Social Media Is A Highly Manipulated Simulacrum Of The Real World, Used To Push Certain Viewpoints And Exclude Or Denigrate Others
And it has been used - especially Facebook - to create, perpetuate, and exacerbate the divisions which we see in society today.
If you connect with people on a face to face basis, you can see the artificiality of the imposed divisions, if you can get beyond the reflexive use of commonly repeated phrases - you’ll discover common concerns and ideas about the present state of affairs. This means leaving the phone behind in the car - or better yet, at home. We need to be having real conversations with each other - even if it’s on the landline at home - and not the cell phone. Social media is an illusion, not a convenience. Get the phone numbers of those people you interact with on social media, and then call them up and talk with them. Better yet, set up face to face conversations, one on one at first, then you can set up “salons” - regular face to face gatherings with those you’ve gotten to *actually* know. You’ll wind up with far fewer connections than you have “social media friends”, but these connections will be with people you know to be real - knowledge which you do not have on social media - and that’s crucial knowledge. Although the article quoted below refers only to Reddit and Twitter, it is equally valid for all social media including Facebook - and for the latter, probably more so.
From an article by Winston Smith:
”When communities oriented around tech development, geopolitics, and history began promoting woke ideas, I knew something was not right. This was not free speech, it wasn’t even contextually relevant speech, but rather a platform’s willing attempt to push a particular narrative and censor opposition.
The demonisation of ideas such as individualism and free speech, promoted on the level of the administration of the platform itself, is undeniably wrong. This degree of manipulation could potentially spill onto all social media platforms within the next few years, and I can only hope that this will not be the case. But for now, the extremities of anti-individualism, hyper-conformism, and the systematic justification of ideological possession are limited to a few select platforms. Don’t fall into the ideological trap of Reddit, which can, and often does, convince its users that they are alone in their criticisms of the ‘current thing’.
One extremely evident example of this is the overwhelming and uncritical support of the United States current leadership. I don’t want to delve too deeply into mainstream American politics, I’m not American, and I’m no expert, but I think this is a good example of how the platform distorts public opinion. To begin with, Reddit (as with Twitter) appears to have come under extreme manipulation leading up to and immediately following the 2020 election. This was enforced through manipulated user feeds and heavy censorship. Just as with the 2016 election, this manipulation coincided with an increasing number of users blindly praising Democratic nominees while simultaneously demonising Republicans.
However, the past two years have been vastly different to the pre-election stage. The US population was largely divided in 2020, with many people openly supporting a Democratic candidate (often for the sake of getting Republicans out of office). This is no longer the case. In fact, the criticism of the current Democratic government is unlike anything I have seen, in my opinion surpassing the rage following the Republican win in 2016. This is reflected in left wing forums, including openly admitted Marxists groups, in which I have seen a unified distrust of the current government and its willingness to partake in Identity Politics (classic Marxists see this as counter productive to class mobilisation, which is ironically correct). Despite this obvious shift in the political climate, if one were to visit Twitter or Reddit, it would seem as though ‘the current issue’ and the Democrat politicians in power are more popular than ever… by a long shot!
Perhaps I am wrong, but it seems to me that those critical of the US governments absurd and ironically anti-democratic policies are met with generic responses on Twitter, Reddit, and even YouTube. My hypothesis - which I stumbled across in a Marxist forum of all places - is that GPT-3 level automation is being used in a mass astroturfing campaign to re-validate the idea of Democratic supremacy over competing parties. Why do I think this? I have seen - as have others who also noticed this - that posts mentioning particular keywords, phrases, or general talking points critical of identity politics and destructive ideology are met with responses labelling them ‘Fascists’, ‘Trump supporters’, and so forth. These responses are all very similar in their phrasing and wording, and will occur without mention of political allegiance, or even if political allegiance is admitted as far Left. Unless a subset of real life people (who I believe exist, but not in such large numbers) are being continually activated by particular keywords, then I believe that algorithm generated content is making up a large part of what one sees online, and particularly on Reddit and Twitter.
Now on that topic, the use of the older GPT-2 algorithm to generate content for social media is possible. In fact, it was tested at a large scale on Reddit itself. It came to my attention while researching this very topic. Named the ‘subreddit simulator’, this community on Reddit was self isolated to allow for the propagation of bot posts and comments. It did this by picking random communities on the website, data scraping them, and then allowing the algorithm to generate a post. From there, bot accounts would be allowed to comment at one-minute intervals. The results are practically indiscernible from real people. In fact, when actual users are allowed to comment, it becomes impossible to distinguish human from algorithm. This was all done by nonprofessionals, using a small amount of sample data, and running an older iteration of the advanced GPT algorithm. Now imagine if these sites wished to execute such manipulation professionally and on a large scale.
