Uniform Thought Machines

How social media induces social conformity even without the algorithms

May 02, 2023

Social Engineering of Civilization

Social media is the oppressive conformity machine of an entire civilization. Much has already been written on the negative societal consequences of social media adoption mostly focused on either poorly implemented polices or algorithms. However, what if the policies and algorithms are only part of the problem that has its basis in the very architecture or nature of social media itself and the types of emergent behaviors that arise out of its construction.

The basis of nearly the entirety of current conversations of social media revolve around the algorithmic manipulation of interactions on these platforms. These methods could be viewed into two major categories. Those being a) engagement hacking and b) social engineering. Let’s describe what these are and how and why they exist then proceed to reason about what phenomenon still remains that may simply be inherent in the mechanism with how we engage on these platforms that still manipulates societal interactions.

Engagement hacking

Social media initially had two objectives. It wanted to create an enjoyable experience and find a way to be profitable such that the services could continue. Early features such as the “like” button were attempts at making the experience simply enjoyable as described in the documentary The Social Dilemma.

“It is very common for humans to develop things with the best of intentions that have unintended, negative consequences.”

Justin Rosenstein, creator of the like button

What was actually discovered was a very effective engagement hook. A trigger for dopamine that keeps individuals engaged to whatever is in their view. As the need to find revenue was a paramount issue, this effect turned out to be a great method to keep users engaged which assisted the model of building advertising revenue from the user generated content.

Social engineering

The model for engagement continued to become more sophisticated and the driver for the evolution of the model are the metrics behind total user engagement. The end goal is to simply increase the numbers. The actions the users take and the screen time spent on the application.

The more screen time available, the more ads that can be shown and more revenue generated. However, what keeps individuals engaged doesn’t need to be anything that has a positive context. Negative context is often even more effective at eliciting a response that captures someone’s attention. Therefore, as algorithms are tweaked to provide higher engagement metrics, they are simultaneously fueling negative interactions.

Social media subsequently found itself within a role for which it was never prepared to handle. Responsibility beyond its knowledge and capabilities. Negative interactions, on the surface, seemed an obvious and apparent problem that required intervention.

The following is an extremely well stated observation of precisely the position that unfortunately the builders of social media platforms found themselves within.

“Facebook is removing content because they wanted to make money with a website, and the job of statecraft fell in their laps in the process.
They didn't volunteer, they aren't qualified, nobody told them they were signing up to run a kingdom, let alone the world. So they don't produce lofty, philosophical, well-thought-out positions on free speech and human rights.
They don't carefully manage the public square with the long term good of humanity in mind. They make the same expedient, best-effort, unenlightened, sounds-good-to-me decisions that literally every poorly qualified there-for-the-wrong-reasons ruler in all of history has made.
Your majesty, people are dying because cats are vessels of Satan! By royal decree, kill the cats. That's all this is.
I think they are trying, and I wish they had a Thomas Jefferson on staff and saw themselves as needing one. But they don't.”
— Dove, Hacker News (2021)

So, they did what any individual does that wishes to make the world a better place and discovers they also have the means to do so. They embark on the journey which leads to the Paradox of Tyranny.

The actions that seem obvious and intuitive often turn out to be the worst possible upon reflection. However, wisdom requires extraordinary time built on experience, deep contemplation and historical reflections. Our current principles of freedom and liberty came about over a process that started with the Charter of Liberties from 1100, nearly a millennium ago. Centuries of accumulated knowledge and experience in the pursuit to moderate and limit governing powers. Likely none of the stewards of social media are aware of what they need to know in this regard.

Without the prerequisite wisdom to understand the consequences of their actions, social media commenced on fixing what was perceived to be wrongs and injustice on their platforms and in the greater society. Unknowingly following the missteps of countless others prior.

Unmoderated spaces

What would social media look like without algorithms or moderation? Do all the problems go away? Or are there other negative inherent forces in play?

