen others suggest include:

1) Dieting - consuming far less social media if your tendency is to spend hours a day. Personally I find popping on briefly in the morning, popping back briefly in the afternoon, and maybe (or perhaps not, depending on the day) taking a quick look in the evening is far better than spending much of the day looking at my feeds, going into that daze of scrolling, scrolling, scrolling

2) Watch carefully - notice the source. If credibility seems off, check a fact-checker site to see if it is legitimate. Employ the maximum critical skills at one's disposal first rather than leaping to like or share.

3) Have more and better face time with family and friends - turning off the phone/computer/tablet when people are around as much as possible.