The Passive Voice is not a political blog and won’t become a political blog, but PG found the following fascinating.
From The New York Times:
At one point during the 2016 presidential election campaign, I watched a bunch of videos of Donald Trump rallies on YouTube. I was writing an article about his appeal to his voter base and wanted to confirm a few quotations.
Soon I noticed something peculiar. YouTube started to recommend and “autoplay” videos for me that featured white supremacist rants, Holocaust denials and other disturbing content.
Since I was not in the habit of watching extreme right-wing fare on YouTube, I was curious whether this was an exclusively right-wing phenomenon. So I created another YouTube account and started watching videos of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, letting YouTube’s recommender algorithm take me wherever it would.
Before long, I was being directed to videos of a leftish conspiratorial cast, including arguments about the existence of secret government agencies and allegations that the United States government was behind the attacks of Sept. 11. As with the Trump videos, YouTube was recommending content that was more and more extreme than the mainstream political fare I had started with.
Intrigued, I experimented with nonpolitical topics. The same basic pattern emerged. Videos about vegetarianism led to videos about veganism. Videos about jogging led to videos about running ultramarathons.
. . . .
It seems as if you are never “hard core” enough for YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. It promotes, recommends and disseminates videos in a manner that appears to constantly up the stakes. Given its billion or so users, YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.
This is not because a cabal of YouTube engineers is plotting to drive the world off a cliff. A more likely explanation has to do with the nexus of artificial intelligence and Google’s business model. (YouTube is owned by Google.) For all its lofty rhetoric, Google is an advertising broker, selling our attention to companies that will pay for it. The longer people stay on YouTube, the more money Google makes.
What keeps people glued to YouTube? Its algorithm seems to have concluded that people are drawn to content that is more extreme than what they started with — or to incendiary content in general.
. . . .
[Google engineer Guillaume] Chaslot worked on the recommender algorithm while at YouTube. He grew alarmed at the tactics used to increase the time people spent on the site. Google fired him in 2013, citing his job performance. He maintains the real reason was that he pushed too hard for changes in how the company handles such issues.
. . . .
The Wall Street Journal conducted an investigation of YouTube content with the help of Mr. Chaslot. It found that YouTube often “fed far-right or far-left videos to users who watched relatively mainstream news sources,” and that such extremist tendencies were evident with a wide variety of material. If you searched for information on the flu vaccine, you were recommended anti-vaccination conspiracy videos.
It is also possible that YouTube’s recommender algorithm has a bias toward inflammatory content. In the run-up to the 2016 election, Mr. Chaslot created a program to keep track of YouTube’s most recommended videos as well as its patterns of recommendations. He discovered that whether you started with a pro-Clinton or pro-Trump video on YouTube, you were many times more likely to end up with a pro-Trump video recommended.
Combine this finding with other research showing that during the 2016 campaign, fake news, which tends toward the outrageous, included much more pro-Trump than pro-Clinton content, and YouTube’s tendency toward the incendiary seems evident.
. . . .
What we are witnessing is the computational exploitation of a natural human desire: to look “behind the curtain,” to dig deeper into something that engages us. As we click and click, we are carried along by the exciting sensation of uncovering more secrets and deeper truths. YouTube leads viewers down a rabbit hole of extremism, while Google racks up the ad sales.
Link to the rest at The New York Times
For visitors to TPV from outside the United States who have opted for a calmer and more productive life by ignoring US politics for the last couple of years, since the election, a major theme of political discourse has been that operatives working for President Trump “colluded” with operatives working for Vladimir Putin to swing the election in Trump’s favor.
(Legal note: PG doesn’t ever remember reading/hearing that “collusion” is a crime. Conspiracy to commit a crime is a crime, but there has to be an actual crime somewhere in the mix. Collusion and Conspiracies to get even richer happen in Silicon Valley all the time, but nobody gets arrested for them. Collusion and Conspiracies to persuade people to vote for Donald Trump are not a crime, except in California, where only Collusion and Conspiracies to persuade Oscar voters to choose George Clooney as best actor are permitted.)
We have a special counsel (in this case, sort of a roving super-prosecutor who fights evil wherever it may be found) who has been searching for evidence of this widespread “collusion” for nearly a year, but has so far only located people who have tried to avoid paying taxes and lie about it when asked, a long-time American practice that requires no Russian assistance.
This issue relates to the OP because some of Russia’s allegedly nefarious activities have been to use their superpowers on US-based social media services to persuade gullible voters to vote for Trump instead of his opponent, Hilary Clinton. (PG will not comment about whether the gullible voter voting block is traditionally a core Democratic constituency or not.)
