Chained to the algorithm The joke’s on us as social media capitalizes on our base impulses in race to the bottom By: Melissa Martin Posted: 7:00 PM CST Friday, Dec. 16, 2022

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 15/12/2022 (740 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There’s a certain type of video that spreads like a noxious weed through social media. If you spend any time at all on TikTok, or Twitter, or Instagram, or Facebook, you will eventually run into it. For simplicity’s sake, we can call this phenomenon the Bad Food Video, and they can be amusing, as long as you know what you’re seeing and why.

There are several subcategories of Bad Food Video, all with their own well-established structure. One of the most successful is the cooking hack video. In these, there’s always a perky chef, almost invariably female and white. There’s always someone behind the camera who glides around the kitchen island to capture the action and validate its culinary genius.

“Oh wow,” they’ll purr, as they move the camera within inches of the ingredients. “That’s incredible, that looks amazing.”

But the food, in these Bad Food Videos, does not look amazing. In fact, it looks shockingly gross. The perky chef will dump a large pot of spaghetti and several jars of sauce onto a granite countertop, then squish it around with her hands. She’ll wrap a whole block of cheap cheddar cheese in a tortilla, or coat an unseasoned raw chicken with sour cream.

“This is the best way to make nachos,” she’ll chirp, as she massages an amorphous goo of ingredients with her fingers.

People are, quite rightly, aghast at these videos. They tend to trigger a basic sort of disbelief and revulsion; they also serve to confirm some viewers’ suspicions about how bad other people’s cooking really is. So the videos spread like wildfire as people share them, making jokes about the chef, finding solace in experiencing this terrible thing together.

And this format doesn’t only involve with food. It happens with makeup: one TikTok model became blindingly famous, and then rich, thanks to her “technique” of slathering half a bottle of $65 foundation on her face. It happens with relationships, as when couples make staged videos catching each other cheating. It happens with various “life hacks.”

Some articles about these videos call the techniques shown in them “trends,” which is incorrect. They’re not trends. Nobody is actually doing things like this when not on camera. What these creators are doing is playing the algorithm; what they have realized is that, so long as you can get people disgusted or outraged or horrified, then you can be famous.

Here’s how it works. Social media companies want to keep people using their service; they want to keep you at least a little addicted. So they have internal systems — their algorithms — which monitor what you look at, what you share, or what you respond to, and then use that information to put more of that type of content in front of you.

And what social media companies know, and most algorithms lean on, is that the most addictive type of content is anything which generates strong reactions. Cute animals are good for this — the nurturing instinct is a powerful emotion — but anger or disgust or outrage are best. Nothing sparks us to react quite so well as that which offends.

Some of this stuff is harmless. At the end of the day, smearing litres of sour cream and shredded cheese on a countertop as a “taco hack” is disgusting, but it’s not damaging any actual lives. But it’s the tip of the iceberg of how modern communication is shaping and dominating our public discussions, and those do have catastrophic consequences in the real world.

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I write this, because something is changing on one of the most important social media platforms that allows us to see how that process works, almost in real time. Since Elon Musk took over Twitter last month, many users have observed (and are starting to document) that the platform’s has changed; it’s becoming a much angrier place.

Here’s one example. Late last week, I tapped on a headache-inducing tweet about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s new Netflix documentary; the tweeter was outraged that Meghan had poked fun at her own first, overly dramatic curtsy. I just wanted to read the replies, knowing there would be some funny responses.

The algorithm made me pay for that mistake. For the next several days, I was deluged with an increasingly unhinged stream of tweets from royal watchers I don’t follow, pushed into my feed by a system that guessed that, since I’d showed a flicker of interest in a furious tweet about the Duchess of Sussex, I would be hooked by more.

In this case, the algorithm overestimated my interest — there’s only so much ranting about the imagined personality of a celebrity I can take — but it was a marked difference from how Twitter, as a system, had worked for me before that point. Now, I’m being force-fed more opinions that boil over with tension, that push conflict, that divide.

I’m not the only one that has noticed the difference. Since Musk took over Twitter, a number of people have observed that the content being pushed into their feeds has changed. It’s angrier, more combative, more offensive: a close friend, who is gay, is quite suddenly being inundated by overtly homophobic posts by far-right American provocateurs.

This week, one person tallied up the amount of user engagements on tweets by some of the most controversial right-wing accounts on Twitter; they’ve skyrocketed since Musk’s takeover. There are ways to limit this, if the user manually changes some settings. But there’s no doubt, Twitter is now more aggressively marinating its users in these opinions.

To be clear, none of this is new. Social media algorithms are in significant part to blame for the crystallizing extremes in our culture, such as the QAnon conspiracy cult; journalists and researchers have shown how YouTube and Facebook algorithms serve as a radicalization pipeline, pumping frustrated people with constant content designed to arouse their anger.

For the platform, that’s a boon. It keeps people hooked. Someone addicted to watching video after video about why women or minorities are to blame for their problems, each more extreme than the last, is someone who is also watching a whole lot of ads. Which demonstrates just how ill-equipped our brains are, to healthily engage the digital worlds we inhabit.

With that in mind, the most important thing we can teach ourselves, and our children, about how to navigate those worlds is this: the algorithms want you to be angry. They want you to be angry, because it is good for business. They want you to gorge on content that upsets you, because the anger it provokes keeps you glued to your laptop, or your phone.

To be good, to be useful, to be constructive, anger has to be grounded in community

This is not, to be clear, to cast a blanket aspersion on anger, as an emotion. Anger is important. It’s necessary to change the world for the better. Segregation, apartheid, oppression of all kinds; none of these things end without anger. Yet to be good, to be useful, to be constructive, anger has to be grounded in community. It has to be directed in healthy ways.

So anger is good, where it can challenge power, but the same can’t be said for inchoate rage. And it’s the latter that content fed to us by algorithms tends to foster, an inchoate rage born of meaningless conflict and fear of the other. Twitter is trying more of that now. And it can be really hard to turn away. But it’s easier when you realize what’s being done to you.

Remember that, always. The algorithms crave your anger. You don’t need to give it to them.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca

Melissa Martin
Reporter-at-large

Melissa Martin reports and opines for the Winnipeg Free Press.

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