CityReads | Social Media as the Hype Machine

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Social Media as the Hype Machine

A trifecta of three technologies makes the Hype Machine possible: digital social networks, machine intelligence, and smartphones.

Sinan Aral, 2020. The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health—and How We Must Adapt, Penguin Random House.

Source: 

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/570128/the-hype-machine-by-sinan-aral/

The coronavirus pandemic of 2020 was a "black swan" event, the repercussions of which were felt throughout the world's health systems, economy, and the very fabric of everyday life. But another dramatic, albeit subtler, consequence of COVID-19 was the rather abrupt shock it delivered to the world's global communication system—the central nervous system of digital connections that links our planet. And as the virus sent humanity scurrying off the streets and into their homes, it pushed billions of people onto their laptops and smartphones, scrambling to get online. The day the offline world stood still, the online world ignited like a digital forest fire.

Demand for social media skyrocketed. We relied on social media for human connection, social support, and lifesaving information. But it was also a cauldron of misinformation about impending national lockdowns and false cures, nationalistic finger-pointing between the United States and China, and foreign interference designed to fan the flames of our fears. Privacy debates took on new meaning during the COVID crisis as the threat of "surveillance capitalism" morphed into lifesaving "disease surveillance." The perils of social media surveillance for privacy were sharply contrasted with the promise of social media surveillance for health. Some thought the surveillance was worth the privacy risk. Others thought the risks outweighed the benefits.

So which of these visions of social media is correct—the promise or the peril? Is the Hype Machine a force for good, for collective intelligence and solidarity? Or is it a scourge and a pariah?

In other words, is social media a force for meaningful connection, collaboration, social support, and access to lifesaving information? Or is it a propaganda machine that, left unchecked, will destroy democracy, civil society, and our health? Can the promise of social media be realized without the peril? Or are they inexorably linked?

Sinan Aral, a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management, offers a scientific dissection of social media, the greatest communications force of our time, in his new book, " The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health—and How We Must Adapt”. Aral directs the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, and the book is the result of his more than two decades of dedicated research on social media.

Aral refers to the real-time communications ecosystem created by social media as the "Hype Machine". The Hype Machine has created a radical interdependence among us, shaping our thoughts, opinions, and behaviors. This interdependence is enabled by digital networks, like Facebook and Twitter, and guided by machine intelligence, like newsfeed and friend-suggestion algorithms. Together they are remaking the evolution of the human social network and the flow of information through it. These digital networks expose the controls of the Hype Machine to nation-states, businesses, and individuals eager to steer the global conversation toward their ends, to mold public opinion, and ultimately to change what we do. The design of this machine, and how we use it, are reshaping our organizations and our lives. And the Hype Machine is even more relevant today than it was before the COVID-19 pandemic pushed the world onto social media en masse.

Aral argues that social media could deliver an incredible wave of productivity, innovation, social welfare, democratization, equality, health, positivity, unity, and progress. At the same time, it can and, if left unchecked, will deliver death blows to our democracies, our economies, and our public health. Today we are at a crossroads of these realities.

The argument of this book is that we can achieve the promise of social media while avoiding the peril. To do so, we must step out of our tendency to armchair-theorize about how social media affects us and develop a rigorous scientific understanding of how it works. By looking under the hood at how the Hype Machine operates and employing science to decipher its impact, we can collectively steer this ship away from the impending rocks and into calmer waters.

The goals in this book are to describe the science of how the Hype Machine works and to explore how it affects our politics, our businesses, and our relationships; to explore the consequences of the Hype Machine for our society, both positive and negative; and to discuss how we can—through company policy, social norms, government regulation, and more advanced software code—achieve its promise while avoiding its peril. The Hype Machine has the potential for both promise and peril. And the decisions we make in the next eighteen to twenty-four months in how we design, regulate, monetize, and use social media will determine which path we realize. We’re at a crossroads. To act responsibly, we have to educate ourselves about how social media works.

The new social age

Every minute of every day, our planet now pulses with trillions of digital social signals, bombarding us with streams of status updates, news stories, tweets, pokes, posts, referrals, advertisements, notifications, shares, check-ins, and ratings from peers in our social networks, news media, advertisers, and the crowd. These signals are delivered to our always-on mobile devices through platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter, and they are routed through the human social network by algorithms designed to optimize our connections, accelerate our interactions, and maximize our engagement with tailored streams of content.

But at the same time, these signals are much more transformative—they are hypersocializing our society, scaling mass persuasion, and creating a tyranny of trends. They do this by injecting the influence of our peers into our daily decisions, curating population-scale behavior change, and enforcing an attention economy. I call this trifecta of hypersocialization, personalized mass persuasion, and the tyranny of trends the New Social Age.

