Written by: Dennis O'Neill, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Today’s modern social media networks are riddled with issues that are not in the best interest of their users. Anywhere from mining your personal data for their profit, using behavioral scientists to unfairly manipulate you based on your own data, and selling your data to third parties who can (and often do) use your information for nefarious purposes, not the least of which is an invasion of privacy and manipulation. Millions of social media users are unknowingly being fleeced of their personal data and then subsequently manipulated in a variety of ways by their own data. These practices by social media platforms allow them to influence your mood, your purchasing, your view on a topic, and even your political stance, without you ever knowing!
The movie “The Social Dilemma” points out some of these significant problems with social networks.
Having the unfair advantage of all your private data, social media platforms feed you back information, stories, photos, video clips, political propaganda, and advertisements that are intended to stimulate your emotions towards whatever goal these platforms set.
‒ Dennis O’Neil
It is statistically easier to stimulate feelings of anger, fear, and resentment than it is to promote feelings of joy, affection, and security. ‘CORDIS- EU research results’ wrote a great article on this in their “Trending Science” column. The power that this type of influence gives social media monoliths over millions and millions of users can be deeply corrupting to the political process in a variety of ways. It is an unfair influence that can be used to create enormous bias. It should be very concerning to anyone who uses social media and does not appreciate being steered towards an opinion or a purchase by some data stalker.
Social media is certainly not the passive tool that we perceive it to be. Some benign platforms waiting to be used. It has its own goals and its own technologically advanced means of pursuing them by using your psychology against you. It is essentially a creepy stalker of your data, with a perfect memory, which studies your habits, tendencies, political views, purchase history, friends, and acquaintances, and all of their habits and actions. Every decision you make on the platform, every AI-identifiable photo that you upload, and every link that you click, is stored, studied, compared, and used to determine what you are presented with next, in real-time, based on the goals of the platform. The film “The Social Dilemma” explains the effect of the recommendation algorithms on the human psyche. In a nutshell, everything that people do online is recorded and reduced to raw data.
Social dilemmas are situations in which individual rationality leads to collective irrationality. That is, individually reasonable behavior leads to a situation in which everyone is worse off than they might have been otherwise.
“The Social Dilemma” argues that as long as corporations have no limit on how much profit they can make from purchasing your attention, social media will benefit companies rather than people.
Tech experts from Silicon Valley have sounded the alarm on the dangerous impact of social networking, which ‘Big Tech’ uses in a concerted attempt to manipulate and influence
Problem
1. We are “Users.” In general, the documentary was shocking and disturbing. One thing that stuck out was that individuals are called “users.” The only other industry that calls its customers “users” is the drug industry. The meaning behind this? The algorithms used to make these apps are supposed to make us addicted. Social media is seen as a way to escape real life for a while, but the main goal of the algorithm is to attract attention. Every second you are on an app, the algorithm is updated to be more appealing to you!
2. Fake news is everywhere. Fake news spreads six times faster than the truth — Yes, six times! Social media was not made with morals; it was made by big tech companies with money on their minds. When we type something into Google, we expect to see the same results that everyone else does, but this is not the case. Google’s algorithm decides what we will view, which means different users will get different results for the same search. It is built to anticipate which results fit into more of your ideas already. It takes your demographic, past results and so much more into account when it chooses what to show first.
This means the recommendations you’re shown might not actually be in your interest. When you stumble onto a video for a few seconds, it can create thousands of recommendations, which can lead to propaganda and conspiracy theories. Some may have a measure of truth to them and some may be all fake, but the algorithms do not care either way because you are still reading and watching.
3. We get dopamine from our apps. AI technology was able to build the psychology of persuasion, making the goals of social media to get us to take action, use up all of our attention and intermittently reinforce these behaviors with rewards. When we receive “rewards,” our brain releases dopamine that will eventually take us to the level of addiction. When we put our phones down, we go into a dopamine-deficit state that leaves us wanting more.
When we connect with people, our brain naturally releases dopamine. Technology has found a way to manipulate our evolutionary need to connect with other people by optimizing it. Apps have been able to tie our created self-worth and identity to their products by dosing us with approval every 5 minutes, which exceeds 10x the amount we have received historically…Overload!
4. We are an experiment. In the documentary, we are called “lab rats” because, in truth, we are always being studied and tested on. Growth hacking is a strategy aimed at achieving massive growth to manipulate the user. In order to do this, big tech companies perform real-time experiments on people online who are unaware they are being manipulated.
Now take a second and think about all the ways you have been manipulated by your apps. From seeing something you MUST buy, to news articles on why you SHOULDN’T eat or drink a particular product. When you dive deep into how you came to that decision, it may shock you how often you find that you have been unfairly influenced. We are seen as part of a global experiment where apps compete for our attention and our basic privacy is sold to create a future where we could be controlled by AI.
What can we do?
The solution to all these “social media monopolies” harvesting our data and using it against us is SoMee.Social
About SoMee.Social:
Own your own data
Profit from any ads on your content
Profit from all activities conducted on the network
SoMee Is a new Social Network where users own their own data and profit from all activities they conduct on the network. SoMee does not share user information without permission. Users' posts on SoMee are safe, secure, and owned by each individual. Additionally, strong incentives are built to encourage user interactions and quality content to cultivate strong community building and a safe social environment.
SoMee.Social provides several avenues for earning rewards, starting with content monetization, and reward-earning options for active participation in the community or for sharing your data (if you choose to do so) on the advertising marketplace.
SoMee is a blockchain platform that utilizes the HIVE blockchain as the first sidechain, users earn $SME, $HIVE, and $HBD for content rewards and an Ethereum-powered advertising system based on $SAT (SoMee Advertising Token). In addition, users can boost their earnings potential on the network with Power Boost packages, which extend their $SME earnings and their $HBD earnings on the Hive network.
Additionally, SoMee continues to innovate in the social space by working on future features, such as social content moderation (a user-centric moderation strategy that is both fair and equitable to all users on the platform), sector-specific social media spaces (to allow under ‒ or misrepresented cultures, or areas in society to have better representation online), and advanced security for social media users online. SoMee's vision has always been and continues to be that users are free to do what they wish on social media, and their voices matter and are equal. All efforts to that end dictate how the platform builds new features and services for its users.
Dennis O'Neill, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Dennis O'Neill is currently the President and board member of Biomedican, Bio-Kai and ActinexRX . He has over 30 years experience as an Investment Banker. He helped start two of the largest regional Investments banks in Chicago then went on to Managing Director for Softbank Investments/ E2Capital office in Chicago and raised over 2 billion dollars in capital for early stage companies to date. Mr. O'Neill has a significant amount of experience and success in Sales, Marketing, Financial Media, Business Development and Institutional Capital Raises. He is an expert and thought leader on Venture Capital, Private Equity, Biotech, Cannabis Therapeutics, Blockchain and Smallcap stocks and has spoken at over 75 conferences around the world.
