Here are three of my favorite quotes about elections and society:
Vote early and vote often. -- attributed to Al Capone
We can have a market economy but we cannot have a market society. -- George Soros
I like to vote. I like going into the voting booth and pulling those levers and stuff. Only sometimes, I'm not sure my machine is hooked up to anything. Sometimes I'll pull the lever for something like "healthcare" and something like "flag burning amendment" comes out. -- comedian Jake Johannsen
The elections of 2016, 2020 and 2024 have been equally surprising to the public, for multiple reasons that likely all stem from the effects of social media. While swamped with technologies that seem to be able to deliver "instant" information and collect instant feedback on people's likes, we actually seem to know less about actual reality and the ideas of our fellow citizens and leaders. Citizens seem to sense a disconnect between these modern technologies that seem to be instantaneous and truthful and outcomes in our political processes. We now seem to be at a point where people think their retweets and social media comments carry more weight than their vote in an election for the people that ACTUALLY control the levers of power in our legistlatures and executive branches at the federal and state level.
A large proportion of the public has literally become addicted to interacting with "content" presented via social media technologies. These platforms may not have been CONSCIOUSLY designed from the git go as brain hacking platforms to manipulate elections but their current evolutionary state is having EXACTLY that impact. To be clear, these systems are not hacking the election systems (registration tracking systems, voting machines and tallying machines) themselves. Instead, they are altering the public's internal perceptions about events around them, perceptions about causes and effects, feeding addictions for immediate (but worthless) feedback and stimulus and leaving the public confused about what really drives change in the world.
How Social Media Warps Public Perception
The other day, I watched a video, seemingly dropped into my YouTube recommendations at random, about the "Secret Life of the Videorecorder" that was narrated, Carl Sagan-like, by a man named Tim Hunkin and originally aired on the BBC around 1987. The video traced the design of VCRs back to the origins of recording tape and included a demonstration of how recording tape is literally a bunch of iron filings stuck to a strip of plastic tape and how a signal can be recorded and played back from that tape. Pretty cool. The video was digitally cleaned up so it looked like a modern resolution video clip. Okay, that was pretty cool. CLICK. Here's a like.
From the moment I submitted that "like", each new view of my suggestions in YouTube has included one or two more restored videos from that program series, and some new ones the host is apparently creating now in the 2020s. It's almost like Google realized I wanted a glass of water and is now offering me a firehose. We all experience this.
There's no surprise to how this works. Google collects the like. The video that was liked is linked to a collection of tags such as "science technology demonstration vcr hunkin". Google can instantly find other active videos with similar tags. Google can further analyze all of the tags of all of my likes to correlate with others who liked the same video and identify new tags that don't appear as often in my likes and randomly add one of those tags in generating my recommendations to toss in a new category of videos I might like. If I click on that video and watch more than a few seconds of it, Google will increase the weighting on that new tag by X amount. If I actually LIKE that new video from that new tag category, Google will increase the weighting on that new tax by 3X amount and now I'll see a LOT more of those in my recommendations.
Nothing in the world has changed to make that topic 3X more salient to me or to anyone else and nothing in the content itself has changed in its validity (good or bad). But suddenly, Google has figured out how to monetize it and so they do. And now some other random topic that might be worth my attention gets crowded OUT of my recommendations as Google attempts to extract more revenue from advertisers or by getting me to succumb to subscribing to YouTube premium to avoid those ads.
If the only impact of this algorithm was a viewer or reader getting steered from one provider of science explainer topics to another provider of science explainer topics, the adoption of these algorithms would pose no problem to society and democracy. These platform providers and advertisers that use them for the most part do not care about the "content" that attracted the eyeball that watched their ad. It could be science explainers about VCRs, it could be a "news report" about a network coaching a Presidential candidate about interview questions before the interview or a story from the fringe claiming the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre was staged by disaster actors. It's all just "content," right? I got my ad watched by my target demographic, all's good. Mission accomplished.
However, these algorithms ARE damaging our society and posing a dire threat to conditions required for democracy to survive. A click generating a like can certainly be tracked, associated with other meta data, analyzed, trended over time and used to make certain predictions with relative accuracy. Unfortunately, interpreting a binary inputs such as "likes" in a content system and attempting to extrapolate them to preferences about complex topics is inherently flawed, for several reasons.
First, interpreting a binary "like" as feedback on an idea obviously loses a great deal of information. It's the equivalent of attempting to color code a beautiful sunset as one of two colors: black or white. Well? How would you describe the colors in that scene? It doesn't matter how many people click on one of those two choices, information has been lost in the process. Any conclusion drawn from those millions of votes is only reflecting the bias of the person claiming to interpret those black / white answers as anything else.
Second, it isn't just platform providers and advertisers who have learned how the algorithm works and manipulated the system to their benefit. Content CREATORS have figured it out as well. At a harmless but annoying layer, this is why most YouTube videos now feature thumbnails with the creator making some exaggerated sad face, puzzled face, irate face or even duck face. A FEW creators did that on a few videos that went viral (maybe for that reason, maybe for some other reason), the algorithm responded, steered more traffic to those videos, other creators saw the pattern, started making the same types of thumbnails, started getting rewarded with views and the rest of the creators saw their traffic PLUMMET... Until they also started posting their new videos with these childish thumbnail photos. There's now almost a meme on YouTube of every creator publishing a video explaining how they HATE this process and how they are having to spend nearly as long creating the THUMBNAIL for their 10-15 minute video as they did editing the full content.
But the "duck face" problem is much more serious than stupid thumbnails. The tendency of algorithms to hype any content that triggers even a mildly more intense volume of reaction rewards more extreme content with more impressions which leads to more views. In the early days of the Internet and these platforms, this was thought to be a benefit by providing people not solidly in the middle of the bell curve on any particular dimension a sense that they were not alone in their opinion, preferences or plight. That's supposed to be good, right?
