ilyĀIMY.com

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Huh. Facebook.

People like to gripe a LOT about the free service that they can’t seem to Live without. Whether it’s a voyeuristic desire to tune into others’ Lives and pretend they’re staying in touch with their friends without all that messy reliance on actually peer to peer communication, or whether it’s that joyous stalking of that girl you liked from high school, or its businesses looking for an easy and inexpensive (read : free) way of advertising (yes, including bands and rob’s open mics) – every time there’s a change to colour, layout, functionality of your end-user licensing agreement – there’s massive social uproar, headlines and, yes, status updates – and then everyone goes back to the new normal with a minimum of fuss.

Yup. There’s always fuss. But though there’s plenty of audible ruckus, I can’t remember the last time a friend said “the new status quo! It’s untenable! I am LEAVING FACEBOOK!!!!” Maybe I missed it. Maybe it was pruned from my update feed. I’ve had friends leave because they craved “real” interaction, or people won’t get onboard in the first place because of privacy issues – but – in a perfect demonstration of the “slippery slope argument” I don’t remember any of my friends getting fed up and saying that the new colours, layout, functionality, privacy statement or EULA was driving them away from social media once and for all.

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Nope – we just update our status, throw up our hands and swallow it whole.

Are we informed consumers? We’re pessimistic, certainly. I think the most common response is the belief that we’re being spied upon in every way possible, but as long as it’s not Obama, it’s probably okay.

And I find that fascinating. The Big Brother fears are almost completely allayed by the concept that it’s not our GOVERNMENT. Facebook? Have at it! Amazon? It’d be COOL if THEY had drones! Match.com? No problem! Google? PLEASE take all knowledge of my personal medical history, sexual tastes, kinks, reading materials, political leanings, credit card numbers, home address, GPS-based travel path (predicted on a daily basis to give me traffic warnings) and temperature preferences (thanks NEST) to better tailor my Life both on and offline… as long as they’re doing it for free and then SELLING me something based on it, it’s okay – because capitalism is the ultimate salve… but if someone we’ve elected into office charges me upfront (taxes) and sends me a survey (census) and then harvests all of the above data from all the sources we’re VOLUNTEERING it to – well, that’s the ultimate devil – and we call that Socialism and Fascism and … well, you get the picture.

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And what is the difference there? Why do we trust the people we race to give our money and information to and not our government? Certainly not SIMPLY because people are buying their way into office, right? I mean – that means ultimately rich people are in control of the government and aren’t those the same people that We the People are making rich? Is it because we’re afraid that the Wrong People have the vote? Is a democratic republic a little TOO democratic and we don’t like the face of our changing nation?

No, I don’t believe any of that. I think it has a LOT more to do with willful ignorance. We want to blame the people in power, but want to forget who put them in there. And we want to blame the rich, but want to forget who gave them the cash. Yes, there are old boy networks, and straight white men are doing an awful lot of thinking for the general good of gay black women – but we Love to forget that we’re part of the equation.

Here’s something that’s making me very, very angry. Someone won a lawsuit recently. I don’t know the details, but suddenly at the House of Musical Traditions we’ve got to add a page to a contract because someone won a lawsuit vs Rent-A-Center. Basically enough people felt that the contracts at Rent-A-Center were underhandedly too difficult. And rather than simply simplify said contracts – we’re suddenly handed an edict that says certain portions of information have to be reiterated and signed. Twice. Apparently the signature at the end of the contract isn’t enough. Me going to House of Musical Traditions and signing my name to a legal document isn’t enough to state “I understand the terms of what I’m signing and am, of my own free will, signing this contract”. No – now we’ve got to REITERATE a couple of numbers, say “now, you REALLY understand this, right?!” and have ANOTHER signature saying that yes, it’s REALLY understood this time. I swear. I totally get it.

I imagine if someone wants to they’ll still sue us to get out of the contract, claiming that we should’ve explained it a THIRD time.

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Now – we’ve recently had a massive credit crisis. You may remember it. It kicked off the Great Not-Quite-Depression, or whatever. A recession so bad it took almost FOUR YEARS for the stock market to hit historically record highs.

People who had variable rates suddenly had those rates vary – they went up! Companies to who people owed money suddenly wanted their money back! Now – it’s shit that all said shit hit the fan at the same time – and it’s shit that I have NO DOUBT that there were predatory lenders scoping people who’d probably only ever be able to pay the minimum on their loans for the foreseeable future and bled them for everything they could get – but when you sign a contract and don’t understand what you’re signing, you don’t have anyone to blame but yourself. And anyone who’s winning lawsuits that are reneging on those contracts is thwarting a basic precept of American law – that ignorance of the law is NO defense…

Just cause you don’t know what the speed limit is doesn’t mean you’re not obligated to obey it. If you can prove there’s no way you COULD’VE known it, there’s a defense. If you can show that a speed limit sign was purposefully altered by someone and that you were misinformed, that’s a defense – but if you read a sign and ignored it, decided you knew better, willfully avoided looking ahead at the possible consequences – well, I just don’t feel there’s anyone to blame but yourself – and the fact that legal battles are encouraging our lack of personal responsibility is… un-American. And is being reflected in every aspect of American culture.

