“Never before in history have fifty designers, 20-35 year old white guys in California, made decisions that would have an impact on 2 billion people.” —Tristan Harris, Co-Founder of the Center for Human Technology
All of the speakers featured in Netflix’s new documentary The Social Dilemma are tech industry leaders who have left their high-paying, high-profile jobs at Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube, among others, and have banned social media for their own children. Why?
When asked directly what the problem is, the interviewees audibly gulped.
Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google, now called “Silicon Valley’s conscience,” currently plays a significant part in the articulation of what he and others see leading us to the end of humanity. They see democracies crumbling, the tearing of our social fabric, and a fast-approaching point in time where technology “overwhelms human weakness.”
HOW SOCIAL MEDIA IS CHANGING US
You might be thinking, How can posting a photo of my breakfast to Instagram pose an existential threat to humanity? Sure, it seems innocent enough. But what about that feeling when you don’t get enough Likes, not enough little doses of social approval? Chamath Palihapitiya—the CEO of venture capital firm Social Capital—characterizes this feeling as the “conflation of hearts, likes, and thumbs up with value and truth.” When self-worth is correlated with the unregulated input of others who are not thinking through the implications of their comments, people undergo a physical and mental change. Teenagers are especially susceptible. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist with NYU Stern, describes Gen-Z (or anyone who got on social media in middle school) as “a whole generation [that] is more anxious, more fragile, [and] more depressed.” In The Social Dilemma, Haidt presents us with some sickening statistics. According to the CDC, non-fatal self-harm rates for 10-14-year-old girls have gone up 189 percent since 2009, when social media became widespread and publicly available; suicide rates for the same demographic have increased by 151 percent. Social media platforms were “not designed by child psychologists who were trying to protect and nurture children” says Tristan Harris. Engineers “were just designing to make algorithms that were really good at recommending the next video to you.” Where children were once protected under various laws and socially accepted moral guidelines, the tech industry is now taking advantage of every weakness they see to exploit their psychology.
A popular saying around Silicon Valley is, “if you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product.” Actually, it’s not really you that is the product in this case, but your time and attention. Jaron Lanier, the “founding father of virtual reality,” has a more nuanced way of looking at this phenomenon. He says, “It’s the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behavior and perception that is the product.” Essentially, social media platforms are changing what we do, how we think, and who we are—for profit.
As the mathematician Cathy O’Neil says, “Algorithms are opinions embedded in code. Algorithms are not objective.” They are driven by the commercial interests of the company they are written for and the personal goal of the designer they are written by. As they are used, they become smarter and more accurate at predicting your next search or figuring out what video is most likely to keep you online. And if that means propagating dangerous conspiracies and spreading fake news six times faster than true news, so be it. At the root of what we call political polarization, addiction, and populism is this ‘recommendation algorithm’ and the customization of the content we view.
The more inflamed, jealous, or sad the content you see makes you, the longer you stay online. The longer you stay online, the more advertisements you see. The more advertisements you see, the more money the advertiser makes. The more tech companies tailor content to specific users, the more there is a difference in what people see and the more polarized users become. The more polarized users are, the more varied their consuming activities and the products they buy. It is in the financial interest of the tech companies—who are making money from advertisers—to keep you online for as long as possible.
We are living through a pandemic and “people have no idea what’s true,” says Tristan Harris, “and now it’s a matter of life and death.” The danger comes from how our emotions and minds are subtly changed by the content we see; “It’s not about the technology being the existential threat,”continues Harris, “It’s the technology’s ability to bring out the worst in society and the worst in society being the existential threat.” The problems we face today are calamitous: the climate crisis, racial injustice, the current public health crisis, and the assault on global democracy. And yet all attempts to fix these problems are thwarted by the fact that we do not have a shared understanding of reality. As Harris points out, “If we can’t agree on what’s true, then we can’t navigate out of any of our problems.”
A NEW AGENDA FOR TECH
How can we protect ourselves from manipulation and exploitation? How can we prevent the crumbling of democracies and societies under extreme political polarization and election hacking? How can we protect minorities from being targeted by populist groups weaponizing Facebook? How can we prevent children from being subject to the experimentation of “20-35 year old white guys in California”? How can we get back to the place where we have a shared understanding of reality? Keep in mind that people in the tech industry don’t give devices to their children.
You can:
- Turn off your notifications (anything that buzzes or dings)
- Don’t simply accept what is recommended to you; always do your own search for content
- Before you post, do a thorough fact-check and think through the implications of what you are saying
- Don’t click on click-bait (it perpetuates the financial incentive for companies)
And, you can follow Jonathan Haidt’s three rules:
- All devices out of the bedroom at a fixed time every night
- Work out a tech time budget with your family
- No social media until high school, 16 being the recommended age
We must encourage the next generation—girls in particular—not to use social media before high school. Their rates of depression, anxiety and self-harm—brought on by myriad social pressures and unattainable expectations—have increased the most since the proliferation of social media out of any other demographic. As high schoolers, we are in the best position to influence and support those students. And, if you are strong enough, you can delete your social media accounts.