Another thread that can potentially slide in elsewhere, but haven't seen anything specifically focused on 'Big Tech'.
The purpose of big tech social media is to shape your thinking and modify your behavior.
Period. End of sentence.
I learned this on my local Reddit group long before r/thedonald got silenced. You really have to be into some weirdo territory to get some relief and even then the troll farms won't completely leave you alone.
I've been waiting to see who emerges as the big tech replacements and one piece of that puzzle seems to have fallen into place now that Rogan is on Gettr. Instead of trying to get through to suicide cult members it might be worth your while to share your opinions and experiences with sympathetic people who you wouldn't necessarily agree with on other issues. Breaking the false left/right divite et impera paradigm might be a much better use of your computer hours.
Then again there's always real life.
...
I'm in total agreement with you on the purpose of social media, and I'd add an additional observation that it's meant to index people, their thoughts, and their interests for the purposes of data science and contextualizing that data in ways that can inform how best to manage populations.
I saw it come into being over the 2006-2014 period and really kick into action after that. I was actually heading down a lucrative PMC path within that industry before becoming disgusted with the whole thing.
The breaking point for me was discovering, in no uncertain terms, that the only goal of these platforms - not discourse, not discovery, not sharing ideas or meeting new people or any of the things I was in it for - is to 'establish spheres of interest' to keep people within and utilize algorithms to serve 'content relevant to those interests and drive engagement' - to sell both ads and user data and collect on both ends of the bargain. How do users leverage the platform to discover new ideas or interests? Those things are served to them, of course! That was in early 2013 when I exited that path and returned to the path I've known was mine since I was a kid.
I've watched it get demonstrably worse since. I'm pretty sure I can pinpoint the moment someone decided it was more valuable to cause people to fight rather than bring them together/provide a service for collaboration and conversation. I know how some of the people designing these systems think. It is not about ad revenue anymore. Fun little aside to chew on: it's only a matter of a short time indeed until social media profiles, posts, all media, user history profiles and data-use profiles are tokenized and tradableAlready beginning on certain platforms, and people will welcome it, I'm sure. "Why not? Get paid to post anime boobs and talk sh*t about people? I'm down!"
Your statement about behavior modification is very on point, and if my experiences in that scene are still relevant, I'd imagine that is considered a good thing by many of them. Keep people behaving orderly, protect society, organize and contain and direct, make people 'happy' and enable a brighter future, etc. etc. It's quite likely their monster has turned on them, is acting on them, and has engaged a recursive Define Bad Person -> Fix or Contain Bad Person process.
I actually suspect that the 'permissible' discussion of the weaponization of social media (in the context of Other Team Uses Social Media Bad!) which both 'sides' of the false left/right division that you mention whine about in their particular ways is a method by which to manage and focus the latent skin-crawling sensation that people have about the modification happening (which most people can sense but not understand). Direct it away from blaming the generalized technology and onto that old workhorse of The Other Team.
I use these platforms critically, take careful caution and keep my guard up as best as I've been able to throughout my life - I know it's not perfect, but something also keeps me going back into the belly of the beast to do my best to pop those bubbles. Something about just letting them rot doesn't sit right with me.
Who knows, perhaps that's how the algorithm has been able to keep me engaged? I'm not so arrogant as to believe it won't or hasn't found a way to shape me too, especially as I'm quite aware of the depth and breadth of data it's collected and indexed on my specific user class and yes, me specifically. I'm nobody important, but that really doesn't matter with the technology we're talking about.
It is entirely technically possible and almost certain, for example, that reddit has a bead on the certain type of questions and topics which elicit a reply from me and sorts them into my view (regardless of upvotes or downvotes), so that I spend the time to write a reply - which often gets more engagement as people respond vigorously, one way or the other.
This may be the cause of my current observation of particular viciousness, but having done this for a while, I'm picking up something different and strange.
https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/165100.html
