Month: May 2024

Categories
intellectual self-defence

Twitter is now the bad friend

Originally published 2022-12-23 at https://medium.com/@tomstafford/twitter-is-now-the-bad-friend-679a0e1d92df

I joined in 2009, I’ve tweeted 30,200 times, I loved the good times I spent on twitter, but those days are gone.

Yes, I joined mastodon. I was inspired by Brian Nosek’s collective action experiment from the end of October.

Enough of the people posting content I like moved to mastodon that I don’t need to read twitter any more. Yes, I’ll post there, and check replies, but it’s faded into the background of my attention, like facebook before it.

Yes, Elon Musk’s attitude to twitter employees, unbanning accounts, and ridiculous new features (blocking links to mastodon, wft?) didn’t help, but for a long time it was obvious that twitter was a bad friend.

Social media plugs into our natural instinct to relate to information in a social context. Not what was said, but who said it, and what everyone else thinks of it. Elon said (and was ridiculed) that twitter was a cybernetic device for collective intelligence. There’s lots to be said about this, but I don’t think he’s wrong.

If social networks support a kind of collective intelligence — and in the weak form of a kind of collective sense-making, this is undoubtedly true — we can ask what the design features of a platform are that support or hinder collective intelligence. Do the affordances built into the software encourage collective intelligence or stupidity?

Some features of twitter

  • Quote tweets: i.e. a context removal device, promoting reacting without understanding.
  • Surfacing tweets you’ve liked or replied to in other people’s timelines: the social media equivalent of sidling up to a friend as whispering “Have you heard what Tom thinks about X? What do you think about that?!”. Offline we’d call that shit-stirring, in social media it is called optimising engagement.
  • Prominent counts of likes, replies and RTs: social proof on steroids, collapsing it into a unidimensional metric of How Important this is, deprioritising information on why it is important.

And now, logging onto twitter today, I’ve seen that they put the number of views marked on each tweet. Why? So we can all feel bad about how few people read our posts? I suspect it is a desperate bit of growth hacking from twitter, prompted by what must now be obvious —millions, like me, are turning the attention away from twitter.

You won’t see this in the headline figures. I still have an account, still follow thousand of people. But I’m not reading their tweets, and I’m not logging on every 5 minutes like I was, and I’m not replying (and people aren’t replying to me — for a couple of years now I have noticed less and less substantive engagement on twitter. Maybe I’m more boring, or have minimised my attack surface for replies, or something, but I suspect that we’re all collectively waking up from the fever-dream of twitter). The people inside twitter must have the stats to confirm this, must be able to see what is happening to the platform.

Mastodon isn’t a perfect substitute for twitter, but many of the differences are features, not bugs. As Clive Thompson wrote, mastodon is anti-viral design. It’s not trying to maximise engagement by provoking controversy, it hides how many other people have boosted or replied to a post, encouraging you to think for yourself whether you want to engage, rather that take social proof. And, more importantly, it isn’t a platform which is selling your attention to advertisers.

The outcome is a platform which isn’t as slick, but on which I can discover interesting information and have sincere engagement with many different people. That’s enough for me.

The thing mastodon doesn’t yet have, and which twitter is losing, is that sense of being a public space, a town square, where people of all types, and all institutions, were represented and could take part in discussion. For years twitter seems to escape the contradiction between looking like a public space, but being a private company with a mission to make a profit out of people. Musk’s takeover may have just made that latent contradiction manifest. Twitter was remarkable because of its elite capture of journalists, politicians and institutions. Maybe there was a path to building it out from there to a sustainable service which contributed to the public good and made a profit. Rather, it looks like — in the manner of a Greek tragedy — twitter will make itself irrelevant by working it’s dark magic on its new owner. Musk-on-twitter will become a hollow caricature: endlessly chasing of engagement, subservient to audience capture, holding onto the rising balloon of shrinking attention.

@tomstafford@mastodon.online

Categories
intellectual self-defence psychology

Facebook’s persuasion architecture and human reason

Originally published 2017-11-12 at https://medium.com/@tomstafford/facebooks-persuasion-architecture-and-human-reason-cd0cd8b96bc2

Facebook is a specific, known, threat to democracy, not a general unknown threat to our capacity for rationality

@Zeynep Tufekci has a TED talk ‘We’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads’. In it she talks about the power of Facebook as a ‘persuasion architecture’ and she make several true, useful, points about why we should be worried about the influence of social media platforms, platforms which have as their raison-d’être the segmentation of audiences so they can be sold ads.

But there’s one thing I want to push back on. Tufeki’s argument draws some of its rhetorical power from a false model of how persuasion works. This is a model in which persuasion by technology or advertising somehow subverts normal rational processes, intervening on our free choice in some sinister way ‘without our permission’. I’m not saying she would explicitly endorse this model, but it seems latent in the way she describes Facebook, so I thought it worth bringing into the light, pausing just for a moment to look at what we really mean when we warn about persuasion by advertising.

