Margaret Louis / 22 September 2024 / Categories: Books, Non-fiction

Social Warming - the dangerous and polarising effects of social media

Reads Like Science Fiction except he’s describing our world right now.

I took much from this book by journalist Charles Arther. So much I think everyone should read it. It certainly indirectly advocates for somewhere like Poopsnoop, not controlled by in the authors words A moral algorithms.

“Social warming has happened gradually – as a by-product of our preposterously convenient digital existence. But the gradual deterioration of our attitudes and behaviour on- and offline – this vicious cycle of anger and outrage – is real.”

An absolutely fascinating and super well researched, kinda scary insight that certainly has changed my behaviour online and completely woken me up to my mindless scrolling, (and I thought I was pretty good at detaching from my phone) apparently in two hours a day our daily average of scrolling if we are one of the 4 billion smart phone users globally we are mindlessly looking at approx 700 pages of information. And that is worth a lot of money to companies like Meta (Facebook, Instagram) X formerly Twitter and TikTok.

Bulletin board called the well out of San Francisco in the late 70s where developers saw the more time spent arguing the more engagement was the start and great for the well as more time was spent they made more money for the site. What are you allowed to put on the internet 1990 communications decency act, trying to get porn off the internet, a pretty hopeless task, people being sued for what appeared on a bulletin board item they weren’t responsible for it, moderate as much or as little as you like, sites aren’t responsible for what other people put up there, section 230 (came out of the us) people have the inbuilt desire to rule other people because of their anonymity.

India tells Twitter certain things can’t be put online, Singapore restricts what can be seen about the royals, Germany insists hate speech has to be removed in 24 hours. Social media companies self regulate.

Meta

Get as many users as you can

Don’t let go of their attention

monetize that attention

There is no good incentive to get rid of people causing trouble.

There are few good examples of companies platforms that have filtered out the bad users by moderation.

Interesting example in the book

Reference text about fruit flies on sale for 1 million dollars and then he saw another copy to 1 million and 2 dollars, then the next day the book went to one million and 100 thousand.

The machines between the two systems, one was trying to sell on price and the other was trying to sell on reputation. These are algorithms that have no idea what they are trying to do. when only one of the two suppliers had the book.

The one thing you are going to understand from this book is “Algorithms have no morals”