YouSaid · the spoken record

Max Fisher

lines on the record: 46
first: 2022-09-09
most recent: 2022-09-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“They contacted me, you two, before the story came out, and they said actually we have to adjust our statement, we are not going to be making this change to our algorithm. We will continue to recommend videos of children to users. I couldn't believe their explanation. They said the reason we're going to do that is that YouTube creators rely on the recommendation system in order to make money, which is revenue that YouTube gets a cut of. could not and still could not believe that their answer was it's about money and that's why we are going to keep this on but that is at the end of the day the overriding impulse at these companies and it is what tends to prevail and it is why the platforms are as they are”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were ready to come out and laud YouTube as heroes, basically for doing what would seem like the absolute bare minimum.”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That prominently feature children. And we know they know how to do this because of an earlier scandal with these videos, they had already found a way to turn off comments on videos with young kids them. He said, look, I'm not saying remove every home movie. I'm not saying shut down the algorithm altogether. Just stop recommending people into videos that have young kids to them because then these videos would never get promoted. They would never get circulated. They would stay obscure home movies with 12 views instead of softcore porn that was shown to 600, 700, 800,000 people. And also, by the way, this is a minuscule portion of their revenue. They're not giving up that much. And initially, when I talk to YouTube, I raised that thinking that they would say, you know, no way we don't mess with the algorithm. But the woman who I talked to said she was cagey about it. She said, we are trending in that direction and I hope to have news for you soon, which was like.”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I still had reported that I think it was two years ago, and I still have a hard time with it. His recommendation, Jonas Kaiser, the guy who found that YouTube system was identifying basically innocent home movies of really young children, adolescent children, who just happen to be in bathing suits and their underwear, not wearing a lot of clothes. That in context, it was clear this is just an innocent home movie, but was selecting all of these videos from all across its system, packaging them together so it would show them one after another, and then pushing them out to users who had watched basically softcore porn of really young women. And so basically treating these videos of in this perfectly innocent families, unwitting families, young kids as soft core pornography, and showing them to tens or in some cases hundreds of thousands of people, he said, look, YouTube's system knows how to identify video.”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Certain things that get recommended. And there's not exactly an agreement on what are the features that it would be most important to turn off, but there is a real sense that I got from everyone that it has to come from not how do we hire more moderators, how do we kind of police the content better because that's just something on the back end where you're taking as a given that social media is going to produce these harms. But actually shutting off the features that compel all of this and what comes out of it. Now the question of how you actually get the companies to do that is a much tougher one because it cuts just squarely against our financial self-interest. So it's not clear why they would do it unless they were forced to. But I think that is the kind of technical answer to it.”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Were the head of YouTube or Facebook or Twitter for a week, what would you do? And the answer was almost always, and I want to stress this is some people who were not inveterate tech critics. This is from a lot of people who spent their lives in Silicon Valley, love technology. They would say turn parts of these platforms off, just turn it off. Not the whole thing. We're not saying erase Facebook from the world, but all of the features that are designed to compel, persuade, cajole us into spending more time, and that could be recommendation algorithms, other one that we hear about a lot, but it can also be as simple as the likes, the little counter under each post that says the number of likes that it got. Even Jack Dorsey, who was a longtime head of Twitter, said before he left, I'm not sure that having a little like and retweet counter is good for the world. This might actually be really dangerous because of what it compels in us. It might be turning off.”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's a tough question and it's one that I spent a lot of time asking the folks studying this is what can we actually do and on an individual level it can be I think almost a little too pat to say we'll just uninstall the apps from your phone I haven't uninstalled all of them we live in a world that at this point is engineered to an enormous extent around social media even if you're not on it that the people around you are and therefore you community is shaped by the norms that are pushed through the platforms your politics are shaped by the misinformation and the extremism and polarization that those platforms produce so turning it off those studies suggest will make you personally a little bit happier but will not change the overwhelming fact of what the platforms are doing to our world which I think is for a lot of us the overwriting concern and what I would ask people who had studied it you know okay well what would you suggest if you had a magic