The Social Dilemma and Data Science
Social media is the largest media development of the twenty-first century. Most think of social media as an outlet to escape or to connect with new people right from their pockets. There is no doubt that social media platforms, such as Facebook or Instagram, have connected the entire world and often for the better good. People have started mass movements over social media, and information and news have spread like a wildfire. However, to some, social media has also become an essential part of their lives, as vital as eating and sleeping. As our lives have become more tightly intertwined by social media, numerous negative effects have emerged. Soon, a social media user’s number of likes or followers are determining factors of their personalities and a source of personal worth, which studies have shown results in depression. One of the largest caveats of social media is its ability for people to present false or modified versions of themselves, such as filtered visages or idealized lifestyles, to the internet, resulting in the normalization of lying and purposeful addictiveness. Social media allows its users to assume different personalities; for example, being a college student by day, then an “internet troll” by night. This shift from the real world causes serious issues like cyberbullying because now you can supposedly do whatever you want to do on social media that would be considered outrageously unacceptable in person. Moreover, it has signaled a new era of news media, where frenzied cries of “fake news” are hurled by partisan politicians and their followers.
Recently, I watched the new documentary, The Social Dilemma, which dives deep into the core structure of social media, often from the perspective of the large corporations themselves. The director of The Social Dilemma, Jeff Orlowski, exposes the inner workings of seemingly inviting platforms, like Facebook and Google, as havens for mass data collection. The primary argument of the documentary was conveying how corporations like Google, Facebook, Instagram, and other giants that collect data do not sell their product, but they sell their users. Take Facebook, for example. Facebook collects data about users that the users don’t know about themselves. It tracks data such as time spent on a post, and likes given and received, and much more. This seems like a standard, benevolent data collection procedure, but what makes Facebook the giant it is, is its half-trillion-dollar data algorithm that personalizes ads, potential friends, and groups. This algorithm, together with Twitter’s scrolling feed, is not addictive by accident; they are addictive by design. Multiple articles cite how social media platform developers had invited professionals from the gaming industry to deliberately make their apps addictive. For Facebook, their addictive features are combined with their prized algorithm, which is designed to engage users in downward spirals of spending as much time on Facebook as possible, with the algorithm recommending more and more attractive items to click — and Facebook making profits at every turn. The COO of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg, is responsible for taking Facebook from $56 million dollars in loss to $18.5 billion in profit by applying its algorithm to profit-making using the targeted advertising model from Google Ads. Because of Sandberg’s role in heralding a new era of utilizing data from users to make money for Big Tech companies, Shoshana Zuboff dubbed Sandberg the “Typhoid Mary of Surveillance Capitalism” because of her introduction of tailored advertising in Facebook. She made Facebook less restrictive than Google in data collection and usage. She used the data so that it would not only satisfy, but generate more demand. Society has entered the “data age,” the Fourth Industrial Revolution, where everyone’s decisions, actions, and predictions are based on collectible data — what Orlowski calls a “Checkmate on Humanity.”
Facebook is not the only corporation that gathers and monetizes massive amounts of data from its users. Virtually all social media outlets and tech giants, such as Google, Instagram, Snapchat, and many more, have their own algorithms that are not only trained using user data, but are also used to train us into using its products compulsively. It now poses the question about what data collection is ethical, and what data collection is not. To explore this in more detail, I took a course at my local community college about business decisions, data science, and ethics. From the course, I personally think that data collection is crucial, as data manipulation can provide useful insights for businesses, and from what I have learned, this data science is the biggest step for expansion. However, there should be a fine line between data collection, and an intrusion of privacy. Collecting data from other means than a website or app, typically that data users do not want to be shared, is an obstruction on privacy, and is the whole reason why ethics in Data Science — especially in social media — is such a big deal.
These larger philosophical and economic implications for smart tech and the role of data collection are cited by Harvard Business Professor Emeritus, Shoshanna Zuboff. Zuboff’s book, Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, cites how Big Data and social media platform creators have engendered an economic system centered around the commodification of personal data, one where the core purpose of their collection efforts is to engage users and make the highest profit possible. Zuboff defines “Surveillance Capitalism” as “ unilaterally [claiming] human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data” and “parasitic and self-referential”. To corporations, the people associated with their data are merely peripheral, as their data is the real gold mine. Corporations like Google and Facebook are monopolies because of this. Companies like Ring, have little security for the data they collect, and how it is used, and who it is shared with. Ring is a smart doorbell subsidiary of Google, which has “forged video-sharing partnerships with more than 400 police forces across the United States”. Although this system has helped catch real criminals, most people do not know about this pact which may threaten their civil liberties. Zuboff’s book has made an impact. What Shoshana Zuboff calls Ring as “Orwellian Surveillance” calls back to the term “Big Brother” in George Orwell’s novel 1984, where the term “Big Tech” comes from. Recently, California has been among the first to herald checks on Big Tech’s power, in the form of this year’s Proposition 24. Prop 24 was approved on November 3, 2020, in California and it limited businesses’ abilities to use consumer data, such as consumers opting out of data collection, and asking for data collection permission for minors.
Overall, data collection is undoubtedly the driving force behind the success of most major corporations like Google, Facebook, and other social media platforms. Behind each of these outlets is what makes them so popular and successful — its data algorithm. They collect data from their users to create a personalized experience for each user, but not everyone knows what’s really going on under the hood, and how ethical this data collection is. Films like “The Social Dilemma” and books like The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshanna Zuboff expose the inner workings of Big Data corporations, and what they really do with user data. The reality is that most companies share and sell user data: because whoever has the most data, has more control over the masses, and sometimes monopolizes their fields. The fact of the matter is this: Big corporations do not really sell their products, but they sell their users.
