More Than Just Communication - The Truths Behind Social Media Engagement-Part 1-

Back before the internet, the first time we would see someone die was usually in a hospital. It would often be a grandparent succumbing to an illness, a loved one with a terminal condition, or if we were very unlucky, it was a family member with a rare disease. Furthermore, if we ever saw two or more people die, it was typically years apart – decades, even. This gave us precious time to absorb, grieve, compartmentalize, and the ability to realize how fleeting life is. It also gave us time to seek professional help or cope alone.

Nowadays, anyone who has gone snooping to the gutters online has seen someone die, whether it be a live leaked video, a 4chan GIF, or a Facebook post that hasn't been reported yet. Friends who think they are funny may send you awful clips or a politically charged uncle linking you to a fake conspiracy video that features violent footage.

The very fact that the first time we'll see someone die will be online, that's a phenomenon no other generation had to deal with. The internet will also be the first place most of us will ever get radicalized by political rhetoric, and the first place we will see someone get bullied into an anxiety disorder, or worse, into suicide.

In short, the internet, especially social media, should come with warnings. Your computer should arrive with neon caution stickers, training seminars telling you what you're about to see, and a therapist to stand by your desk. Now, what if I told you there's a place where those exist – a company that understands how dangerous the internet is; A place that hires people to clean out the gutters of social media, and where the new hires must sit through videos of brutal gang stabbings, racist commentary, drone strikes, online bullying, conspiracy rants, and oceans of nudity.

What if I told you some people are trained to receive all those adverse internet realities for you to professionally shield you from the worst that the internet has to offer. Now, what if I told you that the training doesn't work. The professional therapy, the pay, the seminars, and the warnings can’t lessen the screening anxiety because the human mind simply isn't built to handle what we put online to entertain us as a species. Hi. Welcome to Facebook's content moderation team, the place where we prove once and for all that the screens that we carry around are built for anxiety. _________________________________________________________________________

Last year, Netflix put out a documentary called The Social Dilemma, which is all about the designs and the purpose of social networks and social media data. Last year was also when Congress grilled Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook CEO, for four hours on television. Although that hearing turned into a total train wreck, the results were pretty clear - We are living through the wild west of social media.

Except, the wild west migration was spurred on by the gold rush and folks with pickaxes looking to strike it rich. As for you and me, we are the gold that the internet companies are trying to strike it rich from. Well, our data is a gold mine, and the more they can keep you online, the more money they rake in. So that's our subject for the next two episodes. In today's part 1 episode, we will cover myths about social media engagement.

Myth 1: Facebook and other social media companies provide a simple service: communication. In return, they sell ads. What's complicated about that?

These are the myths today on social media engagement. In next week's episode, we'll talk about the cost of that engagement, the cost in lives, and the cost in personal health. The narrative from this episode, Cognizant, came from a Casey Newton article. Please go to the Verge and read the article called the Trauma Floor by Casey Newton. He interviewed people who worked at Cognizant, which was one of the many contractor groups that Facebook hired to do their moderation. We're only going to cover some of the points that Casey gets to, but it's incredible, and it really points out that none of us are immune to the ill effects of the internet. They literally train people to deal with PTSD from what they are about to see online.

Joe: Todd and I re-listened to Zuckerberg testifying, and a question he got asked was how he keeps Facebook free. Zuckerberg just stood there, blinked once and then said, "Senator, we run ads." That clip is almost smarmy to the senator not understanding how Facebook works. Facebook ads aren't like TV ads where you're advertising to a family blanket; You are advertising to a specific individual whose data you have monitored. That disconnect in age and understanding of how data and ads work is a perfect encapsulation of the next two episodes we're going to cover.

Joe: Todd and I, for this episode, we want to get a job. I don't know how Todd feels about this, but every time we do an episode about college degrees, jobs, or companies, I always want to apply to him. So, we're going to get a job at Cognizant today, and Todd will walk us through how we're going to do that and what we will get paid for seeing the worst that the internet has to offer.

Todd: Well, we're starting out as Facebook moderators, which is a great title, and it's a very successful tech company worth billions of dollars. You would think $40 is reasonable for a starting pay. Now there are only 1,000 people who have this role at Facebook. When I first heard this, it sounded like a lot, but it isn't when comparing it to how big Facebook is. In addition, 15,000 are hired through an outside contractor. And guess what? The outside contractor pays just 15 bucks an hour to start.

Joe: So, there's a real difference between those 80-100K official Facebook employees and the contractors we were talking about. Where do we work if we are contractors?

Todd: One of the big centers is in Arizona. It's extremely secretive, not advertised anywhere, and you would probably apply without even knowing what it entails. However, they sign many non-disclosures because you're going to see more misery in one 8-hour shift than most humans see in their entire lifetime. You can't share any of the private data because they know everything about everyone.

Joe: To clarify, there's an episode of the podcast Reply All, and they go into detail about what your phone records because there's a lot of times where people think that their voice is being recorded by their phone so they can have targeted ads go to them. In short, you're not being spied on with audio, but anything you type into Facebook, any picture you drop, and anything you click on is monitored. Facebook has data on that.

