Okay so there’s this concept of ‘revealed preference’ in social media algorithms—effectively, what users say they want and what the data show they want are two different things.

While this is plausible, there’s a few things that this ignores, especially around social media addiction. If we bypass what people’s vocalized preferences are, we start to play on something deeper in their minds.

If a person addicted to social media says that they want to cut back, that’s their stated preference, but if you just look at the trends of their usage, you’re not going to see that. You’re going to see that they consume X amount of content for Y amount of time about Z topics.

The algorithms don’t care what you want, that’s not what they’re controlling for. Platforms don’t care what you want, it’s not how they make money. ’The Algorithm’ just cares about keeping your attention by any means necessary. The longer it has your attention, the more ads can be served to you, the more data that can be collected, and the deeper its hooks bury into you.

It’s almost like going “well, this person wants to quit smoking, but their ‘revealed preference’ is that they really like smoking cigarettes, so I’m just going to keep shoving cigarettes in their face whether or not they want that, because I know they’ll take it”. This kind of thinking is dangerous and blatantly irresponsible and is made worse with the proliferation of AI systems (and AI social media, for fuck’s sake…that’s definitely a great idea at this point in time).

There’s going to be a time in the not-too-distant future (provided cooler heads prevail over this god-forsaken American government) where the creators of these algorithms will answer for the damage they’ve done to society, much like the tobacco industry a few decades ago. They know what they’re doing. They don’t care. They will give you as many hits as they can to keep your attention, and it needs to stop. Now.