wand”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It feels very bonding. It feels like a sense of purpose. And he was this kind of fringe figure who before social media would just be kind of a weirdo who was able to get thousands and thousands of people to condemn what appeared to be perfectly innocent people who were just out in front of their house to call for their social isolation, to call for them to be fired, to call for violence against them in their homes, which he admitted weirdly in a stream at one point was partly just about trying to sell merch basically and to get attention. And I thought he was this kind of, I don't want to overstate the importance of him because it can be easy to overstate that to the exclusion at much more positive forms of this, like Black Lives Matter, which is seizing these same tools to have this transformative effect. But I thought it was important to present both of those side by side as a reminder that even when this machinery is used for good, it's not ours. It doesn't belong to us.”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I thought it was important to, alongside that tell the story of this guy, Carlos Dillard, who saw that and found a way to cynically exploit it. This is someone who, I'll be honest, does not appear to be the canniest exploiter of social media. There's some interviews with him. He does not come across as a evil genius, but he is someone who just scrolling through his feeds had figured out that if you stop someone on the street and you film a video of yourself accusing them of really horrible racism and express a lot of moral outrage at them, you know, how could you do this? And especially if it's a call to action, guys, we have to get them. We have to get this person usually a white woman. We have to get this lady, that that will go incredibly viral and win a ton of attention because it hits this trigger in our minds that say this is a moral transgression that we have to go police and also because it can be, and we don't like to admit this very pleasurable to participate in world.”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think probably the chapter that wasn't the most intensive reporting, it wasn't the one that was hardest to get the story, but the one that I spent the most time on trying to get precisely right and to get the nuance in was a chapter on moral outrage. Moral outrage is a really powerful and important force in our world because, of course, laws only encompass so much human behavior. And a lot of what we do day to day is governed not by what's legal or what's illegal, but by what our community thinks is acceptable. Social media, which amplifies moral outrage tremendously, maybe more than any other force, it is something that it boosts to just an incredible extent. In some ways, this is good and can be really helpful. And, you know, we talked about Black Lives Matter, we talked about Me Too. These are expressions of moral outrage against moral transgression. It's social media enabled the policing of, which is great.”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You think, but your own internal sense of morality because your brain is constantly trying to attune itself to what are the things that are going to keep me in good standing and elevate my status within the community, which social media is just incredibly powerful at tapping into.”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Has arrived at. But it doesn't look like that to you. It doesn't look like Facebook wants me to read this conspiracy theory. What it looks like to you is my community, all of these people who I know online believe this conspiracy and believe it urgently and want me to join in. And when that social trigger gets hit, you are just many, many times likelier not only to believe it and to take it on, but to join in yourself. And when you join in yourself, then there is this whole other effect from social media where if you put the post where it's like France did COVID and that's why we have to go get the French because that is a claim that is very appealing on social media, the algorithm will promote it. You will get lots of likes and your brain will internalize that reward and say, I have got to get more of that social approval. And because this is winning approval, it must be true, which again is something that we know from some really fascinating studies can over a relatively small number of iterations change not just what”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, and something that I found really compelling that I think about a lot is some studies that looked at when are conspiracy theories or when our hate speech persuasive to you. And in the most case, if you encounter them in a traditional setting, it is not actually that effective at changing your mind. When you see it, you kind of, even if it's a newspaper that you trust or a news broadcast that you trust, you engage, as I'm sure people listening to this are right now, an intellectual side of your mind that says, is this true? What do I think of this? And is kind of very cautious about internalizing it as true? But when you encounter something in a social context, it hits on a completely different set of impulses. You become much likely to believe it. And this is something that social networks are really, really candy at doing, is, you know, let's say these COVID conspiracies. It's the Facebook algorithm that is selecting it and is putting it in front of you, even if it's not, you know, no one is consciously doing that. That is what the algorithm.”