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The power of platforms like Facebook and Google has escaped the control of the optimistic technocrats at their helm. And it is wreaking havoc in ways that we lab rats have only just begun to understand. At least, that’s the case Netflix’s new documentary The Social Dilemma, directed by Jeff Orlowski, makes. Through interviews with repentant tech leaders, we learn how websites that began as ostensibly innocent attempts to bring people closer together have since mutated into sophisticated, self-teaching attention-harvesting machines that are getting better and better at keeping us glued to our devices. 

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In March the United Kingdom curiously declined to impose significant social distancing measures in response to the global pandemic. The government was taking advice from several parties, among them the so-called “Nudge Unit,” a private company called Behavioral Insights Team, which uses behavioral science to advise U.K. policymakers on how to “nudge” people toward certain actions. Chris Whitty, England’s Chief Medical Officer, reportedly cited “behavioral fatigue,” the idea that the public’s commitment to the measures would fade over time, as a policy concern in government meetings. This shaped the country’s pandemic response despite challenge on the idea from the Nudge Unit, led by experimental psychologist David Halpern.* The lax measures sparked fierce backlash not just from epidemiologists concerned about the virus’ spread, but also from a group of 600 behavioral scientists—psychologists, sociologists, economists, political scientists, and more. They signed an open letter doubting the quality of the evidence that led to the government’s decision.

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During the Spanish flu of 1918, it was Vick’s VapoRub. During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, it was canned food. Now, as the number of cases of COVID-19 grows worldwide, it’s, among other things, toilet paper. In times of precarity, people often resort to hoarding resources they think are likely to become scarce—panic buying, as it’s sometimes called. And while it’s easy to dismiss as an overreaction, it underscores just how difficult it can be, for both the general public and public health authorities, to choose the right response to a dangerous, rapidly evolving situation.

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A few weeks ago, I made a small donation to the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF), a nonprofit that works to prevent the spread of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa. It was easy; after just a few clicks through their website, two dozen new insecticide-treated mosquito nets started their journey along the e-commerce supply chain toward people in need. Yet this act of charity, encased in the cold, blue light of my computer screen, felt strangely impersonal and calculated. Despite the photos of smiling net recipients and the transcripts of their effusive testimonials, the process failed to deliver the sense of human connection — the warm glow of empathy, the exchange of niceties, the flush of smug self-satisfaction — that I had come to expect from my all-too-rare acts of generosity in the physical world. I began to wonder what my real motivations were.

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Last month, Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenage activist, excoriated world leaders for their ongoing failure to address the climate crisis. “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words,” she said at one point during her speech at the United Nations. Thunberg has been galvanizing public support for climate action since rising to prominence with her school strike about a year ago, and her latest remarks are no exception. They’ve attracted millions of views all around the internet—and nearly as many strong opinions. The praise and scorn she received in the aftermath of her address spotlights not only the power and intricacy of moral language, but also its ability, when articulated in a sound argument, to change public opinion on contentious moral and political issues.

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Facebook once teamed up with scientists at Cornell to conduct a now-infamous experiment on emotional contagion. Researchers randomly assigned 700,000 users to see on their News Feeds, for one week, a slight uptick in either positive or negative language or no change at all, to determine whether exposure to certain emotions could, in turn, cause a user to express certain emotions. The answer, as revealed in a 2014 paper, was yes: The emotions we see expressed online can change the emotions that we express, albeit slightly. Conversations about emotional contagion were quickly shelved, however, as the public disclosure of the study sparked an intense backlash against what many perceived to be an unjust and underhanded manipulation of people’s feelings. Facebook would later apologize for fiddling with users’ emotions and pledge to revise its internal review practices.

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One of the first things I noticed when I started my PhD — and something that you’ve surely noticed by now if you’re also a graduate student — is that people in academia tend to be really busy. It didn’t exactly come as a surprise; constant busyness seemed a logical and necessary response to the high demands of academic life. But as I stumbled through my first year in graduate school, I came to understand in a frustrating, firsthand way that not all kinds of “busy” are created equal.

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The episode last month at the Lincoln Memorial involving the boys from Covington Catholic High School, like so many internet-borne controversies before it, spawned vituperative reactions, reactions to the reactions, and sweeping meta-analysesof the reactions to the reactions. Altogether it was exactly the type of politically-charged commotion that nobody could seem to resist weighing in on (myself included). Yet at the heart of it was a misinterpreted, arguably meaningless event driven by an emotion that social media is making more and more familiar to all of us: moral outrage.

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What cats, cucumbers, and psychedelic drugs tell us about the nature of consciousness

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About three years ago, cat owners around the world stumbled upon a strange phenomenon: their beloved pets appeared to be deathly afraid of cucumbers. This discovery quickly grew into an entire genre of viral video, and in case you aren’t familiar, a typical upload features a cat being scared witless—often stumbling backward wide-eyed or even springing into the air in panic—after finding a cucumber that its owner had covertly placed nearby.

Continue reading “I can has self-awareness?”

The push and pull between social media and our moral emotions

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A version of this article has been published by Nautilus

In December 2013, Justine Sacco, then the senior director of corporate communications at IAC, sent out a string of tweets over the course of a long, multi-leg journey from New York to South Africa. She started with sardonic observations about the minor trials of travel—one about a smelly passenger at JFK Airport, another about London’s peculiar food and predictably inclement weather. Then came this one, which she sent shortly before boarding her plane for the final, 11-hour flight to Cape Town:

“Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”

Continue reading “Twitter Triggers”