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The Observer

The tunes you hum, books you read, rows

you have: Twitter and co are shaping your
world
Sonia Sodha

The big social media platforms don’t reflect back our views so
much as form them
Sat 5 Nov 2022 18.47 GMT
‘I
didn’t do it to make more money. I did it to try to help humanity.” Elon
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Musk in his own words on buying Twitter. He follows in the footsteps of
fellow multibillionaire Mark Zuckerberg, who in 2017 published a
“manifesto” for Facebook, setting out how he wanted it to help save
humanity from itself.

Delusions of grandeur in wildly rich men aren’t unusual, so it’s tempting to scoff,
then move on. But they are right to claim that their ownership of huge social
media platforms confers significant power – in their heads, to do good, but, for
the rest of us, to create harms spanning mental health to child safety to health
misinformation. Zuckerberg’s manifesto didn’t stop Facebook helping stoke
violence against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar or in the Tigray conflict in
Ethiopia.

Musk’s first actions as the new owner of Twitter have been to sack the whole
board, dramatically cut its headcount and get rid of its human rights team.
Twitter’s moderation policies have always been highly opaque, taking a
permissive approach to racist abuse while kicking off individuals who don’t
subscribe to dogmas held dear by Silicon Valley. But things could get much worse
if they become subject to Musk’s idiosyncratic whims.

Big platforms have minimal incentives to reduce these harms, because of the
profits they generate and much has been written about the confounding problem
of how governments should regulate them. But Twitter, Facebook and TikTok
also have impacts that go beyond the sharply quantifiable, like self-harm in
children or vaccine takeup rates: consequences that stem from their power as
gatekeepers not just of what we talk about and how, but with respect to the
books, music and fashion we consume.

The most engaging Musk’s vision of Twitter is as a “digital town square”:

material is that which a democratising force that takes power away from the
triggers emotional editors who filter stories and opinions through their
reactions: outrage, or own worldviews and hands it back to the people.
strong feelings of What this underplays, however, is how much of the
belonging content we see is pushed to us by algorithms whose
success is measured purely by user-engagement.

The most engaging material is that which triggers

emotional reactions; on Twitter, this means stuff that prompts outrage and anger
or strong feelings of belonging. This is why so much of its content is about
signalling virtue to like-minded followers and picking bad-faith fights, rather than
information exchange or open-minded discourse. This is how to go viral; it’s what
the algorithms push, and hence encourage.
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Twitter’s reach isn’t anywhere close to that of Facebook or TikTok. But because so
many journalists, politicians and social campaigners are on it, it has a
disproportionate impact on political discourse. Narcissists are particularly drawn
to its outrage/ingroup dynamic, because it feeds their sense of superiority.
Research suggests that people with narcissistic traits are more likely to become
addicted to social media and to engage in online bullying. It is no coincidence that
politics and civil society movements now feel dominated by the cult of the
individual and them-and-us mentalities, rather than building diverse alliances
and winning the hearts and minds of those whose values don’t perfectly map on
to yours.

It’s not just the world of politics and campaigning where algorithms have exerted
their opaque pull. I met a musician last week who told me he doesn’t think we yet
understand how a platform like TikTok is affecting our music tastes. With more
than a billion global users, TikTok is the fastest growing social media platform.
Young people aged 15 to 24 spend an average of 57 minutes a day on the app.

In TikTok, the algorithm reigns even more supreme than in Facebook, Twitter or
Instagram; even if you don’t follow any other users, you are fed a stream of short
video clips via the “For You Page” users see when they open the app. The FYP
algorithm learns from the way you engage with and interact with clips to feed you
a progressively – some would say, scarily – tailored stream of video content,
designed to maximise the time you spend on the app.

TikTok’s algorithm TikTok views are increasingly affecting chart success

doesn’t just yield in the music industry. The musician I spoke to said it’s
power over who gets getting harder to be signed by a label without first
signed, but it sends having gone viral on TikTok. Big-name artists such as
signals to artists about Becky Hill have talked about the pressure to produce
what to produce content that will spread like wildfire on the platform.
TikTok’s algorithm doesn’t just yield power over who
gets signed, its emphasis on short, snappy video clips
sends signals to artists about what to produce and ultimately what we all end up
consuming. TikTok is similarly influencing which books are commissioned in
young adult publishing, with some first-time authors being given six-figure deals
after going viral.

To assume that there have ever been benign gatekeepers of politics and culture
would be to romanticise. Newspaper editors have always been swayed by what
sells copies and what we want to read has never been perfectly aligned with what
might be considered in the public interest to print. What publishers and record
might be considered in the public interest to print. What publishers and record
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labels choose to platform has always been driven not just by commercial interests
but their own tastes and prejudices. There are some who might argue that
TikTok’s FYP algorithm simply reflects back to us what we collectively want
better than any human could.

But these algorithms are the platforms’ most jealously guarded commercial
secrets. No one really knows how they work and the rise of TikTok – and signs
that Meta, Facebook’s parent company, is increasingly looking to emulate the way
TikTok operates – suggests that the primacy of the algorithm is only going to
grow. To what extent do the algorithms feed us what we really want or what we
are manipulated to want? And what consequences might this have for political
communication and our cultural preferences? Like them or not, they will
probably be near impossible to unpick.

Sonia Sodha is an Observer columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to
submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us
at observer.letters@observer.co.uk
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