Media Manipulate, So Question Democracy
With elections on the horizon, the social engineers are gearing up again to "protect our democracy." We must watch out for sanctimonious justifications for the censorship-industrial complex.
When proof emerged earlier this year that Hamilton 68 was a high-level hoax perpetrated against the American people, it was met with a great wall of silence in the national press. The disinterest was so profound, it suggested a matter of principle rather than convenience for the standard-bearers of American liberalism who had lost faith in the promise of freedom and embraced a new ideal. —Jacob Siegel
During elections, X works to get in front of a range of tactics that people use to target the process. To do this we hire the right people, update our policies and evolve our product. … We’re currently expanding our safety and elections teams to focus on combating manipulation, surfacing inauthentic accounts and closely monitoring the platform for emerging threats. —X Trust and Safety
Tristan Harris is famous. He’s like a white knight standing in front of the censorship-industrial complex. If we just focused on him, we might think the whole rotten scaffolding was built on good intentions. And truly, I think Tristan Harris has good intentions. He doesn’t call for censorship per se. Instead, he calls for a mix of moralizing and regulation.
More recently, Harris has moved on to AI.
But Harris became famous after he left a mammoth internet media company, whereupon he started crusading for social media reform. Because social media is still the primary way most of us get our information, we should touch briefly on what we'll call the Harris Hypothesis, despite evoking social media histrionics that might strike us as so 2020.
You see, Harris isn’t entirely wrong.
Social media has an enormous shadow, as do the humans who crouch in it. Still, we must take hold of our fears before they take hold of us. The idea of regulating the internet to “protect democracy” might seem like a good idea at first, but it probably helps justify more of what we despise—censorship and manipulation—carried out by a different, multi-headed master.
The Harris Hypothesis
The Harris Hypothesis has elements of truth, so it's important to acknowledge it while dispelling the hype and hyperbole. The summary is my own, so discerning readers might want to give Harris an independent hearing, for example, by watching the 2020 documentary, The Social Dilemma. Anyway, here are some summary points:
Social media companies are profit-driven.
Social media companies use sophisticated algorithms and supercomputers to monitor online activity and develop sophisticated psychographs that predict our wants and behaviors.
Social media companies use these psychographs to serve up content we want, so they can get more and more of our attention to paying advertisers.
Users are 'forced' to use social media due to powerful network effects.
Users get lots of media that conform to their biases; advertisers get access to users' attention; social media companies make more money.
Social media companies inadvertently reinforce people's biases, which causes political polarization, social fracturing, and disconnects from reality.
Users are fairly helpless, as these systems hijack their dopamine and limbic systems, creating a perfect tool for both positive and negative reinforcement.
Reality-based civic engagement required by a healthy democracy is lost as more and more people descend into a self-reinforcing downward spiral.
Democratic institutions are at risk; populist nationalism is rising due to social media. (And Trump. God help us, Trump!)
Government officials must regulate social media companies, and those same officials must tweak social media algorithms for the overall good.
The forgoing is a plausible-sounding hypothesis, which makes it dangerous.
Social Media: Upside and Down
Let's examine how the Harris Hypothesis focuses on social media's perceived downside while virtually ignoring the tremendous upside. The hypothesis assumes people are more like tropistic creatures than thinking, choosing agents. Of course, some people are more susceptible to manipulation than others.
Otherwise, the overarching narrative is that we're all addicted to social media content like grannies are to slot machines. Of course, there is an addicting property to media, just as there was to television media 40 years ago. But we are neither living in a massive Skinner Box nor are we utterly helpless to all the highly-paid engineers' algorithms or the supercomputers that power them.
If we wish not to be manipulated, we must operate with skepticism by default, seek out better sources, and learn to be more discerning as critical thinkers.
Tristan Harris is one in a string of social media whistleblowers who won accolades because he courageously went up against powerful social media companies. But the whistleblower trope assumes people are clueless about how social media companies work. But we’re all getting more savvy, and less credulous—particularly as the #TwitterFiles only confirmed what we already knew.
Weirdly, social media paladins don’t like how Big Tech uses “our” data. In other words, those self-same clueless people ought to be able to publish information on the internet and expect no one to scrape it, analyze it, or use it to offer them things they want. The idea is that it's your data just as a chair or a toothbrush is your property. But information is a non-scarce good. You can't expect to give it freely to the world and keep it, too.
Remember Cambridge Analytica?
The Trump campaign retained the company in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election. Whistleblowers with guilt complexes were greeted with fawning adoration and instant halos when they bravely came out. Cambridge Analytica's CEO stepped down. Congress convened hearings. Mark Zuckerburg folded like a Dixie cup, then apologized and reinforced the story of Trumpian manipulation by psychograph.
When Trump got elected, the other team was suddenly interested in the ethics of using big data in elections—even though Big Tech manipulation likely benefitted Clinton more than Trump, according to analyst Robert Epstein. Before that, everyone had fully embraced the microtargeting practices that had been called brilliant and innovative after President Obama's 2008 and 2012 victories. The yearning for integrity was motivated more by partisan team sports and horror at Trump's election than by any categorical imperative.
The Harris Hypothesis runs adjacent to the Cambridge Analytica guilt complex.
The most troubling part of the Harris Hypothesis, though, is that there is one Master conception of the true, the beautiful, and the good that a cadre of Silicon Valley Philosopher Kings or Regulatory Seraphim happens to possess. Implicit in all of this is that Tristan Harris-types will ride in upon white horses and help benevolent angels in the government create the right algorithms. When they do, we can all be well-informed and civically engaged in just the right way. Yet somehow, we got Hamilton 68.
Who will help us all be upright voters in 2024?
Masters of Manipulation and the Very Idea of Democracy
Undoubtedly, Big Tech is composed of master manipulators capable of swaying elections. They will put their thumb on the scales. They will bias their search results. And I have told you about being a victim of Google’s censorship.
Perhaps no one has done more than analyst Robert Epstein to expose just how far Big Tech companies are willing to go to socially engineer their customers.
The problem, with all due respect to Harris, Epstein, and even the Founders, is that there is no such thing as a voter—much less a politician—who is knowledgeable and civically engaged enough to make decisions on behalf of 325 million people. Each of us operates in a complex adaptive system we call society. No algorithm on earth will ever change that fact.
The problem, therefore, lies with the very idea of democracy.
Social media might have helped illiberal regimes. If search results bias researcher Robert Epstein is to be believed, Cambridge Analytica had almost nothing to do with Trump’s 2016 victory and it appears that social media bias accounts for the number of votes by which Hilary Clinton won the popular vote.
Still, populism has been around a lot longer than Alphabet (Google, Youtube) and Meta (Facebook and Instagram). And media manipulation has been around a lot longer than Edward Bernays. Indeed, if social media targeting the masses during elections is of concern to everyone, maybe we're looking at the wrong problem. Maybe we should reconsider the dynamics of our very system of government.
Maybe we should reconsider that golden calf, democracy.
Don’t forget to enter the Constitution of Consent contest by October 15 for the opportunity to win a piece of $25,000.
Yes, democracy is the problem, not the solution. Or at least the form of democracy that involves voting and majority rule. Perhaps genuine rule by the people is allowing individuals to vote with their wallets and their feet. A free market in governance would allow everyone, even in niche markets, to get the governance they want without having to figure out which is the lesser of two evils.