Completely unmoderated spaces open to the entire world typically devolve into bedlam. Why, because of the low cost of disruption that does not occur in real life. Quality content and information is expensive to produce in comparison. Disruptive content is cheap and can be reproduced efficiently at scale with cheap resources or automation. In an unmoderated online space, quality content will always be drowned out by disruptive noise. Spamming and trolling will tend to dominate. In contrast, real life activities cost more in resources and effort as individuals must organize, travel and pay expenses incurred and their activities also tend to be tempered as they may have reputational consequences as they are not anonymous online accounts.

We can think of moderation existing in multiple forms. One being to simply establish order, preventing spam and troll content such that conversation can be functional. The next being topic moderation with the purpose of keeping a discussion space oriented on the goals, interests or objectives of the group. Finally, opinion moderation which would generally be considered hostile moderation in the attempt to control narratives.

Moderation and the factor of scale

These issues of moderation tend to become mostly apparent at large scale. Conflicting views, opinions and nefarious actors are inevitable in an unlimited participation public forum. Moderators are often anonymous unelected, uninvited agents of interference of public discourse over selected for dispositions inclined to find great satisfaction in controlling what others are allowed to say. Yet, they are necessitated due to the unique conditions mentioned above of fully open online spaces.

In the physical real world, even large gatherings rarely require the concept of moderation. This is because everyone self selects only into the conversations, topics and other individuals with which they are interested. In a large public space, people will gather and organize into smaller groups. All voluntary association. Conversations of others across the room are drowned out by those local to you.

If we were to attempt to replicate the experiment of social media in the real world, then everyone attending a public gathering would each wield a megaphone and be required to use it for anything spoken. There is no locality of conversation as any utterance, no matter for who it is intended, will be heard by all. Focusing on any productive conversation becomes almost futile as the background is filled with constant competing distraction that is often purposely nonsensical and sensational as it becomes the only effective means to gather attention and to be heard.

Any attempts at rationality are countered with statements of absurdity. Not because they are genuinely believed, but because they are desperate attempts to garner attention from the crowd. All statements ever spoken are recorded only to be used as a mechanism for out of context disruptions at some future point by opportunists vying for dominance of attention.

This imagined chaotic scene, representative of a real life manifestation of the rules and conditions that are exhibited by social media, calls into question the sanity of even attempting to create such an environment at all. It seems to be completely unaligned and unnatural to our methods of communication and socialization. A doomed to fail experiment that was conducted on the majority of the entire world’s civilization.

Social media bubbles

Communication outside of the major social media platforms is typically perceived as echo chambers or bubbles of isolation. The implication being that major platforms expose you to the most diverse set of ideas, that you are well informed and will be more aware of what is going on in the world. You are in the community of everyone and therefore will be exposed to the maximum possible set of perspectives providing you with the essential knowledge for best judgement.

However, do the combined major social media platforms actually create such an environment? Do they exist outside the concept of any type of bubble of knowledge and views? Or, is it in reality one very large bubble in which the participants tend to conform to the mass?

There are multiple dynamics which work in opposition to the concept of being exposed to a broader set of ideas. First, there is the hesitancy to introduce points of view that are in strong opposition to the norm. This is a self modifying behavior where the individual is reluctant to engage in discussion that may result in criticism. How many negative interactions does it take for an individual to change their behavior? Negative interactions often carry much stronger emotional weight than the positive interactions. A person may receive a hundred compliments, and a single very strongly worded attack can destroy the positivity felt by all others. This results in the self moderation of ideas or points of view willingly discussed.

Second, is the desire to be accepted. Everyone has a desire for belonging. Many will temper their views so as to feel accepted. The larger the community the more normalized will be the views. Individuals will naturally adapt to some degree to fit the consensus norms of the group.

Third, social media has introduced a new dynamic that exploits every individuals desire for recognition and significance. This results in searching for views and behaviors that will bring about maximum attention or engagement from the mass. The effect is that emergent behaviors form via attention seeking goals that then become normalized. Since the origin of these behaviors are not seeking out productive accomplishments such as solving novel problems or providing realized value to anyone, they tend to gravitate towards harmful, decadent, risky or other extravagant behaviors as a means to capture the gaze of the mindless zombie horde of perpetual scrolling users.