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Engage in that fight with my fellow in-group members who are in this heroic struggle against the Democrats or whoever who were spreading COVID, I have to spend a lot of time coordinating with them. Facebook noticed that, started recommending those groups, or especially recommending gateway groups like groups that were like one step removed from the conspiracy groups to lots of other groups. And then this, you know, much like a virus, this conspiracy theory started spreading to lots of different groups until it is all over the platform. And then, of course, we know now over time that conspiracy starts absorbing other conspiracies, which becomes QAnon, which becomes a lot of stop the steal far right conspiracies. So ends up gelling this much larger, really scary movement that I'm sure some people would have believed anyway. But this kind of system for inculcating people into it just proved enormously effective and addictive. And I'm sure quite”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which was something that Facebook at that point was really, really pushing because they thought it was going to drive. You know what? More engagement was something that would just spread like wildfire. And there was this one really fascinating study that tracked how the Facebook groups recommendation algorithm, which is if you're in one group, you're in the yoga group, it will recommend other groups for you to join. This study showed how at the beginning of COVID, people who are in all sorts of groups that were not related even to public health and were definitely not even related to outlandish fridge far right, you know, China did COVID as a bioweapon conspiracy theories, started recommending those groups. And the reason it was recommending them was that people who were in groups that had been exposed to this conspiracy theory started spending way, way more time on Facebook. And the reason they spent way more time on Facebook was this conspiracy theory had like lashed into their brain as like this is the answer. This is how I'm going to fight back against this threat. But in order to...”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Confused about your place in the world. Maybe it's just that you're feeling depressed. And if you can turn that into a narrative of you are part of a group that is under attack by another group, which is something it's so powerful that extremism researchers have a name for it. They call it the crisis solution response that will absolutely glue you because to your mind, it is like, aha, now I can wrap my hands around this, I can understand it, I can grasp it. And in COVID, this is something that was really, really powerful where you immediately, when COVID started spreading, you started seeing these pretty ludicrous and easily debunked conspiracy theories absolutely thriving online that would say COVID was spread by a racial minority. COVID was spread by a hostile foreign country, or it was spread by the political party that you don't like. And on social media and especially on Facebook groups,”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So disinformation around COVID, which was something that happened as I was finishing the book, is something that just happens to hit on this kind of perfect storm of a few different sentiments that social media is enormously effective at converting into eyeballs and into time on site. one of quite a few is that when we are faced with something that feels scary or threatening to us, we are really, really attracted to explanations that reframe that threat from an individual one or from one that is invisible or especially from one like COVID very early on that is impossible for us to control into one that is a matter of us versus them conflict. If you can take some threat and maybe it's COVID, maybe it's a young white guy who is going to”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The people who stayed on Facebook viewed it through a very polarized lens and the people who had come off of it viewed it through a much less polarized lens where they were much more understanding of the other side, much more willing to kind of see multiple sides of an issue and less locked in to a kind of us versus them position on it. And the effect by which it reduced polarization was equivalent to 50% of the overall increase in polarization in the United States over, I think it was a 20 year span from like 1998 to 2018, 50% blew my mind. And that doesn't mean that social media is responsible for 50% of the polarization in the United States. Obviously, that is driven by many, many different things. But it was a really staggering to see how this small change and a number of people used one social network really transformed how they viewed politics. And that's just measuring it on the back end. That's before you get into more fine-grained issues of let's study one particular”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“one third of the effect of going to therapy of a professional therapist just from turning off their Facebook. And this is something that confirmed what a lot of studies had found, which is that being on social media makes you unhappy, it makes you much unhappier, which of course raises this question, why do people use it if it makes them unhappier? Well, it's addicting them. What is it addicting them with? It's addicting them with hammering away its social stimuli in a way that is manipulative and in a way that is really unpleasant but is hard to turn off. And the other big effect that they found was the people who deactivated their Facebook. And this is a study in the United States where, of course, partisan polarization is like the defining issue of our times, that it had erased an enormous amount of the polarization that people felt around issues. It wasn't that it had transformed how people feel about members of the outer party as a whole. It's just four weeks, but issues that had come up during that time.”