But the OP reveals that the US doesn’t need any stinking Russian interference to radicalize voters in our elections. We can do the job better ourselves!
With computer algorithms instead of spies!
And we make money doing it!
By selling advertising!
This sounds like an all-American conspiracy to PG, but, as usual, he could be wrong.
Politics and extremism apart, the YouTube recommendations generally suck. Start listening to Baroque music, for example. Going to YouTube is a perfectly reasonable strategy if you like Baroque music (as I do) but you have to stay on top of it. Otherwise you will inevitably end up at either an endless round of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons (if you are lucky) or a multi-hour loop of Pachelbel’s Canon (if you aren’t). It doesn’t matter where you start. Begin with an obscure composer anywhere in the century and a half that constitutes the Baroque period and you will end up in one of those places.
What’s the difference between Putin and Clinton? Putin can win an election rigged in his favor.
Clinton ran to prove that a woman can be president, but Trump did one better and proved that anyone can be president!
My take on the Cambridge Analytica thing…
“You mean social MEDIA is just like the MEDIA?” 🙁
I just deactivated my Facebook account. It was annoying anyway. I’d rather engage in forums like here, where the people have similar interests and can actually talk to each other.
This is the Motherboard article from January of 2017, updated a bit with the latest.
The Data That Turned the World Upside Down
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mg9vvn/how-our-likes-helped-trump-win
“How Cambridge Analytica used your Facebook data to help the Donald Trump campaign in the 2016 election.”
All that is happening is going into my Story folders.
Uncle Jo said: I’d rather engage in forums like here, where the people have similar interests and can actually talk to each other.
Be careful in looking to only associate with “people of similar interest”. That is the heart of Compulsive Narrative Syndrome(CNS).
In the Joel Shepard series, whole worlds destroyed themselves in essentially ethnic cleansing driven by Compulsive Narrative Syndrome(CNS), making the people who used to be their neighbors into their enemies. Essentially, everyone ends up in their own “silos”, and those silos go to war.
– The danger of CNS is that once you are in a silo you can’t see anyone outside that silo as anything other than “Other”.
IMHO, it is imperative to surround myself with “annoying” people. i.e., people who can disagree with me on many things, while still sharing common interests.
– If you find yourself only surrounded by people saying what you are saying, believing only what you believe, then you are in trouble. HA!
I am curios, and I pay attention to a wide number of topics, so I follow my curiosity wherever it takes me. That means I will often run in to annoying people.
In my journeys, I find examples of CNS everywhere I go.
The blogs that I visit and post on create “Strange Honey”. I enjoy collecting that Strange Honey. So I am happy wandering from blog to blog, following my search for Strange Honey. I have learned so much, from so many different blogs, but I am always surprised when people in those blogs are actually in their own “silo” and shocked by my posts about the world outside what CNS allows them to know.
Here’s an example:
I have posted on other blogs about Indy Publishing — when the subject comes up. I am routinely attacked by the people in those blogs. To them, I am “crazy”, “not even wrong”, “You don’t know what you are talking about”, etc…, I’ve heard it all.
– Yet all I posted was that Indy Publishing is a simple, step-by-step process, that does not cost thousands to publish a book. That if you go DIY it can cost dollars to produce, not thousands. When they continue to object, I will link to examples of people Indy Publishing.
That is enough to trigger people to pull out pitchforks and torches.
A Riot Is an Ugly Thing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buvSIrFi0Hw
Or, they go quiet, hoping that the “crazy” person goes away.
What is interesting, is that I will post on various subjects about, simple, obvious, stuff that I know — all fact based, that anyone can easily come up to speed on — that sends them into rage, and pulling out pitchforks and torches. HA!
It is as Shepard said in the story:
“They’re not just being stubborn, their brains are literally structurally incapable of processing what they perceive as pattern-anomalous data. That’s why some ideologues get so upset when you offer facts that don’t match their pattern, it’s like you’re assaulting them.”
I stumbled across this saying about a year ago.
Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates: At the first gate, ask yourself “Is it true?” At the second gate ask, “Is it necessary?” At the third gate ask, “Is it kind?”
– Anon
The “Rules Lawyer” in my head instantly started working, pointing out, “Is it ‘kind’ to let people stay ignorant?” because on some level I felt compelled to tell people what is so obvious to me, no matter the cost to the other person.
– That’s when I had the astonishing realization, “Is it kind?” wasn’t about them, it was about me.
I suddenly saw the question as, “Is it kind to me?” Why should I say something so simple and obvious, that will have me fending off angry villagers coming at me with pitchforks and torches, when I was only trying to help.
