The social networks have changed the world: they have changed our perception of everyday life, our way of living, moving and being informed. They have reduced distances and, thanks to the efficiency of their affinity algorithms, have enabled us to stay connected and informed instantly. They entice us to consume over a billion hours of video per day. The Internet user is a consumer without being aware of it, thanks to the “scrolling” technique which offers content in line with our desires and preferences.

Given this situation, some would say that social networks make life easier for users and that we should not be afraid of progress. But the invention of the bicycle has facilitated people’s mobility without affecting democratic practice. What has changed with social networks is that we have moved from an environment where inventions were simple tools to one where tools foster addiction and manipulation.

Some courageous experts said “no” to this manipulation

 Tristan Harris, Chamath Palihapitiya or Tim KENDALL were at the heart of Google, Facebook, Pinterest. Considered as geniuses who changed the face of the world, thanks to their inventions, they occupied sensitive, extremely well-paid positions.Nevertheless, they withdrew from these digital giants: the (GAFAM) by refusing the (omerta) created by their applications. 

Tristan Harris, a former design specialist at Google tools, was part of the team that developed Gmail, the world’s largest email service

 He believes the social media industry has taken a wrong turn. This was because no one on his team wanted to add tools to Gmail’s development strategy to make it less addictive. When his numerous warnings to his superiors had no effect, he decided to leave his post, rejecting the fact that a few designers in Silicon Valley, working behind their screens, were plunging two billion people in the world into addiction. 

A method that is part of a panoply of persuasive technologies taken to extremes, with the aim of modifying a person’s behavior: for example, scrolling endlessly through content on their screen, because the results change with each page: in social psychology, this is called positive intermittent reinforcement. This is a growth technique developed by Chamath Palihapitiya and used by Facebook, UBER and Google.

How do these techniques impact on children?

Edward Tufte, Professor of Computer Design at Yael University, points out that only two industries refer to their customers as consumers: the pharmaceutical industry and the software industry.

According to Chamath Palihapitiya, social networks are becoming an ever more important part of children’s lives and are changing their self-esteem.

Generation Z (those born after 1996) are the first to access social networks in college and this generation, according to several studies conducted in the US, is more anxious and unstable.

Youtube Kids has broken all the boundaries that protected children from massive exposure to television advertising. All this is due to an unparalleled technological evolution: from 1960 to 2023, processors have evolved by 100 billion percent, while our brains have not had the same rate of evolution.

Are social networks becoming a misinformation machine?

Social networks are no longer used by the public exclusively for entertainment but also for information, as they are more and more accessible thanks to cross media. This observation has ideological and ethical explanations: several opinion polls show that many citizens declare that they only get information via social networks to know the truth because they consider that the conventional medias lie and are often at the service of financial lobbies.

This conspiracy theory is not new, but the spreading of it is dangerous because, for the first time in human history, the value of data has exceeded that of fossil fuels. This means that whoever holds the information (its production and spread ) has almost absolute power. The Massachusetts Institute Of Technologies (MIT) has published a study that shows that fake news spreads 6 times faster than real news.

The most edifying case concerns the coronavirus: the false information consisted in saying that the disease did not exist, that it was propagated by the great world powers to test certain people’s reactions. The risk with social networks is that we no longer know what is true and what is false, whatever the topic , but at the same time it is important to remember that there is no artificial intelligence capable of distinguishing fact from propaganda. If the rules do not change, we are heading towards a world where everyone becomes suspect.

The algorithms are opinions in code form

 

Who would like to live in a world where every user is manipulated by a handful of Silicon Valley designers who decide on the standards of beauty through Snapchat filters, the brands we buy through increasingly targeted ads, the number of hours we spend on the internet…? ? ?

 Social networks are not objects waiting to be used: they have their own objectives and, to achieve them, they use psychological persuasion techniques.

Vincent Joul, the father of persuasive communication, explains in his book “petit traité de manipulation à l’usage des honnêtes gens” or (((( a brief manual on manipulation for honest people)))) how to give a person the illusion of choice through a certain number of purely marketing procedures that make them believe that the ultimate decision is theirs, whereas this decision is made in advance by the salesperson.

Emails and notifications that you have been tagged in a photo are a cash machine for Facebook, a technique used to increase interaction activity within its network.

In a recent interview, Tim KENDALL, former founder of Pintrest and former director of monetization at Facebook, said that surveillance capitalism has become the new business model for these companies. The amount of data collected from each one of us allows software to make an increasingly accurate prediction: all clicks, videos and exposure times are recorded and studied.

Imagine that every time you use your smartphone, someone is monitoring what you say, what you write and then suggests content that might interest you according to your needs. It’s almost identical to social networking except that instead of machines, it’s an AI that takes care of it, trying to achieve three goals:

1. Connection: Stay connected as long as possible.
2. Growth: come back and convince your friends
3. Advertising: generate the most money by using one of these services

What we have to understand today is that we have created a world where being connected on social networks prevails over other means of communication. And this is the problem, because social networks are no longer a space of freedom where everyone can freely express themselves: they have become a space for the creation of public opinion, the crystallization of the most extreme opinions, of obscurantist ideas and of conspiracy theories.

For instance, as you read this article, social networks are vying for our attention. This struggle has only just begun as technology becomes more integrated into our lives and artificial intelligence becomes more effective at predicting .

Can we change the game while maintaining the benefits of social networks?

Another better world is certainly possible, if two key players do their part. First, the leaders of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Appel, Microsoft (GAFAM) must exercise their responsibility by imposing new rules to automatically eliminate violent images, extremist groups, dangerous profiles and fake news that are plaguing most of the social networks. It is a question of will, because when one wants to ban a content or a person from the networks, one can do it with a single click.

It is important to keep an eye on the new policy adopted by the new owner of Tweeter, Elon Musk: his attitude is considered both dangerous and risky by specialists and even investors. Indeed, at a time when networks need more than ever moderators to regulate and remove unwanted content, Elon Musk has made a series of dismissals