It would seem that the second and third dynamics are in complete opposition. However, they synergistically work together to transform outlying behavior into normalized behavior. This is how we arrive at what would seem bizarrely anti-normative establishing itself as the norm as we have attention seeking behaviors that then gravitate towards the most common and effective of such behaviors resulting in narrowing into a set that become very popular. This satisfies the condition of the individuals who are seeking both attention and belonging.

There are additionally many detrimental side effects to society from the emergent attention seeking behaviors that affect even those not participating in such activities. Each side representing the opposing arguments becomes amplification mirrors for the worst points of view of the other side as that is a very effective attention hook. In other words, to find the most provocative statements or construct out-of-context statements to the same effect. It becomes difficult to know just how many participants in these types of conversations actually hold genuine views as the incentives push towards the more extreme for greater engagement. The tragedy is that each opposing side reacts to each escalation as if they are genuine until it is all noise and impossible to discern or quantify any metric of reality. Observers of these activities get caught up in the anxiety induced by the constant bombardment of seemingly tragic and imminent concerns for which some do not even exist in reality but are just the manifestations of attention seeking.

All of the effects described above are inherent in the architecture of most of the social media platforms and exist as a basis prior to the addition of any type of moderation or algorithmic manipulations that might also exist on top of these effects. The algorithms simply make an already problematic situation worse as they don’t address the core issues that cause rise to the problems.

However, a glimpse of socialization before mass social media might give us hints as to what better structures might look like if by some means they could still exist.

Pre social media

Communication prior to social media might be perceived as primitive, archaic, limited and void of a new world of ideas that exist today in modern society. How could it possibly be superior to the technological advances that we now have as the future is always progress, right?

But what if we actually gave up a plethora of advantages in the tradeoff of inviting the entire world into the same discussion space? What if existing in bubbles actually was an advantage for nearly everything that we perceived would be advantageous of an unlimited open community?

Prior to the entire-world-shares-same-space social media, communication existed in vast numbers of small website forums and discussion groups across the internet. Also and importantly, prior to smart phones there was still far more communication that occurred person to person in real life.

The advantages are numerous, but all lead towards individuals self directing their lives versus being caught up in the wake of social phenomena seemingly out of their control.

The different outcomes arise precisely from being in bubbles, but not just one gigantic bubble. Instead, everyone is in many small but diverse bubbles. It is far more decentralized than what exists today as there is not a single point of control for moderation or policy for every conversation spoken on Earth.

Each of these small bubbles, we will call social circles, are semi-private. The conversations are not broadcast out to the entire world. There are still group dynamics at play that shape conversations, but the point is that there are a multitude of these social circles that exist. Individuals discover and join those with which they find common interests.

There is less to gain from attention seeking behavior in small social circles and there isn’t the inherent need to do such simply to be heard. Controversial ideas tend to be less confrontational or threatening as every type of idea has more or less its own space where those who wish to participate in that type of discussion voluntarily do so. Therefore, censorship is not seen as essential means to have civil discourse as most simply gravitate to whatever social circles welcome the types of conversations they wish to have. Additionally, there isn’t the concept of magnification of threats or outrage. Meaning that what might represent some infinitesimally small proportion of views can not go viral to create the appearance of a broad acceptance of such views.

The concept of having a home feed or following individuals mostly doesn’t exist. Therefore, you are not bombarded with topics out of the lane of your conversational interests. In the real world, we don’t follow individuals and listen in to every thought they have throughout the day. If we did, we would likely find that to also be an unpleasant experience. Everyone we meet, all of our friends and acquaintances have some ideas with which we would strongly disagree. Yet, we mostly navigate this space without conflict because with in-person contact we are more oriented towards associations that are built on common interests and goals and we de-emphasize our differences. Therefore, we voluntarily engage with these other individuals around activities for which we find mutual curiosities and for other activities we perform them apart.

