MIT professor Sinan Aral’s new book, The Hype Machine, examines the dynamics of social media and suggests new ways to prevent online information from exacerbating falsehood, polarization and social tension.
WITH Professor Sinan Aral’s new book “The Hype Machine” examines the dangers and promises of social media in a time of discord.
Do you do a lot on social media? When was the last time you checked Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram? Last night? Before breakfast? Five minutes ago?
If so, you are not alone – which of course it is about. Humans are very social beings. Our brains are wired to process social information, and we usually feel better when we’re connected. Social media uses this tendency.
“The human brain evolved essentially more than anything because of sociality,” says Sinan Aral, MIT professor and information technology and marketing expert. “When you develop population-level technology that delivers trillions of trillions of trillions of social signals a day in real time, the rise of social media is not unexpected. It’s like throwing a burning match into a gasoline pool. ”
The numbers make this clear. In 2005, about 7 percent of American adults used social media. By 2017, 80 percent of American adults were using Facebook alone. Around 3.5 billion out of 7.7 billion people on the planet are active social media participants. Globally, on a typical day, people post 500 million tweets, share over 10 billion Facebook content, and watch over a billion hours of YouTube video.
“Social media disrupts our choices, our economies and our health,” says Aral, David Austin professor of management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Photo credit: M. Scott Brewer
However, with the growth of social media platforms, the once predominant utopian vision of the online community has disappeared. In addition to the benefits of easy connectivity and improved information, social media has also become a vehicle for disinformation and political attack from outside sovereign borders.
“Social media disrupts our choices, our economies and our health,” says Aral, David Austin professor of management at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Now Aral has written a book about it. In “The Hype Machine,” published this month by Currency, a Random House legal notice, Aral describes why social media platforms have become so successful, yet so problematic, and suggests ways to improve them.
The book covers the same area as “The Social Dilemma,” a popular documentary on Netflix. But Aral’s book, as he puts it, “starts where the social dilemma ends and goes a step further, asking: What can we do to meet the promise of social media and avoid its danger?”
“This machine exists in every facet of our life,” says Aral. “And the question in the book is what do we do? How do we achieve the promise of this machine and avoid the danger? We are at a crossroads. What we do next is important, so I want to equip people, policymakers and platforms to get the good results and avoid the bad results. ”
When “commitment” equals anger
“The Hype Machine” draws on Aral’s own research on social networks as well as other insights from the fields of cognitive science, computer science, economics, politics and more. For example, researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles found that people receive greater amounts of dopamine – the chemical in our brains strongly linked to motivation and reward – when their social media posts get more likes.
At the same time, consider a 2018 MIT study by Soroush Vosoughi, an MIT graduate student and now assistant professor of computer science at Dartmouth College. Deb Roy, MIT professor of media arts and studies and executive director of the MIT Media Lab; and Aral, who has been studying social networks for 20 years. The three researchers found that from 2006 to 2017, false messages were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than real messages on Twitter. Why? Most likely because false news is more novelty than the truth and generates stronger reactions – especially disgust and surprise.
With this in mind, the main tension with social media companies is how their platforms generate audiences and revenue when posts generate strong emotional responses, often based on dubious content.
“This is a well-designed, well-designed machine whose goals are maximized,” says Aral. “The business models that power the social media industrial complex have a lot to do with the results we’re seeing – it’s an attention economy, and companies want you to get involved. How do you get engagement? Well, they give you little dopamine hits and … make you angry. That’s why I call it the hype machine. We know that strong emotions make us engaged [that favors] Anger and immense content. ”
From Russia to Marketing
In “The Hype Machine”, both the political implications and the business dimensions of social media are examined in depth. Social media are certainly fertile ground for misinformation campaigns. During the 2016 US presidential election, Russia disseminated false information to at least 126 million people on Facebook and an additional 20 million people on Instagram (which Facebook owns) and was responsible for 10 million tweets. About 44 percent of American adults visited a false news source in the last few weeks of the campaign.
“I think we have to be a lot more vigilant than we are,” says Aral.
We don’t know if Russia’s efforts changed the outcome of the 2016 election, Aral says, although they may have been quite effective. Oddly enough, it is not clear whether this is also the case for most US engagement efforts.
As Aral studies, digital advertising is often extremely ineffective on most of the major US online platforms. Academic studies show that the “lift” created by advertising campaigns – the extent to which they affect consumer behavior – has been overstated by a factor of hundreds in some cases. It’s not enough just to count the clicks on ads. Instead, online engagement with new consumers tends to be more effective and when it is well targeted. In this sense, there is a parallel between good marketing and guerrilla social media campaigns.
“The two questions that I am asked most frequently nowadays,” says Aral, “are, has Russia managed to intervene in our democracy?” Second, how do I measure ROI? [return on investment] of marketing investments? As I was writing this book, I realized that the answer to these two questions is the same. ”
Suggestions for improvement
“The Hype Machine” was praised by many commentators. Foster Provost, professor at the New York UniversityThe Stern School of Business says it is a “masterful integration of science, business, law and politics”. Duncan Watts, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, says the book is “essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how we got here and how we can do better somewhere.”
With that in mind, The Hype Machine has several detailed suggestions for improving social media. Aral advocates the automated and user-generated flagging of false messages and limiting revenue tracking based on false content. He also urges companies to help scientists better research the problem of electoral influence.
Aral believes that federal privacy measures could be useful if we learn from the benefits and missteps of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe and a new California law that allows consumers to stop sharing data and find out which information companies hold about them to have. He does not advocate the breakup of Facebook and instead suggests that the social media economy needs structural reforms. He calls for data portability and interoperability so that “consumers can own their identity and move freely from one network to another”. Aral believes that without such fundamental changes, new platforms will simply replace the old ones, fueled by the network effects that are driving the social media economy.
“I’m not advocating a silver bullet,” says Aral, who emphasizes that changes in four areas combined – money, code, norms and laws – can change the way the social media industry develops.
However, if things continue unchanged, Facebook and the other social media giants risk significant setbacks and user burnout, according to Aral.
“If you make me angry and angry, I might click more in the short term, but I might also get really tired and upset about how this is making my life miserable and I could turn you off altogether,” notes Aral. “I mean, that’s why we have a Facebook delete move, that’s why we have a Stop Hate for Profit move. People are pushing back against the short term vision, and I think we need to embrace this longer term vision of a healthier communication ecosystem. ”
Changing the social media giants can be a huge challenge. Still, says Aral, these companies are not necessarily meant to rule.
“I don’t think this or any other technology has a deterministic endpoint,” says Aral. “I want to bring us back to a more practical reality, namely that technology is what we make of it, and we forego our responsibility to steer technology towards good and away from bad. That is the path I am trying to illuminate in this book. ”