Okay – rant over. I’ve been having a thoughtful day – and most of its had nothing to do with the renting of a refrigerator or a clarinet, lawsuits or Amazon. It’s back to Facebook and social media. It’s about emotional contagion and social responsibility, cancer, smoking and depression. You know. The big stuff.

A couple of days ago news broke about Facebook experimenting on its users. It came up in my Circa feed and I thought… “huh, how come no-one’s talking about THAT?” – and then everyone WAS.

For those of you that don’t know, in 2012, for one week, Facebook manipulated some 650,000 users’ newsfeeds. The newsfeeds were run through a text algorithm that searched for “positive language” and “negative language” and for 1/3 of the users a certain percentage of positive posts were thinned out, for another 1/3 the negatives were culled and for another third they just sat back and watched. Users were randomly selected, and statistics and posts were stored anonymously. No posts were deleted or altered or censored. You could still go to someone’s page and see everything they’d written, it just wouldn’t show in your newsfeed as frequently as if your newsfeed was following its usual algorithm. You know, the same algorithm that determines who you’ve been interacting with enough to see on a regular basis, that determines which bands and products you REALLY want to know about… et cetera. Full details are available from their published paper here : http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full.pdf. I’d recommend you read it because I’m truly impressed by how newscasters are sensationalizing it all. It’s not too long and doesn’t get TOO technical.

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The stated purpose of the experiment was to study “emotional contagion” over social media. Emotional contagion with face to face contact is well-documented and mobs are something to be feared for that very reason. As far as I know, this is the first documentation of how emotional contagion occurs over social media.

Now, there’s a lot of different levels of paranoia that come with the idea of running experiments on an unknowing populace. NPR helpfully brings up medical experiments on populations of African Americans, letting them develop preventable (and curable diseases) to see how those diseases proceed – if we want to be really horrific, bring up Japanese Unit 731, or the horrors of Nazi Germany. Those are war crimes. By comparison, tweaking of Facebook Newsfeed content for a week is relatively innocuous and I feel that these panic-mongering comparisons are beneath “journalists”.

Facebook points to its EULA, which states that by signing up for their service your data can be used in any number of ways (including “experi-mentation” – now a) this language was apparently added post the 2012 experiment, and b) it says how data can be used, NOT that data can be MANIPULATED so that seems a bit iffy) but I think that their legal legs are kind of grey and wobbly. And certainly the idea of their not getting explicit consent from their 600k lab rats seems really iffy (and even when I start thinking that it’s a really innocuous experiment, imagine you found out your KID was one of those 600k and it starts to seem like something people should sensibly get angry about!)… the argument that a depressed person might’ve been pushed to suicide by having their feed made more negative seems non to me – that’s the same argument as saying that maybe, just maybe someone was on the edge of suicide and they were in a POSITIVE group and Facebook saved their Life…

But I haven’t heard much discussion of the results – just a lot of discussion of the morality of the experiment.

And there were MEASURABLE results. Statistically very significant results. People who had their feeds negatively tweaked posted more negatively. People who had their feeds positively tweaked posted more positive things… like begets like. Interestingly, people who’s emotional content was deemed relatively “neutral” were not inspired to post as much as users with “unbalanced” feeds. Emotions inspire posts and like begets like. A talking head on NPR announced the exact opposite, apparently having only misread one of the latter paragraphs of the study. WTOP only reports that people’s posts were manipulated negatively. Al-Jazeera reports that Facebook “unleashed a rigged algorithm” on an unwitting populace. CNN reports that Facebook “intentionally made a subset of its users less happy”  â€œbut you shouldn’t be surprised. After all, experiments on users are commonplace on the Web. We are lab rats in Internet mazes.”

Geez. Axe to grind much? Maybe there’s too much negativity in these reporters’ feeds.

The experiment’s been run, it’s done. I haven’t ceased using FB because of this experiment and don’t plan to. I doubt they’ve lost many users over the subject. If anything, people don’t seem to care very much. It’s going to be a headline for a while, but I doubt we’ll see much change because of it. Facebook says they’ve altered their review structure, whatever that means. British authorities plan to “probe” the subject. Maybe there will be a class-action lawsuit, but since the data is anonymized I don’t see how they can find any victims. The damage is done, the data’s collected – where do we go from here?