Furthermore, in-person conversation allows for far more nuance and understanding possible than in online spaces. We can easily perceive if someone is uncomfortable with a conversation topic and maneuver the conversation accordingly to avoid the conflict. This early filter or warning mechanism allows us to discover with whom we can discuss certain topics and with whom we should more delicately navigate those boundaries. Having difficult conversations online is often nearly impossible, but in-person allows the opportunity to gradually approach subjects and explain at a pace the listener is capable of following that can only be achieved through the type of feedback available via expression, tone and body language.

Therefore we find prior to the inception of mass social media that individuals in society are members of many social circles. Each allowing the expression of ideas without censorship or undue social pressure to self moderate ideas as we are able to join communities that are eager to participate with us in such conversations. Each such social circle allows for more in-depth and nuanced conversation that is more productive without the distractions of attention seekers hijacking the stage.

Participating in many circles allows for greater diversification of ideas as there is not global conformative pressures on such individual circles. This provides opportunities for strongly conflicting ideas to be discussed and explored without actually being disruptive or necessarily divisive.

These effects are only strengthened in relation to ever smaller social circles until we reach one-on-one in-person communication as the pinnacle of meaningful social interaction. In-person communication is far higher bandwidth and carries multiple signals in parallel. That being the primary message combined with other signals that help us interpret the message in the correct context. Is the message serious, a joke, sarcasm, etc? We are able to intuit if our message is understood and provide more context when needed often without even being asked to do so. Furthermore, the frame of mind is different. There are no group pressures or outside influences to interfere.

A very concise summary of the disparity that represents what was and what now is the societal condition could be stated as the following …

Pre-social media: Seek people with which I have things in common. Hang out with them and enjoy life.

Post-social media: Seek people with which I only have disagreements, harass them, ridicule them and live in misery because they exist.

Better social media

A better social media experience would be one which allowed for more self directed engagement for precisely the type of conversations for which an individual is interested. This is the inherent advantage of in-person real life conversations as well as many small distributed forums or groups that were popular prior to mass social media.

This could only be accomplished if social media places more control into the hands of the individual user to choose their own type of experience and content. Allowing users the ability to build more positive directed interactions on the platforms.

I would argue the entire concept of following individuals on social media is flawed by design. As stated previously in this article, it doesn’t represent anything we would want to do in the real world. We generally are not interested in following every thought of any individual. A better concept might be one in which users post to their own topic channels and we can subscribe to those channels instead of the user.

Some platforms that are already somewhat oriented towards smaller social circles with community building are Locals and this platform Substack. Both have a form of optional gated memberships through paywalls. This becomes an effective self selection mechanic that filters only those truly interested in the content area. Also, mass social media has spawned a horde of habitual trolling armies and currently membership only access is one method to keep them at bay.

I also created a feature request for Twitter to begin to add some mechanisms that allow the users more control over their content. As of this writing, it is ranked 3rd of all feature requests. If you find it valuable, you may wish to add your vote or comment to the referenced feature below as well as make suggestions to Substack Notes to incorporate capabilities that help align communication with those who are interested in honest participation.

Twitter feature request - "For you" content should be by user preference customizable

Finally, please add your thoughts, suggestions, or other interesting social media platforms you have discovered that you think may handle these issues better to the comments below.

If you find this content interesting and of value you can help me grow this publication and produce more content by sharing with others in conversations across social media.

Media attributions, used in illustrations

https://pixabay.com/illustrations/brain-biology-abstract-cerebrum-2836401/
https://pixabay.com/photos/adult-beautiful-beauty-face-1867889/
https://pixabay.com/photos/beanie-guy-man-beard-jacket-grey-2562646/
https://pixabay.com/vectors/machine-learning-information-brain-5720531/
https://pixabay.com/vectors/brain-organ-cerebrum-cerebral-lobe-5605289/
https://pixabay.com/photos/social-media-digitization-faces-2528410/
https://pixabay.com/illustrations/social-media-scrabble-social-5217024/
https://pixabay.com/illustrations/mobile-smartphone-app-networks-1087845/