reSee.it - Tweets Saved By @Liv_Boeree
@Liv_Boeree - Liv Boeree
Our news industry is broken. Instead of optimizing for truth, it optimizes for outrage. And it's no one in particular's fault! It's the nature of the game itself. A classic Moloch trap. I explore this in my new film "The Media Wars" now available on Twitter in full: 👇 https://t.co/MCwX96StKD
Video Transcript AI Summary
The video discusses how the media industry, both legacy companies and social media platforms, contribute to the polarization and anger in society. It highlights the role of algorithms and the media's focus on negative news to maximize engagement and profit. The video argues that this unhealthy competition for attention is driven by a force called Moloch, which prioritizes short-term gains over long-term solutions. The speaker suggests redesigning social media algorithms and changing consumption habits as potential solutions to combat the negative effects of Moloch. They also emphasize the importance of understanding the perception gap and steel manning the other side to reduce online rage.
Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Our way of life is under attack. The patients are literally gasping. Too loud to say it is, that's extremely dangerous to our democracy. Liv, Look at this, can you believe it? That is outrageous.
Quick, comment how stupid and awful he is. People need to be reminded. Okay. Wait. What if this just gives him more attention?
Who cares? He can't just get away with it. True. I just can't believe anyone is this ignorant. Okay, so comment, let us know.
In fact, maybe do a quote tweet so your followers see it too. So today, I wanna talk about rage because doesn't it feel like everyone's going a little mad lately, especially online? But I swear, every day, some new thing comes up. They might start out completely innocuous, but will inevitably dissolve into some Politicized nightmare of left versus right trends and countertrends where everyone's just screaming at each other through the digital void is also miserable and hostile, and yet, so weirdly addictive. I've lost count of How many times I've got sucked into some online debate even though I didn't even want to?
I even had to get one of these stupid safes to keep my phone in Because the online world is so ever present and tempting. It's almost like there's some insidious force through it, trying to get its hooks into my brain so I can go online and do its bidding. You cannot die. And my personal issues aside, I wanted to talk about this because, well, frankly, this is getting really scary because not only are we seeing more and more sort of radicalization and civil unrest here at home, But this is increasingly starting to affect our chances of solving these really big global coordination problems like climate change and Pandemics and arms races, which require us to come together to solve, and instead, we're getting torn more and more apart. So what the hell is going on?
You know, are we acting this way because everything really is falling apart? Or is it more that our perception of the world is getting twisted, Which is making us crazy and then sort of turning this all into a big self fulfilling prophecy. Well, as always, the answer is far from simple because It's certainly true that there are plenty of individuals out there who are directly profiting from all this drama. But the thing is, there's something even deeper at play here, A force far more reckless than any one individual company. A force so powerful, it can Whether it's the matrix or the terminator, at this point, we're all pretty familiar with the trope of humans naively building a for a machine to serve them, but then the machine takes over and makes them serve it.
You have 20 seconds to comply. Movies have been telling story for years. In fact, it dates all the way back to 1927 in the silent film called Metropolis. Metropolis tells the story of this futuristic, Seemingly utopian city that seems great on the surface until we learn that deep underground, there's a huge machine which demands the blood, sweat, and tears Poor workers in order to keep everything running. Pretty dark stuff for the time.
And remarkably prophetic given that it was written nearly a 100 years ago And that today, we are increasingly at the mercy of a giant machine of our own creation, except that instead of cogs, ours is made of bits. And Instead of feeding on flesh, it feeds on our attention. That's right, folks. I'm talking about our media industry, which, of course, up close is made up of Lots of individual people. But from a zoomed out view, essentially functions as this giant digitized attention processing machine that our species built in order to spread its news information more efficiently around the globe.
And back in the pre Internet days, The machine was really just a small number of companies that kind of controlled all the news flow in a very centralized power structure. But, of course, nowadays, we have Social media too, as well as those old legacy companies. And so it's become this curious combination of both top down broadcast and bottom up user generated content, both kind of feeding into each other while everyone competes in a giant game of who can win the most attention. But this doesn't inherently have to be a bad thing. Right?
