Social Media as Social Control.
Summary
TLDRThe transcript discusses B.F. Skinner's controversial 'Skinner boxes' and their application to social media platforms, which act as modern-day Skinner boxes. Skinner's behaviorist theories aimed to condition human behavior through operant conditioning, an idea that has been criticized for undermining freedom and dignity. Today, social media algorithms and policies subtly influence user behavior, creating a form of social control. The concept of 'libertarian paternalism' is introduced, suggesting that people can be nudged into making decisions that align with a desired outcome without force, similar to how Skinner's experiments worked.
Takeaways
- 🔬 B.F. Skinner's experiments with 'Skinner boxes' aimed to study and control animal behavior through operant conditioning.
- 🐁 Skinner's methodology involved placing animals in boxes with mechanisms like levers and lights, where specific behaviors were rewarded or punished.
- 💡 Skinner believed that human behavior could be conditioned and controlled through a system of reinforcement and punishment, similar to his experiments.
- 📚 Skinner's book 'Beyond Freedom and Dignity' argues for a behaviorist utopia where human behavior is shaped by external stimuli.
- 🤔 Skinner's ideas were controversial among psychologists, especially those who believed in the importance of subjective experiences.
- 📈 Modern social media platforms function as 'Skinner boxes', where user behavior is shaped by likes, shares, and algorithmic recommendations.
- 🚫 Social media sites use bans and content removal to create a 'chilling effect', subtly controlling user behavior.
- 🌐 The concept of 'libertarian paternalism' is a modern application of Skinner's ideas, where choices are subtly manipulated to guide people's decisions.
- 🧠 The 'heuristics and biases' program suggests that human cognition is flawed and requires guidance from social engineers.
- 🔑 Social media platforms use tokens of approval (likes, shares) to incentivize and control user behavior, similar to Skinner's reward system.
Q & A
What were Skinner boxes and how were they used in B.F. Skinner's experiments?
-Skinner boxes were experimental devices used by the American psychologist B.F. Skinner to study animal behavior. They were boxes with mechanisms like lights, levers, and switch plates. Animals placed in these boxes were subjected to operant conditioning, where they received rewards or punishments based on their actions, such as standing on a lever or pulling a switch at certain times.
What is operant conditioning?
-Operant conditioning is a method of learning that occurs through rewards and punishments for behavior. It is a behaviorist approach that suggests that behaviors can be modified by controlling the consequences that follow them.
How did Skinner's experiments with animals relate to his views on human behavior?
-Skinner believed that the principles of operant conditioning observed in his animal experiments could be applied to human behavior. He envisioned a society where human behavior could be conditioned and controlled through reinforcement and punishment, similar to the way animals were conditioned in his experiments.
What is the connection between Skinner's ideas and social media platforms?
-The concept of Skinner boxes has been extended to social media platforms, which can be seen as modern-day Skinner boxes. These platforms use algorithms and feedback mechanisms to reinforce certain behaviors, such as liking, sharing, and commenting, shaping user interactions and potentially influencing their thoughts and beliefs.
What is meant by 'libertarian paternalism' in the context of social control?
-Libertarian paternalism is a concept where individuals are nudged towards certain decisions or behaviors without overt coercion. It suggests that by structuring choices in a particular way, people can be guided to make decisions that align with the desires of social engineers or policymakers, while still maintaining the illusion of free choice.
How does the script suggest that social media platforms exert control over users?
-The script suggests that social media platforms exert control by creating an environment where users are rewarded for certain behaviors (likes, shares) and subtly discouraged from others through mechanisms like banning or content removal. This can lead to self-regulation and a chilling effect, where users self-censor to conform to perceived community standards.
What is the role of heuristics and biases in the social engineering perspective discussed in the script?
-Heuristics and biases refer to the mental shortcuts and systematic errors people make when processing information. The social engineering perspective discussed in the script views these as flaws in human cognition that can be manipulated or 'fixed' by external forces, such as social media algorithms, to guide people towards desired behaviors.
