Whether it’s otters or guns, social media cannot exist without algorithms
If you follow me on Twitter, you may have come for the digital rights content and stayed for the otters. I joined Twitter reluctantly for professional reasons – to find out what is going on in the world, connect with people doing insightful work, and to share my own professional content. But the more time I have spent on the platform, the more I have found myself drawn to otters.
Did you know that sea otters sleep on their backs in the water holding hands so they don’t drift apart, even in their dreams? Or that otter mothers hold their babies safe on their bellies while they groom their fur? Otters are the ultimate timeline cleanse in a turbulent world. But as Elon Musk took over Twitter I saw a worrying dip in otter content as my furry online friends were replaced by hot takes on the disastrous future of the free bird app and news of mass tech layoffs across the board showing up the shaky foundations of social media’s business models.
Being brainwashed into joining an online fan club for cuddly predators may be a time suck, but it is hardly an online harm. The way social media works, however, has the potential for much more serious damage on both an individual and a societal level. Our timelines are not natural phenomena. They are designed to distract us from everything else we could be doing instead. The algorithm knows that if you want to keep me from the laundry, my tax return, or even holding hands with a real person in real life, a cuddly mammal meme is more likely to do the job than any amount of political scandal, tech news or appalled outrage about anything. But that is not the case for everyone.
Toxic content promoting gun violence, self-harm, suicide, misogyny and climate denial spreads across the online world, not because anyone needs it, or wants it, but because it serves to keep people engaged and glued to their screens. The algorithm doesn’t have a moral compass, it just knows what works for you, and it has developed this way thanks to a new form of advertising that has emerged and dominated our online environment over the past decade.
Surveillance based advertising runs on the assumption that we, as online consumers, can be understood at a granular level so that our individual attention can be harnessed and sold, in real time, for hyper-targeted adverts. Our online lives are studied so that we can be more effectively sold and packaged as captive, gullible consumers to people who want us to buy stuff – whether that is a soothing weighted blanket or a dangerous ideology.
Social media as we know it today is essentially sugar coated personalised advertising. Ironically, however, it may be the very online advertisers that drove the business model in the first place, that are now shaking its foundations.
Since Elon Musk took over, advertisers have been leaving Twitter in droves, not because of the otters, but because of the reputational and financial risks associated with placing your name in the middle of a global information super highway with no guard rails to prevent your brand from careering off a cliff as it collides with toxic hate filled bile. And Facebook has been hit hard by Apple’s decision to allow people to opt out of online tracking for marketing from anyone but Apple itself. It turns out that when people are given the choice of whether or not to have their every move monitored for marketing purposes, they choose not.
Social media companies rely on our engagement to sell advertising space, but they tread a fine line when they personalise to keep our attention. I deleted Instagram after a tweak of the algorithm bored me senseless with dog videos – I have my own dog IRL and, no, she is not interested in becoming a dogfluencer…. And adverts for a dementia charity popping up in my feed when visiting an elderly relative were the last straw. This week Twitter served me up otters designed and delivered by GPT-3, an artificial intelligence tool, in a much more convincing way than was possible even a month earlier.
But what the AI failed to grasp was that, in getting so close to the bone of my inner life, the deep fake otters, and Twitter, may have finally lost their grip on my soul. If Twitter is the canary in the coalmine for the current model of social media, now would be a good time to think about what we want next, and in mapping the future, we cannot afford to ignore the role of advertising in the online world we live in.
Surveillance based advertising has skewed our online experience, but as advertisers themselves start to question the impact of that business model, we have an opportunity to reset our relationship with Big Tech and advertising – even if that means I may miss the otters.