Tag Archives: Facebook

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Meta Response

My Thoughts, , , , , , , , , ,

Does the interaction of social and emotional data with the power of social and emotional data translate into positive results?

Recently I was given a Meta Survey via Facebook and I replied with this…

What is your biggest concern about Meta?

I work with ML/AI and I know it is possible to steer people with it to get a given outcome in very subtle ways. My concern is that companies like Meta are steering people towards content that produces a psychological reaction that then produces addictive behavior in order to keep them engaged with the goal of gathering personal data for the purposes of sale of such data and targeting people with advertising that encourages them to consume more than they would under normal circumstances. Generally with social media the corporations running it are extracting a resource, as in data, time and attention from people in a way that tilts the scales in favor the social media platform providers. To improve this would require more transparency with regards to the data that is collected and an ‘open book’ policy where individuals must give consent to all elements of data harvesting and are allowed to access the records that are kept on their personal data. Also, to have tools built into the platforms that allow people to block things as simple as using keywords to black/whitelist content and optimize the user experience in a way that allows them to override algorithmic control of the content that they are presented with, including advertising. AI/ML works best when it is collaborating with the user and not in the role of an invisible hand that exercises control over their experience from beyond their control.

What do you value most about Meta?

The fact that there has been some open source release of code such as PyTorch which I use on a regular basis.

Meta Survey
Meta Survey

 

Extremism and Mental Illness and Social Media

There is something that is pushing extremes and actually it is in both directions. This seems to have happened ever so slowly, it has crept in. Someone I heard on a podcast said once “Almost everyone is in Wokeistan or Trumpistan and there are like 7 people left on Earth that are like WTF???” It is an exaggeration but makes a point. There are disturbing things in the realm of mental illness, one of the worst is the fact that there is now a catagory for suicide in pre teens. There was no such category at one point as it was too rare of an outlier to keep track of, since 2007 there is. What happened around that time? Smartphones with social media apps, correlation is not always causation but, it does make you wonder. If anything the issue pushing extremes can be found in the media, both traditional as it grapples with loss of market and pushes more extreme ‘bait’ to keep viewers. And, lastly you guessed it, social media in which the invisible hand of algorithms feed us content determined by large corporate interests. I think that it will, and this is the hope, that it will selfcorrect, the pendulum when it gets to an extreme will eventually go in the other direction. This is the blessing of free, democratic countries, change is possible. Democracies are a mess but, they are the best we have as of now,considering the alternatives have generally turned out worse for people.

censorship

Social Media Reform

My Thoughts, , , , , , ,

Recently I posted a comment to this video below. What got me to post this comment besides the video itself was the censorship of Coronavirus videos on YouTube created by Dr. Seheult which thankfully are still all available on MedCram. Also I recently heard of censorship on Facebook as well.

Comment to Video

Personally I believe that major problems with social media as it is are privacy, censorship and machine learning curation of content that may include unintentional bias. I understand with machine learning many times the bias is accidental and purely based on the data going in to create the model. Another subtle potential issue with social media is manipulation, as in the manipulation of human behavior in order to create a situation in which they can be motivated to act in ways that are good and thereby profitable for the entity that owns the platform but not in a healthy behavior pattern for the individual in the long run. In my opinion humans can be subtly gamed with stimulating content curated by the platforms that can do things from as simple as encouraging more use of it to something along the lines of gently reforming a set of values that could sway a populations way of thinking over time. All institutions are capable of doing this but, social media being a unique personalized experience certainly has more power in this regard. It can be both your best friend and worst enemy. To shift forward into a new and more equitable model, in my opinion a good idea would be to redirect the funds that go from the government to the companies that run the social media platforms and fund programs at research universities to foster the development of alternative social media platforms. This would include any fines that would become levied on the social media companies for violations of the laws that will be written as a result of this executive order. The idea is to foster the development of alternative platforms that allow for a public commons on the Internet that is ideally along the lines of a self organizing system. Preferably it would not be under the control of any single entity and have transparency as far as the technology is concerned so there are no tricks up it’s sleeve, such as privacy concerns, censorship issues and unintended model/algorithm biases and unintentional human behavior modification. A model for this would be along the lines of what has been done with academic scientific research, open source software or other media such as Wikipedia, which by the nature of having many eyes on it becomes self adjusting to the needs and wants of the users, with the mechanism that achieves the results in plain sight. No doubt given enough funding and some bright minds on the task this could become a reality as the current technology required to achieve this goal is readily available.