[gundmc]

> "Changes to your behavior and actions..."

Isn't this the definition (or goal) of all advertising? I don't see the connection to the first half of the statement tying it to free products and services.

There are plenty of paid services that are riddled with ads as well. Movies, Cable TV, airline flights, etc. The fact is that people and organizations are _constantly_ trying to influence your behavior. It's not obvious that's only a bad thing.

[soneca]

I believe the extra step of social media is that they are not satisfied by changing your behavior from not buying a product to buying a product. They also change your behavior in somewhat indirect ways with the goal that you continue to engage with their platform more and more and be subject to more advertising on the future. So they make you more fanatic or more extremist or more polarized, because it will lead you to stay more time on their site.

They want you perpetually in the state of looking into a rabbit hole rather than feeling that you are satisfied with your knowledge of something and ready to move on with your life.

The fact that we bring our phone everywhere, that there are push notifications, and that we interact with other people (often friends) makes it fundamentally different from a TV or a magazine.

[amurthy1]

> They also change your behavior in somewhat indirect ways with the goal that you continue to engage with their platform more and more

How is this different than any other kind of media like TV, magazines, newspapers, etc.? All of them are trying to make their product engaging so that you consume more of their media and more of their ads. Just because those services also charge a subscription fee, doesn't change the dynamics of what they're trying to do. Social media has maybe just been more successful in doing so, partially because

> The fact that we bring our phone everywhere, that there are push notifications

So the dynamics have always existed in previous platforms, it's just been ratcheted up to a higher level with social media.

[inglor_cz]

The word "just" in your last sentence does not paint the full picture of the situation.

Imagine two villages. In one of them, it is customary to drink a glass of wine with dinner. On holidays, two.

The other village has a habit of drinking themselves stupid every single evening with gin.

Now: this is really only a difference in quantity. Both are consuming alcohol for pleasure. But the first village will probably be OK; there are tons of such villages in France, Spain and Greece, where people live to be 90.

The second village has a huge, deadly problem.

[soneca]

Other platforms never leveraged opinions, pictures, life facts from people I know, like friends, family, acquaintances, coworkers, etc to induce behavior change.

And things change a lot with scale. Even if the intent or the principle is the same, dynamics are different if it is in a scale orders of magnitude larger.

I don’t think we should be dismissing new understandings of how social media affect our lives on the grounds that other media in the past tried to do the same.

[FooHentai]

Putting aside for a moment the much tighter feedback loop and way more in-depth metrics that allow much greater tuning and targeting...

With broadcast media, you can turn off the TV, radio, or put down the magazine. The social punishment cost of this is limited - If someone asked you about current affairs or the latest show etc, you might have to deal with being out of the loop.

But with smartphones and social media, everyone's a content publisher and it's all intertwined. Stepping back/checking out has a much higher social cost as you're not reachable and you're gonna miss those life updates from friends and family if you're not sitting on the same communication channels as them.

[godelski]

Simply, your TV doesn't turn back on and tell you that all your friends are watching a certain show. When you turn your TV off, it is off.

[adamsea]

Don’t give them ideas! ;)

[ldubost]

> So the dynamics have always existed in previous platforms, it's just been ratcheted up to a higher level with social media.

I remember a friend saying the "optimization is killing us". The whole economy is getting better at what it does and as it happens there are many side effects.

Those with no ethics will manage to harvest the social media technology for their profit and not for society. It applies also to taxes where companies are getting master at dodging them. Liers are getting masters at lying and we have to fight to rebuke the lies (the documentary has a quote about how much more effort is required to fight disinformation than to create it)

He also argues that optimization is poison to yourself ! But that's off subject.

[TeMPOraL]

Optimization per se isn't the problem, much like thinking isn't (and arguably one is quite likely synonymous to the other at a fundamental level). The problem is with what you optimize for, and how hard.

So most companies aren't optimizing for a goal of "maximize our pockets AND maximize world happiness AND maximize the value our users get from us" with a proviso to not optimize too hard, so that unknown but desirable values that aren't expressed in the goal function don't get optimized away. No, they just optimize for "maximize our pockets", and do it hard. And when they do it like this, any sense of ethics or dignity is one of the first to fly out of the window.