The striking thing about the New Social Age is that fifteen years ago this cacophony of digital social signals didn’t even exist. Fifteen short years ago, all we had to facilitate our digital connections was the phone, the fax machine, and email. Today, as more and more new social technologies come online, such as Friendster in 2002, MySpace in 2003, Facebook in 2004, Twitter in 2006, WhatsApp in 2009, Instagram in 2010, WeChat in 2011, and TikTok in 2012, we know less and less about how they are changing us.

How does fake news subvert sovereignty ? How does fake news disrupt elections? How does fake news affect public health? Why does the social media influence the news you watch, how you exercise, who you date and even your mood? Why can influencers convince us to buy? This book offers scientific analysis and explanation.

For instance, this book introduces the science of fake news. False news spread significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth—sometimes by an order of magnitude. While the truth rarely diffused to more than 1,000 people, the top 1 percent of false news cascades routinely diffused to as many as 100,000 people. It took the truth approximately six times as long as falsehood to reach 1,500 people and twenty times as long to travel ten reshares from the origin tweet in a retweet cascade. Falsehood spread significantly more broadly and was retweeted by more unique users than the truth at every cascade depth. False political news traveled deeper and more broadly, reached more people, and was more viral than any other category of false news. It reached more than 20,000 people nearly three times faster than all other types of false news reached just 10,000 people.

The social network is the computer

While Apple sold computers, Facebook sold the network (or advertising on it). But for me the mural had a deeper meaning. It described a view of the world in which society is essentially a gigantic information processor, moving ideas, concepts, and opinions from person to person, like neurons in the brain or nodes in a neural network, firing synapses at each node in the form of decisions and behaviors—what products to buy, who to vote for, or who to date—billions of times per minute, every day. In this analogy, we are the nodes, and the architecture of the information-processing machine we collectively inhabit is the social network. The digitally connected social network created by the aggregation of Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, WeChat, and Instagram "is the computer." But if the social network is the computer, what is it processing?

The information that ebbs and flows through this computer—this gigantic information-processing machine that connects us all—embodies ideas, suggestions, political messages, calls to action, artistic and cultural shifts, shocking news of horrific events, facts, figures, ways of thinking, advocacy, and yes, stupid cat pictures and Instagram memes of Chihuahuas that look like blueberry muffins. The Hype Machine is, at its core, an information processor, regulating and directing the flow of information in society, from person to person and between people, brands, governments, media outlets, and international organizations. We, the nodes in this network, are ourselves information processors and decision makers. We go about our daily lives, shopping, voting, dating, advocating, posting, sharing, and curating the information that flows through the network. The collective outcomes we experience as a society are the aggregation of the individual decisions we make, which are in turn informed and influenced by the flow of information, ideas, and opinions to which we are exposed through various media, including corporate broadcast media and, today, more and more, social media.

The constitutes of the hype machine

A trifecta of three technologies makes the Hype Machine possible. The design and development of digital social networks, machine intelligence, and smartphones together determine how the Hype Machine structures our world. In large measure, digital social networks structure the flow of information in society. Machine intelligence guides the evolution of digital social networks through friend recommendations and the flow of information over the network through feed algorithms. Smartphones create an "always on" environment for the Hype Machine to operate in.

They learn from, and feed granular second-by-second data about our behaviors and opinions into, the machine intelligence that structures our access to information and the opinions and beliefs we are exposed to. This trifecta of digital social networks, machine intelligence, and smartphones has transformed how information is produced and consumed, how we are informed, how we behave, and thus how the Hype Machine changes us (Figure 3.2).

Two regularities of the social graph directly influence what we are experiencing on the Hype Machine today. First, it's clustered more than one would expect by chance, meaning we form dense clusters of people that are highly connected within the clusters, much more than we are connected across the clusters. Second, it’s homophilous, meaning that similar people connect. These two properties explain why the Hype Machine helps foster political polarization and echo chambers, spreads fake news, and generates outsize returns on marketing investments. Understanding clustering and homophily is essential to understanding the Hype Machine.

The Hype Machine framework (Figure 3.10) proposes three technologies, four levers, and three trends that contribute to the ongoing production and development of social media and its consequences.

The combination of digital social networks, machine intelligence, and smartphones (or the Hype Machine’s next-generation medium) form the technological backbone of this revolution in human communication. The interplay of these three technologies propels three trends that the Hype Machine enables at scale. Hypersocialization wires us into a staggering amount of new digital social signals from our friends, families, and the crowd, connecting our thoughts, behaviors, and actions with those of over 3 billion people in a new hive mind. Personalized mass persuasion creates a new wave of targeted, individually tailored persuasive messaging designed to influence what we buy, how we vote, and even who we love. And the institutionalization of the attention economy keeps us engaged long enough to monetize our attention and create a tyranny of trends.

We have four broad levers with which to steer this ship: money, code, norms, and laws. By carefully considering how we design the business models and economic incentives that govern social technologies, the software code that programs and designs its algorithms, the norms with which we appropriate the technology, and the laws we enact to address its market failures, we can and must change the nature of our relationship to the Hype Machine.

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