Three-Toed Sloth

The Distortion Is Inherent in the Signal

Attention conservation notice: An overly-long blog comment, at the unhappy intersection of political theory and hand-wavy social network theory.

Henry Farrell has a recent post on how "We're getting the social media crisis wrong". I think it's pretty much on target --- it'd be surprising if I didn't! --- so I want to encourage my readers to become its readers. (Assuming I still have any readers.) But I also want to improve on it. What follows could have just been a comment on Henry's post, but I'll post it here because I feel like pretending it's 2010.

Let me begin by massively compressing Henry's argument. (Again, you should read him, he's clear and persuasive, but just in case...) The real bad thing about actually-existing social media is not that it circulates falsehoods and lies. Rather it's that it "creates publics with malformed collective understandings". Public opinion doesn't just float around like a glowing cloud (ALL HAIL) rising nimbus-like from the populace. Rather, "we rely on a variety of representative technologies to make the public visible, in more or less imperfect ways". Those technologies shape public opinion. One way in particular they can shape public opinion is by creating and/or maintaining "reflective beliefs", lying somewhere on the spectrum between cant/shibboleths and things-you're-sure-someone-understands-even-if-you-don't. (As an heir of the French Enlightenment, many of Dan Sperber's original examples of such "reflective beliefs" concerned Catholic dogmas like trans-substantiation; I will more neutrally say that I have a reflective belief that botanists can distinguish between alders and poplars, but don't ask me which tree is which.) Now, at this point, Henry references a 2019 article in Logic magazine rejoicing in the title "My Stepdad's Huge Data Set", and specifically the way it distinguishes between those who merely consume Internet porn, and the customers who actually fork over money, who "convert". To quote the article: "Porn companies, when trying to figure out what people want, focus on the customers who convert. It's their tastes that set the tone for professionally produced content and the industry as a whole." To quote Henry: "The result is that particular taboos ... feature heavily in the presentation of Internet porn, not because they are the most popular among consumers, but because they are more likely to convert into paying customers. This, in turn, gives porn consumers, including teenagers, a highly distorted understanding of what other people want and expect from sex, that some of them then act on...."

To continue quoting Henry:

Something like this explains the main consequences of social media for politics. The collective perspectives that emerge from social media --- our understanding of what the public is and wants --- are similarly shaped by algorithms that select on some aspects of the public, while sidelining others. And we tend to orient ourselves towards that understanding, through a mixture of reflective beliefs, conformity with shibboleths, and revised understandings of coalitional politics.

At this point, Henry goes on to contemplate some recent grotesqueries from Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Stipulating that those are, indeed, grotesque, I do not think they get at the essence of the problem Henry's identified, which I think is rather more structural than a couple of mentally-imploding plutocrats. Let me try to lay this out sequentially.

1. The distribution of output (number of posts) etc. over users is strongly right-skewed. Even if everyone's content is equally engaging, and equally likely to be encountered, this will lead to a small minority having a really disproportionate impact on what people perceive in their feeds.
2. Connectivity is also strongly right-skewed. This is somewhat endogenous to algorithmic choices on the part of social-media system operators, but not entirely.
   (One algorithmic choice is to make "follows" an asymmetric relationship. [Of course, the fact that the "pays attention to" relationship is asymmetric has been a source of jokes and drama since time out of mind, so maybe that's natural.] Another is to make acquiring followers cheap, or even free. If people had to type out the username of everyone they wanted to see a post, every time they posted, very few of us would maintain even a hundred followers, if that.)
3. Volume of output, and connectivity, are at the very least not negatively associated. (I'd be astonished if they're not positively associated but I can't immediately lay hands on relevant figures.) *
4. People who write a lot are weird. As a sub-population, we are, let us say, enriched for those who are obsessed with niche interests. (I very much include myself in this category.) This of course continues Henry's analogy to porn; "Proof is left as an exercise for the reader's killfile", as we used to say on Usenet. **
5. Consequence: even if the owners of the systems didn't put their thumbs on the scales, what people see in their feeds would tend to reflect the pre-occupations of a comparatively small number of weirdos. Henry's points about distorted collective understandings follow.

Conclusion: Social media is a machine for "creat[ing] publics with malformed collective understandings".

The only way I can see to avoid reaching this end-point is if what we prolific weirdos write about tends to be a matter of deep indifference to almost everyone else. I'd contend that in a world of hate-following, outrage-bait and lolcows, that's not very plausible. I have not done justice to Henry's discussion of the coalitional aspects of all this, but suffice it to say that reflective beliefs are often reactive, we're-not-like-them beliefs, and that people are very sensitive to cues as to which socio-political coalition's output they are seeing. (They may not always be accurate in those inferences, but they definitely draw them ***.) Hence I do not think much of this escape route.

--- I have sometimes fantasized about a world where social media are banned, but people are allowed to e-mail snapshots and short letters to their family and friends. (The world would, un-ironically, be better off if more people were showing off pictures of their lunch, as opposed to meme-ing each other into contagious hysterias.) Since, however, the technology of the mailing list with automated sign-on dates back to the 1980s, and the argument above says that it alone would be enough to create distorted publics, I fear this is another case where Actually, "Dr. Internet" Is the Name of the Monsters' Creator.

(Beyond all this, we know that the people who use social media are not representative of the population-at-large. [ObCitationOfKithAndKin: Malik, Bias and Beyond in Digital Trace Data.] For that matter, at least in the early stages of their spread, online social networks spread through pre-existing social communities, inducing further distortions. [ObCitationOfNeglectedOughtToBeClassicPaper: Schoenebeck, "Potential Networks, Contagious Communities, and Understanding Social Network Structure", arxiv:1304.1845.] As I write, you can see this happening with BlueSky. But I think the argument above would apply even if we signed up everyone to one social media site.)

*: Define "impressions" as the product of "number of posts per unit time" and "number of followers". If those both have power-law tails, with exponents \( \alpha \) and \( \beta \) respectively, and are independent, then impressions will have a power-law tail with exponent \( \alpha \wedge \beta \), i.e., slowest decay rate wins. )To see this, set \( Z = XY \) so \( \log{Z} = \log{X} + \log{Y} \), and the pdf of \( \log{Z} \) is, by independence, the convolution of the pdfs of \( \log{X} \) and \( \log{Y} \). But those both have exponential tails, and the slower-decaying exponential gives the tail decay rate for the convolution.) The argument is very similar if both are log-normal, etc., etc. --- This does not account for amplification by repetition, algorithmic recommendations, etc. ^

**: Someone sufficiently flame-proof could make a genuinely valuable study of this point by scraping the public various fora for written erotica and doing automated content analysis. I'd bet good money that the right tail of prolificness is dominated by authors with very niche interests. [Or, at least, interests which were niche at the time they started writing.] But I could not, in good conscience, advise anyone reliant on grants to actually do this study, since it'd be too cancellable from too many directions at once. ^

***: As a small example I recently overheard in a grocery store, "her hair didn't used to be such a Republican blonde" is a perfectly comprehensible statement. ^

Actually, "Dr. Internet" Is the Name of the Monsters' Creator; Kith and Kin