With the "banning" of Trump on Facebook and Twitter, I have got a few messages and had some discussions in support for and against the moves. The thing that people need to remember is that Twitter and Facebook are businesses. They are not in the business of well-being, societal reform and improvement or mental health - they are in the business of making profits for shareholders. Every intentional move they make is in relationship to their bottom line and this is true for all corporations - none of them care about you.
With the platforms and news media driven by the attention on the drama that drives the clicks that bring in the advertising revenue, the incentive is to generate drama. This is best engineered through the polarization of populations by positioning topics in social groups using the age old battle of good versus evil, light versus dark. This puts people on opposite sides of an argument and through the gateways of the internet, allows for siloing and a widening of the normal distribution to push the poles further apart until they no longer can even discuss directly with each other, leaving the media to be the translator of the discussion, one in which they are incentivized to leverage for profit.
This isn't new, but the digitalization of the social discourse as well as so much of lives interactions and social exchanges, means that the data they have available to segment and target with is incredibly large and the tools to do so, getting becoming more refined and precise. This means that rather than generalization of conversation, there is a spectrum of infinite slices that they can create and populate by artificially bringing together members of both sides of the argument, pulling in more and more until a mass is formed.
This then becomes self-subsistent, organically growing, while the platforms and media can manage the flow of information to direct the discussion, create more polarizations and of course, discover and leverage new slices of argument to draw attention and more clicks. It is a repeating cycle that will endlessly divide discussions by inserting wedges between groups, split attention, degrade relationships and society as well as reduce an individual's bandwidth and resources to be able to ever get a full picture of what is going on,.as the flow and dynamic change of the conversation and information is so fast, that there is no time to investigate deeper or even think about what is being said, before the next drama arises.
This creates a user who is purely an informational consumer, where there is always more to eat and due to the psychological need and appetite for "new", the whole can never be filled. This results in a consumer who will always demand, but never have the time, energy or resources to create - reducing the chance of competition for attention. Essentially, this means that a corporation like Facebook and Twitter can not only generate the profits, but simultaneously increase the barriers for competition to enter. And of course, the more this happens, the more profits they make, giving them the ability to squeeze-out or buy-out potential competition, as well as direct public discourse and acceptance of their practices to further protect themselves.
As the saying goes, knowledge is power, but it is powerful because of the way it can be used. We are in the information age and we have never had so much information at our fingertips. Yet, the amount of information we have and more importantly, our possibilities to use it effectively are much more limited than people realize, since much of the information is compartmentalized within a handful of corporations to the point even the governments of the countries in which they operate, have no visibility on it.
This means that the information can be used in various ways without any one external person understanding the entire picture. Most likely, even the internal people haven't the understanding of it all or perhaps even most of it, and the drive of algorithms and AI to manage the flow of information makes visibility even harder to grasp, let alone the ramifications and consequences of activity.
As long as the corporations keep making money, they do not care how they make money. Of course, economies are driven by consumption, which means demand, so it is our own behavior as consumers that incentivizes the pathway of profits, although we are heavily influenced by our informational environments, so the managed information sources can affect our future decisions and positions by surrounding us with content to feed upon that ultimately helps them make more money - and take more power economically.
So, this means that while knowledge is power, power also comes through economic capabilities and because the power is in the usage, wealth attracts wealth, that wealth can be used to improve knowledge, which can be leveraged to control the flow of information to direct consumption for more wealth, which then attracts a higher degree of wealth again.
There is a reason that the largest companies in the world are the data collectors and there is a reason that the wealth gap keeps increasing. The process used to polarize populations using the flow of information to continually segment for profits, will continually extract wealth from the polarized and transfer it into the hands of those who control the flow. So, the very act of engaging in polarized discussions is a component of driving the wealth gap, as it not only improves the knowledge leveraged, it also introduces the opportunity for more slices as well as generates more clicks to increase profits.
It all becomes self-fulfilling, because people feel that they have to be up-to-date with the latest developments in the world, otherwise they lose social capital in their peer groups. So they log-in to the media platforms that push the information that polarizes their peer groups and drives them apart, disconnecting communities and reducing the possibility of robust relationships to form, as individuals will be judged topic by topic, rather than the whole person, and no one agrees on every topic. This leaves people exposed to the risk of isolation, something that humans fear, so many will stay largely silent, becoming consumers only, rather than risk the backlash of speaking their mind. After all, they have seen what happens socially to people who speak their mind.
Pretty much every social discussion, every topic and all of the drama is engineered intentionally, or unintentionally through the algorithms of the platform. It doesn't matter if it is left or right, black or white, truth or lie - it is controlled for profits.
Pretty interesting, eh?
If you are expecting that corporations are going to look after your well-being - you are gonna have a bad time.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]