Similarly, the optimization being "poison to yourself" is not as much a danger of optimization per se - wanting to improve yourself is a useful and noble desire! The problems usually start when you focus on a narrow goal too hard, to the exclusion of everything else in your life.

As for the market and how things are: my belief is that we're in a tipping point where the market, as an optimizer, is getting out of control and needs to be reined in. It's worth remembering that the main force behind market optimization is competition - I'll find a new trick to undercut you, you'll find a new trick to undercut me further, etc. until we reach diminishing returns, and the price of goods/services settles at barely above costs. Here are things I strongly believe to be true (and rather self-evident) about competition:

1) In a competitive environment, once one party figures out a trick that gives them advantage, everyone else has to do the same or risk getting outcompeted.

2) You don't have to compete only on production efficiency - you can also compete on quality (in the direction of getting away with lower quality for the same, or slightly lower, price), on business models, on ethics (any ethical principle you can skirt will open up new avenues for free profit), on advertising, on adherence to laws, etc.

So over the past centuries, the market had a lot of low-hanging fruits to pick. New materials, new processes, economies of scale, innovations in transport - all allowed to provide better goods for less. But now, I believe, we've run out of these easy wins - most competition happens on the grounds of lowering quality, business models (Everything as a Service, DRM, razor-and-blades, etc.), ethics (see e.g. social media companies), advertising (better RoI than making marginally better product), legality (Ubers and AirBnBs of the world running on a "break laws, and use VC money to keep regulators at bay until the market is cornered and competitors are destroyed").

The market is no longer optimizing us for giving us best possible goods at lowest possible price. Instead, it gives us worst sellable crap at highest possible price, by tacking on hidden and indirect costs.

That's why I'm increasingly in favor of regulating some business models out of existence - particularly the ad-subsidized everything, razor-and-blades everything, and "move fast and break laws" ones. The market's role in society is to make our lives better. The market has optimized past that. So the easy and socially destructive tricks need to be cut off, so that the market can return to optimizing for betterment of consumers.

[thu2111]

they just optimize for "maximize our pockets", and do it hard

That's not the case.

Consider the purest examples: Google routinely incorporates factors beyond short term profit into their ranking functions. For instance they ranked SSL using websites higher than non-SSL using websites, to encourage use of encryption. The ads "quality score" system penalises advertisers whose ads appear to be low quality, defined by users not finding them useful. The constant shovelling of social justice themes into the search engine homepage.

The biggest problem these firms have is that they are not focused exclusively on maximising profit. Profit is an excellent metric! It is the sum of all the happiness and utility you are creating across all your customer and userbase, minus effort expended, in a single quantifiable number. Think of all the happiness created by Apple, Amazon, Google and yes even Facebook and Twitter. Hundreds of millions of people use the services of these firms, often for free, and they use it because they like it.

The problem big tech firms have is they explicitly got on board with "let's maximize world happiness" as a goal. Dumb dumb dumb. Nobody agrees what world happiness is, but there sure are a lot of activists who will always be convinced you're not doing enough about it. Once you go down that path you'll never stop walking, and the further you walk, the more abusive the activists get. It's so subjective and unquantifiable you can never tell if you've done enough.

my belief is that we're in a tipping point where the market, as an optimizer, is getting out of control and needs to be reined in

Isn't that just a classical Marxist or Malthusian collapse proposal? People have been predicting that capitalism will somehow collapse in on itself for hundreds of years, it never has because it's a fundamentally natural, evolved and stable system. The alternatives, not so much.

[stocknoob]

Comparing newspapers to Facebook is likening a cup of water to the ocean ("just water, scaled up"). People aren't reading an ever-changing, infinite-supply, A/B tested, microtargeted newspaper.

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

In terms of behavior changes: Don't forget alcohol, tasty food, the whole sex industry, fashion, and even many aspects of the shelter industry. There isn't a seller on earth who passes up the opportunity to engender eagerness to buy.

[nsb1]

>How is this different than any other kind of media like TV, magazines, newspapers, etc.? All of them are trying to make their product engaging so that you consume more of their media and more of their ads. Just because those services also charge a subscription fee, doesn't change the dynamics of what they're trying to do. Social media has maybe just been more successful in doing so, partially because

I think this trivializes the problem. The issue isn't that these things have existed for ages and are simply getting better, the problem is that we have gone from mass-marketing designed to appeal to a broad audience to personalized marketing designed to appeal to just you. With that in place, the more data that gets collected about you, the more precise the message delivery can be. The more sophisticated the algorithms that input all that data get, the more susceptible you'll be to their messaging because they are designed to capitalize on human psychological weaknesses.