Starting at the beginning of this, we're talking about getting hired at Cognizant. So, we're pretending that we're about to be onboarded for three weeks in one of those meeting rooms where they will show us dark stuff. Why these things get posted in the first place is our first myth we want to cover. In general, Facebook sells ads; What's so complicated about that? We want to talk about how much engagement it takes to get those ads and sell at the volume they do. Why are people posting shootings? Why are people posting nudity? Why are people posting violence ?Facebook is for connecting with family and friends and stalking people from high school.

To begin, we're going to leave a link to TechCrunch. They talked about Facebook, and they're known for borderline content. As a question opener, when do we spend the most amount of time on Facebook? We are two middle-aged or above men, so our experience on Facebook will be different than, say, like a 14-year-old girl who is posting every 10 seconds. Keep in mind that this isn't just an attack on Facebook; we are talking about social media in general. We are just using Facebook's data because they made it publicly available. So, there's a graph that they looked at, and they were trying to figure out when do they get the most time out of people – they call it engagement.

This graph from TechCrunch found that right before somebody gets politically radicalized, right before they start posting stuff that will get them, band, that is the peak engagement. This graph looks like a hockey stick. It begins going up as people start getting outraged and start becoming politically motivated. As they get more engaged with political rhetoric, they get more engaged with violence. Then as they get more engaged with things like conspiracy theories, that line skyrockets until people are spending approximately eight hours a day online on social media.

By this point, that is when they start posting wild stuff because they think they have unlocked the secrets of the universe. This is when they start testing the boundaries, and if they step over a little bit, their dopamine levels kick up. You and I had an episode about grudges, and we talked about how news organizations run on moral outrage. If you can get someone hooked on moral outrage, that's when you get the most engagement. Feelings of moral outrage are as addictive as being on a hard drug.

Myth 2: Social media is a marketplace of ideas, right? Surely the best and the truest ideas rise to the top – not just the ideas being yelled the loudest or coming from the prettiest people.

If Todd and I are arguing about something and one of us is clearly wrong, and the others clearly, people listening will lean in faster. In politics, they don't grey rightness and push this moral outrage to gain more engagement. Most don't believe what the news says, but on social media, it works. There's nobody who needs to be held accountable in real life going this route, and we can sort of out a news anchor by saying they are wrong and can prove they are wrong. Sometimes they backpedal on rare occasions, but if you look at this graph of Facebook engagement, nobody's there to tell these people that this information is bad or that these conspiracy theories aren't good. You can't cancel a random internet that floats your way through Facebook. So, these content moderation teams and what they're facing is unprecedented.

Next, what keeps us hooked to the screen? If you like one of my pictures and comment, I feel obligated to do that for your pictures, right? How much of our life is being ruled by the little dopamine kicks of people clicking the like button? Todd brought up that attractive people do better on social media because sex sells. But is it sex, or is it just being attractive? The old 1940s 1950s ad campaigns relied on girls and the notion that sex sells, but we're starting to get into an age of less sex and more how attractive facial features can be seen as more trustworthy and interesting. I got a study from Cornell, and it talks about how it's not just sex; it's pretty people. People are easier to believe when they are attractive. This Cornell study talks about how beautiful people are more believed, more likable, and are considered more trustworthy in real life.

When you go shopping online, and you want to look for someone to trust, do you trust a company, or do you trust a person? I always trust what an ex-employee would say than a company's mission statement. A report found that 92% of online shoppers trust consumers and employees more than the company itself and are 23X more likely to trust customer-generated content. They also found that gender didn't impact the attractiveness bias, but attractiveness, in general, was important. Part of the study was asking 119 adults in crowdsourcing to evaluate the attractiveness of somebody on a scale of 1 to 10. Then they asked people if they would trust a hotel review if a hotel review was positively written. They found that even if there were negative reviews involved, people trusted the positive reviews of people with attractive profile pictures more than the negative reviewers who were unattractive or did not have a photo. In a nutshell, I think we're more apt to trust attractive people, but I also think we see them as a threat when they're physically in our proximity. As for negative star reviews, according to HBR and Forbes, a 1-star review can lead to a 5 to 9% change in revenue. That is one person thinking something is bad and being weighed heavily against a larger number of 5-star reviews. The research also discussed how if you have an excess of three negative articles or more within research results, you can expect to lose 59% of our business. It really depends on what your business is, but it sure as heck counts. Fake Spot is something that people use for Amazon. This is not an ad for them, but there are services out there that can pull out what reviews are real and what reviews aren't (bots or people). If you have one loud negative reviewer, who can get on three different accounts, they can decline your business if they are really motivated.

Myth 3: Regardless of how the ideas spread, the truth will win in the end. Because the facts are verifiable, and there can only be one truth online, right?

If we're talking about being radicalized online, have you ever been won over by conspiracy theory? Have you ever had one where you think it sounds true? Some are convincing. I look at conspiracy theories, and if they're if they require too much coordination, I think the government couldn't do that. The government can barely hold together an investigation. But if it is something that kind of seems lazy, like I can see that happening because they didn't do their policy right. I'm not weak to conspiracy theories, but I can see myself being drawn into them.

