You’ve probably already seen (or heard about) the New York magazine article titled “The Feed Is Fake.” Here’s reporter Lane Brown’s lede:
“Joe Lim estimates that 90 percent of what you see on the internet is advertising in disguise, and he should know. For three years, Lim ran a company called Floodify, which at its peak operated 65,000 dummy social-media accounts used to drum up attention on behalf of paying clients. On a typical day, he says, Floodify posted 50,000 videos across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and X, all of them designed to pass for the unscripted output of ordinary users….”
The article is behind a paywall. Of course, you can find plenty of commentary giving summaries of the article on various social media outlets. Also of course, 90% of those commentaries are going to be fake. In other words, the problem with social media is not AI slop. The problem is hidden marketing campaigns that manipulate the algorithms of social media platforms to deliver the content they want you to see. Nor do the social media platforms mind, because all these marketing campaigns cause you to spend more time on their platforms.
If you use any of the major social media platforms — TikSlop, Youcrude, Facecrook, whatever — you’re being suckered into believing “people” are talking about things…that no one is actually talking about.
And it’s not just merch and music that are being marketed to you. Your politics are also being manipulated. Take, for example, the Superbowl Bad Bunny kerfluffle:
“Some narrative campaigns don’t just push one side of an argument; they push both. That, [Keith] Presley says, is what Gudea [a behavioral-intelligence firm that uses AI to track the sources of viral phenomena] saw in the fuss leading up to Bad Bunny’s performance at the Super Bowl halftime show in February, which broke along predictable political lines: MAGA-aligned commentators complained about the NFL’s decision to hire a Spanish-speaking artist, and progressives pushed back. Gudea analyzed 3.7 million related social-media posts and found that fewer than 4 percent of the accounts in the conversation generated more than a quarter of the content. Also, the two opposing narratives were mirror images of each other in volume and posting cadence, suggesting that the same culprit may have been amplifying both sides of the fight. Gudea speculated that nation-state actors might have been responsible, but it’s not the only possibility or even the most intuitive one. By the time the controversy burned itself out, the NFL had gotten exactly what it wanted from a halftime show — a week of saturation coverage with a culturally divided country griping about its programming choices — while Bad Bunny got the kind of attention that even a global superstar can’t always buy directly….”
Remember this the next time you get all worked up about some issue from politics or the culture wars. There’s a 90% chance that whatever conflict you’re getting worked up about is a marketing campaign being forced on you. And that other 10%? Since we’re so influenced by the 90% that is marketing, most of the remaining 10% is probably real people who are merely mimicking what the marketing campaigns are doing.
Today’s so-called conservatives have little or no interest in classic conservative issues like individualism and excessive rationalism. Today’s so-called progressives no longer pay much attention to classic leftist issues like the well-being of working class and lower middle class people. Whatever you may think your politics are, your politics are not your own — you’re being manipulated.
And this helps explain why, when I look at the social and political stands taken by the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) — or by those Unitarian Universalists (UUs) who oppose the UUA such as the “Gadflies” — I mostly see the same old political standpoints being pushed on social media. Whatever you may think UU politics are, our politics are not our own — we, too, are being manipulated.