Social media, Recommendation systems and Democracy

Facebook and other social media giants has been in the news garnering quite a bit of negative PR. Fake news, user privacy concerns, leak of damning internal research on the mental health of its teenage users to name a few. But the gist of it is that the firm has chosen growth and profits at the expense of its users. I’m not going to say that these firms are wrong in prioritizing profits over its users. A capitalistic corporation is supposed to work towards its profits. I’m not even going to question the morality or rather the lack of one. Instead I’ll talk about the root of the problem and actions various stakeholders should be taking to not let this incredibly useful ecosystem break a democratic society.

Root of the problem: Recommendation systems

We all know the feeling when we want to just relax for 5 mins by scrolling online and end up spending 20 minutes instead. That’s recommendation system working its magic. Your online activity has led to this system develop a mathematical model of your interests and recommends the content which you think you’ll most likely lose track of time in. Once in a while the system also throws you an advertisement which you might be interested in. And if you click on it, the corporation makes money. This is a Win-Win-Win proposition for all three parties involved namely, User, platform and the entity paying for the advertisement.

Recommendation systems are always solving a mathematical optimization problem. They keep arriving at a solution based on which the system recommends you the content. This solution can be best described as follows:

“Most people, most of the time prefer their opinions/ideas/interests to be validated rather than challenged”

As you can see this is a very simple way to get you hooked on the platform as the you will be getting a positive reinforcement reward(Dopamine). So you are literally getting addicted to the platform. Very similar to how people get addicted to drugs or alcohol. As the saying goes, “if you are not paying for the product, you are the product”.

The system recommends what it predicts is your opinion rather than the truth. This creates a bubble of information around you through which you perceive the society. And in this society opinions are stated as facts and facts are dismissed as opinions. So the next time you are baffled by how can someone think that climate change is a myth, remember that they just happened to find themselves in the bubble where climate change is a myth backed by “Facts”.

Recommendation system hacks Democracy

The idea behind a democratic system is that government which represents the majority is incentivized to make sure that, overtime, only the ‘good’ ideas will filter through and ‘bad’ ones will not because the majority is always good. This idea assumes that there is no censorship in information flow and the society engages in discussion. So the political entities engage in finding what the majority wants and appease to it and in some cases tries to change the public opinion through the use of other advertising media which are expensive, slow and hard to evaluate how the ad campaigns are performing.

Thanks to recommendation systems these political entities are looking at a divided society. And it’s easier to appease to their division than trying to unite them which reduces the cost of changing the public opinion through ads. Adding to problem is the ability to get a quick feedback on the ad campaigns through analytics dashboard and iterating on them.

As you can see, the system which is delivering value to all the stakeholders ends up harming one of them when they interact with the real world; The Users, without them even realizing.

The simplest solution is to ban social media or get ourselves off of them. But that is not a realistic solution nor is the most productive one. So we will explore a complex solution which is a combination of government regulation, social awareness, political will and activism.

Stakeholder #1: Government

One possible action governments across the world can take is to bring in restrictions on who can advertise on social media. It is a critical tool for businesses who are marketing their offerings but not so much for a political entity and other groups who are aiming to change public opinion.

Also restricting these systems from recommending few polarizing topics such as religion, climate change etc will go a long way in getting the users out of their bubbles. I’m not recommending censorship. Any content can be shared manually by any user to their connections. I understand this is a grey area but that shouldn’t be the reason for inaction.

Stakeholder #2: The firms and shareholders

The above regulations will hit the revenue prospects for these firms as the user interactions on the platform can potentially reduce. So these firms must find other ways to revenue streams.

We need the kind of shareholder activism we are seeing in big oil. One driven my morals, ethics and facts rather than just profits which is easier said than done.

Stakeholder #3: Users

Users must know the products they are using and how they are looking a skewed view of the world. They should listen to the opposing view as well and do so deliberately because the system won’t recommend it to you. This can be done in an individual capacity but it would be unrealistic to expect a majority to do it diligently.

Instead the users who are also the citizens should force their governments to regulate this industry without restricting the freedom of speech.

Stakeholder #4: Employees of these firms

The recommendation system is the same technology used in cancer diagnosis, self driving cars and other cool stuff. I’m sure the people behind this technology wouldn’t have foreseen the negative impact this technology has on society and the health of a democracy in particular. The employees of these firms come up with very clever features to improve the companies’ revenues but they also have a moral and ethical responsibility to roll back on features which have unintended consequences.

The employees of these firms are the ones best placed to bring about the required changes. We are fortunate enough for the few brave ones who spoke up. And we need more.

Conclusion

We don’t need to know everything about every product we use. We don’t need to know how a water bottle or a ceiling fan works. But we would want to know what a medicine does to you because it changes something inside you. These seemingly harmless products are similar to a medicine because they change something in your mind and everyone who is using them needs to be cautioned by their harmful effects so that they can develop the right etiquette.

Or that’s just my opinion. Let me know your thoughts.