> now Facebook, the world's biggest social networking site, is facing a storm of protest after it revealed it had discovered how to make users feel happier or sadder with a few computer key strokes.
> It has published details of a vast experiment in which it manipulated information posted on 689,000 users' home pages and found it could make people feel more positive or negative through a process of "emotional contagion".
Pretty significant difference between "Facebook has done some research on changing moods" and "Facebook's product is changing your behavior."
It's overly dramatic in the way that I could say "Axe weilding man splits homeowners door uninvited" and "Fireman had to break down a door" and both are technically true, but only one is apt.
Facebook's product is influencing my behavior, technically, maybe, but it's a clumsy description made for the sake of drama. It's more accurate to say their product is targeted advertisements.
I don't see what else you want. In 2014 it was revealed that Facebook did run experiments to see how much of an impact they can have on people's sentiments. Just check the study, it's public: https://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full.
The researchers found out that Facebook's news does influence sentiments in a contagious manner. Which implies it does result in behaviors change on the platform, otherwise they don't have a way to measure the effect in the first place...
And don't forget to check the Acknowledgement section:
> We thank the Facebook News Feed team, especially Daniel Schafer, for encouragement and support; the Facebook Core Data Science team, especially Cameron Marlow, Moira Burke, and Eytan Bakshy; plus Michael Macy and Mathew Aldridge for their feedback.
It's not like they hide it, that's exactly why advertisers and political parties partner with Facebook in the first place.
It's not that I "want" anything else. It's that Facebook's product is ads, even if they also ran experiments to change sentiment. If I want to make a million people sad, I can't buy that from Facebook (directly). Conversely, if I want to show a million people an ad for my widget, I can absolutely directly buy that from Facebook.
Yes, that's true. At the same time the argument of "The Social Dilemma" is that at Facebook scale you just need a very small effect to influence the crowd in a way that matters. Paraphrasing the documentary (from memory): tuning human behaviours 1% in the direction you want, worldwide, is what Facebook sells and what their customers pay for.
Isn't that the goal of just about all human behavior, to influence other humans behavior? Is the issue with Facebook that they are too effective at it, or is it that most marketing & advertising behavior is unethical?
I personally don’t see my goal, the goal of projects I work on, the goal of companies I work for, or anything else I contribute to, to be about manipulating people behaviors without their knowledge and/or consent.
Facebook has been doing completely unethical experiments since forever (are you aware of their role in Rohingya’s genocide in Myanmar?).
They have been open about a lot of them, bragging how good they are at manipulating crowds.
And yes, they are crazy effective. And they have the scale. They have unethical behaviors, that are effective, applied at humanity scale.
My understanding of the Myanmar incident is that FB didn't swiftly block material used to inflame already existing ethnic tensions? From what I know, the fault there is they allowed communication in language that their AI and human reviewers couldn't understand.
They do not just show ads. They also display content.
Existing in a filter bubble has a strong effect on your perception. Perception has a direct influence on your actions. Couple this with interfaces which are purposefully addicting ("high user engagement" is a euphemism), and you can very directly influence behavior.
The pervasiveness of smartphones means that these apps are only a few clicks away for virtually the entire world population. And worse, once these apps are installed on your phone, they relentlessly pull you back in with and endless stream of notifications.
It is not only Facebook. Applications like Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok all follow the same basic patterns.
It is not an overly dramatic description. If anything the public has been frightfully unaware of the influence that these companies can exert on the world. I am glad that this film has brought these issues into the spotlight.
The movie raises the question of what advertisers are paying for, and conclude it must be behavior modification. From public service announcements that smoking is bad for you to Tom Selleck endorsing reverse mortgages, it seems advertisers pay to "show me ads" believing it will alter someone's behavior at least a little. Given the scale of Facebook's data and the scale of Facebook's audience, advertisers can use Facebook to make small surgical modifications to a vast slice of humanity. To me, this is somewhat compelling argument that Facebooks' "show me ads" business model really is pay to "influence your behavior".
"Show me ads" since the dawn of time has always been in an effort to influence behavior. Magazine ads. Newspaper ads. TV ads. This is just a different medium that much more surgical with its targeting.
The biggest danger in my opinion is how this time it's not just the ads that are changing your behavior but the platform itself.
The exact quote from the movie is changing "you are the product" to the product is
> the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your behavior and perception that is the product
It is not hard to argue that an ad fits such a description. Ads change behavior. We don't just have ads to buy things, but we also have political ads. We have ads for charity. We have ads for religion. We have ads for mental health. We have ads for public awareness. There's this common argument that ads are just about selling you things but such an argument doesn't reflect reality and is often strange to find coming from people living in a country that is going through a major political election where they are being accosted by ads encouraging people to vote. Considering we've been doing this for a few hundred years, I'm pretty sure someone would have picked up on it being wasted money if ads didn't influence behavior.
Take "make you buy" - are they "making" you do it, or are you in the market for a camera and they're providing you with a really nice choice of one that will likely suit your needs?
The answer of course is somewhere in between depending on context. People don't have zero agency, but they also don't have 100% agency.
Continuously feeding someone false information can change their perception of what’s right in the first place. That’s the whole point of impression ads. That’s why companies will pay so much to imprint an image on viewers.
If you are looking for a camera, going to a review site will give you a fair chance to find the product that fits your needs (most likely a lens module for your phone). Looking at Canon ads is not that.
They are making you associate brands or products with certain lifestyles, beautiful people, or status. This will bias your choices towards spending too much money on things that do quite little for your happiness in the end.
If an advert doesn't do a detailed comparison with other products then it's trying to convince you by manipulation, not presenting you information and relying on your agency.
A short version of this would be any product information media output that doesn't detail a products principle flaws is manipulation intended to sidestep your agency.
When did you last see a fizzy drinks (pop, soda) advert that said "tap water is better for you and cheaper but our brand advertising is supposed to associate drinking our drinks with being cool, so choose to avail yourself of our continued widescale brainwashing of your society to help you feel socially superior" or "we make sure our batteries mtbf is 2.5 years, with a narrow sd so that it needs replacing just after the warranty period expires; the battery though, it's glued in - clever eh!".
The central tenet of market capitalisms optimisation relies on consumers having perfect information and operating on that information. Advertising, the ads I've ever seen, are a direct effort at circumvention of that.
Yes, people still have some agency, otherwise ads wouldn't be needed. But ads purpose is to erode that agency.
Your post sounds like the attempted justification of someone who uses advertising?
I didn't realize how much these platforms police our thoughts until I started diggin around for stock footage on wikimedia commons. It only took a few hours before I was watching air strikes on iraqi communities, nuclear tests, people jumping to their deaths during 9/11. This stuff gets buried on social media, and it doesn't even appear on TV, yet I think it's important for all modern Americans to view it, because I believe most people would think differently and make different decisions if they saw such things.