How does the script argue that privacy concerns on social media are secondary to behavioral control?
-The script argues that while privacy concerns are significant, the more profound issue is the behavioral control exerted through social media. It suggests that metadata collected from user behavior is used to create AI systems that further reinforce desired behaviors, making users more susceptible to manipulation.
What is the concept of 'token economy' as it relates to social media?
-A token economy is a system where individuals are rewarded or punished with tokens to reinforce or discourage certain behaviors. In the context of social media, likes, shares, and comments act as tokens that reinforce user behavior, creating a form of social control.
How does the script describe the potential dangers of social media as Skinner boxes?
-The script describes the dangers of social media as Skinner boxes by suggesting that they program users in a similar way to how animals were conditioned in Skinner's experiments. It argues that this can lead to predictable and controlled behavior, where users may be manipulated to believe in certain 'consensus' views without realizing the extent of external influence.
What is the script's view on the term 'radicalization' in the context of social media?
-The script challenges the common use of the term 'radicalization' to describe individuals becoming more extreme in their views. Instead, it suggests that it is the users within social media systems who are being radicalized, as their behavior becomes more controlled and influenced by the platforms' reinforcement mechanisms.
Outlines
🔬 Skinner's Box and Behaviorism
The paragraph discusses B.F. Skinner's experiments with 'Skinner boxes', which were used to study animal behavior through operant conditioning. Skinner would place animals in boxes equipped with mechanisms like levers and lights, and program the boxes to deliver rewards or punishments based on the animals' actions. This method aimed to train animals autonomously. Skinner's work was controversial within the field of psychology, as it focused on observable behavior rather than unobservable mental states. His ideas extended to human behavior, envisioning a society where behavior is conditioned and controlled through reinforcement, as outlined in his book 'Beyond Freedom and Dignity'. The paragraph also draws a parallel between Skinner's boxes and modern social media platforms, suggesting that these platforms function as vast Skinner boxes, conditioning user behavior through likes, shares, and other forms of social reinforcement.
📉 The Chilling Effect of Social Media Control
This paragraph delves into the chilling effect of social media platforms' control over user behavior. It discusses how platforms use bans and ambiguous terms of service to regulate user conduct, creating an environment where users self-censor for fear of punishment. Over time, this can lead to a form of mass lobotomy, where users internalize the platform's values and reinforce acceptable behavior. The paragraph also touches on the concept of 'libertarian paternalism', a viewpoint that suggests guiding people's decisions without forcing them, akin to Skinner's box on a societal scale. It mentions how social media sites can control the visibility of content to influence user behavior, and how this can be achieved with minimal effort, leading to a form of social control that gives the illusion of user autonomy.
🤔 The Illusion of Control in Social Media
The final paragraph critiques the idea that social media platforms are neutral spaces for free expression. It argues that these platforms are designed to control user behavior through incentives like likes and shares, which are analogous to the tokens used in Skinner's experiments. The paragraph suggests that the true concern with social media is not privacy, but the behavioral control exerted through metadata collection and AI-driven algorithms. It also discusses the concept of 'radicalization', suggesting that it is not users outside of social media who are radicalized, but those within the system who are being programmed to adopt new consensuses and beliefs. The paragraph concludes by emphasizing the power of social media to shape user behavior and思想, raising questions about the ethics of such control.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Skinner Box
💡Operant Conditioning
💡Behaviorism
💡Social Media
💡Reinforcement
💡Chilling Effect
💡Libertarian Paternalism
💡Heuristics and Biases
💡Token Economy
💡Radicalization
💡Social Control
Highlights
B.F. Skinner's Skinner boxes were used for animal experimentation to study behavior.
Skinner boxes had mechanisms like lights and levers to study operant conditioning.
Animals in Skinner boxes were rewarded or punished for specific behaviors.
