Dear Commons Community,
I am in the middle of reading Yuval Harari’s current bestseller, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. As the title suggest, this is no small, short topic. If you have read any of his earlier books such as Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, you know that a Harari book is long and slow. I need to keep my iPhone near me when I read his work so I can look up terms and phrases. And at over 400 pages, Nexus… is not a quick weekend read.
I read one chapter yesterday that I feel compelled to share. In Chapter Eight, entitled, Fallible: The Network is Often Wrong, Harari takes aim at underlying reasons why social media has come to dominate not always for the good much of what we see on the Internet. He starts by relating several examples of how the Stalinist regime controlled and manipulated information in Russia. Harari quotes and refers to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, during the discussion and moves to today’s social media companies such as Facebook and YouTube. In between, Harari also incorporates background on Napolean Bonaparte and Carl von Clausewitz, a 19th Century Prussian general and military theorist. Here are several quotes from this chapter reflecting on 21st Century social media.
In discussing YouTube, he mentions that the company in studying how to boost its viewership (from 100 million hours per day to 1 billion per day) used AI algorithms that concluded that “outrage drives engagement”. And when “users dialed down outrage and stuck to the truth, the algorithms tended to ignore them.”
Harari also references Facebook’s whistleblower Frances Haugen who stated:
“We have evidence that our core product mechanics, such as vitality, recommendations, and optimizing for engagement, are a significant part of why hate speech, divisive political speech, and misinformation flourish on our (Facebook’s) platform”.
Harari concludes: “As we have seen again and again throughout history in a completely free information fight, truth tends to lose.”
In reading this chapter, I kept thinking about our current presidential election.
God help us!
Tony
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