[tilolebo]

The problem isn't only the dynamics, but the regulation that comes with the technology.

In many countries, TV is highly regulated: can't advertise for alcohol or cigarettes, political speech time is measured to make sure each "camp" get the same exposure, etc.

There's no such thing on social media.

Same goes for Uber, Airbnb & co, by the way, although this is easier to regulate.

[maigret]

TV, magazines have to choose _one_ editorial line at a given time. Social media can present everyone their own bubble, and so it has bad side effects. When you have a forum, everyone is presented the same content. For example, this results in administrators being aware of bad content most of the time (at least in the few forums I follow). Everyone on HN see the same ranking. Social media and recommendation engines though, will send you into your own rabbit hole of a handful of interests. I advise you to view the documentary, this will answer your question best.

[agumonkey]

It's also blurring the line. Ads were clearly ads, now you can't really tell where or when you're tracked.

[ldubost]

> > "Changes to your behavior and actions..."

> Isn't this the definition (or goal) of all advertising? I don't see the connection to the first half of the statement tying it to free products and services.

I believe it was "the product is the 'ability' to change your behavior"

So the difference here is that not only the sell it but it actually works because it can adapt to the people in realtime. This is probable what is scary..

Standard advertisement is already manipulation but it's more easy to know when it is advertisement (though it's arguable that there are also tricks to get around this for TV).

In my view it is indeed the advertisement industry going too far and being allowed anything. Social Media just build a product for its client and none of them have any doubt and limits when it comes to choosing between profits and ethics.

Advertisement is ok when it is honest and not manipulative.

In addition the product is sold for politics which is even more scary.

There are regulation in many countries about what's allowed or not in advertisement. In some cases it's not allowed to blatantly lie. Or it is not allowed to hide advertisement as content, etc...

It is possible to forbid micro-targetting and manipulative AI algorithms or other methods. Users & Regulators need to understand what is being done, and how the effects are harmful to society.

[gfxgirl]

Well, for movies/tv it's well known they were used to get people to buy wedding rings, cigarettes, and many other things. Not the ads, the actual movie/tv show. When you see some character light up a cigarette with a cool pose IIRC that whole idea was started by the tobacco companies to the point now that most people just seem to assume you show someone smoking to make them appear cool. It's portrayed as cool either because of the way the shot is made the person acts, or because knowing their bad for you clearly this person likes take risks, live dangerously, so they're exciting.

https://smokefreemovies.ucsf.edu/history

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/ho...

[joshocar]

When we watch ads it's pretty clear that the advertiser is trying to manipulate us. With social media it's different. They are manipulating us to keep us engaged so thay we see more ads. With TV, the network is trying to create a great show that engages people so that they can get more advertising money. I get that, most people get that, it's a win win. We get entertaining shows and they get more eyeballs for afs. With social media, they are doing it in a different way. They use algorithms that create silos of information meant to keep us scrolling. This leads to all kinds of negative effects on society. I would argue that cable news and social media are more alike than different in this respect.

[shajznnckfke]

Not just advertising, but any communication. You wrote this comment to influence me and everyone who else who read it.

[Ygg2]

Dose makes the poison.

There is a difference between someone telling you Band A is good, and someone hooking you on drugs and promising more drugs if you buy Band B.

[adamsea]

You would reduce it all to atoms.

[shajznnckfke]

I’m just trying to take the ideas in this thread seriously. If we are going to argue that it’s bad to try to influence people’s behavior, we ought to think through what that means when applied to entities other than Facebook. That will help us figure out if we really mean what we are saying. Is it an actual value we hold, or only a rhetorical point when we are taking about a few tech companies?

[maigret]

No it is fine sending a comment expressing opinion. There are so many qualitatives differences:

- This is human to human communication, not an optimised algorithm.

- People here are not sending you 10 comments and looking at the one which you engaged the most time, because they don't have the metrics. Social media knows how many seconds you looked at a post and classify it with AI, they can make a profile of your current sentiment.

- The poster probably didn't analyse your whole past discussion history with algorithms before answering in a way that would be best calibrated for your way of thinking.

