Be a healthy skeptic
When I was a kid, my parents would read the Sunday New York Times out loud to each other. Whatever section my mom had, she would read out loud items that interested her to my dad. Whatever section he had, he did the same to her. They shared news, in the tiny little bubble that was our Sunday kitchen table. They discussed and debated. And then it was over.
These days, the Sunday New York Times actually comes out starting on Saturday afternoon, and rolls out across the Internet as articles are published on their website and subsequently pushed onto social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The tiny little bubble of the kitchen table is now the 1 billion people who are on Facebook and the 400 million who are Twitter. Plus the hundreds of millions on Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, Reddit, Messenger, etc. etc. etc. The debates and discussions start, and they don’t seem to ever end, and they are pushed through aggregators and filtered through other websites and it’s never actually over. It’s one giant loop of news ingestion, news digestion, and oftentimes, news indigestion.
It’s exhausting.
For some people, Facebook has lost its appeal of helping you stay connected to friends and family. They are leaving the platform, sometimes in favor of another app, like Instagram, and sometimes in favor of just real life.
Facebook’s daily active user base in the U.S. and Canada fell for the first time ever in the fourth quarter, dropping to 184 million from 185 million in the previous quarter. Overall, Facebook’s daily active user audience was up 32 million people in Q4. But it was the smallest quarter-over-quarter increase in two years.
Facebook is trying to pivot in the wake of the accusations that it allowed its platform to be manipulated by Russia to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, an accusation that founder Mark Zuckerberg was far too cavalier about in the beginning.
So now Facebook will favor content that’s shared by users or otherwise actively engaged with. The thinking goes that Facebook believes prioritizing content that’s acted on will reduce the occurrence of fake and offensive content in the news feed. ‘Likes’ are worth less, comments are now gold. Shares are good too.
I have serious doubts this will change what’s gone wrong with the social platforms that are now anything but social. If I’m an avowed anti-vaxxer convinced that my boat could sail off the end of the Earth into space, I’m going to keep commenting on content that supports my views, and sharing it with others who think like me. I’m going to see more of my Aunt Mary’s bridge club, maybe, because my mom comments on all those posts, but fundamentally I’m going to keep my angry bubble alive and happy.
The most important thing to always be aware of is that on social media we are constantly being manipulated. Blatantly, but also subtly. For example, we put so much stock in what’s ‘trending’ to guide us as to something’s importance. But the influx of bots and false Twitter/Facebook accounts that were discovered in the wake of the 2016 election and continue to proliferate makes “trending” an illegitimate barometer. Bots create fake stories, fake hashtags, and then work together to push them to the point of trending, where mainstream media might then pick it up as an actual story.
It’s called computational propaganda — defined as “the use of information and communication technologies to manipulate perceptions, affect cognition, and influence behavior” — and it has been used, successfully, to manipulate the perceptions of the American public and the actions of elected officials. It’s been ongoing since at least late 2015, and remains effective despite the focus that has been put on manipulation via social media.
Bottom line: be a healthy skeptic. Take everything with a bag of salt. Whether it’s your cousin’s claim that she went on the best cruise ever (actually everyone had norovirus) or your friend’s claim that she’s got the best job ever (she cries herself to sleep every night), or Alex Jones’ claim that Hillary Clinton has sex slaves held captive in the basement of a DC pizza house: Be smart. Share less. Talk more.
