ANALYSIS: A social media danger to society

The closed-loop aspect of people being more accepting to views that are similar to their own than contrary ideas can lead to walled-off minds. Just like the 18th century pioneer who was not prone to considering any beliefs but his own.

Such a padlocked mind often results in echo chambers: The beliefs of a group, churned inside but not outside this group, are further amplified and reinforced. Because the information is cloistered from rebuttal, even criticism, most of us are prone to seek out information that reinforces our existing views. Without encountering opposing views, these mental echo chambers can increase social and political polarization and extremism. That is the conclusion of many people who study human behavior.

As for you and me? Of course not. Our loops of empathy and openness to opposing views are accepting and wide as can be. We can only wish this were so. Echo chambers are part of human nature.

Indeed, in America, the land of free expression and open communications, self-reinforcing, self-amplifying echo chambers exist. They have led to many closed groups. Some are quite vociferous in voice and violent in practice. Their presence in our country is growing.

Unfortunately, cognitive bias and echo chambers are not academic contrivances. They pose a threat to our traditional reliance on relatively high-quality information — information on which we should base much of our lives.

Memes have become an integral part of the Internet. Part of the information flow in the cyberworld takes the form of memes. A meme is usually a photo accompanied with text, but it can be a video, text alone, graphics, a link, a hashtag, etc. Popular memes can spread rapidly. Using Internet parlance, they can go viral.

Memes are effective because they take advantage of people being interested in or amused by the same subjects. Those subjects can be anything, such as jokes, political views, certain kinds of art or a clever catch phrase. They require no skill to relay to others and only limited skill to create.

Bots have also become a significant part of the Internet. Bots are software programs designed to make users believe they are communicating with another human, when they are actually communicating with a software application. As of 2021, bots consumed at least 50 percent of all Internet traffic. Of these bots, about half are classified as “good” bots (carrying accurate content) and half are “bad” bots (carrying misleading content or outright lies).

If these statistics are correct, 25 percent of Internet traffic contains misleading or outright false information. How would you react if you turned on your morning news, or picked up your local newspaper, with the expectation that ¼ of the information was designed to misinform you?

Often, the bots present a user only with information that reinforces the user’s views, even if the information is of poor quality or false. The user is often presented information that melds and reinforces the user’s own viewpoints, but the information may not be accurate.

The information stream might begin with modestly critical information designed to lure the user to continue surfing about the topic. The user might be neutral about a subject. “Hmm, that’s interesting,” a user might think, “I’ll surf a bit more on the topic.”

Often, the user does not do any surfing at all. The social media vendor’s software takes over and the user is involuntarily subjected to a spate of memes designed to persuade the user to a desired way of thinking; that is, the vendor’s desired way of thinking. Remember that this vendor is not only a company that markets a commercial product, it may be a vendor that markets a political, racial or religious philosophy.

Of course, the user might be further along than curiosity. The user might be looking for reinforcement of his or her beliefs.

Whatever the case may be, once snared, the system lures the user with more enticing information, often more provocative. The goal of these kinds of memes and bots is to persuade users to embrace some belief, some product, some advertisement. Ideally, for the social media vendor, the user is corralled into accepting the messages (often in the form of memes) being sent to their screen.

In essence, they are designed to manipulate the user. Of course, you and I are impervious to cognitive bias, memes and bots. Maybe so, but the person next to us is not.

During his career, Uyless Black consulted and lectured in 16 countries on computer networks and the architecture of the internet. He lives in Coeur d’Alene with his wife, Holly, and their ferocious three-pound watchdog, Bitzi.