Facebook, Mobocracy & Augmented Reality - (Top3ics, 23 May)

This isn’t the first time I’ve covered the impact of social media on news; technologies like augmented reality; and the impact of both on society. It is the first time these Top3ics have meshed so perfectly in one month. Consider these as first notes towards a future post.  

TL;DR: Facebook has been in the news a lot recently, but Congress’ faux outrage masks bigger issues. These include the uncomfortable fact that Trump is not even the first demagogue to take advantage of today’s media landscape, as Austria just showed. And if you think it’s bad now, just wait for augmented reality to kick-in and really allow people to ‘make their own reality’.

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Facebook: Asking the wrong questions

Facebook’s been in the news a lot since Gizmodo reported that workers tampered with the stories that showed up in its “Trending” module to the detriment of conservative-leaning content. There are hundreds of articles out there on this. Where to start?

So what happened? As the Trending Topics story itself trended, leaked internal guidelines showed "human intervention at almost every stage of Facebook’s news operation, akin to a traditional media organization" (Guardian).

Why do we care? Cue outrage (US Senate, pdf) as assorted politicians wake up. Which is interesting. Where were the Congressional hearings when Rupert Murdoch set up Fox News? Why are there no inquiries into political bias at each and every newspaper?

It’s not as if the revelations are totally scandalous: “Curators were told to not “trend” a story if only Newsmax or Breitbart… reported it. This is just good editorial guidance: Breitbart and Newsmax have a reputation for playing fast and loose” - A Bold New Scheme to Regulate Facebook (The Atlantic).

As the New Yorker pointed out, “Facebook is playing editor all the time… we don’t recognize it, because the editorial influence takes a different form … It’s interesting to consider why it so troubles us.” - Why Do We Care If Facebook Is Biased?

Why indeed. For many, Facebook is a utility, from which "we expect a kind of dumb passivity … phone companies don’t send through certain calls and not others…Utilities are regulated to assure fairness and consistency of service; Facebook and Google are not.“ (New Yorker)

But it’s not a utility - it’s a media, and an unprecedently dominant one. As Facebook Owns the Future, another Atlantic article, points out: Facebook’s advertising revenue grew by more than 50 percent since 2015; the company’s building an AI-driven, virtual reality future (more on that below); and the average Facebook user spends more time on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger than reading, sport or social events. 

In Facebook Must Be Accountable to the Public (Medium), Danah Boyd points out the many ways news media are made accountable (ombudspeople, whistleblowers, public editors), and that ”Facebook and other technology companies have not, historically, been included in that conversation. Zuckerberg’s stance that Facebook will be neutral as long as he’s in charge is … what it means to be a benevolent dictator“.

Or, put most pithily by Ross Douthat

Politics is downstream from culture, which is downstream from Mark Zuckerberg

Filter Bubbles: Ignore 'reality’ - just build your own

The Trending Topics story also seems to have revived interest in the Filter Bubble, although for some reason some people need to 'update’ the concept by calling it a 'Funnel Filter’:

The bent isn’t just liberal or conservative. It threatens to become more insidious, as groupthink risks becoming invisibly commonplace
- Facebook’s Trending Topics and the growing power of the funnel filter (Ken Doctor)

While I’m not convinced we need to change the name, there are better things to argue about, as other resources recently tagged filterbubble make clear. These include research by Internet Policy Review, which finds

”no empirical evidence that warrants any strong worries about filter bubbles. Nevertheless, … if personalisation technology improves, and personalised news content becomes people’s main information source, problems for our democracy could indeed arise“ - Should we worry about filter bubbles?

Curious? Check out Blue Feed, Red Feed on WSJ, and see ”Liberal Facebook and Conservative Facebook, Side by Side“.

While filterbubbles risk reinforcing everyone’s existing prejudices and worldview, ”a diverse set of opinions among a user’s friends makes everyone want to speak up less“, according to a study examined in The long-term effects of ugly political discussions on Facebook (ars technica). While ”social media has the potential to bridge gaps in ideology … [Facebook’s] low threshold for friending …  can be a breeding ground for alienation and resentment“.

Social media, in other words, could be designed better. Why it’s not happening isn’t hard to understand: ”Facebook’s news feed … is tailored just to us … to keep us interested and happy… and that keeps a user targetable with advertisements for longer“ according to FastCoExist in the truly excellent Social Network Algorithms Are Distorting Reality By Boosting Conspiracy Theories. In consequence:

Algorithms, network effects, and zero-cost publishing are enabling crackpot theories to go viral… Self-publishing has eliminated all the checks and balances of reputable media … We are into the realm of siloed communities … that experience their own reality and operate with their own facts.”

Blogplug

As it’s impossible to discuss people 'experiencing their own reality and operating with their own facts' without mentioning US politics, I just updated Prepping for the AfterTrump on Medium.

Key additions include the progress since the first draft by the far-right in Austria, France and Germany, as well as an eye-opening piece by Andrew Sullivan on the extraordinary insights of Plato, who wrote, around 2400 years ago:

the longer a democracy lasted… the more democratic it would become. Its freedoms would multiply… Deference to any sort of authority would wither… But it is inherently unstable. As the authority of elites fades… views and identities can become so magnificently diverse as to be mutually uncomprehending… 

In such a 'late-stage democracy’, Plato argues, “a would-be tyrant will often seize his moment …”

a man “not having control of himself [who] attempts to rule others”; a man flooded with fear and love and passion, while having little or no ability to restrain or moderate them; a “real slave to the greatest fawning…”
- Democracies end when they are too democratic (New York Magazine)

See also:

• Trumpmenbashi, on the extraordinary parallels between Trump and the dictatorships of former Soviet Central Asia, right down to the dancing schoolgirls (The Diplomat)
• The Dangerous Acceptance of Donald Trump (New Yorker)
• This is how fascism comes to America (WaPo)

Storytelling in the Internet of Experiences 

The Fastcoexist article introduced me to someone who saw this coming before I was born:

“former Librarian of Congress Daniel J. Boorstin wrote in 1962 that “We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they can live in them.””

But I don’t think even Boorstin would have predicted Magic Leap, profiled in Wired's The Untold Story of Magic Leap, the World’s Most Secretive Startup. If you’re not up to speed with augmented reality, read it, because “To date, investors have funneled $1.4 billion into it… All the major players—Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Sony, Samsung—have whole groups dedicated to artificial reality, and they’re hiring more engineers daily." 

There are a few resources on my Hub tagged augmented reality and/or VR, but none of them really captured the change these technologies represent like this:

what we are building with artificial reality is an internet of experiences… you gain authentic experiences, as authentic as in real life. People remember VR experiences not as a memory of something they saw but as something that happened to them.

This is the Holy Grail of storytelling, where mirror neurons deep in your brain fire in response to emotion-driven, human-focused stories, making you absorb ideas far more effectively than your frontal cortex (see Buffer's Science of Storytelling, and almost 70 resources tagged storytelling).

We already live in a world where people invent their own reality after reading blog posts and watching YouTube videos. 

Can anyone imagine how society will evolve when everyone can use augmented reality to create alternative realities? 

Footnote

Respect, FT

Next time you have to design a '404 Page Not Found’ page, know that you are unlikely to beat this one:

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