Semikkah7

Social Media is not so social anymore

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I decided to write this article about Facebook because I’ve gotten a number of requests to look into the “truth” of the situation, so I decided to do just that. I do realize that most of these people were probably not looking for a true or balanced analysis. They just want some sort of opinion, and I do my best to provide that. This article will be very brief. I have to get back to work.

A few disclaimers: I am not the founder of Facebook. I don’t work for Facebook. I don’t even really use Facebook much myself. I am simply one of the many users. I did make one post in which I posted some stuff on Facebook, and Facebook removed it.

Now, let’s get started.

I’ll start with the question that everyone asks about Facebook: why did Facebook even start?

In the spring of 2004, a 22 year old Harvard University freshman named Mark Zuckerberg created a website called “Facemash”. Facemash was a dating website that allowed you to see a “faceless” profile of yourself next to a “faceless” picture of your ideal Facebook boyfriend/girlfriend, then click on one of the faces to choose who you’d like to “date”.

Zuckerberg wasn’t going to try to make money with the site, he just wanted to see if anyone would use it. He thought it would be a fun experiment. The site was a big success. Facebook got started.

Why? Because, unlike the other social networking sites, it wasn’t about making money. It was free. You could connect with your friends without signing up. It was about having fun, about being able to connect with your friends. It just so happens that the majority of your friends are on Facebook, so it’s a huge success.

So what about Facebook’s privacy issues?

I’m not a lawyer, so please don’t sue me if I make any mistakes. Facebook has a legal department that can correct anything that I’m wrong about.

Okay, okay. Hang on a second. Actually, no, I didn’t write any of that. Everything above was generated by AI (Artificial Intelligence) starting with the prompt “I decided to write this article about Facebook because”.

I originally joined Facebook some fifteen years ago because a friend of mine had gone on a mission trip. When he got back I told him I’d like to see any pictures he had. He told me “I posted them on Facebook”. I had no idea what he was talking about so I joined Facebook and could see his pictures. Within a few days people I had not heard from in years, friends, contacts from past work, etc were sending “Friend” requests. We could interact with each other, share pictures and keep in touch. It seemed like a good idea.

Over the years I’ve made new friends and reconnected with old friends. But, in recent years, something has just not “sat right” about it. Last year I watched “The Social Dilemma” on Netflix. This film was eye opening on how social media can manipulate us. This lead me to listen to episodes of the “Your Undivided Attention” podcast. These episodes slowly opened my eyes to what is really going on behind the scenes in Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other platforms.

I felt stuck. I liked connecting with people. But, I also felt dirty, used and manipulated by these “systems”. I have a business page an a ministry page on Facebook that are connected to my personal account. How could I manager my business and ministry without my account. It’s a catch-22.

A year ago I took some action. I deleted Facebook and Twitter apps from my phone. I switched my SMS app to Signal (you can read about this in previous articles). I eventually deleted Facebook messenger from my phone and told my close friends and family to use text (Signal preferred) or email (ProtonMail preferred).

Then while listening to one of my favorite podcasts the host recommended The Jordan Harbinger show. After hearing him reference it a couple of times I decided I should look it up. There are over 500 episodes. So I don’t have time to start at Episode one and catch up. Instead I scrolled the episodes and saw one by Tristan Harris (host of Your Undivided Attention and producer of The Social Dilemma). So I downloaded the episode and listened to it. The interview was facinating revisiting some of what I had already learned from Tristan and some new material including talking about a new project Childhood 2.0 comparing the childhood of our parents, our kids and us.

This lead me to listen to other episodes of The Jordan Harbinger Show.

First up was was Episode 156 with Jaron Lanier. Jaron wrote a book “Ten arguments for deleting your social media account right now“. If you want the condensed version this article or this one provides a summary of the ten points. Lanier uses a acronym B.U.M.M.E.R. (Behaviors of Users are Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent) to refer to the big social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. All ten arguments were compelling, but I think what resonated with me was his indication that a “Facebook User” is not a customer. Actually users and all they data they create are the product. Customers are those who are paying millions of dollars to Facebook (including Instagram and WhatsApp) along with Twitter, YouTube, etc. to target people with ads, news, etc. and gather the users data in return. He describes an environment where he would be willing to have an account that has two requirements:

1. Users pay for the account and therefore are customers
2. Users own their data, and if the data is valuable they can sell it at a price they determine.

The closest thing I can think to that does this today with MeWe where they don’t sell ads and you can buy a premium account. I do have an account on MeWe but it also suffers from a problem that Lanier points out of moving to another social media platform – none of my friends are there! You are welcome to review MeWe’s terms of service for yourself and then decide if you want to create an account.