This plays into the so called ‘dead internet theory’ which has been floating around for years. The basic premise being that almost all interaction online is not real. It is either faked through algorithmic expression, or at least manipulated and distorted to censor or push particular elements of an online interaction. The theory holds that the majority of falsity comes from comments, views, likes, shares, and other metrics which bear little depth. However, it also holds that online conversations between actual people can fall prey to this same manipulation, although this is far more complex. For example, someone may begin a conversation over text, which in actuality is being monitored and manipulated by an algorithm. This algorithm would be tapped into other data streams, allowing for seamless integration and subtle manipulation which does not stifle the communication of important details (which would expose the algorithm, especially if both parties have access to each others phones).
Again, I am unsure of just how deep these ideas cut within the context of such platforms as Reddit and Twitter. For starters, it is presumed that bot accounts have to be limited in their utility and limited in their numbers. The reason behind this is a presumption that once artificial intelligence behind bot accounts advances beyond a certain point, they will begin generating content which contradicts what is expected of a human. This would include long and incomprehensible sentences or equations only understood by other bots running off of an equally evolved algorithm, thus setting them apart from normal humans.
I tie most of the manipulation and possibility for control back to societies inability to contain itself in the online space. The younger generations are the first to grow up entirely immersed in a paradigm which we truly do not understand. I say this literally. Understanding something in a technical sense is not the same as understanding it in relation to oneself. The online space is like an abstraction of reality, or as the postmodernists would label it, a simulacrum. It takes the veneer of reality and mirrors it, but it is not the same. Instagram - a personal dislike of mine - does exactly this; it mirrors reality based off of rationalised attributes and builds an exaggerated hyper-reality out of it, which neither reflects actuality nor is distinguishable from it. It becomes an extrapolation and mockery of itself.
A good example of this is the act of texting. It is no longer just about contacting someone over a long distance. It is an act of itself. This is why it is addictive. It is why people will text continually whilst in social settings with actual people around them. I believe such things as texting, posting photos of oneself online and monitoring the reaction, checking out the updates from others, and so forth are not mere social interactions, but are also a type of isolated projection of ones own psychopathology. It is not merely a gateway, but a mirror which reflects an element of oneself back inwards without awareness.
I do not think that we understand our relationship to the online world. In the past, the happenings of life occurred almost exclusively within real-time observable time and space. Rare exceptions were books, stories, and song where we could be transported ‘beyond’ oneself momentarily. However, people understood themselves in relation to these things. A story was understood within the context of the self. In contrast, we do not understand ourselves in relation to social media. To give an example, social media is not reality, nor is it even a snapshot or narrow view of reality, yet we subconsciously assume that it is. As I mentioned earlier, it is something akin to a simulacrum of the actual happenings in the world, upon which a new reality is built which cannot be distinguished from the old (actuality).
If we cannot understand ourselves in relation to social media platforms, then it should come as little surprise that the possibility of exploitation is huge. The gaps, flaws, and misunderstandings are everywhere, and anyone who spends enough time thinking over them will eventually figure out how to exploit them to their own advantage.
I believe Reddit and Twitter are the tip of the iceberg within a broader social problem and I’m certain many of you would agree. These manipulations are obviously wrong, and our inability to understand ourselves in relation to the technology we possess just compounds the issue. We have been thrown into the deep end as a modernised society, unable to truly comprehend how our abstracted online landscapes (which we unwillingly project a part of ourselves into) will impact us in the future or assist us in navigating the now.
Unlike reading a book, looking at the news, or extracting meaning from a religious text, the social media landscape is more complex in other-self relationships, boundaries are uncertain, abstraction is fundamental, and as such is more open to the evils of propaganda.
I think people are becoming increasingly fractured, superimposing parts of themselves onto ever-evolving aspects of opaque technology, and finding it hard to rediscover themselves apart from such things.
Moving forward, people must wake up to the blatant manipulation made possible by this online obsession. They must disconnect themselves from their abstracted online realities, and see things for what they truly are. And this coming, not from an old man who’s out of touch with technology, but from someone in his mid 20s who has been immersed in it.
This comes back to educating oneself, not merely in a philosophically obtuse way, but educating oneself on how the world actually works. Possess logic and reason. No matter the complexity, philosophical and ideological arguments will crumble when wielded against someone who possesses the underrated knowledge of logic and empiricism, able to strip away the language and see the flawed fundamentals which often have no legs to stand on. Establishing oneself on the foundation of logic and reason will set him apart, able to fight against any corrupted ideas which come his way.”