cliff lampe 01 — Transcript

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1. 0:00hi my name is cliff lampe i'm a
2. 0:02professor at the school of information
3. 0:03here at the university of michigan
4. 0:05my research area is in social media
5. 0:07today i'm going to talk to you about
6. 0:09what is the intersection between social
7. 0:11media and misinformation
8. 0:13we've had this information for as long
9. 0:15as we've had media basically as long as
10. 0:17people have been able to
11. 0:19manipulate the media they've been trying
12. 0:20to use it for their own ends to shape
13. 0:22the beliefs of others
14. 0:23so what is it about social media that
15. 0:25makes this any different than yellow
16. 0:27journalism a hundred years ago
17. 0:29or the wars between jefferson and adams
18. 0:32100 years before that
19. 0:33what is it about this new technology
20. 0:36that matters
21. 0:37i'm going to talk about three things
22. 0:39that i think really matter in terms of
23. 0:40social media
24. 0:41the first one is that social media is
25. 0:44not just a platform where you're pushing
26. 0:46stuff out
27. 0:47it's also constantly collecting things
28. 0:49about you
29. 0:50now that's intended to enable the social
30. 0:53media platforms to provide you with
31. 0:54better
32. 0:55targeted ads right so it's an
33. 0:57advertising mechanism
34. 0:58shoshana zubov of harvard university
35. 1:00calls this surveillance capitalism
36. 1:03the platforms surveil your life so that
37. 1:05they can sell you more things because
38. 1:07all of their incentives are around
39. 1:08selling ads
40. 1:09if you look at twitter or youtube or
41. 1:12facebook or
42. 1:13instagram they all make the majority of
43. 1:15their money through ad sales
44. 1:17and so i think if we were going to give
45. 1:18them a lot of credit we could say that
46. 1:20what they're trying to do is collect
47. 1:21information about you
48. 1:22to provide you with more meaningful
49. 1:24better targeted ads so you don't see ads
50. 1:26for things you don't care about at all
51. 1:27now the problem becomes is that bad
52. 1:29actors can use that micro targeting
53. 1:32to then target certain types of people
54. 1:35and able to really
55. 1:36persuade them so you can find people who
56. 1:38really believe a certain thing
57. 1:40based off their shared interests create
58. 1:42sophisticated computer models
59. 1:44about who can be dissuaded from voting
60. 1:47or who's going to believe a conspiracy
61. 1:48theory
62. 1:49and really target those folks with your
63. 1:51message
64. 1:52all political campaigns are really using
65. 1:54this micro targeting strategy to big
66. 1:56effect right now
67. 1:57when you look at the big presidential
68. 1:59campaigns what they're doing is they're
69. 2:00running
70. 2:01what we call a b testing running many
71. 2:03experiments using these micro targeting
72. 2:05mechanisms
73. 2:06and then using that to determine which
74. 2:08picture do you like most
75. 2:09which message do you like most which
76. 2:11message will get you to donate more
77. 2:12money which is most likely to get you to
78. 2:14share the video all of these are
79. 2:16mechanisms that ad campaigns are now
80. 2:19using to kind of
81. 2:20suborn uh ability of the platforms to
82. 2:23sell ads right so
83. 2:24they're selling ads too of course in a
84. 2:26way uh and what they're trying to do is
85. 2:28to get those people who are gonna be
86. 2:29most swayed by those ads
87. 2:32the second thing that i think the reason
88. 2:33social media plays a role in here is
89. 2:35because of
90. 2:36it wasn't intended for political
91. 2:38discourse right social media was
92. 2:40originally invented in an era where it
93. 2:42was mostly being used to
94. 2:44share personal stories in our personal
95. 2:46lives and for many people they'd prefer
96. 2:47that it was still that way
97. 2:49if you look at facebook for instance the
98. 2:51reaction buttons are on facebook are all
99. 2:53things like
100. 2:53like love hug sad laugh
101. 2:57right none of those kind of emotional
102. 2:59reactions are things that we would
103. 3:00typically see in political discourse or
104. 3:02at least would
105. 3:03think we're positive in political
106. 3:04discourse so when we look at facebook as
107. 3:07a mechanism
108. 3:08especially for sharing information it
109. 3:10was designed for us to share
110. 3:12personal information sharing political
111. 3:15information
112. 3:16triggers a different part of our brain
113. 3:18so that emotional part of our brain is
114. 3:19great it's powerful we need it
115. 3:21every day but it also kind of short
116. 3:23circuits critical thinking a lot of
117. 3:25times
118. 3:25if we can feel a strong emotional
119. 3:27reaction about something
120. 3:29that will swap out our more analytical
121. 3:31reasoning side of our brain
122. 3:33this is this two-stage thinking model
123. 3:35that psychologists talking about right
124. 3:37so if we think quickly and emotionally
125. 3:39that can often swamp
126. 3:40out the slower more analytical thought
127. 3:42process that might think like
128. 3:44wait maybe pizzagate isn't true or maybe
129. 3:47that we did land on the mood
130. 3:49raising these emotional responses
131. 3:51triggers a different part of our brain
132. 3:53and that's why social media is so
133. 3:54powerful for people interested in
134. 3:56misinformation
135. 3:57because built into it is this short
136. 4:00circuit around our anal
137. 4:01analytical reasoning parts of our mind
138. 4:04the third reason why i think social
139. 4:06media plays a huge role in this
140. 4:07is because it's multi-source content now
141. 4:10what do i mean by that i mean
142. 4:11if you look even within facebook a bad
143. 4:14actor
144. 4:14or somebody who's trying to manipulate
145. 4:16your viewpoint can create multiple
146. 4:18groups with different identities so you
147. 4:19never know exactly where information is
148. 4:22coming from
149. 4:23and who is behind that information
150. 4:26even beyond one single platform like
151. 4:28facebook it's really
152. 4:29easy for people to set up a twitter
153. 4:31account an instagram account a gab
154. 4:33account
155. 4:34and have them all working together to
156. 4:36create an information environment
157. 4:38that's intended to persuade you deceive
158. 4:40you or manipulate you in some
159. 4:42way all of these together make it very
160. 4:44hard for platforms to fight against that
161. 4:47as we'll talk about in another segment
162. 4:49so when we look at what is the role of
163. 4:51social media let's talk about those
164. 4:52three things again right
165. 4:54we're talking about micro targeting of
166. 4:55information we're talking about
167. 4:57emotional responses that short circuit
168. 4:59rational thinking
169. 5:00and we're talking about the ability of
170. 5:02people to use the
171. 5:03multivariate aspects of the platform to
172. 5:06send information from all sides
173. 5:08thanks very much and i appreciate you
174. 5:10listening