Well, if a user merely used a platform to FIND that such ideas existed, that's one thing. If the platform then drastically alters its behavior and begins feeding that user DOZENS of similar articles, the platform isn't just providing evidence the idea exists, it is warping the user's perception that the idea is COMMON or WIDESPREAD and thus has more weight and merit than it possibly has in the real world. For people not familiar with the design of the technology or a firm grasp on reality to begin with, this disorientation via content flooding can be life altering.
The third danger in the dominance of these social media platforms as indicators of engagement is that by leveraging millions of units of free raw material generated every day by users, the platform providers are pitting every content provider against every other content provider and forcing them to chase algorithm driven trends and extremes if they want to maintain view levels and sustain their own ability to profit from their viewership.
Most content providers are not sophisticated enough to recognize this form of business blackmail being applied to them. They create a presence, money starts to flow in, they become dependent on that revenue then chain themselves to the whims of the algorithm going forward to protect their own income. The minute they decide to stray, the algorithm will drop their presence to zero, their views will plummet overnight and their ad revenue will vanish. Many creators of the most absurd, fraudulent content didn't start out in those genres, they simply followed where their monthly AdSense income led them because they lacked the ethics or intelligence to do anything else.
Themes for an Election
So how do these observations tie back to the quotes at the beginning of this rant?
Vote early and often. First, social media platforms have warped the public's perception of WHERE their preferences are most accurately collected and reflected. The illusion of instant feedback provided by social media platforms has fooled millions into thinking the most effective way for them to make a difference is by tweeting with a trendy hashtag or clicking a like button. If all three hundred and fifty million people in the US woke up tomorrow and simultaneously tweeted #endwarnow, that won't change a thing in Ukraine or Gaza. And in a world where troll farms register millions of fake userids to generate "like spikes" on content being pushed by foreign governments, no one should trust the volume of likes, views and comments on ANY platform as an accurate measure of sentiment on anything. Voting early and often via social media isn't voting at all. You are only creating false data used by giant corporate monopolies to trick others into using their products and allowing them to sell ads and confusing the public about what topics really merit attention.
We can have a market economy but we cannot have a market society. Social media platform engineers believe that nearly any problem can be boiled down to data and algorithms and subjected to market forces to find a solution. They're engineers and software developers. It's in their interest to believe that. They command lucrative salaries designing and building systems based upon that premise. But it's not true. You can attempt to model a system when data about that system's current state and inputs can be accurately collected without bias. But most of the world's most critical problems involve human actors who a) do not fully understand the world around them, b) have a tendency to lie about their actual preferences and c) have psychological predispositions to ignore situations that don't match their current perception of reality. Any attempt to discern the true needs of a society via social media popularity will inevitably swamp any true signal from the boring middle with noise from the far extremes of the audience. And any solutions derived primarily from the fringes will further disorient and alienate those in the middle, further eroding confidence in the system.
I'm not sure my machine is hooked up to anything. The dirty secret here is that this FEELING that our actual voting process isn't hooked up to anything is the actual INTENT of many of the actors in the system who are relying on apathy and frustration to push away voters who would normally thwart their intentions if they participated in the process. We have politicians in office for decades running on the complaint that government can't do anything right. (Then why do you keep running for office?) We have special interests pushing for online sports betting claiming the change will boost tax revenue to help suffering schools. (Well, if we want to help schools, why aren't you proposing an amending to raise taxes specifically for schools and let us vote on that? If taxes on gambling revenue helps schools, why have our schools declined for forty years despite state lotteries, riverboat gambling and full casino gambling that have been in place for 30+ years?)
The reality is that the voting machine is the ONLY machine able to change what's wrong in front of us. But the process comes with caveats. The process is not immediate -- it is incapable of instant gratification. You won't get everything you want the next day, the next week or month or the next year. The process must be used consistently. Political terms are staggered by design to PREVENT sudden extreme changes. If you want big change, you must participate in the process consistently over time. Decades, perhaps. The process must be fed coherent choices over time. Voting for a pro-abortion Presidential candidate then voting for extremist Senators and Representatives who support abortion bans and even contraception bans is not a coherent voting strategy. Voting for Democrats after Republicans tank the economy then returning Republicans to power as the economy recovers to steer it into the next disaster is not a coherent voting strategy.
Is there any way to jostle the disaffected out of this democracy funk and properly comprehend the stakes? Perhaps a mental exercise would help. If you are looking at the current situation and thinking democracy as a means of preserving your freedoms and improving your opportunities for personal success is a lost cause, try travelling back in time to the morning of June 6, 1944 and imagine yourself aboard one of the boats nearing the beaches at Normandy. You are standing behind an iron door that is already clanging with machine gun fire from Germans in protected fortifications. You know that in seconds, those steel doors are going to drop and you will be facing that machine gun fire until either you take IT out or it takes YOU out. And when that door drops, you step out and race across the beach to confront that immediate threat and the larger threat it represents.
THAT'S how much democracy meant to people in that generation and THAT'S what they were willing to sacrifice to preserve it, not only for America but its allies.
Today, the average voter doesn't need to run out of a landing craft into a wall of machine gun fire to protect American democracy. That average American just needs to surf the internet, preview the ballot in their community, read up on a few issues and amendments then consider who seems to WANT people to vote and who seems to want to PREVENT people from voting. Then spend an hour waiting in line to pre-vote, vote on Election Day or mail in a ballot and participate.
If you are seriously contemplating NOT voting in this election, what would you say to one of those veterans who faced a far more dire situation than you and ran into machine gun fire to preserve YOUR right to vote? #TLDV (too lazy, didn't vote)?
WTH
