{"id":8629,"date":"2019-04-02T11:03:51","date_gmt":"2019-04-02T18:03:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/myuctv.tv\/?p=8629"},"modified":"2019-04-02T11:03:51","modified_gmt":"2019-04-02T18:03:51","slug":"the-social-media-bubble","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.myuctv.tv\/blog\/humanities-2\/the-social-media-bubble\/","title":{"rendered":"The Social Media Bubble"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Social media has become such a ubiquitous part of our lives that it\u2019s difficult to remember a time before Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram, etc. So ingrained are these platforms in our daily routines that we seldom stop to ponder their effect on ourselves, other users, and\/or the larger society.<\/p>\n

As an early financial advisor to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, venture capitalist Roger McNamee is uniquely positioned to consider those effects. In conversation with San Diego Union-Tribune\u2019s Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, Jeff Light, McNamee discusses the concerns that led to the publication of his recent book, Zucked<\/em>. He starts by describing Facebook\u2019s business model, which is predicated on enticing users to spend ever-more time on the site to maximize advertising exposure and on selling members\u2019 data to those advertisers.<\/p>\n

McNamee outlines the use (or misuse) of algorithms to tailor the \u201cFacebook experience\u201d to each user. \u201cLikes,\u201d targeted News Feeds, comments, online games and other features are designed to reinforce the user\u2019s sense of belonging to a larger community, which of course serves a basic human need. This seems harmless enough on the surface, but McNamee argues that the net effect is to create a \u201cFacebook bubble\u201d around the user, in which already-held theories and beliefs are constantly reinforced while opinions that may challenge those beliefs are discouraged or hidden altogether. In that light it should come as no surprise that roughly 40% of adult Americans believe things that are demonstrably untrue.<\/p>\n

More pernicious, and potentially more damaging to society, is the outsized influence wielded by social media platforms on civil discourse and the democratic process itself. A society that cannot agree on basic facts is a society that cannot function effectively. McNamee cites two momentous events, the Brexit vote in the UK and the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, as instances where Facebook and other social media were manipulated by Cambridge Analytica, the Russian and Chinese governments, and other disruptive agents in such a way as to influence the vote\u2019s outcome. As the evidence for this manipulation steadily mounted McNamee confronted the Facebook leadership, who at that time refused to acknowledge the severity of the problem or change their practices. Thus, began McNamee\u2019s disillusionment with social media and growing sense of alarm over what he perceived to be a threat to democracy.<\/p>\n

Though McNamee believes this threat is very real, he is nevertheless optimistic. He points out that there is still strength in numbers, and voters can pressure legislators to protect consumer privacy by ending the unchecked (and in McNamee\u2019s view, wholly unnecessary) \u201cdata mining\u201d employed by the tech sector. They can also require social media platforms to make efforts to verify information before posting, at the very least by identifying the information\u2019s true source.<\/p>\n

McNamee also insists that we social media consumers can and must do a better job of educating ourselves. Determining which news and commentary sites are trustworthy is a good start, and McNamee notes that there are tools available to help.<\/p>\n

Watch “Zucked” with Roger McNamee – Helen Edison <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Social media has become such a ubiquitous part of our lives that it\u2019s difficult to remember a time before Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram, etc. So ingrained are these platforms in our daily routines that we seldom stop to ponder their effect on ourselves, other users, and\/or the larger society. As an early financial advisor to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[637,871,1046,30,569,88],"tags":[1045,836,1047,1048,1049,1050],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myuctv.tv\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8629"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myuctv.tv\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myuctv.tv\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myuctv.tv\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myuctv.tv\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8629"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.myuctv.tv\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8629\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myuctv.tv\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myuctv.tv\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myuctv.tv\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}