Like, machines have made our lives so much better over the years, As has capitalism, which is ultimately driven by this competitive process. So in theory, having highly data driven, competitive media ecosystem should allow the cream to rise to the top so that only the most high quality information is what ends up getting Spread. And yet, here we are. So where the hell is it all going wrong? Again, those metropolis writers were strangely insightful.
Because in that scene where the underground machine is first revealed, the film's protagonist has a sudden vision that there is something even deeper and more malevolent controlling it, Almost like something demonic has taken hold of it, a monster that consumes its victims as a sacrifice in exchange for power. And the name of that monster is Moloch. Now the legend of Moloch originally comes from a bible story about this war obsessed cult who was so desperate for victory, They sacrifice their literal children to it in exchange for military power. Awful stuff. But these days, It's better known as the god of unhealthy competition.
In other words, the force of bad incentives, where players in a game end up more and more of their other values in order to get a short term advantage, which forces all their competitors to do the same thing. But then everyone ends up worse off than before. So like when businesses cut corners on environmental protections to boost profits, or like when athletes give into illegal doping because they feel like all their competitors are doing it anyway, Or when countries pull more and more of their GDP into military defense because otherwise, they'll be left vulnerable to their enemies. If you saw my video, the beauty wars, you'll remember how I covered myself in face filters to explain how these same molecule forces are driving this epidemic of body dysmorphia on various social media platforms. The thing is today, we're talking about the whole media industry itself.
Allow me to introduce you to our new star, the media mollock. Good afternoon and welcome to Look at This News. Now we've got a lot of stories lined up for you today. Although, first, let me just say, live. Just because a bunch of teenagers are too dumb to realize that staring at Kardashianified versions of themselves all day long is going to be bad for them.
Doesn't mean the same thing applies to All the good folks out there who are just trying to keep themselves educated on world events. They are just being responsible. And my media company is just keeping them informed. Well, perhaps that would be true if you guys painted an accurate picture of the world. But that's not your goal, is it, Moloch?
Otherwise, you wouldn't be putting such an inflammatory spin on every damn story. So you're clearly optimizing for something else. The world is falling apart out there, and you're saying that we are overblowing it? Sounds like you're the evil one. Yes.
Obviously, there are countless awful things happening every single day, as has always been the case throughout history. There are so many positive things happening all the time too. Random acts of kindness, disease eradication. Where are all your stories about those? Like, I can go scroll through Any major news outlet across the political spectrum and the ratio of negative to positive stories is just absurd.
Like, why not just show a little more balance? Well, we all know why. Because bad news sells better. And the media have been capitalizing on the negativity bias, well, since the dawn of the printing press. In fact, here's a study that measures the tone of world events as they've been reported by Wikipedia.
You can see the very clearly rough times during the major world wars. But aside of that, the vibe has trended pretty positively since the end of World War 2. But according to the media, things have gotten more negative over that time. So someone is clearly getting it wrong. And if I had to guess whose reporting is more accurate, media companies Whose primary goal is to win eyeballs to keep their shareholders happy versus the hive mind of thousands of Wikipedia historians.
Well, I know who I'm betting on. Okay. So we focus on the negative stuff a little more than we should. But no one cares about good news. And look how many shares all my stories are getting.
I'm clearly just giving the people what they want. Yeah. But are you actually? Because, like, we know people can get sucked into addiction or into cults, you know, down social media rabbit holes. And the trouble is We tend to assume it only ever happens to other people.
It's really hard to spot when we are the ones being manipulated. But we really are. And it's not just by Sketchy social media algorithms trying to get us hooked on their feeds either. The legacy media are absolutely at it too. Like on Google, the New York Times' project Feals For starters, which uses advanced data science techniques to predict emotional responses to their articles so that their advertisers can better serve ads according to people's moods.
And then, of course, there's the, awkward fact that news media directly profits from political tension. Like, no one boosted the profits of both the right wing And the left wing news outlets, more than Trump, even though half of them claimed they hated him. So no wonder polarization is getting worse. Your attention game is getting more competitive than ever, And our anger is the cash cow keeping half your companies alive. Because species have so many human emotions.