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh my god, just set you off there. Let me see if I can think. I approach this question at two different angles in the book. One is asking at the back end, to the extent we can measure the overall aggregate effect, how can we measure it? And there have been a number of really fascinating studies into this exact question. There's one that comes to mind that recruited two sets of people, you know, a control group and a study group and asked half of them to deactivate their Facebook for four weeks, half of them to keep it on. Everything else is the same. You know, lots of controls to make sure that these were similar groups. And over just four weeks, which is not very long, the differences between those two groups were so much more than even I would have expected and certainly what the authors would have expected. The group that turned off Facebook reported much higher rates of happiness and life satisfaction that were equivalent to, and this blew my mind.”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was someone who left Google to go be one of these revolutionaries. His attitude was, thank you, Silicon Valley, thank you, Facebook, for helping us to make this happen. But four years later, he came back and he said, guys, these platforms, they were not good for our society. They are driving polarization, a push towards extremism, conspiracy theories, and us versus them that he argued, and a lot of people in and outside of Egypt had concluded had helped drive the country to what by then had been its complete breakdown in this really severe civil strife between different political and different religious groups that had then to the reinstatement of democracy. And he said that it wasn't just that it was a double-edged sword. He said, these tools that we thought were liberating us were in fact dooming us because they were not actually our tours to control. They were owned and controlled by Silicon Valley, which has one interest, and it is not the”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is hard, they have to be twice as engaging, twice as provocative, twice as algorithmically sophisticated in order to win the same amount of attention, which is not enough because Silicon Valley economics mean that you constantly have to be growing a user base, growing your time on site substantially. A kind of example of this that I think about a lot showing both the good and the bad of social media is Egypt and the Arab Spring revolution there from 11 years ago in 2011. A lot of organizing against what was then this very repressive Egyptian dictatorship happened on Facebook. As you would see in Time magazine, the Facebook revolution. And because it was a free space where people could broadcast and because the authoritarian government, Egypt could not shut it down, people were able to organize in a way that had been impossible before for protests and then to create this sense of critical mass that this government has to go, which it then did. And if you read interviews with Waile Honourable”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ends was the arms race for attention because, of course, it's not a neutral platform. It's not just a place where you go and post your ideas and maybe they spread or maybe they don't. Because these services are free to use and they have to make money, but they're also these huge companies that have to make not just money, but by the way, an incredibly huge amount of money. They are constantly competing with themselves, with each other, and with every other form of information and stimulus in the world to capture as much of your time and attention as possible. And something I was really blown away by seeing the statistics on this is that human attention, which is the resource that they mine for money by showing assads, is collapsing in value every day. Every day it is worth significantly less to have one second of your attention because the amount of just social media content roughly doubles every year, which means that social media platforms have to work twice.”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you're absolutely right that social media can, and especially early on, often was a real force for transformative good. It had a real power to circumvent the traditional gatekeepers, which by the way includes those of us in the institutional mainstream media. Black Lives Matter and the Me Too movement are just hugely important examples, things that would not have happened without social media because it gave people who did not traditionally have a voice, the power to force themselves onto the agenda by sheer numbers and by having access to this platform that allowed free and open communication for everyone, which is really a pretty revolutionary thing. I think in a lot of ways the original sin of social media and the thing that turned a lot of those powers that it has to bring good towards much more destabilized”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Say they know not to say it anymore, but they used to say very openly it is we think that we are really saving humanity by rewiring the world and human nature from the ground up to be better, which sounds nuts now.”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, if you are involved in an activity that is maybe in a more gray area or where maybe outside experts and journalists are documenting some harm, your individual psychological incentive is to say, I think they're biased, I think that's not the case, they're just trying to sell newspapers. And there is at the same time this longstanding, very deeply held ideological belief in Silicon Valley that the kind of traditional systems of governance are broken and that they don't work and that it is the job and the destiny of enlightened technology engineers to kind of save us from ourselves by creating this new society. And so if more people are spending more time on these platforms that are designed from these supposedly enlightened ideals of freedom of ideas and lack of governance and lack of checks by gatekeepers, then that is going to be good for the world and something that these CEOs used