Skinner's experiments aimed to demonstrate that behavior could be conditioned autonomously.
Skinner's work was controversial due to its implications for human behavior modification.
Skinner believed in a behaviorist utopia where behavior is conditioned from stimulus and response.
Skinner's ideas have parallels in modern social media platforms, which act as giant Skinner boxes.
Social media sites use reinforcement to control user behavior.
Social media algorithms can create a chilling effect by selectively banning users.
Social media platforms can program millions of people with minimal effort.
Libertarian paternalism is a modern application of Skinner's principles on a large scale.
Heuristics and biases program suggests that human cognition has flaws that need fixing.
Social engineers use token economies to incentivize certain behaviors on social media.
Social media platforms use metadata to create AI systems for cognitive control.
People on social media are becoming radicalized due to the programming of their behavior.
Skinner's boxes are programming humans in the same way as mice, with the ability to rationalize it.
The concern with social media is not just privacy, but the behavioral control it exerts.
Transcripts
the american psychologist b.f skinner
became notorious for his
skinner boxes which were kind of animal
experimentation
at least in terms of animal behavior
what he would do is
take mice or other animals and put them
in these kind of boxes
with different mechanisms on the inside
there would be lights
levers uh switch plates and other kind
of things
and what he would do is program the
boxes in such a way that if the mice
stood on a lever
or pulled something at a certain time
maybe when a light came on or something
else
they might receive a reward they might
get food pellets
or they might get an electric shock or
something else
the experiments varied and they
continued for years and years
but the idea of a skinner's box is that
you can
leave an animal in a box by itself you
don't have to actually
train it or program it to do this or
that or the other
you can actually just design a box that
trains it autonomously
so you can leave a mouse in a box
overnight come back
and he will have a very complex set of
behaviors
that you design beforehand with your
experiment
this is what's called operant
conditioning sometimes these are called
operant conditioning boxes or something
else like that
and they were very controversial because
skinner was part of behaviorism and
behaviorists
really viewed it as being totally
unscientific
to even think about psychological traits
as being
scientifically real or at least
objective you can't necessarily ask
someone about what they think about this
that or the other
you really can only look at behavior
that's the only true way you can do
science
and although he did many of these
experiments with
animals and stuff like that the primary
direction
of all of these experiments was use on
humans
skinner actually wrote a book called
beyond freedom and dignity which is sort
of a controversial title i guess
but it explains his way of looking at
the world
his vision was to create a behaviorist
utopia
where all human behavior is conditioned
from stimulus and response similar to
these skinner's boxes
so for example humans they do
good social things by getting reinforced
for doing those things and they're
punished
if they do something undesirable skinner
ultimately believed that
as the title suggests that freedom and
dignity are
just sort of abstractions they're spooks
they're metaphysical
they're not really the goal of anything
in human society
and a social engineer can come and
design the society
for us and ultimately train people to
behave in the way that they expect
this is one of the things that made
skinner and other behaviorists so
scientific they really thought of even
looking at the psychological traits of
mankind as
just being pseudoscience anyway
this is relevant for us because we now
live in a world of
skinner boxes that is specifically i'm
thinking of social media
social media is social control
every single social media site be that
facebook or twitter or reddit or
anything
else they are giant skinner boxes
now that doesn't mean that skinner or
whoever the programmer
is constantly looking over your shoulder
and telling you what to do or think
but they are ways of getting
reinforcement for particular behavior
now originally when these platforms
started
they sort of had the veneer of being
open and
anyone could say whatever and there was
the idea that there would be
emergent consensus from everyone it's
sort of a
a decentralized i guess bottom-up
process
where people develop a culture for a
site as time goes on
but as time actually went on that is not
what happened
the people in control of these sites
realized that they could play skinner
they could play the social engineer
and so what has happened is that you can
actually put just a teensy tiny bit of
work
into a social media site and make it a
skinner box make it a giant social
experiment
where you can program millions and
billions of people with very little
effort
social control actually takes very
little effort in social media