Up next was Episode 486 with Nina Shick. A few years ago I attended a Gartner conference. In the opening Key Note a statement was made that I have not forgotten that was something like “the time is coming when the ability to generate Fake News will exceed our ability to detect it”. Remember the first time you saw a Photoshopped image. Suddenly images could be manipulated so you couldn’t be sure that what you were seeing was real or not. But now Photoshopped images are some life like that sometimes it is hard to tell the difference. I understand that Adobe now embeds data to indicate which image was real and which were modified. But what if the image is created by the AI? What if it’s not an image? What if it’s the responses to Tweets as text so real you can’t tell a human didn’t write it? What if it’s a picture of a person (note that the link will generate a picture of a person that does not exist) or a cat (this one generates a picture of a cat that does not exist) that is so real you can’t tell if it is real or fake – generated by a computer. What if it’s a video that is so real you can’t tell if its a real video of someone or a fake.

Back in the 1980’s Max Headroom was pretty clearly fake.

What if someday someone is able to submit video evidence of you committing a crime and you have to get eye witnessing to confirm you were home watching Netflix?

For example check out this video of “deep fakes” that show some examples, like “what if Burt Reynolds had played James Bond”.

Well, as I listened to these episodes I realized that all of these things are now possible. They are called “deep fakes” and using technology available in the app store or free software you can run on a personal computer you can generate these videos yourself.

Test yourself here. The site will display two images. You have a fifty fifty chance to pick the one that is real. But what if there was one real one in four. One real one in a hundred? Million? Can you detect them then?

Finally, I listened to Renee DiResta on Episode 420. She also gets into talking about fake content and AI. What really captured my attention is best quoted from the show notes:

[01:19:11] So those are various sensational moments that then inspire people to go and try to authenticate the video, find out who created it, find out how it spread. So there’s a lot of attention that kind of immediately goes into understanding that particular video. The thing that’s been more interesting to me has actually been like GPT-3, which is the open AI’s text generation AI.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:19:30] So this is like an AI algorithm or program that writes like a human. Is that kind of what that is? 

Renee DiResta: [01:19:35] Writes text. Yeah

Jordan Harbinger: [01:19:36] Okay.

Renee DiResta: [01:19:36] You give it a prompt. You can give it kind of constraints around how creative it can be. The AI has been trained on content on the Internet. So it’s read Wikipedia, right? And so it has a body of knowledge, which is very interesting. And so I’ve been using it, just to see what comes out of it. Depending on what prompt you give it and how, whether you constrain it to stick to what it knows or allow it to be more creative, you will get content back, very different content. You can submit the same prompt over and over again, and it’ll return very different types of content to you. And you can have it write long form essays. You can give it tweets and it’ll return back kind of tweet link things. I’ve been working on an essay actually, and I thought of him having a hard time with the closing.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:20:17] Yeah.

Renee DiResta: [01:20:17] Well, it’s an article on AI, let me give it a GPT-3 and see what the AI generates for me for my closing. And it did a couple of really interesting things. Like once or twice it pulled in characters, I had not mentioned. I was writing about AI and all of a sudden it gave me a paragraph on Edward Snowden and I thought like —

Jordan Harbinger: [01:20:33] Wow.

Renee DiResta: [01:20:33] — okay. I wasn’t expecting that. Once or twice, it returned links to regurgitations of academic papers that it had probably kind of read at some point and consumed.

I looked up OpenAI because I wanted to play with the GPT-3 that she was talking about. You have to have a login to use it or license the technology. However, I found an open source version that is free to use that I used to compose the first part of this BLOG article.

So what can we do? I deleted my personal Twitter account. I created a new Facebook account to manage my business and ministry pages and then signed out of Facebook. Perhaps I’ll deactivate my personal Facebook account. But at least for now, I’ve broken the cycle of spending hours on end scrolling Facebook while super computers blast me with what they want to see. Here are some steps I think we can all take:

• Delete or limit use of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter, YouTube
• When using YouTube don’t login. Use the search to find what you are looking for instead of letting it recommend videos to you.
• Use Rumble instead of YouTube
• Use MeWe and Parler instead of Facebook and Twitter
• Use Signal for text and direct messaging instead of Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp
• Use ProtonMail instead of gmail, yahoo mail, or other free email services.
• Pick up the phone and call a friend to connect.
• Send an email to a friend.
• Send a text to a friend.
• Write a letter to a friend.

Yes, staying in touch is important. We are made for community. God said “it is not good for man to be alone”. But filling our lives with “Facebook friends” is not a replacement for real relationships.