- Users of social media platforms like Facebook are part of constant marketing experiments
- Because algorithms are driven by AI and machine learning, it’s impossible to know how social media companies are choosing what to show — and not show — different groups of people
- Because there is no “random assignment”, marketers can’t fully tell if one ad might work better than another one.
- In the process, groups of social media users can be excluded from important messages
- Algorithms are so precise, they can target people down to an individual level
In other news, its been over a decade since Facebook started selling user data to Cambridge Analytica, who used it to massively target and proliferate polarizing political advertising during the 2016, greatly contributing to Trump’s win and the proliferation of QAnon insanity and general political diviseness and radicalization in the US.
I’d call that quite an ‘experiment’, but sure, Facebook is still definitionally doing a massive psy-op campaign, all the time, with new tech too, yep, that’s bad.
I hate this interpretation of black box algorithms.
We know how they work. It isn’t magic. We intentionally built them to be the way that they are.
What we don’t know is precisely which outputs you get from a large combinations of inputs, because it would require memorizing entire databases and simulating results as a weird form of mental math, and how we score things will be impacted by interpersonal biases even if we attempted that.
It’s a little deeper than that, a lot of advertising works on engagement -based heuristics. Today, most people would call it “AI” but it’s fundamentally just a reinforcement learning network that trains itself constantly on user interactions. It’s difficult-to-impossible to determine why input X is associated with output Y, but we can measure in aggregate how subtle changes propagate across engagement metrics.
It is absolutely truthful to say we don’t know how a modern reinforcement learning network got to the state it’s in today, because transactions on the network usually aren’t journaled, just periodically snapshot for A/B testing.
To be clear, that’s not an excuse for undesirable heuristic behavior. Somebody somewhere made the choice to do this, and they should be liable for the output of their code.
It’s not deeper than “we know how they work” which was the point I was making. I admit I gave am oversimplified layman’s explanation but it is not deeper than that.
Precisely why I’ve removed as much of myself as I can from each Meta platform. I hate that it’s such a grip on long-distance communication and I’m actively working with my family to minimize our interactions on there in hopes of them doing the same.
I had an idea a while ago on how you could lightly regulate social media platforms.
Require them to:
- Group users into cohorts of a size greater than X. ie, individual level targeting isn’t allowed. The higher this number the better.
- make available to users the cohort they are in
- publish openly every single cohort and their size
- make it possible to view feeds as if you were in a specific cohort.
Will this stop them funnelling customers into rabbit holes? No, probably not.
But it would make “targeted indoctrination” harder as they would have to try and indoctrinate multiple people at once. And it would make it more transparent just how many people are being fed propaganda or whatever you want to call it.
I have have made it to the wrong side of 40 without ever owning a Facebook account. Neither do I use watts app or instagram or X.
I have loathed social media from day one and always been of the opinion, anyone I actually care about or want to hear from I’m in touch with.
Don’t get me wrong, work groups / activities I do outside of work that I’m involved with curse me because I won’t join their groups, but alas, I have lasted this long and don’t see me caving in now :)
