Twitteretter

Something pretty disturbing is happening with my Twitter feed and maybe with Twitter’s artificial intelligence altogether. Twitter recommends posts to its users, at least to me, but I like to think they did not introduce that feature just for my benefit. Lately, the majority of tweets which appear in my recommendation notifications are tweets of users sharing a bereavement in their family. People opening their heart to tell the wider World that their father, mother, brother, sister or child has died. These are random people I don’t know or follow. I am not going to write here about the wisdom of sharing such private news on an open media platform, but why does Twitter keep recommending this content to me? Did I, at some point, inadvertently click on a coffin advert? Do I have a fascination with death that I am unaware of but which Twitter’s AI, knowing me, by now, better than I do, is trying to satisfy? It’s not pleasant, but it’s indeed curious, and gives me something to write about L...

Those of you who know their family history will have heard stories of how our parents and grandparents, as post war children, were targeted by unregulated tobacco companies, as new consumers easy to get addicted to their products. This targeting, as we saw later on, had catastrophic consequences on public health. Tobacco corporations resisted, for years, attempts to regulate them, offering to self-regulate and casting doubt on the reported danger of their products, until they were eventually brought in line by society through extensive regulation. Today’s children are being targeted by social media companies, with ever more sophisticated Artificial Intelligence algorithms to compete for their attention at a time when they have not developed the tools to defend themselves. We are already starting to see the consequences, but they will only be fully clear, as happened with tobacco, years ahead. It is not your purse or your life, but rather your lungs or your time, but it is still crimina...

Monopoly. When you are a child, this is a board game, in which you greedily strive to become a property tycoon, accumulate land and build houses and hotels on it, to crash your opponents by taking all their money, ultimately winning the game. When nobody secures dominance, the game goes on forever, as monies you take when others land on your property, you return when you land on theirs, so nobody’s wealth runs out. This is a very apt analogy for how monopolies work. Once you establish one, as Peter Thiel, the mega successful Silicon Valley investor tells us, you guarantee maximum profits by negating the possibility of competition. One winner and every one else losing is fun in a board game but, when the game is real life and the board is society, this is a problem, from many perspectives. We are seeing this with the tech giants today, Google, Amazon and Facebook, behemoths which own their markets, increasing inequality and stifling entrepreneurship. Time to change the rules of the game...

I’ve started paying attention to the Screen Time functionality on my smart phone. In case you don’t know, this feature tells you how much you are using it, and what doing. It is enlightening and I highly recommend you start reviewing it to understand your own usage. For me, currently 2h31m per day, 225 notifications and 122 pickups. Disappointingly for the tech industry, I don’t use social media very much. 12m on Twitter, under a minute on Facebook, Instagram and any others. A lot of my time is spent reading news. The one weakness is WhatsApp, responsible for nearly 4 hours and 350 pickups per week, most of which, I guess, a complete waste of time. Time, you see, is becoming for many of us, at least for those lucky enough to be doing well financially, our most scarce resource. Our smart devices are aggressively focused on stealing it, outsmarting us, not a hard thing to do as we are not aware and conscious a lot of the time. I’m going to war against my pickups. You should do the same L...

I am watching Jeff Orlowski’s brilliant documentary about how the tech industry is using behavioural psychology and a deep understanding of our biochemistry to develop an addiction to their tools in our young people, driven by their aim to grow advertising revenue and improve behaviour predicting models and akin to pushing drugs at the school gate. I highly recommend it. An all out assault on the mental stability of our young is taking place in the face of indifference from our governments, and it can’t be permitted. It may seem difficult to solve, but it isn’t, if the political will is there. Solutions could be articulated around making the industry responsible for the welfare of their underage users. For example, a significant fine, shared between social media companies, every time someone under 20’s screen time on social media exceeds 1 and a half hours per day would soon put pay to this antisocial corporate behaviour. One thing is clear. This is a problem we must solve. And quickly...

A process of extraordinary importance is taking place in Canberra, ignored by most of humanity. The Australian state, a traditional superpower, is engaging in battle with Facebook, a new supranational superpower, over payment for editorial content shared on its platform. Facebook acts, for many, as a news and content hub, a one stop shop which presents content from many sources, shared by their network. The snug is, whilst it makes huge advertising revenues, it does not pay for this content, and the Australian legislature is considering whether this is appropriate, after a claim by NewsCorp. Facebook is retaliating, not by building a Death Star, but by withdrawing news from its platform in Australia and by removing news about Australia from its global platform. When watching this dispute ensue, it is important to remember that the Australian legislature has a democratic mandate, it represents the interest of its people, whilst Facebook does not, it represents its shareholders Length: 9...

Donald Trump has been banned from Facebook. All he had to do to get to this outcome is engage in a ten year campaign of overt racism, inciting to hate and violence against foreigners, blacks, women and Muslims, insult a wide range of public figures, attempt to delegitimise American democracy, apologise for white supremacism, excuse a number of murders and lie to the public over 20,000 times in under 4 years. My 17 year old son has also been permanently banned from Facebook, after two innocuous posts and the grand crime of attempting to create a business page for his first, minor entrepreneurial project. All requests for reinstatement so far have been cast aside by Artificial Stupidity Systems (their performance doesn’t grant the more common AI moniker) and we have to date not managed to reach a human intelligence which may take a more sympathetic view. I hope the only thing Samuel ever has in common with Trump is the complete inability of Facebook to treat both of them commensurately...

I am at times preoccupied with how to increase the Twitteretter readership and, at those times, I am relieved that I am not trying to do the same on Twitter. It seems to me that, to find resonance in social media, to achieve that holy grail of virality, the most effective tactic is to be aggressive or offensive against an idea or person respected and despised by equal portions of the population. This tactic has the best chance to generate engagement (here is the English language showing its ability to evolve with technological evolution for the third time in just a few lines) and to attract platform (fourth) users, some of whom may stick (fifth).   I should probably try it, at least at some point, to see how it transfers to longer content and, should I decide to do so, there are plenty of people and ideas which would fit the above target specification and who I would have no logical trouble or moral qualms in attacking.   If you have a favourite, leave me a comment and I will ...

There is a new video based social media trend. Pranking. A section of users of channels such as Tik Tok and Youtube are intent on growing their following, with the ultimate objective of monetising their media presence (if this language is unintelligible to you, don’t worry, this is normal, it is tech speak designed to find new, industry specific ways to say things that can be perfectly said in normal English). One of their strategies is to publish videos pranking others, designed to elicit easy laughs from voyeuristic, lazy observers amused by seeing others ridiculed in public. Ridiculing others to gain following is not new, this is just the medieval square on modern social media. The pranksters, and their followers, demonstrate that, on average, little progress has been made since the Middle Ages and that the additional education we receive succeeds only at adding a layer of cheap sophistication to the same basic, deplorable instincts that have ballasted humanity through its history...

  I’ve grown concerned lately by the apparent difficulty that internet age natives have reading books. Snapchat and Instagram are always there, demanding attention whenever they dare lay down their device to immerse themselves in a book. The risk is that the quality of content we receive from social networks is a lot lower than from books. Not because people today are less creative or capable but rather because, with books, we get not only the very best of each period in human history, but also mostly only what has withstood scrutiny by subsequent generations. 10 or20 may have made it from each decade, the best, rising from a cacophony of completely forgettable heaps of less valuable content. When we put down our book to check Snapchat, we prioritise the forgettable cacophony of now over the very best selected for us by millions of readers before us. It is tantamount to rejecting a 1967 Margaux to drink a recently harvested, run of the mill wine (and I am being kind to social netwo...