to”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's such a tricky question because so many things in studying social media, you're getting to this question of human nature and how we process and internalize truth, which is something that is on my mind because that's something that a Facebook user, YouTube user is constantly having exploited and turned against them. And it's just as true for engineers where on the one hand, yes, they have a very clear financial incentive to say that, well, if we are increasing users' time on site, that means that it's good for them and that means that it's making them happier, which of course is ridiculous because their entire worlds of knowledge organized around the idea that if something is addictive, if it creates an impulse, it's probably bad for us. There's also a psychological incentive there. We all want to believe that we are a force for good in the world and that we are good people who are doing the right thing.”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of course, there's plenty of video game users who are extroverts who are great at socializing, but there was enough of a trend in this that this system realized that videos that answered a sense of young white male grievance or especially confusion around gender and confusion around how to relate to women, that it could really, really attract that audience and keep them watching hours and hours and hours of video by feeding them this content. So he sounded the alarm, he said, I think that this algorithm is not healthy for society, not healthy for our viewers, and it's increasing watch time, but in a way that is maybe not actually so great for our world. And I tell this story in the book, but through a lot of back and forth and a lot of fighting, he ended up being fired from the company and then later became someone and is still doing this who is trying to document from the outside what people in YouTube have an interest not to document, which is what is this algorithm actually doing to its users and where is it sending them?”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was not good for them. In particular, what he was seeing, and this is a dynamic we're very familiar with now, is that people who watched videos about video games, which at that point were very, very big early adopter market on social media, so it was something they paid a lot of attention to, that over and over it would push people who watched those videos into videos that were about basically misogyny, that were basically expressions of the feminists are coming to get us, they're trying to control men, there's a vast global feminist conspiracy to subjugate the virtuous young white male, and that he realized that the YouTube algorithm, because it was so powerful, had made an insight that no engineer possibly could have, which is that because a lot of video game video watchers are young men and maybe particularly young men who might spend a lot of time at home, so maybe have some trouble socializing, this is not always the case.”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We just design the system to design itself to do that. And so when people in Silicon Valley say, well, no, the system doesn't do this, it doesn't do that, they don't actually know. And some of them will concede to you, we're not actually sure how this thing works. So what are the people I profile in this book, as I'm sure a guy that you know, a guy named Guillaume Chaslow, who was a YouTube engineer who came into the company, I think it was 2012 or 2013, which is just when the kind of cusp of this like algorithmic revolution. And he was someone who had studied artificial intelligence. So this is a pretty sophisticated field of engineering and pretty sophisticated field of programming. And he started to realize when they were implementing the very first algorithms in YouTube, one, no one really knows how they works. And that two, immediately, immediately, they were seeing on their end that the systems were pushing people towards content that”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know. I know you wrote a book about YouTube and what about TikTok, so you know this very well, too, and those are two of the platforms where this is really, really true. It is shocking when you realize that these systems are, they're so powerful and they are so automated and the way that they work is that it's not someone in Silicon Valley sitting down and typing into a computer. Let's surface these emotions and promote these kinds of posts, that it is a computer program that builds computer programs iteratively over time. And what”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To the people who are studying the social platforms, it's a story of two very flawed systems that came together and produced something really seismic, one system being social media and the other being the human mind, which has, we know, a lot of flaws in it, a lot of weak points. And this is something that early on in Silicon Valley, people were quite honest about. Before there was the backlash to social media, you could go to conferences and people would very openly discuss how can we boost growth by hacking and exploiting the shortcuts in how people's mind works and how we process information addiction was a word that people threw around very freely as a business strategy. And that is what a lot of folks like Nick Clegg now want to say they are not doing, but of course they have poured an incredible amount of money in research into developing systems that will do exactly that.”