Interactions, discussions between people, even conflictual (not violent), are fine. Communication is fine. Mass communication is mostly fine (traditional advertising, broadcast...). What's not fine is manipulating people by mass-communicating while adjusting the message given metadata that those people are not even aware about.

[shajznnckfke]

In a conversation, you subconsciously build a model of the mind of person you are talking to, and your words are tuned to fill the gap between what they know and are thinking and the ideas you are trying to express. If I think back through my life, the communication that has affected me most as been from humans in face-to-face conversations, not on websites. But I could be bad at objectively evaluating this.

I think for Facebook to be more effective than humans at influencing behavior, they have to implement theory of mind, which might require AGI.

[monsieurbanana]

I also think a human can be much better at influencing people 1-on-1. But adapting his speech to two people at the same time? That's more difficult. There's only so many tricks you can use to have two different people hear what they want to hear. 5 people? 10? 2 billions?

That's the scary thing. Facebook is good enough at influencing someone, but they do it for half the population of the world simultaneously.

[everdrive]

In a conversation, the influence goes both ways: if you try to persuade me of a political point of view, I can do a number of things: (and whether these are valid or not, they will impact the flow of argument, and the success of the persuasion)

- I can suggest you're biased

- I can try to change the subject

- I can decide you're a bad person for holding the "wrong" views

- I can directly argue against your point

- I can attack the structure of your argument

- I can make an emotional appeal regarding why I must hold my point of view

- etc ....

In these and other ways, I can push back and modify how much I'm influenced by a one-to-one argument. I won't always be successful, for sure. But sometimes as well the persuasion go will go the other way, and I will influence you.

This is not true on social media because another power is dictating which one-to-one conversations may happen in the first place, and then loading the deck with idea before those one-to-one conversations even happen. Further, social media changes the scale of communications. If we worked together, and saw each other regularly, we could mediate each other's influence, place boundaries, etc. With social media, there is always a crowd of strangers: too many people converse with, know, and set boundaries with.

There are obviously other distinctions between one-to-one conversation and social media, but I particularly wanted to talk about the key differences here: lack of real back and forth, and scale.

[maigret]

Look at the documentary... One of the guy explains that AI is not yet good enough to surplace humans at their strengths, but can game us on our weaknesses. This is the exact point that people think it's not having an impact on them, while it has, even so subtle.

As a person, you can get better at convincing people of course, and masses of people even - humanity has gone through that with ups and downs. Now we have a system that's working totally differently. From example, I remind reading that many conspiracists build distance with their friends and family as they close themselves to in-person discussion or any argumentation not fitting their views.

[adamsea]

Well Facebooks content is human.

Also, what about books? Ideas? Film.

IMHO people are too complicated, and situations too situation specific to be able to generalize about how someone is influenced.

Sometimes people ignore the advice of those close to them, sometimes they don't, and, it probably depends on the subject being discussed, the particular relationship between the people, the state of mind of the person in question, and so on.

[bickeringyokel]

A single person generally has orders of magnitude less power to influence than the the biggest companies in the world. That's surely not a fair comparison.

[TeMPOraL]

Intent matters. Intent of 1:1 conversations between people is usually win-win, or at least win-neutral. Advertising beyond the point of informing that a product exists is exploitative; it's intent is very much win-lose.

Put another way: if your friend came to you and started manipulating and pressuring you the way ads do, for the reason ads do, they'd very quickly stop being your friend.

[gfxgirl]

I don't think that quiet puts the finger on the distinction.

Apple trying to sell me an iPhone claiming it's more secure and more privacy respecting might be true so if buy one it's a win-win if (a) it is true and (b) I actually wanted those features.

> Advertising beyond the point of informing that a product exists is exploitative

Okay, so, Apple showing silhouettes dancing was exploitative? The should only say "we made a device, it plays music, it's this size, the batteries last this long"?

Was the 1984 ad exploitive? I'm just trying to think of famous ads. Is the Ikea add "Time To Leave Home" ad exploitive?

I guess I don't see them as win-lose.

[TeMPOraL]

> Apple trying to sell me an iPhone claiming it's more secure and more privacy respecting might be true so if buy one it's a win-win if (a) it is true and (b) I actually wanted those features.

