Friday, September 18, 2020

A MUST WATCH DOCUMENTARY: THE SOCIAL DILEMMA

This documentary was first highly recommended to us by my youngest son. After watching The Social Dilemma with my husband, I am moved to recommend this film to everyone. There are many layers of reasons why we cannot agree on what is grounded in fact and truth, why we are so polarized and propagandized, why anger and addictions are epidemic, and why we humans and other beings, our nation, and our world is so endangered. This documentary nails a significant part not all, but a vital part of the roots of the extreme decline that we are witnessing all across our country and the world. Please watch this film. Please be informed and changed. And please spread the word. Thank you. Molly
 

 The Social Dilemma

This documentary-drama hybrid explores the dangerous human impact of social networking, with tech experts sounding the alarm on their own creations.

"We tweet, we like, and we share--but what are the consequences of our growing dependence on social media? As digital platforms increasingly become a lifeline to stay connected, Silicon Valley insiders reveal how social media is reprogramming civilization by exposing what's hiding on the other side of your screen."

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_social_dilemma  

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A powerful exploration of the extreme impact that a relatively small number of engineers in Silicon Valley have over modern-day society, The Social Dilemma deftly tackles concepts like technology addiction, social engineering, and surveillance capitalism and makes them visceral, understandable, and urgent.

The film has an award-winning team behind it, including Jeff Orlowski  the director of Chasing Coral and Chasing Ice and the producers of Fed Up and An Inconvenient Truth. The adage “if the service is free, then you are the product” is not the whole story when it comes to the services tech platforms provide. Search engines, networks, instant information and the like are merely tools to lure us in.

Once we’re hooked, the real commodity they sell is their ability to influence and manipulate us.

The Social Dilemma disrupts the disrupters by unveiling the hidden machinations happening behind everyone’s favorite social media and search platforms.

https://www.humanetech.com/the-social-dilemma 

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Center for Humane Technology What We Do

Tech platforms make billions of dollars keeping us clicking, scrolling, and sharing. Just like a tree is worth more as lumber and a whale is worth more dead than alive—in the attention extraction economy a human is worth more when we are depressed, outraged, polarized, and addicted.

This attention extraction economy is accelerating the mass degradation of our collective capacity to solve global threats, from pandemics to inequality to climate change. If we can’t make sense of the world while making ever more consequential choices, a growing ledger of harms will destroy the futures of our children, democracy and truth itself.

We need radically reimagined technology infrastructure and business models that actually align with humanity’s best interests.

CHT raises awareness and drives change through high-profile presentations to global leaders, public testimony to policymakers and heads of state, and mass media campaigns reaching millions. We also mobilize technologists as advocates and collaborate with top tech leaders through open and closed-door convenings.

Working at the intersection of human nature, technology, and systems transformation, our goal is to shift the mindset from which persuasive technology systems are built, and to use that process to support crucial parallel shifts in our larger economic and social systems.

https://www.humanetech.com/what-we-do

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Ledger of Harms
 
Making Sense of the World
Misinformation, conspiracy theories, and fake news
 
Why It Matters
A broken information ecology undermines our ability to understand and act on complex global challenges from Climate Change to COVID 19. 
 
64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools...our recommendation systems grow the problem”, noted an internal Facebook presentation in 2016. Yet repeated attempts to counteract this have been repeatedly ignored, diluted, or deliberately shut down by senior Facebook officers, according to a 2020 Wall Street Journal investigation. In 2018, Facebook managers told employees the company’s priorities were shifting “away from societal good to individual value.”
 
6X faster Fake news spreads six times faster than true news. According to researchers, this is because fake news grabs our attention more than authentic information: fake news items usually have a higher emotional content and contain unexpected information which inevitably means that they will be shared and reposted more often.
 
Reading a fake news item even once increases the chances of a reader judging that it is true when they next encounter it, even when the news item has been labeled as suspect by fact-checkers or is counter to the reader’s own political standpoint. The damage done by fake news items in the past continues to reverberate today. Psychological mechanisms such as these, twinned with the speed at which fake news travels, highlight our vulnerability demonstrating how we can easily be manipulated by anyone planting fakes news or using bots to spread their own viewpoints.
 
45% of tweets about corona virus are from bots spreading fake information, according to research from Carnegie Mellon University. An analysis of more than 200 million tweets created since January 2020 indicates more than 100 false narratives, including conspiracy theories that hospitals are full of mannequins. Researchers note that these posts appear to be aimed at sowing division within America, commenting “We do know that it looks like a propaganda machine”.
 
As the pandemic develops, there has been a significant increase in posting fake news and false information even among human users, due to the algorithms underlying social media platforms. Researchers note that people naturally repost messages on the basis of their popularity, rather than their accuracy. Fact-checking has been unable to keep pace. Such false information is particularly dangerous because, as noted above, it tends to be retained for a long time, irrespective of fact correction.
 
The primary driving force behind whether someone will share a piece of information is not its accuracy or even its content; the main reason we share a post is because it comes from a friend or a celebrity with whom we want to be associated. As humans, we’re often more concerned with status, popularity, and establishing a trusted “friends” circle, than with maintaining the truth. As a result, social media spaces will inevitably be spaces where the truth is easily downgraded.
 
2 minutes of exposure to a conspiracy theory video reduces people’s pro-social attitudes (such as their willingness to help others), as well as reducing their belief in established scientific facts.   

Anger is the emotion that travels fastest and farthest on social media, compared to all other emotions. As a result, those who post angry messages will inevitably have the greatest influence, and social media platforms will tend to be dominated by anger.
 
17% Each word of moral outrage added to a tweet increases the rate of retweets by 17%. It takes very little effort to tip the emotional balance within social media spaces, catalyzing and accelerating further polarization.
 
 

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