Now – I’m going to posit something that’s not popular. I don’t know that I agree with it. It’s one of those many rob ideas that comes out of me that says “if I ran the world, it’d be a better place – under fascist rob-rule”, but I don’t know that it would REALLY be a better world…

So – we’ve established that emotional contagion is a real and trackable thing. Beyond that, we’ve spent the last decade or so campaigning for people, physicians and insurance companies to recognize that emotional problems like depression are every bit as real a disease as a chemical addiction like alcoholism, and that THAT is every bit as real and damaging as heart disease, cancer or the syphilis that was allowed to ravage those black men in Tuskegee. And you’ve just scientifically proven that there’s a way to reduce the spread of negative emotional contagion…

What’s our social responsibility there?

Now – I bounced the idea off Heather, that perhaps it’s Facebook’s responsibility to USE what it has learned. Last week I had a firmly-held belief that it was a bad thing to surround myself with negativity. That it effects me negatively. This week I have a scientific paper to point to. Ever since it was scientifically proven that cigarettes caused cancer, that they were dangerous and caused disease – it’s been the medical community’s mission to stamp them out. Well – here’s something that’s spreading a potentially very real mental health issue, yes?

Heather was nonplussed, said it smacked of the Pax. I argued that they already manipulate our newsfeeds – as above, they collect information and use it for the sake of selling things to us. They keep needling at our mental cracks, trying to figure out what they could do for us to let them in. What button could they push, what image could they show that would get us to click… and that’s okay? 

It’s that phrase – “for your own good” – or even worse “for the greater good” that will perhaps always be damning. It’s built on a lot of suppositions, but IF you accept the research as valid, and IF you accept that depression is a real and dangerous thing – and our culture is certainly pushing for greater recognition of mental health issues, what’s the logical conclusion? A slippery slope indeed. Maybe it’s a bullet point in the EULA – “I understand that using Facebook allows them to manipulate my user experience in such a way as to make me a happier person and to make that experience as positive a thing as possible”…

Or maybe Facebook will use their powers for evil? Extrapolate. The moment I hear they’re in bed with an anti-depressant-producing pharmaceutical company I’ll have to start calling my friends when they post something negative and see if they’re day really has been as bad as all that.

Showing male users some cleavage in the hope that they’ll buy something… well… that’s just capitalism. Even though it perpetuates the continued erosion of our cultural recognition of women as anything but sex objects, “sex sells” is okay. Even though it saturates our culture in violence and depression “if it bleeds it leads” is accepted – but the concept of stemming “emotional contagion” is perhaps even more stigmatized than free condoms at a Catholic school.

Enough out of me. It frankly probably doesn’t matter. As long as it’s not the GOVERNMENT doing it, people will probably accept it just fine. Just as long as they don’t start CHARGING for it.

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Random post-rant thoughts and clarifications:

– yes, I know that just because the stock market hit an uber-high it doesn’t mean everything’s better, if anything, with wage inequality being what it is, it REALLY just means that the people in power are doing so well that they’re not going to bother fixing the problems for the rest of us, but I DO get sick of hearing about how “things are the worst they’ve been since 2011”, or 2010 … or in extreme cases FIVE YEARS!!!! It’s something that Obama said when he took office that I KNEW no-one was really capable of ingesting. In our 24 hour news cycle we expect things to resolve in days or weeks. Months are an eternity, the idea that a “crisis” could take a year or more to recover from seems unthinkable whereas I feel like if a crisis DOESN’T take 12 months to recover from then it wasn’t really a “crisis” and a “crisis” that doesn’t take about 5+ years to claw our way out of certainly doesn’t deserve the prefix “Great”

– and in the midst of all this SCOTUS is handing out really iffy religious exemptions to the ACA – I think a) the ACA was about the best thing to come out of the government for quite some time, but it was executed poorly and b) unfortunately the grounds under which it was declared “Constitutional” were EXTREMELY shady so c) the idea that provisions of it are being knocked out sucks, but is hardly surprising but d) the idea that corporations can hold religious views? Bullshit. You can either be non-profit and a church, or you can be FOR profit and worship at the altar of the dollar. I think that a for-profit company can’t TRULY follow the precepts of Christianity (or most other religions) so how can they go around picking and choosing? The Bible has some pretty outlandish sentiments in it, but a for-profit corporation gets to pick and choose that it’s going to follow the tenets of birth control / abortion but NOT stoning adulterers? Sorry, in the case of a for-profit corporation, you’ve ALREADY put something else beforee your god, and that’s cash flow….

– And I think in the midst of all this I imagine what would happen if FB really WAS out to get you – redesign the colour scheme with something a touch more garish and place ads for headache medication… only place ads for Christian ministries in the feeds of people who’ve selected “atheist” in their profiles… use your check-ins to track your mileage and place ads for tires, track when you post and place ads for sleep medication OR target ads for times when an algorithm hypothesizes you are sleep-deprived and vulnerable… place ads for spy bear to people who “look” at a lot of profiles but don’t comment on them…