So suddenly the answer to the second question, “Is it necessary?” becomes, No, it’s not necessary for them to know. And I leave the second gate closed.
And the first question, “Is it true?” is then not enough for me to open the first gate.
I realized that my whole life has been spent blithely walking through those three gates without seeing them, and having to fend off angry villagers. As far as they could see, I had entered into their personal space and “assaulted” them, just like Shepard said.
Basically, I am more comfortable with ambiguity than most people. It takes a lot before I start saying, WTF? So I have learned so many things over my life because I had no problem with that new information burning my brain. I always thought that was part of the process of learning.
Also, it is hard for me to see a problem in passing on that information that is so obvious to me.
So I am slowly learning, that the three gates are there to protect me, not them. I can stand outside and learn, grow in understanding, without coming under attack.
Yet, as you have seen, I am still posting odd things that set people off, while I gather that Strange Honey.
I think that a few stings, now and then, are worth the cost, because in trying to explain things to people, I learn far more than if I’d stayed silent. HA!
Thanks…
Ugh, more stuff to look at. Lol.
Similar interests doesn’t necessarily mean similar views. Just that we know about the topic. I get annoyed on facebook because people yammer on without knowing anything. Like, anything I know anything about if I see someone talking about it on facebook it’s 99% stupidity.
Like, for example, if we talked about Amazon’s dominance here we can actually talk about how it affects us, how it affects the economy, etc…on Facebook it would be all “Well Jeff Bezos is a bla bla bla so Amazon is an XYZ and yadda yadda the 90’s were better.”
Then I’d be all “face palm head in hands” and they’d be all, “yer just a XYZ who doesn’t believe in INSERTBUZZWORD”
Amiright?
Pretty much.
A common area of interest doesn’t automatically imply total commonality of interests. In fact, it is the variety of experiences and knowledge in other areas that make discussions in this particular online community actual information exchanges rather than a bunch of nodding heads. Some things are broadly accepted, others not so much.
The other thing that helps is a willingness to accept (and share) new information and ideas, different ways of looking at the world.
Not all communities/tribes have to turn into closed silos. I can think of at least three where the un-common interests enable lively and educational exchanges.
There is some (small) hope for humanity.
When you read how Cambridge Analytica used data to create customised ads for each swing state voter, to amplify their emotional response in such a way as to favour Trump and disfavour Hillary; it’s like we’ve all become the lead actor in our own personal Truman Show.
Interesting disclaimer that you won’t be political, since you quickly then did wade into very political waters. A great deal of money is being made by manipulating opinions. Just ask the now-suspended CEO of Cambridge Analytica. I agree ‘collusion’ is not a crime per se. But being in cahoots to commit a crime most certainly is. Mueller most likely is fully aware of all this 🙂
Amen.
Is it just me or does this smack of brainwashing?
I rarely follow ‘recommendations’ so I haven’t noticed this algorithm on YOutube, but it’s disturbing to say the least. I studied psych for a few years and I’m appalled at how behavioural research has been used to drive compulsion through subliminal cues.
When advertisements do this, everyone knows they’re being manipulated. When algorithms do it, very few people are aware of the manipulation. But it /is/ manipulation, and it is subliminal, although not in the way of the past.
Why aren’t people jumping up and down and demanding that heads roll? Why isn’t Google being sued?
Because people like being manipulated? 🙂
Recommendation algorithms everywhere work off feedback loops: they point people at something. Then they record what happens. If it works, they do it again. I doubt Google intentionally coded that behavior but it could easily be an emergent trait of the dataset they’ve collected over time.
In other words, the algorithm gives people (as a whole, not as individuals) more extreme solutions, whether the NYT approves or not, because that is what society has consumed over the past decades of youtube monitoring.
The NYT is probably reading the correlation backwards: it is viewers’ collective choices that have trained the system, not the system the viewers. After all, the US has grown steadily more polarized over recent decades.
“Is it just me or does this smack of brainwashing?”
At least ‘revving ’em up’ a bit. After all, you can’t have an argument if everyone is considering both sides, you want them swung as far to one side or the other as you can.
Having the masses fighting each other means they aren’t joining together and fighting the government.
I’ve been posting this many times and few people seem to realize what Jaron Lanier is saying. He is talking about the advertising bots taking people to extremes, to get more eyes on the screen.
Watch these out of sequence.