Sure, it's a win-win if the features match your needs. And a win-win would be Apple making the claim, listing the privacy features of their new iPhone, along with honest arguments why these features protect your privacy better than competition. I absolutely do not mind things like that - it's the socially-useful purpose of advertising: informing people about products and their features, so that individuals can pick the best solution to their problems.

It's only when advertising tries to override individual's agency when I consider them bad. And note that purposefully and covertly overriding someone's decision making capability is a malicious behavior, and very rarely justifiable.

> The should only say "we made a device, it plays music, it's this size, the batteries last this long"?

Would it be bad if they did only that?

> Was the 1984 ad exploitive?

Of course. While it's nothing compared to today's ads, it still tried to sell you a computer by tricking your mind with completely irrelevant references to 1984 and the feelings it evoked. It tried to override your capability for thinking, by sneaking in an emotional payload.

> Is the Ikea add "Time To Leave Home" ad exploitive?

It's a fun comedy sketch, but again: it tries to use an emotional payload to get you into the market for furniture and think of IKEA in particular (and make it a first association in your mind, over competitors).

Look at it from this point of view: imagine you live in a small town, and there are two small-time shops building and selling farming widgets. Would you want them to spend all their energy and innovation capacity one-upping each other in comedy stand-ups on the storefront, or would you prefer them to focus on designing better farming widgets?

[bosie]

> if buy one it's a win-win if (a) it is true and (b) I actually wanted those features.

c) you need a phone in the first palce d) you need a USD1200 phone in the first place

[adamsea]

"Influence" is a big word.

Context and details matter. As does intent. Saying that all discussion is really "influencing", isn't useful, imho.

In the context of our discussion about Facebook, IMHO these are the defining qualities specific to Facebook:

1. Massive, global scale and scope - behavior via Facebook can influence culture, politics, etc.

2. An algorithm driving the bus, as opposed to people (albeit people choose what the algorithm does or doesn't do).

3. Facebook's primary motivation in influencing is to profit via increased user engagement - they currently have no financial incentive to care about the particular nature of said engagement.

4. Facebook's poor track record when it comes to acknowledging critique or concerns around the power its platform has, and Facebook's denial that it should exercise a degree of responsiblity (or be legally held accountable in some way) for said power.

5. The somewhat covert nature of how Facebook functions; as this documentary shows, while how Facebook functions may have been "in the open", it's not something most non-tech folk are aware of, and it's not something Facebook has been, in good faith, forthright and transparent about.

6. The particular power and impact of computers/the internet as a medium of mass communication, which we are still learning about.

6.5 As a subsection of item 6, the viral nature of the internet/social media which means stuff spreads very quickly, unlike other modes or media of human communication.

So sure, a parent "influences" their child, a teacher influences a student, newspapers influence people, and so do Coca-Cola commercials, but not the same way that Facebook has "influence", which I've attempted to describe above.

[everdrive]

Local influence is not nearly as pernicious or destructive as social media. Yes, every person in the world influences others, and there is no escaping this.

But to compare it to what has been proven to be possible via social media is absurd.

[api]

None of this is new in principle. The difference we are talking about here is more between a hunting rifle and an M-16. The depth, pervasiveness, and insidiousness of persuasion is so much greater with social media. It’s a wider channel, a bidirectional, channel, and a one on one channel.

Now when tech similar to GPT-3 gets out there it’s going to be like hunting rifle vs atomic weapons. Pretty soon we will have what I am calling “mechanized con artistry.” We are almost literally inventing the medieval demon whispering into everyone’s ear. Mass surveillance plus big data plus generative AI will be like the hydrogen bomb of propaganda.

[adamsea]

For anyone unsure like me, GPT-3 is a deep-learning based model which can be trained to produce human like written language (text).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-3

Unsettling indeed.

[ppod]

Also there is an underlying class thing going on with "you are the product". Choosing to pay for a service is not just an equal alternative to a free service for most people. Most people have to work hard to afford paid services, many of them at low wages. Sneering at people who choose to use a free service rather than sell their time for $15 an hour is not a great look.

[andrepd]

Exactly, it's a class thing. People who can't afford to pay for services have less "trouble" with being exploited in return for a free product.

[mattgreenrocks]

Can’t they just not use the thing? Usually this critique is applied to social media, which is not an essential human need. Ubiquitous and handy, yes. But not essential.

[kordlessagain]

The choice to not use a device which is intended to elicit interaction is not available to all, and in that case the only people that can make the choice are the others that know better.

[dominotw]

social contact is a need. I don't think i can actually survive without watsapp.

[hervature]

I'll be the first to tell you that humans are social beings that need social contact. I'll also be the first to tell you that social media is not necessary for that. I assume you're being hyperbolic with Whatsapp being vital for life, but do you honestly not know how humans got their fill of social interaction 12 years ago? And no, the answer isn't Facebook.

[closeparen]

It’s no longer socially acceptable to make unprompted PSTN voice calls, unless you and the recipient are on very familiar terms.

Even with my parents, we always arrange a time via messaging first.

[hervature]

Ok, and where exactly is Whatsapp a vital life necessity in your world of messaging before calling? Those also aren't forms of meaningful social interaction. I assume you again use messaging and/or voice to set up the actual interactions such as Christmas (or whatever you celebrate) and family get-togethers. I'm assuming you don't show up to those events and talk to your loved ones via Whatsapp.

I don't have social media, barely text (my plan has 100 texts per month), and hardly talk by phone (100 minutes per month). However, I have multiple friends and family that can claim that I'm the only one to have ever come to visit them at their house. This is either so strange or such a positive impact on them that I somehow hear it from other friends/family even though I'm surrounded by ether. The moral of the story, the ether isn't as thick as you think and the vast majority of people's "social interactions" are so shallow that showing up to a friend's door to drop off a bottle of wine will be a highlight of their year.

[sriram_malhar]

That would mean your parents and you are not on very familiar terms. Perhaps that is the situation for you, but it is by no means generalisable.

I live pretty well without any personal social media. I call friends and family often, while being mindful of their time. Voice calls are wonderful.

[CaptArmchair]

It's hyperbole, but it still indicates a hidden very real and well known social dynamic: humans have an intrinsic drive to belong to a tribe.

This is a very real behavioral mechanism which was essential to human survival as early as the paleolithicum and the emergence of the first hominid species. Not belonging to a tribe meant being exposed to hardships that you might not survive.

Feeling lonely is part of that mechanism. That's your subconscious kicking you into high gear and go seek companionship in order to ensure your chances to survive as an individual.

Kurz Gesagt explains this dynamic in more detail. [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3Xv_g3g-mA

Modern technology, industrialisation and social advancements in healthcare, politics, law enforcement and agriculture have created circumstances in which you don't need to physically belong to a tribe 24/7 in order to survive. You can perfectly live alone and have your basic needs covered.

However, that drive for social connection is still there. That's hard wired into us. And that's what social media companies are exploiting.

Fear of missing out is exactly that. You don't want to be "out of the loop", you don't want to miss out on what's going on, you don't want to find yourself "outside" of a group. Think about how it was when you were in school, and you found out your friends had a get-together over the weekend and you weren't invited: it totally sucked. Well, that's basically that primitive part of your brain kicking into high gear, warning you that your survival may be at stake.

12 years ago, few people were on social media. And the vast majority of your friends contacted each other via cell phones, e-mail or MSN and such. You were less likely to miss out because you knew that the available channels didn't cater to 24/7 real time action with video and audio, plugging you in the middle of the action remotely.

Today, that's totally different. Modern communication is literally that: 24/7 high intense social contacts with video/photo/audio fragmented across dozens of group chats, group calls,.. and dozens of channels to keep track off.

Net result? Studies indicate an increased prevalence in anxiety, depression, loneliness, suicide, self harm and so on. There's a clear correlation between the two. As is shown in the documentary.

The trade off of weaning off from all of that, for many, is having to battle with and against those engrained behavioural changes that make one grasp for their smartphone every other minute. And that's, basically, the very definition of addiction.

Moreover, unlike other addictions, there's a very real chance that if you don't look at your smartphone for a day that, yes, you will miss out on information the in-crowd - peers at school, friends, co-workers with watercooler talk,... - deems important to know.

[raxxorrax]

There are some mechanisms like that but I think this explanation, as well as that from the video, is layman psychology at best. Yes, there are factors or mechanisms that drive your desire for belonging, but it is a pretty unconvincing observation. It doesn't have to be tribalism to prefer being around people you trust.

But if so, being enlightened about the failures and limits of human psychology certainly would constitute a tribe of its own, no? Because it seems to be en vogue to have simple explanations. FOMO is more connected to the fear of the unknown and fear of loss in my opinion. A "tribe" would shield you of course, but it is mostly a sign of other needs not being met. Advertisers use it to their advantage for decades. Some appeal to their audiences to be the source of other peoples FOMOs. "think different" instead of "stay connected".

There are less suicides than in the 90s. That there is a suicide epidemic is a media scare. The main factor reducing the numbers seem to be economic perspectives, not some facebook group where taste was made illegal.

A much worse effect is that social media seems to push questionable characters in focus. Naive viewers and exploitative "influencers" can do quite some damage.

[maigret]

I moved most of my critical contacts to Signal. Not done yet though to be able to delete WhatsApp, but near there.

[dgudkov]

As my ex-colleague says "Any advertisement is propaganda".

[hapticmonkey]

I prefer David Foster Wallace's description of advertising:

"It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.”

[lozf]

I always liked: "Advertising robs you of your dignity, and sells it back to you at the price of the product."

[TheOtherHobbes]

With the arguable exception of therapy/counselling, you can never retrieve your dignity and self-worth by buying a product.

So all it really does is sell the promise.

[adamsea]

True. As a side point, IMHO, therapy and counseling are not products.

They’re services, and, even more so, should be a service bound by a medical code of ethics, which, since the healing professions go way back, imho makes therapy and counseling distinct from many other services.

:)

[rexpop]

So advertisements deplete dignity, with no recompense or amelioration? No wonder our society's replete with indignity.

[cassianoleal]

I believe in most Latin languages there isn't a separate word.

At least in Portuguese and Spanish, both advertisement and propaganda are simply "propaganda".

[yesenadam]

Not true. In spanish, "ad" is usually anuncio, or sometimes comercial or publicidad. Propaganda can also be used, but is less common than those i think, I've never heard it used.

I once read an original edition of Bernays' Propaganda (1928) with its title in a jaunty typeface on the cover, before the word had a negative connotation.

Pic of its cover here: https://www.baumanrarebooks.com/rare-books/edward--bernays/p...

[cassianoleal]

I have definitely heard "propaganda" in South American Spanish-speaking countries. Perhaps a regional quirk?

[rbanffy]

You can also use "publicidade" in Portuguese, but "propaganda" is not used exclusively for "political propaganda".

[rexpop]

And all propaganda is political.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

Right, except in this case Google and Facebook are not paying the people who create the content (so-called "users")^1, however Google and Facebook are the ones getting paid by the advertisers. The so-called "users" are also paying for the internet access and bandwidth over which the ads are delivered.

In sum, the "users" are the ones paying for the costs of this particular advertising vector (the internet and web).

1. In most cases. There are exceptions where original authors can get a cut of Google/Facebook's take.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

Actually, Facebook does not share any of their ad revenue with their Facebook "users".

[swader999]

The implications for election advertising are that votes and even revolutions are available to the highest bidder.

[dbtc]

The advertisers are the buyers, the platforms are the sellers whose product is your well-trained eyes.

[sriku]

The Jaron Lanier quote (with the first part paraphrased but the rest exact) is this -

"that we are the product being sold to advertisers is too simplistic. It is the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behaviour and perception that is the product."

Yes manipulation is also the goal of all advertising, however the power to manipulate is not mostly in the hands of advertisers. The platform owners wield tremendous power and can decide what gets shown when and what gets priority over what. It means their political leanings influence people whether or not those advertise on the platform. We've never had this kind of concentration of power over the collective mind I think.

[asta_2223]

I am sure there would be regulation and consequences that would apply to Movies, Cable TV, airline flights if misinformation being pushed about Earth being flat to commercially engage them.

[bernardlunn]

There is a world of difference - not just one word - between between contextual & tracking advertising; contextual only knows that somebody reading/watching this content is interested in this subject. Social media tracks everything about YOU. It is totally different

[intended]

This is taking the comment out of its context.

Yes its benign taken out of that context.

In the context of social media and tech, this is no longer the case, or it is the case that people are not comfortable with its untrammeled evolution and utilization.

[nothis]

Yea, but it's never spelled out like this.

[jdc]

I was with you until the last sentence.