it's self-regulating you can actually
have the people
in the social media treat each other in
such a way that reinforces the behavior
you want
now at a basic level you can do things
like banning
now you don't have to ban a large number
of people you just have to ban enough
people
to create a kind of chilling effect you
have to put in place
ambiguous terms of service which all of
these social media companies do
if you get a post banned on uh you know
youtube
or twitter you're usually never even
told what it's explicitly banned for
your just said oh well it's just said oh
well this went against our community
standards so we had to delete it
so people are banned for different
reasons and they're left
guessing what those reasons are and
there's a chilling effect in
terms of people are constantly afraid of
getting kicked off these platforms
and over time what this causes is a kind
of giant
mass lobotomy you are telling people
what they can
and can't think you're telling them that
there are certain things that are
forbidden
and once you do that you can actually
expect that those people who are left
are going to be reinforcing themselves
in
the proper behavior that you want they
will give each other likes
and comments only in those places that
you you know gradually incentivize them
to do you can decide what hashtags go
big
you can decide what videos go big and
although you're not micromanaging every
channel
which is something you could do but
although you're not doing that you can
actually have
a large degree of control behavioral
control over people
and the best part is they think it's
them making the decision
they think it's oh well i you know i
learned this on social media this is
what's pos this
is what other people think this must be
the right thing i don't know that much
about it but i'm going to go along with
it because this is the consensus
that i see emerging when in reality a
lot of these
consensuses are just contrived there
have actually been a lot of
uh you know studies you can look out
here in in
even like news articles on this i
remember a while back there was an
article in
forbes about this guy who did the uh
article saying oh well i just paid 200
bucks for people on the internet to
bought a couple reddit posts and it's
very easy to make
things go viral in the right
circumstance if you just have just a
little bit of money
uh or just a little bit of motivation
and
all the rest of the snowballing effect
happens naturally
in these kind of operant conditioning
environments
like people want to see particular
things they judge things
based on whether they're popular or not
and this is the case in of course every
social media site but there are some
social
media sites like reddit where everything
is
uh consent based everything is social
engineering based so
you can actually do you can have a lot
of control over people's thoughts
just by regulating in very specific
areas
now of course none of this is
old-fashioned stuff because b.f skinner
talked about it
100 years ago bf skinner actually has a
pretty low reputation because
uh you know he said things very bluntly
obviously beyond freedom and dignity
that's a scary thing but today we
actually have
exactly exactly the same thing um there
is a viewpoint uh called libertarian
paternalism out there it's popularized
primarily by richard thaler and cass
sunstein
cass sunstein was actually part of the
obama administration he was
i think office of information and
regulatory affairs or something like
that
um but they have this viewpoint
libertarian paternalism what what is
that supposed to mean well it really is
a kind of
skin skinner's box at a massive scale
the idea being is that
people will want to go along with what
you want them to do
if you make them believe that that is
their decision that is you
have all the decisions that someone
could make all you have to do is nudge
them away of the things that you don't
want
you program them against particular
terms you tell them that that's not a
good idea
or sometimes you just make things
difficult and make other things
easy and you can actually have people
making the decisions that you want them
to make as a social engineer
without even you know forcing them to do
anything
a lot of people think totalitarianism is
the government telling you what to think
that's never been how it is that's
never been how it is anywhere uh what's
a far better
method of control is presenting
different choices to someone but present
them in a biased way
that nudges them in a way that you might
like
so when they make that decision they
have the illusion that the decision is
there that's
libertarian paternalism it's basically
equivalent to totalitarianism
and all of this i guess in the the
psychology literature
is based on what's called the heuristics
and biases program
uh this is a a program i guess a
psychological approach that's usually
associated with
uh two israeli-american psychologists uh
amos tversky and
daniel kahneman tversky's not all around
anymore he died but
daniel kahneman is and they popularized
this idea
that human cognition itself humans
can't even think for themselves like
they don't they have cognitive glitches
they have cognitive