Computer Scientist and Author Jaron Lanier, Part 2
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/tavissmiley/interviews/computer-scientist-author-jaron-lanier-part-2/
Virtual Reality Pioneer Jaron Lanier, Part 1
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/tavissmiley/interviews/computer-scientist-author-jaron-lanier-part-1/
Each time I post these, people are clueless who Jaron Lanier is, and thus dismiss him. That in itself is very interesting to me.
Wiki – Jaron Lanier
To tie this into Story. There is a SF series, Cassandra Kresnov, by Joel Shepherd, where he talks about a “fictional” syndrome called Compulsive Narrative Syndrome(CNS).
This is a comment by the author about CNS.
Joel Shepard
https://www.facebook.com/joelshepherdauthor/posts/581171972018110
This post explains CNS. I copied the whole thing because people don’t seem to actually read the links explaining this. HA!
A brilliant concept — Compulsive Narrative Syndrome
http://www.thenorth.com/apblog4.nsf/0/ECDCECD5A52E699785257DD1005993CB
I first came across this brilliant concept in Joel Shepherd’s “23 Years on Fire”, the fourth novel in his Cassandra Kresnov series. The series started out a little juvenile but has gotten steadily more serious as the depth and age of the characters has increased.
Here is Shepherd’s characters explaining CNS — tell me this doesn’t ring a bell in modern politics.
“The human brain is trained to look for and identify patterns, but in abstract concepts, fixed and unarguable facts are hard to find. So the brain looks for narratives instead, stories that can tie together various ideas and facts in a way that seems to make sense, to make a pattern. And the human brain, always seeking a pattern as a basic cognitive function, will latch onto a narrative pattern compulsively, and use that pattern as a framework within which to store new information, like a tradesman honing his skill, or someone learning a new language. That’s why religions tell such great stories, the story makes a pattern within which everything makes sense. A synchronicity of apparent facts. Political ideologies, too. Humans are suckers for a great story because we can’t resist the logical pattern it contains.”
“When you’re learning a new skill, discarding irrelevant information and organizing the relevant stuff within that framework is good. But in ideologies, it means any information that doesn’t fit the ideological narrative is literally discarded, and won’t be remembered . . . which is why you can argue facts with ideologues and they’ll just ignore you. They’re not just being stubborn, their brains are literally structurally incapable of processing what they perceive as pattern-anomalous data. That’s why some ideologues get so upset when you offer facts that don’t match their pattern, it’s like you’re assaulting them.
So what Compulsive Narrative Syndrome really says is that being a one-eyed partisan isn’t just a matter of taste or values, it’s actually a cognitive, neurological condition that we all suffer from to some degree. And it explains why some people’s ideologies can change, because sometimes a new pattern is identified that overrides the old one. And it explains why the most intelligent people are often the most partisan and least objective, because pattern recognition is a function of higher intelligence. If you want an objective opinion, ask a stupid person.”
Here is another post about it.
Compulsive Narrative Syndrome – if it doesn’t exist, it should.
https://mikefinnsfiction.wordpress.com/2016/04/04/compulsive-narrative-syndrome-if-it-doesnt-exist-it-should/
I have a folder filled with this stuff because it is useful for Story, plus it explains so many things like the NYTimes article. By the very definition of CNS, most people will not read my post, or the various links, because they have already made up their mind long before they even get to the end, here.
To those who actually made it this far, Hi, there. *wave*
Interesting comment, A. Thanks for sharing it.
Some of the same mechanisms explain how so many people see recognizable religious figures in random stains, tubers, etc.
Or animals in cloud formations.
Or constellations among the stars.
Humans are compulsive explainers and extrapolators.
It’s a survival mechanism.
I watched all the Jaron Lanier stuff you posted before and looked him up. It was a real bear too, my stupid internet was going wonky on that site.
He’s so obviously wrong and ideologically driven about what he’s saying that it’s hard to take him seriously about anything else. His blinders are amazing.
One of his core premises is that Black Lives Matter and MeToo and other such movements are as pure as the driven snow, but then algorithms manufacture a counter movement to get the drama based clicks. Essentially, backlashes to ‘liberal’ movements are just products of propaganda, products of the algorithm, but the creators of such ‘liberal’ movements are grass roots heroes.
The truth of the matter is that all movements and reactions tend to have a reasonable nucleus, but the cloistering and radicalizing effect of media can spin it up into something ugly. Left, right, or whatever. Something that starts good can go off the rails too, like what happened with Blacklivesmatter blocking gay pride parades for being police friendly, hijacking the mournful gatherings after the Florida Nighclub shooting, or calling for the deaths of police officers. An anti violence movement turned ugly and lost steam.