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of evolution, we know that things like mob violence are actually not good for society. We know that racism, even though it is something that comes from within our nature, is not good for us and therefore that we should try to manage and contain it. And social media by developing these algorithms that will over billions of interactions test on a level that know psychologist could ever dream of, that know, you know, the most sophisticated lab experiment could ever find, figure out what is the thing that will actually grab our attention and animate and activate us the most. And this is where Nick Clegg is right, is that it's not just social media decided, wouldn't it be great if people were outraged and tribalistic and approach the world in these extremes of us versus them? It's really a story, and this is something I really came around to the more that I talk.”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a great question because I think it's both, and Nick Clegg is actually right, but he's not right in the way that he thinks that he's right. So this is the argument from Silicon Valley is we're not responsible for what's on our platforms. It's what the users are wanting, and we can do our best to clean it up, but really it's you all who are pushing it. Truth that he is getting close to is that although no one in Silicon Valley quite set out to do this, what they ended up developing were the most sophisticated, powerful systems, I think, unquestionably ever designed for identifying, tapping into and surfacing our deepest and in some ways basis impulses, impulses that maybe we have worked to manage or contain or suppress because even though they emerged through millions of years,”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Moment or at any particular issue, and maybe that's because you're a woman on platforms that skew in some cases very heavily male or because you are a racial or religious minority in a country where there is a clear religious or racial demarcation and where maybe the majority has specific grievances that they would find very emotionally activating to push onto your minority. That can be really dangerous. And it can also be much clearer. It's something that comes through that this is a platform that is heightening majoritarianism and therefore heightening the divides and differences between the majority minority. So a lot of those people became kind of early warners.”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm so glad that you noticed that because that's something that I was really hoping was going to come through in this. So a point that one of these, a woman of color who I spent a lot of time interviewing made to me is that social platforms are by design majoritarian. It's raw mathematics and the people who work on them will tout this as kind of a point of pride of what are the emotional affects, the key words, the sentiments that will appeal the most to the largest number of people. And if your job is to say maximize engagement on your social platform so that you can sell more ads and have a really good financial quarter, this is great because you are now deploying some of the most sophisticated algorithms ever designed to maximize in that kind of majoritarian sentiment and tapping into it. But if you were not part of that majority in any particular”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Theories and effects that we can look for in everything from as narrow as had a social media change your emotional attitude, how does it change the way that you process morality to things as large as when you add up all of those impacts? What is the aggregate effect on say the politics in your country?”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And as complex as social media because its effects on us are subtle but so incredibly numerous because basically everything that we do now, whether it's reading the news, consuming information, relating to one another, is mediated now through social platforms. So it's this almost death of a thousand cuts where there's a thousand different ways that social media is impacting us. So what I set out to do And it turned out very fortunately that there were a lot of other people who were at the same time setting out on exactly the same mission and trying to figure out exactly the same questions link up with who are all the best and most interesting researchers on this who are trying to answer as rigorously as possible because their goal is just social science for its own sake and understanding for its own sake to narrow down to really specific and”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Psychologist, neurobiologist, evolutionary anthropologist to try to understand how social media interacts with the human mind and with human nature, going to Silicon Valley, and getting what I hope is as close as we are able to get to comprehensively and holistically understanding what is changing in our world as a result of this technology. And how did you do that then? How did you go from I guess what has been a relatively long-standing theory of the internet and social media are ruining us? The idea of kind of correlation to causation, was there a kind of a single moment where you thought this is this direct link between things happening online and off, or was it kind of just to build up of evidence? That was exactly the question I spent a lot of time trying to figure out is how do you narrow down something as big?”