uh breaks in their brain that need
fixing by social engineers
or maybe just better thinking and it's
the obligation of the libertarian
paternal
government to push people in such a way
that they make the decisions that they
want
now i've actually talked about this
viewpoint before the heuristics and
biases viewpoint
the idea that human psychology is broken
uh i think you can read other people on
this
uh gerd gigarenter is someone i often
recommend because he
he makes the argument and i think this
is a good one that really these biases
are
illusions in the first place it's mostly
just these researchers
who don't understand human behavior in
the environment the
experimental environments they put it in
uh there's a so
the so-called ecological rationality
approach which i
usually endorse but regardless this is
the viewpoint
of the social engineers this is the
viewpoint of most academics
human psychology is broken and we have
to control it in some way we have to
nudge people in a particular direction
it's too condescending to just tell them
what to think
but we can use social media companies we
can use the media
we don't have to massively control
everything just get rid of particular
things that people
shouldn't be thinking that we don't want
them to think and
incentivize them for doing other things
and create a kind of token economy token
economy
i don't know if skinner originally used
this term but it's the idea that people
get
incentivized for good behavior you know
maybe they get
in some kind of um i don't know in some
kind of weird camp or mental home
you get incentivized for particular
behavior you get credits
but that's exactly what we already have
in social media we have likes and shares
and all of this kind of stuff
all of it is the same kind of social
control that purports to be something
that is
something you're creating it's actually
not you think that it's yours but it
isn't
so i i think a lot of people when they
talk about social media
their gut reaction is to say oh well you
know i'm worried about facebook because
of
privacy okay now people will willingly
give all of their private information to
pretty much
whoever that's not i think that that's
missing the mark
privacy itself is not the concern what
the real concern is
is that your behavior on social media
that is being taken as
metadata and of course the people who
are making these decisions might not
even know who you are but
that metadata is being used to create
new ais for really cognitive control
control of you on these social media
platforms
they have new ways of automatic flagging
they're
finding new ways to you know go into
buzzwords to
uh you know trigger different hashtags
or you know
make different recommendations to people
all of this
is a behavioral system it's all
reinforcing the behavior that the people
in control of the system
want that is you know and it's not even
to say that they are actively conspiring
to do this
this is something that will happen if
you have a kind of skinner's box
even if you know they just think they're
doing it for
you know their own good or someone else
is good or just
because they think it's right this is
something that happens
now at the end of it i think there's
something very funny that
you know you often hear in the media
nowadays
especially in social media about we need
to be worried about
radicalization oh people are becoming
radicalized against the system
uh in reality it's just the opposite as
someone you know i have never really
used social media
my whole life i've never had a facebook
or twitter or reddit or anything else
like that
and as someone outside of that system it
drives you crazy to see that it's really
the people
in that system who are becoming
radicalized year in year out
their behavior is more erratic but still
predictable
and controlled and they're getting to a
point where they can be made to believe
anything because they're being convinced
that so many things are new consensus
and they have to go along with it so
it's really the people who are in these
systems who are radicalized everyone
else is just staying put
and wondering what's going on to the
world around them but these
social media companies uh and social
media sites even if they're
controlled by beneficent people they're
not but even if they were
they are skinner's boxes they are
programming you
in the same way that a mouse is being
programmed
to step on a lever or you know some kind
of stimulus
response system it's the exact same
thing and in fact it's arguably even
worse with humans because
we're a lot smarter like when we when we
are being programmed
against something or for something or
we're being
disincentivized to use these words or uh
you know we
you know all these kind of things we can
rationalize it in our brain
we can try and make sense out of it and
humans are very good
at you know pretending that an idea is
their own
pretending it pretending that everything
is fine and this is their own decision
and this is where this all comes from um
so anyway
people are a lot more suggestive than
they think but
either way that's my issue with social
media and
social control
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