Lanier seems to be saying my nuanced opinion makes me alt right and I’ve been somehow manufactured by a computer algorithm. This bubble think is astounding.
Lanier is especially up his own butt on Gamergate. As if thinking Anita Sarkeesian runs an intellectually dishonest clownshow somehow makes a person alt-right. Gamers have been fighting off hysteria and demonization for generations now, when I was young it was the Christians wailing about violence and games. Now it’s Anita and Trump.
What happens a lot of the time, and Lanier talks abut timing of a backlash, is that eventually the mainstream normie catches onto what’s happening and the resulting uproar over the stupidity of it all gets a lot of press. Then the media runs with that because they are selling clicks. Mainstream media, internet media run by algorithms, whatever. It’s click seeking.
Also CNS sounds like repackaged confirmation bias. But I like the term Compulsive Narrative Syndrome a lot better.
Allynh were you using Lanier as an example of Compulsive Narrative Syndrome/Confirmation Bias?
That would make sense.
Allynh I wanted to add, because ‘tone’ is hard to convey on the web, that I very much do appreciate the links.
It gave me something to think about.
You might be a big fan of that Lanier guy and I mean no offense. I disagree with some of his basic premises but, again, I still thank you for the material.
And like I said in the past. Lanier and I probably have the same voting record.
Say it ain’t so, Jo.
Lanier is not wearing blinders, he’s wearing virtual reality goggles. HA!
Here is another view of the concept.
Investor says he tried to warn Facebook about ‘bad actors’ harming innocent people
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2ToX93QVM0
“Roger McNamee, one of Facebook’s original investors and a mentor to Mark Zuckerberg, says he was concerned about the way “bad actors were taking the tools created for advertisers and using them to harm innocent people,” and alerted Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg in 2016. But McNamee says they saw it as a PR problem, not a business problem. He sits down with Hari Sreenivasan.”
I use the basic rule:
“Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.”
Jonathan Swift
Here is something that I point out to people when they talk about “confirmation bias” and why CNS is deeply more disturbing.
– Watch this video a few times. When you realize what has happened you will see what I mean.
selective attention test
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo
– Now watch this video a few times to add to my point.
Incredible Shade Illusion!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9Sen1HTu5o
– See how, even though you know the square does not change color, your eyes are still fooled.
Now, answer me this, Jo.
– How many times was the ball passed.
See, this is what’s so terrifying about CNS.
– Once you saw the trick in the “selective attention test” video a few times, all you paid attention to was the Gorilla.
You took your eyes off the ball.
And that is the whole point of the game that is being played. They show you the trick, and from that point on, all you can see is the Gorilla. That’s what they wanted you to look at all along.
– They have trapped you by using your own belief that you “now” can’t be fooled.
Literally, watch the videos above, the PBS Newshour, the selective attention test, and the Incredible Shade Illusion! many times and you will see what CNS is all about.
I routinely watch the last two videos again and again to remind myself to keep my eyes on the ball, while seeing the Gorilla.
Plus, while you were looking at what they wanted you to see, did you see what was written on the wall behind the players?
And, did you notice that there were two balls in play, not just one.
This is what Compulsive Narrative Syndrome is all about.
Oh man that was a lot I’ll have to get back to this later.
I like CNS. Not ‘like’ it, but you know what I mean. Enjoy it as a topic.
** waves back** 🙂
🙂
A friend of my mother’s actually did that–landed a plane, with zero experience, after the pilot, her husband, died of a heart attack. There was another woman passenger, also with no flight experience, so there were two lives at stake.
The folks on the ground told her how to switch on the auxiliary fuel, then sent up a second airplane, which flew alongside and gave her moment-by-moment landing instructions. She made a successful (but sorrowful, of course) landing.
This was all re-created on a TV show. Maybe it’s the video you watched.
Sorry–I’m digressing.
I’ve totally noticed this myself. I’ve been treating my fear of flying in preparation for an upcoming trip to Europe by watching flying without fear videos on YouTube and also videos that people have taken on their plane trips, looking out the window as they take off and land. All well and good, until YouTube wants to start showing me “Scary Close Call Crosswind Landings!” and plane crash investigation videos. Um, no thanks. And when I watch a video from my church, YouTube pops up with anti-church and anti-religion videos.
Sensationalism and extremism are where the money is.
Hey, at least you missed the small plane one where the pilot has a stroke and the passenger has to land them – at night.
Yup, YouTube needs you to hang around to watch the ads, and stirring viewers up seems to work pretty good. YMMV as they say.
(Though I am shocked that something this thoughtful came from the NYTs, are they off their meds? 😉 )