The Art Of Deception Within Social Media Platforms
The power to control narrative is perhaps the root cause of all problems in society. The ways in which social media platforms are able to manipulate narratives and the psyche of their users has led me to ponder about how actual armies sought to gain a psychological advantage over their enemies.
Within this internal warfare, I think the most important aspect to pay attention to is deception. It takes a lot of planning and complicated infrastructures from social media platforms to be able to lure users into this daily, hourly trap of immersing themselves into their devices. It takes even more of a strategic approach to send users down a path of one-sided information.
Attack #1: Retrieve user data, tailor user-specific algorithms for their daily content, deploy.
Reginald Victor Jones, a British physicist who played a significant role as a military ally in World War 2, is well known for his ideology “Jone’s Dilemma”, which states that “the more of the target’s intelligence and information systems that are manipulated in a deception plan or denied to the target, the more likely the target is to believe the deception” [1].
The more our data is manipulated and overseen by social media platforms, the more accurate their content algorithms are going to be, which also means the higher chance we have of believing what is shown to us on our feeds.
Attack #2: Observe user interaction with content and improve the preexisting content algorithms based on the insights.
It is also important for social media platforms to avoid overselling unfamiliar content to their users. That way, it avoids skepticism and keeps users scrolling for more content.
A parallel example of this is what happened in World War 2 when a German plane intending to attack Belgium was forced to land in Belgium due to harsh weather [1]. Before the German soldiers could get locked up, they attempted to burn all the papers that they had which outlined their attack plans. However, the Belgians believed these papers to be false due to how easily they were able to capture the German soldiers. Even though this Belgian capture wasn’t intended by the Germans, this story tells us a lot about human psychology in general- people always tend to be content when they are constantly fed the same, recycled information that they agree with. The fact that the Belgian’s were able to capture the German’s with such ease went against their original thought of war in the form of pure combat, which led them to become extremely skeptical of this situation.
Social media platforms know this, and they know it well. When a user opens an app, their main expectations are to see variations of some fundamental ideology or form of entertainment that they agree with or enjoy. These platforms track user engagement time with each post in order to make a decision on whether such content should appear on the user’s feed in the future or not.
If a user were to see a post with a completely different take on a topic than what they believe in, then their trust on that platform would go down. To combat this, social media platforms have cleverly added post feedback options where users can select if a certain post was ‘not relevant’, ‘too inappropriate’, etc. At the end of the day, the majority of a platform’s success is based off of one single metric: user engagement. Companies will test out a multitude of strategies to maximize this metric regardless of the consequences such as phone addiction and being fed false information.
Attack #3: Grow user engagement through seamless, unnoticeable strategies.
“If the enemy is the invading party, we can cut his line of communications and occupy the roads by which he will have to return; if we are the invaders, we may direct our attack against the sovereign himself.” — Sun Tzŭ, from The Art of War [3]
In the eyes of social media platforms, users are the sovereign themselves in who the platforms are continuously plotting on. In order to do this, however, a direct line of attack can never go unnoticed.
Platforms use a multitude of strategies to increase user engagement while, at the same time, being able to monetize. Such strategies include new UI updates to make information retrieval and interactions much more appealing, timed and non-disruptive ads which allow the platforms to monetize, short feedback systems which allow the platforms to make adjustments based on what the users prefer.
Social media platforms understand that whatever new changes they make must make the user feel benefited. While this may be genuinely true in some small, minor cases, it’s important to always take a step back and realize the bigger picture, which is that social media platforms are doing everything they can for as much of a user’s time and engagement as possible, which are human beings’ most valuable assets.
Attack #4: Leverage user conflicts to increase user engagement.
This is perhaps the most detrimental form of attack by social media platforms. Once the users have been sucked into the platform, presented with feeds consistent with their viewpoints, and placed in a community or bubble of other users with similar viewpoints, then a user has officially been ‘onboarded’. The horrific, unethical effects of such onboarding is that as more and more bubbles start to be created, the more separated society starts to become.
We see this in our everyday lives; on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, people are constantly getting humiliated for having different beliefs than others. The only credible sources nowadays to users is from those they agree with. Communities and bubbles in social media platforms have been detrimental to society as a whole. Although they allow individuals to feel more ‘included’ and ‘heard’ in society, what these platforms haven’t achieved is a safe and welcoming environment that allows ideas to be shared and spread in an ethical manner.
Does such toxicity hurt social media platforms? Of course not. By creating more bubbles of communities, social media platforms start to come off as more ‘welcoming’ and ‘diverse’ to potential users, which grows their user base exponentially.
The graph above perfectly summarizes the impacts of deception and shines light on what is actually going with social media platforms today- and it all makes perfect sense. Concealment, disinformation, displays, demonstrations, and insights are all tactics used by social media platforms with the simple goal of retaining users for the long term.
“In order to make your defense quite safe, you must defend even those places that are not likely to be attacked;” -Du Mu, from The Art of War [2]
Moving forward, I think it is best to keep this defensive strategy in mind. In order to avoid the dangerous consequences of being trapped into social media bubbles, we must take numerous actions to prevent social media platforms from learning more about us.
Such actions can include turning off notifications in order to avoid excessive app usage, turning off all data-sharing settings, and following users and media companies that tend to not be one-sided. Always try to be aware and conscious of what you are seeing on your feed and why. Pay attention to what types of ads you are getting and what types of users are being recommended to you.
It would be easier to simply tell users to limit their social media usage, but in order to get to that point, the first problem to fix would be how they are interacting with their platforms.
Overall, it is evident that ‘war’ has morphed into a whole new dynamic in today’s day and age. Information and ideology have always been key factors in the cause of conflicts, but it is the medium through which violence is exchanged that has changed.
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