Here’s Tufeki’s most worrying example: targeted Facebook ads aimed at mobilising, or demobilising voters, which are effective enough in changing voter turn out to swing an election. She reports an experiment which tested a fairly standard ‘social proof’ intervention, in which some people (the control group) saw a “get out and vote” message on Facebook, and others (the intervention group) saw the same message but with extra information about which of their friends had voted. People who saw this second message were likely to vote (0.4% more likely). Through the multiplier effect of the social networks they were embedded in, the researchers estimate that 340,000 extra people voted that otherwise wouldn’t have.

Now 340,000 votes is a lot, enough to swing an election, but it would be a mistake to think that these people were coerced or tricked into acting out of character by the advert. These were people who might have voted anyway, and the advert was a nudge.

Think of it like this. Imagine you offer someone an apple and they say yes. Did you trick them into desiring fruit? In what sense did you make them want an apple? If you offer apples to millions of people you may convert hundreds of thousands into apple-eaters, but you haven’t weaved any special magic. At one end, the people who really like apples will have one already. At the other, people who hate apples won’t ever say yes. For people who are in between something about your offer may speak to them and they’ll accept. A choice doesn’t have to originate entirely from within a person, completely without reference to the options presented to them, to be a reasonable, free, choice.

No model of human rationality is harmed by the offer of these apples.

Our choices are always codetermined by ourselves and our environment. Advertising is part of the environment, but it isn’t a privileged part — it doesn’t override our beliefs, habits or values. It affects them, but it no more so and in no different way than everything else which affects us. This is easy to see when it is offers of apples, but something about advertising obscures the issue.

Take the limit case — some political candidate figures out the perfect target audience for their message and converts 100% of that audience from non-voters into voters with a Facebook advert. Would we care? What would that advert — and those voters — look like? They would be people who might vote for the candidate anyway, and who could be persuaded to vote for someone else by all the normal methods of persuasion that we already admit into the marketplace of ideas / clubhouse of democracy. They wouldn’t vote for a candidate they didn’t sincerely believe in, and the advert wouldn’t mean that their vote couldn’t be changed at some later point, whether by another advert, by new information, by arguing with friend or whatever.

There are still plenty of reasons to worry about Facebook:

  • Misinformation —how it can embed and lend velocity to lies.
  • Lack of transparency — both in who is targeting, who is targeted and why.
  • Lack of common knowledge —consensus politics is hard if we don’t all live in the same informational worlds.

Tufeki covers these factors. My position is that it hasn’t been shown that there is anything special about Facebook as a ‘persuasion architecture’ beyond these. Yes, we should worry something with the size and influence of Facebook, but we already have frameworks for thinking about ‘persuasional harm’— falsehoods are not a legitimate basis for persuasion, for example, so we are particularly concerned to hunt down fake news; or, it is worrying when one interest group controls a particular media form, such as newspapers. Yes Facebook persuades, but it doesn’t do so in a way that is itself pernicious. Condemning it in general terms would be both misplaced, a harm to any coherent model of citizens as reasonable agents, and a distraction from the specific and novel threats that Facebook and related technologies constitute to democracy.

Categories
academic

I don’t read students’ drafts. Should I?

Originally published 2016-05-16 at https://medium.com/@tomstafford/i-dont-read-students-drafts-should-i-31423fb1589e

I don’t read students’ drafts. Should I?

Lots of students assume I will read drafts of their work before the final assessment. They do this despite me not offering to do this, or even saying I won’t do it.

Although I’ve sympathy for the students, I don’t want to do it, for a few reasons.

A first reason is that it is unfair to do for some students and not all. It isn’t possible to do for all students, when I teach classes of 200. Or, more precisely, if I took the time to give feedback on 200 drafts then I would have to take the time away from some other part of the course, or from students on other courses.

Not only would this be unfair, I don’t believe it would be the most efficient use of my time as an educator. It wouldn’t be efficient because I know from experience that the feedback I have to give on assignments is the same for the majority of students. In fact, I try and incorporate my advice on how to write the assignment into how I teach the course.

Also, me giving feedback might give a student a false sense of security — as if I have read their work and approved it. The truth is, you can fix the main weaknesses of an assignment and still write a bad assignment.

Most importantly, I think my job as a Univeristy lecturer is to train students to be autonomous learners. This often means asking them to take more responsibility for their work than they are comfortable with. It feels like there is a trade-off between offering reassurance, even if it is of limited value, and helping students come to trust their own judgement.

Obviously, it would be insulting to ask students to complete work without guidance, examples, structures to practice within or feedback of any kind. I provide these things. I give feedback on essay structures and things like question choice, but I draw the line at reading full drafts.

Perhaps this is wrong. Other University lecturers have obviously made different choices in how they design their courses and structure their time. A-level teaching is also obviously orientated around looking at (multiple) drafts. Should I continue that practice, or is it okay to use my courses as somewhere to do things differently?

What do you think?