Joe: If we're trained to fortify ourselves against it at Cognizant, there is no way we would fall for this stuff, right?

Todd: I would hope that we would be above it, but now that we're moderators, that might change. We might start buying into the conspiracy and might start believing in things that not that long ago, we would have bet our life on wasn’t true.

Joe: Let’s say we were in a boardroom being told that everything we see is not true. It's all garbage, and that's why we are moderating it.

Todd: You would think it's already been strained out that it's bad. That's why you're looking at it as a moderator. So, we're sitting there seeing all the brutal, nasty things and the Facebook conspiracy theories. Now, being exposed to this 8-hours a day for even just a week has caused many of these moderators to do a full 180 on their views. Some people start believing the earth is flat, and some started questioning certain aspects of the Holocaust. Some even started to believe that 9/11 wasn't a terrorist attack. All in all, this paranoia has caused many of them to bring guns with them to work and at night because they believe someone will come after them.

Joe: I have a lot of mixed feelings about this. These are not dumb people. I know we keep hitting that button, but these are people being trained to deal with the internet, and they are succumbing to it. I know it’s not everyone; it's not like everybody in the office suddenly starts believing in conspiracy theories. But can you imagine being at a job where you slowly start seeing those cracks form? We've had episodes that cover the mere exposure effect. It's the idea that your brain can't really differentiate sources. If you hear something once from a crazy person, you think it's nuts. If you hear it seven times from seven different sources, your brain starts thinking maybe they're right.

Why does being online a lot make it to where truth doesn't spread as fast? The myth here is that truth is verifiable. People can spread as many lies as they want, but eventually, the core truth comes out. For this, we looked at Twitter’s lie analysis. It turns out both truth and lies are just bits floating around – the truth is not the rock in the stream like we hoped it was. Let's start with people who want to spread lies. Have you ever heard the phrase, Gish Gallop? If you and I are in a high school debate and you were winning, if I go faster than you in an argument and keep throwing out lies, it doesn't matter if they're provable or not.

The Gish Gallop is bringing up in rapid succession vague claims anecdotes misinterpreted facts. It takes longer for people to prove them untrue. Trump uses this as his main debate tactic; he tries to make it very difficult to verify or prove anything he says, and that's something courts pointed out. If you want to go with a non-political source, this is basically how Gwyneth Paltrow's company stays in business. People would have to take cognitive space to disprove. Your brain wears itself out thinking of how you would even start that process. That's why journalists are superheroes for going through somebody's political debate and breaking it down point by point and disproving everything.

In that upward graph we talked about near the beginning, you're more likely to be spending time sharing conspiracies and untruthful stuff because of this reason. In the Twitter analysis, 126K false stories were liked by 3M people. It was a huge dataset that proved things spread quickly. For instance, if they shared something verifiably true by one of our big companies here, they spread to maybe a thousand people. It rarely spreads beyond a thousand. However, verifiably false would spread to a hundred of thousands of people. If I tell you Jesse Becker is the valedictorian, and she secretly has an eating disorder, only one of those things is interesting. One of those things is novel or new information and one of those things is something only somebody who has a high social status would have access to, but it doesn't have to be true – it just has to spike engagement.

Joe: You would think that if social media is the relaxation event, why are people from Cognizant having sex in the nursing mothers’ room? Or why do they have to cry on the outside floor? Why do they have to seek counselors?

Todd: I think it's just them trying to get that dopamine fix. They have to get the stress off of them, including the crying, shaking, and nervous breakdowns. And the sex stuff is just crazy.

Joe: We referenced the murders and the deaths in the opening of this episode, but the thing they keep talking about in Cognizant is that there's so much nudity. At some point, it's not watching nudity for fun; It's just seeing skin all the time and it loses its dopamine. It's not titillating anymore. Changing gears, have you ever had to step away from Facebook?

Todd: Yeah, I would get angry or upset after looking up people from past relationships and just seeing how they were doing. It sounds kind of stalkerish because it probably is, but just looking at all the fun they're having with their new boyfriend made me have to step away. What about you?

Joe: I haven't been on Facebook for about three months now for a few reasons. However, the biggest was due to the anger and jealousy of seeing these highly educated writers who were able to excel, whereas I did not have that same opportunity. It made me feel inadequate, which is a perfect reason to leave.

Todd: I know it's strange with me promoting this podcast on Facebook often now, but for some reason, I still get jealous of other people’s lives that pop up. If they have cute kids, I get jealous that I don't have a family. If they're on vacation, I'm jealous that I’m at work every day when these people are living their dreams. Sometimes I get upset over the political rants and upset at friends who don’t support my sports teams. It’s all misery and jealousy.

Joe: It is a little funny to me that it wasn't the violence, nudity, or crazy political stuff that drove us away – it was the inadequacy. We took it right in the self-esteem like most people. We will get into that in part two of our show. We’ll talk about what that does to you psychologically, but I think it's funny that Todd and I both had to walk away for the same reason.

We hope you'll join us next week for part two, where we will examine what screen addiction is costing us on a personal level and we'll look at potential solutions.