There's been so much conversation recently about societal bubbles, echo chambers, media
bubbles, personal algorithm bubbles.
My newsfeed told me that everyone thought the same way I did.
And there's a conflict there.
One of the biggest reasons that those emerged was that companies like Facebook at the end
of the day you're the product they're selling.
They're actually selling you as a sale on that network; they're selling you to advertisers
and so they need to put a nice polite bow around or you and they need to find look-alike
audiences that think like you and look like you.
And the easiest way to do that is algorithmically to focus on, and at the same time there was
never the dislike button, there was the like button.
And so if you have a positive based signaling system like that that is designed to create
a polite community of like minded people so that I could be targeted easier by an advertiser
because my information is what's being sold, then the result of that is going to be a nice
polite bubble echo chamber and we're seeing that right now.
And people are astonished that I didn't see the other half of this community, literally
half of them that thought differently than me.
I don't see the ideas of that.
At no point in modern history or in any human history has one person had as much control
over what we think, what we see, what we do than Mark Zuckerberg.
He has more power than anyone in human history right now.
And the scariest thing about it is, because I don't think he's innately a bad person,
I don't know him enough to say one way or the other, but the problem is it's not transparent.
We have no idea what dials are being pulled or what knobs are being turned that are controlling
the information coming to us.
There are two big moments that I've had that made me really think about this.
The first is is that I used to represent a bunch of celebrities that were uncomfortable
coming into platforms like Facebook because they didn't know if it was about them as a
celebrity or if it was about them as a high school friend.
And so we worked early on with Facebook and with other platforms to kind of set a set
of rules, here's how we would engage with a famous person and a Facebook page would
mean this.
And so we helped those celebrities create content to talk to their audiences to build
a direct connection.
And suddenly there were people like Mark Wahlberg or Charlize Theron or Hugh Jackman or any
of these people that are massive accounts inside of social they suddenly look like massive
media networks.
The idea that one person could push a button and reach 20 million fans was a big threat
to a business model based on me selling the advertising, not of the celebrity selling
the advertising.
And that was really one of the births of the algorithmic suppression of content.
And so we started seeing that on code drop Tuesdays in Facebook suddenly a person that
would reach five million people out of the 12 million that they had as fans, people loved
their content would engage 100,000 likes, 300,000 likes, really great content that people
loved, we would just see that being dialed down and we started seeing it at such a mass
scale and that's where a lot of the ideas of this book came from is I was looking at
a trillion pieces of data a month across this network that was connected to at times over
eight billion connections in a system that was only 700 million people at the time.
So we had a really good snapshot of what was happening.
And as the business model grew for Facebook it was dial it down, dial it down weekly and
people started screaming but you bait and switched me.
You told me to make content.
I went out there and I put money into your system to gain followers, to gain fans.
It wasn't just celebrities, it was companies like The New York Times or companies like
yourselves or companies that wanted to reach an audience and build a base and then suddenly
Facebook said well, you know, I understand that this is based on a trusted system between
you and your consumer and that consumer subscribed to you because they really want to hear from
you, but we're the business in between now.
And that's a hard business to be in in a long-term perspective because I subscribed to someone
because I trust that source and I need that source.
And so that algorithm, until we have transparency, and then at the same time you read about these
studies where Facebook arbitrarily without anyone knowing took 300,000 random people
and turned up positive content that week and turned up negative content the next week.
And they just wanted to do an experiment on people.
You can't to do experiments on people without them agreeing.
Oh, it's in our click through terms of service 27 pages deep we're going to do random experiments
on you socially.
Those are things that are really troubling to me and those are things that in my mind
are a rallying cry around transparency of these algorithms, around transparency of why
am I getting this information?
What is the reason behind this?
And not six different emotions that I can express of wow or sadness or anger, like fuck
you I'm not that stupid.
Give me transparency.
If 70 percent of millennials are now receiving news information from Facebook, please show
me some transparency in the sources, in the trust factor, what is the edge rank.
Facebook perfected edge rank as a concept that now puts it in people's vocabulary of
the trusted credit score between myself as a content provider and my audience.
We don't know anymore.
There is no transparency.
It's really arbitrary and that scares me.
That terrifies me.
And it's not just in the newsfeed.
I had an experience where I sent an image from a medical textbook of a guy that I was
in a fight with and I was like you're acting like you have a micropenis.
And I went in Google and I went on search and I typed micropenis and of the first image
I got was from a medical textbook of a 47-year-old person and I dragged that into my Facebook
chat window and sent it.
And instantly, I was riding passenger in a car, the stereo went off because my Spotify
was connected, my Facebook account was blocked, of course Instagram I couldn't get into that,
I couldn't get into SoundCloud because I used my Facebook for there.
And then I was like what?
So I tried to log back into Facebook.
It said you're under investigation for international child pornography.
I was like what?
So I went back to Google and I was like okay that's a medical textbook.
It's a 47-year-old I have the proof that this is not child pornography.
And then I was enraged and I was like who do I call?
So I went in the helpline and they said there's nothing you can do.
You're under review.
We'll get back to you within three days maybe.
That was the response.
I was like wait these people have my identity, all these things that I'm relying upon are
connected to this system.
The guy never received the image on the other side because I called him and I said did you
get an image for me?
He said no it just shut off.
That's terrifying to me.
Someone can just be erased from a system without any recourse, without anything?
That's too much power for one person.
And so I've been pushing a lot and what I've been saying lately is somebody should invent
identity within the block chain so that we have an identity system that is mine.
In Iceland we have this thing called a Kennitala.
It's a unique identifier that is literally your unique ID, your genetic records, your
health records, your financial records all in one and it allows me to have total transparency
across a system and anyone that I'm encountering.
So you don't need a payday lender or a check cashing place or a credit score or any of
these third-party parasites that exist in our system because you have real identity.
And so those are kind of fundamental things that I think out of this new awareness we're
going to start realizing that we need incorruptible identity, we need to have our digital identity
as part of us of who we are as human beings as part of this system.
Because relying upon a commercial interest like Facebook to have our identity, to capture
everything it means in our digital life and they can just flip a switch, ask anybody that's
been blocked by Facebook.
There is no recourse.
You're up to somebody in a farm deciding whether or not you're a good person or a bad person
or whether or not you deserve an account.
That is way too much power for any institution to have over us.