Why is it always angry tribalism you fall into? Yeah. Well, we do normally have quite a nice wide range of emotions. The thing is, We don't just read our news anymore. We interact with it.
And we've built these incredibly powerful, but also really dumb algorithms that are designed to just maximize engagement no matter what. And it seems like anger is like rocket fuel for that because it's not only a negative emotion. It's also a very active one that Triggers us into action, you know, to go and defend our tribe. And so it gets amplified way beyond how people would naturally behave. Here's why we need all this delicious anger.
We've got inequality and climate change, pandemics, lying, self serving politicians. Doesn't it just make you furious? Of course it does. But these are insanely complex coordination problems. They're already at the limits of our collective intelligence, so they need us to be calm and rational and Work together to solve them and instead we're getting whipped into this rabid frenzy by both arms of the media machine.
We've got algorithms whose Crappy design act like some kind of heat seeking missile for the most divisive insane opinions. And then we've got an increasingly desperate and clickbaity legacy media whose journalists now source More and more of their stories from social media and have had a feedback loop from hell. And meanwhile, you, through your machine, grow ever more powerful by the day as you and Perversely use Ask to go out and document the worst events on Earth and then mainline them straight back into our Olympic systems in 4 k 247. Essentially reducing our loyal species into a mindless factory farm of rage born junkies for apparently no reason but maximizing third party advertising dollars until we all fucking kill each other. So there we go.
First thing I wanna say is I don't have some kind of vendetta against all media people or all journalists. In fact, it's kind of a quirk of the English language that we use Same word to describe someone who literally risks their life reporting from a war zone as a clickbait peddler who's just Optimizing for whatever the most profitable spin of the day is. But even then, those guys are often forced to write that way by their editors. And their editors are told what narratives to push by their bosses, who are all beholden to their shareholders, all trapped in Moloch's web. And while that doesn't absolve any of them from their individual responsibility, we have to remember that it is a real enemy here.
Not any individual member of the media and certainly not one another. Although now you're probably thinking, ah, so mollic is capitalism. No. It's Certainly something that can act through capitalism, but it's much more fundamental than any kind of economic structure Because it's a force of game theory. Another way you can think of it is as a sort of personification of that mindless Force of disharmony that causes a cell to turn cancerous.
It's the mindset of winning for winning sake at the cost of everything else. So then, how do we get Moloch out of our media? Well, there's no easy answer to that question, unfortunately. Otherwise, we probably would have done it already. But there is some hope because it needs 2 sort of key ingredients in order to thrive.
Firstly, it needs a poorly designed competitive system, And then secondly, it needs a minimum number of individuals within that system who are unable to resist its bad incentives. Now with the first one, Well, luckily, right now, there's some opportunity to redesign social media algorithms away from divisiveness and rage and more towards Better sense making and information and just generally making them more fun. And as for the second one, well, that's on all of us. Right? Because our consumption habits Directly shape the type of content that gets made in the first place.
And one way I personally found helpful is to start muting or at least ignoring Anyone, particularly any politicians, who build the majority of their personal brand around attacking the other side, you know, pointing out what's wrong with the bad guys without Offering any more productive, better solutions. Because if someone's whole thing is about just tearing others down, then it's just And more repetition of the mollock mindset, you know, this zero sumness that is so destructive. Also, I really love this perception gap website, which runs surveys and polls to measure what Democrats and Republicans actually think about an issue, but then also what they think the other side think about that same issue. And lo and behold, there is a big gap in what those two things are. In other words, the average person's views on both sides are much closer than what the media machine has led everyone to believe.
And then, of course, there's the tried and tested technique of steel manning the other side. Steel manning the other side is the latest Breakthrough in cognitive technology to help those suffering from algorithmically amplified rage and hatred. Listen to your doctor. And if any of you guys have any techniques you've personally found helpful at reducing your own online rage, please share them below in the comments. On that note, thank you so much for watching.
And remember, don't hate the players. Change the game.