The Hit and Miss: "The Persuadables"
Social media's goal to persuade you and deliberately change your behaviour
“As more people use social media to tell the story of the future, the wants and needs of more people will be reflected.”
- Anonymous
A few days ago, I wanted to enrol myself in an online course and so I did some browsing and hunting to get a few nice courses. The next day, Facebook showed me this as a sponsored post of an online course.
Has this ever happened to you too? I am sure it has.
How wonderful is it that we can control the internet? It serves you what you want. It captures your searches, your needs and then that is what it shows you? This way, everyone has their own ‘tailor-made’ internet for them. I honestly thought it was extremely powerful a tool, and it made me feel powerful.
Turns out, it wasn’t!
I got curious how people at the Silicon Valley, tech giants like Facebook or Google actually made all of it possible. And so, started my little research on how companies use our data. I have clicked yes on so many ‘Terms and Conditions’ and ‘Privacy Policy’ before that I don’t even remember the last time I actually cared enough to open and read through one of these policies. I should have.
Courtesy: Wall Street and Technology
In 2016, Mark Zuckerberg was asked to present himself in front of Congress over a data privacy scandal. It was reported that Facebook did a little thing with Cambridge Analytica, a British political consultancy firm in London. They apparently used Facebook users’ data to ‘manipulate’ people into voting for Trump in the 2016 American elections. All of this seemed fictional to me, until I read ‘Zucked’ by Roger McNamee who wrote about the activities Facebook was involved in. Cambridge Analytica only seemed a part of the whole game to me when I read it.
While Mark Zuckerberg did say that they were “sorry” and that they could have done better to secure the privacy of their users, the damage was done already.
What Cambridge Analytica did was to prepare a basic profile of its every user – a psychographic profile. It is a detailed profile of each user, what you like, where you comment, which pages you follow most. And based on these, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook worked out a system to figure out who their ‘persuadables’ are. These are people whose opinions have not formed yet, they are opinion to understanding more perspectives. To these persuadables, they then bombard ads and sponsored posts that would suit their narrative. In the 2016 case, the target was to make Donald Trump win. And guess what happened, he became the President of the United States of America.
Several human rights activists have also pointed out the role of Facebook and social media in the Rohingya Crisis and a recent Wall Street Journal report mentioned its role in spreading hate speech against Muslims by BJP leaders in India.
“The problem with Facebook is Facebook.”
- Siva Vaidhyanathan
According to a 2019 report, Facebook has a whopping two and a half billion registered users, making it the world’s largest social media platform. We consume almost all kinds of information from Facebook without really knowing how it could be affecting us in our ideologies and behaviour.
Since there is no tangible impact on our lives due to social media, we probably often tend to not notice it as much. The point is, what can we do about it?
What can we do?
But we can’t live without the internet and social media too. My phone tells me I spend an average of one hour only on Instagram. I get most of my freelance work through social media and for most of us, it is almost impossible to imagine a day without social media. I wondered if in such a situation, we really can do anything to lessen the damage that we might cause to ourselves by giving our data to these tech giants and getting manipulated.
I found this very interesting and insightful article on how one can try to consciously use data online and give out personal information to websites.
These lines from the book I recently read on the Facebook controversy pretty much describes what I wish to.
“Tools that allow users to get answers and share ideas are wonderful in the ideal, but as implemented by Facebook and Google, with massive automation and artificial intelligence, they proved too easy to manipulate. Google’s ability to deliver results in milliseconds provides an illusion of authority that users have misinterpreted. They confuse speed and comprehensiveness with accuracy, not realising that Google is skewing search results to reflect what it knows about user preferences. Users mistakenly believe their ability to get an answer to any question means they themselves are now experts, no longer dependent on people who actually know what they are talking about. That might work if Google did not imitate politicians by giving users the answers they want, as opposed to the ones they need.”
- Roger McNamee, author of Zucked
In conclusion, I guess what I am trying to say is that we are not aware of what data we are giving out on our social media and how it is used to manipulate us. Maybe what we can do is to educate ourselves on the issue. Be aware of your own biases so that you do not become the next ‘persuadable’ and stay safe on the dark web!
I would want to leave you with the following quote of George Orwell from one of my favourite books, 1984.
“The people will not revolt. They will not look up from their screens long enough to notice what’s happening.”
- George Orwell, 1984
Resources for further reading:
1. This TIME article on the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica Scandal
2. This Wall Street Journal Report on Facebook and BJP
3. This TED talk by Carole Cadwalladr on Facebook’s role in Brexit
4. This comprehensive New York Times article on Facebook’s involvement in the Rohingya crisis
5. Book recommendations:
- Zucked (Waking up to the Facebook catastrophe) by Roger McNamee
- The System by James Ball
6. Netflix Documentary: The Great Hack
Access Mark Zuckerberg’s full testimony (it’s over 5 hours) here
Some more things that I want to say:
If you have managed to reach this point in the email, I want to give you a big hug for bearing with me. I genuinely love the responses that I have gotten on my Instagram about the newsletter. I would sincerely love to hear more from you about how I can do this better.
I also am very thankful to already have received some crucial comments on the first issue. Some readers felt it got distracting that there were many links in a single essay and therefore, I have written the essay together and tried adding all the links separately towards the end. To everyone who gave this review, thank you, and I hope to have done somewhat justice in this issue.
I am very open to receiving more suggestions on what to talk about next. Some of the suggestions for the next issue have been talking about caste and class, gender, and/or education. You don’t really have to respond, but if you do I would really like the suggestions.
Seriously, thank you for taking out time and reading this.
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The Hit and Miss, Curated by Tanisha (@_madampanda__)
To the point , very nice.