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This emerged at a Facebook, or even what was happening back in the United States, where Trump had been in office for like a year, and there was this kind of sense that social media had played some kind of role in his rise, but no one was sure exactly what it was. You know, was it just amplifying him? Was it pushing people towards his style of politics? And especially no one was quite sure what does that represent? You know, is Trump and his rise on social media just the tip of an iceberg for these larger changes that we're all struggling to understand? So that became for me this inspiration to say, well, I would really like to know, what is social media actually doing to us all? What is it actually doing to the world? What does it do to change our policies, our ways of thinking, the way it relates to one another? And that became this four-year project that has now culminated this book of, you know, traveling around the world going to, I think about a half dozen different countries to try to study its impact, spending a lot of time with”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From rumors about religious minorities to these kind of extremist platforms or extremist pages that suddenly got started getting this heavy promotion saying, you know, we have to take matters into our own hands and take down this religious group to then outright incitement that the platform is just pushing out to users. And when you would interview people in the country, they would really say, you know, I was fined until Facebook started showing me this and, you know, I couldn't believe how much my thinking changed over the course of a couple of months as a result of this. And of course, as all of this is happening, dozens of people in the country, including senior government officials, were pleading with Facebook to step in, warning them exactly what was going to happen and Facebook did nothing. And what was really striking to me about this wasn't, you know, just the kind of the scandal of what had happened in this one place or Facebook's in action, but how incredibly eerily similar it felt to all of these stories I was hearing from around the world of, you know, a riot or an extremist group that people were saying, no, this”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things up until that point in Sri Lanka between these two religious groups that ended up in this really horrible violent conflict have been perfectly fine, or so it seemed. And then all of a sudden there was this terrible violence that ended up shedding the country down for a couple of weeks. And when I went, what we found was that people were claiming that Facebook had done all of this. And I kind of thought like, okay, well, probably there was a lot of tension here already and then maybe there was a rumor on Facebook that set it off. But the more that we dug in, the more that we saw that a few months earlier things really had been fine and that Facebook had been, it's automated systems which select what you see, how you see it, and how you interact with it had been steadily pushing people towards these previously very obscure and little notice posts that were pushing these very sensationalized rumors about religious minorities. They pushed them over and over again.”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then decide this is the thing I'm going to focus on at book length? So before I started this project in 2018, I actually, to my great shame, did not take social media all that seriously as a topic. I think if you'd asked me before, then what is social media's role in the world? I would have said, you know, it's a neutral amplifier of things that are already out in the world and maybe there are some rumors on it, but how influential can a bunch of websites really be? At the New York Times, I mostly covered things like conflict, geopolitics, extremism, and so thought of this as something that was kind of separate from what I do. And that really changed for me that year in 2018 when I went to Sri Lanka to report on this series of riots that had sprung up completely spontaneously all over the country, all at the same time, and it was this kind of mystery of how did this happen because”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the past 20 years, social media has changed the world in unfathomable ways, how we communicate with one another, how we receive our news, how we form opinions, how governments are elected, how our societies function, and sometimes how they break down. But what is it about Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok amongst others that sucks us in then spits us out, twisted and confused? How have we been rewired by algorithms which claim to know us better than we know ourselves, feeding us endless content? I'm joined by Max Fisher, International Reporter and Columnist for the New York Times, whose new book The Chaos Machine takes us from Silicon Valley to Myanmar and exposes the havoc that social media is unleashing on our world. Max, welcome to Intelligent Squared. Thanks so much for having me. It's really fascinating to be chatting to you and really love the book. I'd love to know how it came about because obviously you've been reporting on this sort of stuff iteratively for the New York Times, but how did you...”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our host today is Chris Stoklewalker, freelance journalist and author of two books on social media, YouTubers on the rise of YouTube and the Creator Economy, and TikTok Boom. No not the Andrew Garfield movie, but a book on how the video platform is helping shape the future of our online lives. Here's Chris with more”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hi everyone, Connor Boyle here. Just a reminder you can take your intelligence squared experience deeper with intelligence squared premium. You'll get an ad free feed, one early episode per week, two bonus episodes per month, discounts on intelligence square plus priority access to our live in person events, and access to our premium monthly newsletter. Sign up at IQ2 Premium. Thanks for all your support. Welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm Connor Boyle. On today's program, the New York Times columnist and reporter, Max Fisher, joins us to discuss how social media has rewired the world around us, sometimes for the better and often for the worse, an issue he explores in his new book, The Chaos Machine.”
2022-09-09 · Intelligence Squared · How Social Media Rewired our Brains and our World, with Max Fisher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT