THE DYSTOPIAN WORLD OF FACEBOOK / (META)

At a networking event yesterday, I found myself gravitating to a group of tech and marketing leaders, among them was a futurist.

The conversation was one I quickly became engrossed with, the five of us, in fact, following the official event took time out to grab a coffee and continue our discussions.

It inspired my thought processes around this post.

In actual fact, in a variety of ways, I have heard many people at one time or another in my online networks, raise concerns about the nature of social media, free speech and in particular #Facebook.

Ten years ago the Facebook experience was different, it’s also been ten years since Facebook’s IPO.

In a superficial sense, much of the “physical” experience is the same: we still have news feeds, we’re still networking with friends / colleagues and some of the third party apps on the “face of it” remain (albeit how third apps now connect to the platform and the information they’re allowed to “take” from us has “officially” been limited).

I’m talking, in the main, about the psychology of the experience - the “feel” has changed.

To varying degrees, some of this is reflected on other social channels.

In the earlier times of Facebook, there was a parade of casual game notifications, an injection of endless clickbait and memes, a slow ossification of discourse into like-minded and frequent agreement.

In general there was a greater sense of celebration and bonhomie and discussion “as a whole” was generally more polite; if there were disagreements, it often petered out into an acceptance of differences.

Although, we spent a number of years not fully aware that our data was being gleaned by 3rd party apps in order they may use our characteristics to “sell to us” or in political voting terms “manipulate us” (we perhaps a little obliviously laid our trust in Facebook to do right by us and to a degree we had more trust in this as users).

Our experiences, to this end, I would personally describe as a “vermination” and I use this word particularly because of its’ highly parasitic nature.

As we coexist utilising one of the most groundbreaking modes of communication to have graced our planet to-date, it’s not too difficult to understand the vulnerabilities and triggers we have in our human brains to our surroundings and the psychological impact (and output) of this terrain.

In our “naivety” (let’s be fair it was unchartered territory), we weren’t fully aware of the dangers of allowing access to our identifiable individual data or of the manipulative forces at play which were possible in infiltrating our individuality and “thought process”

“Farming” had a different meaning to us then, whilst many of us now understand only too well the sinister implications of “data farming” today.

We were more inclined to view menticide and indoctrination as isolated situations or events that may occur in certain “warfare” or “religious sects” etc.

Social media, however, as we know is particularly susceptible to spreading disinformation - it engages viewers in something called “flow,” a psychological idea adopted as a digital-design strategy by video games.

Flow focuses on keeping the user moving from one element to the next, repetitively, in search of gratification from the act of consuming media rather than from engaging with its’ content.

When programs such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are used for political messaging, they bring flow along into the political process, even if the messages they carry are truthful and non-conspiratorial.

That makes these media a threat to coherent political discourse from the age of print.

The heightened tone of political discourse since #Brexit and #Trump’s election has put the fear of god into elites and hoi polloi alike, every side convinced they are losing ground to forces with unchecked power.

The Trump years became a nonstop doom-scroll of panic in every direction at once. A brief glance at the other side was no better: evil corporations and Congress were hamstringing Trump’s attempts to clean the swamp, whether it was Google, George Soros, or Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.

As a result of the public unveiling of the #CambridgeAnalytica scandal, we started to truly see how indelibly dangerous the weaponising of social media could be.

At a cataclysmic level it defied the outcome of “politically loaded printed press” (which at the least, as a broad overview, we could “quantify” and “file” into left, right or mid road camps) - choosing the tabloid or broadsheet we “favoured” as aligning with our values.

As Internet use increased, social media has gradually replaced people's reliance on legacy media as the primary source of information, and consumption of online content has exceeded real social interaction (particularly since the pandemic).

Platforms like #Twitter, Facebook and #YouTube have increasingly become the arbiters of truth, the interpreters of reality, and have transformed from being vehicles of #freeexpression to being instruments for the enforcement of acceptable opinion.

In our lifetime, one “key” platform (albeit there were a few), but ONE stood out as wielding the most ability to sway and brainwash the masses - Facebook.

Without us even being fully aware, our ability to think critically and independently was somewhat diminished, allowing the introduction of new thoughts and ideas to enter our minds, change our attitudes and impact our values and beliefs.

The opinions and attitudes circulated on social media do more than misrepresent public opinion.

They are a form of mass indoctrination.

Unacceptable opinions can be silenced, as every platform reserves the right of editorial veto power over what users may post, which then creates a false perception that the views allowed on the platform are the only views that exist.

This is inherently coercive and is, whether by design or not, a mechanism for engineering the opinions of society, rather than simply reflecting them.

Politicians and journalists are increasingly referring to social media to gauge public opinion, so, given the above, it is not an exaggeration to say that social media poses a threat to #democracy.

Since we have become more savvy to the coercive persuasion and “thought reform” possible through Social Media - in that there are those who actively study the best outcomes to alter the human mind through controlled psychological techniques who do work for social media platforms and in particular Facebook, we are right to be concerned.

Today, there is often an incessant sense that every discussion counts, there’s often an insecure paranoia that any deviation from the right moral path is just a step down the slippery slope toward fascism — or communism.

There is more “fracture” in how we choose to splinter and “re-group ourselves” where we may have once been happy to address larger audiences and discuss opinions with “strangers” we may now think twice.

It appears easier for mistrust among ourselves to rise and I see more open arguments - we haven’t just become “more cynical” of our mode of communication but in our political systems as a whole.

Not only Facebook, but Twitter can explode very quickly and quite aggressively, often without one or many people, truly listening to what the other is saying and reacting negatively to it.

When trust is lost, discord rises.

The one thing that helps to glue our society together is “trust”.

Its presence cements relationships by allowing people to live and work together, feel safe and belong to a group.

When trust is lost in a leader “or in an environment it causes fragmentation, conflict and even war.

Because what social media also did was, it gave us a bigger window into transparency of the political authorities that many of us hadn’t questioned or seen (quite at this depth before).

A lot of trust had been lost in our coexistence online and in our “physical” existences; for many of us our belief of the world and how we viewed our governing systems globally had changed forever.

This changed our output and our interactions with each other completely.

I have seen civil wars over pronouns and memes!

Throughout it all there has been increasing intolerance within micro-sects, the price of disagreement turning far more quickly into stigma than in Facebook’s early days.

I have seen tenured university professors post the most simple minded memes about everything from manspreading to microaggressions. I have seen published writers buy into conspiracy theories around Trump and Biden alike.

Our perceptions in both our environments online and offline have in fact, vastly altered, (it’s knocked our sense of safety, trust and belonging).

Reeling forwards quickly to where we are today, we find ourselves challenged over our “freedoms of speech” by the very platforms we feel coercively monopolised our behaviours in the first place. The very same platforms who allowed third parties access to our data; our individual characteristics, our contact details, our personalities.

I understand how annoying and patronising this feels now.

Today, particular with Facebook, many of us feel that it’s constantly looking over our shoulders at our discussions, judging them and deciding what is and isn’t acceptable.

The way in which Facebook decides to judge unacceptable content evades most of us, in that it is totally nonsensical.

It can only be assumed “because no one is transparently informing us otherwise” that certain words, images and phrases may “trigger” automated content warnings and issue automatic penalty impositions.

Even here, the logic and consistency you’d expect from an automated system defies any real logic.

Once again as users our trust is being eroded.

However, without any direct competition of the Facebook model itself and therefore no “like for like” alternative, it’s complacency in failing to invest in the user experience (which would normally defy any successful organisation’s longevity in any other industry where there is competition), is for me looking like downright arrogance and it’s wholly disrespecting us as users.

In a true democracy this is not how business works.

One thing is for sure the exclusion of what is NOT free speech (as outlined by law); obscenity, fraud, child pornography, harassment, incitement to illegal conduct and imminent lawless action, true threats, radicalism and “brand” copyright infringements) DOES NOT prevail!

What is clear is that Facebook’s own controversial past has forced it into the reluctant role of ad hoc and inadequate censoring, banning people for innocuous comments whilst letting malignant conspiracy theories (and worse) run unchecked.

Having fired our dopamine receptors with the increasing sense that what we do on Facebook is consequential, yet our opinions on there will never change the world at large or correct the deep injustices of war / terror etc - we’re pushed into a corner which brings us “illogical censorship” of our thoughts and actions but no true impact to change this or the worldly injustices we may be passionate about.

It’s a bit of a mind fuck.

Facebook prefers that its users feel important, needed, and urged to participate because it’s making money out of our attention “we are commodities to its business model.

At best, we can carry on giving it our attention, giving it our advertising budgets, promoting ourselves and communicating with our friends, loved ones and colleagues.

Ultimately though, we are censored and controlled and currently if we stay put, we have no choice but to follow down the path it provides to us, herded a little like sheep & Facebook has no real culpability or logic in censoring us or protecting us as users from certain “toxic” content.

I really understand that as a community on here we need to prompt Facebook’s content filters and help it stay on-top of the customer experience, but more often than not, even our individual efforts can go without any immediate response and sometimes no response at all.

It’s user base is shouting from the rooftops at Facebook (who have now conveniently changed their name to Meta), that we need it to seriously address the gaping holes in our customer experience.

It has the financial means to do better but in a galvanised market it isn’t addressing these issues, rather it continues to capitalise on what it anticipates as the next “big earner” and the next major investment.

The #metaverse is beckoning.

A VR space that has ability to be even more intrusive and impactful on our psychology and behaviours.

As users, how can we not enter this new realm with apprehension and concern for the future?