Data versus Democracy: How Big Data Algorithms Shape Opinions and Alter the Course of History

By Kris Shaffer

Human attention is in the highest demand it has ever been. The drastic increase in available information has compelled individuals to find a way to sift through the media that is literally at their fingertips. Content recommendation systems have emerged as the technological solution to this social and informational problem, but they’ve also created a bigger crisis in confirming our biases by showing us only, and exactly, what it predicts we want to see.   Data versus Democracy investigates and explores how, in the era of social media, human cognition, algorithmic recommendation systems, and human psychology are all working together to reinforce (and exaggerate) human bias. The dangerous confluence of these factors is driving media narratives, influencing opinions, and possibly changing election results. 
In this book, algorithmic recommendations, clickbait, familiarity bias, propaganda, and other pivotal concepts are analyzed and then expanded upon via fascinating and timely case studies: the 2016 US presidential election, Ferguson, GamerGate, international political movements, and more events that come to affect every one of us.   What are the implications of how we engage with information in the digital age? Data versus Democracy explores this topic and an abundance of related crucial questions. We live in a culture vastly different from any that has come before. In a society where engagement is currency, we are the product. Understanding the value of our attention, how organizations operate based on this concept, and how engagement can be used against our best interests is essential in responsibly equipping ourselves against the perils of disinformation.


Who This Book Is For
Individuals who are curious about how social media algorithms work and how they can be manipulated to influence culture. Social media managers, data scientists, data administrators, and educators will find this book particularly relevant to their work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Apress
• Release date: Jul 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9781484245408

Book preview

Part IThe Propaganda Problem

© Kris Shaffer 2019

Kris ShafferData versus Democracyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-4540-8_1

1. Pay Attention

How Information Abundance Affects the Way We Consume Media

Kris Shaffer¹ 

(1)

Colorado, USA

This chapter will explain the shift from an information economy to an attention economy and lay out the implications for how information is created, shared, and consumed on the internet. Having transitioned from a time of information scarcity to information abundance, information is no longer a sufficiently monetizable commodity to drive an economy. The focus of human attention as the monetizable commodity in limited supply gives content recommendation algorithms a pivotal place in our information landscape and our economy. This chapter lays out the general economic, cognitive, and technological backdrop for the emergence of those algorithms.

How Taste Is Made

What’s your favorite dessert?

Mine is probably a nice flourless chocolate cake. With raspberries, blackberries, maybe some ice cream, … and, of course, something like an espresso, Americano, or a full-bodied stout to drink—something that can cut through that richness and cleanse the palate so that each bite is as wonderful as the first.

I feel like I gained a few pounds just writing that paragraph. Why is it that everything that tastes so good is so bad for you?!

Or is it?

When I first studied evolutionary psychology in college, I remember learning that humans generally evolved preferences for things that are good for us.¹ Things that are safe and help us live at least to the age of reproduction, so we can pass on our genes. Humans who associate something with a positive emotion will do that thing more often. Things that we associate with negative emotions we tend to avoid. We seek out pleasure more than pain, and our ancestors who took pleasure in things that helped them survive and reproduce, well, they survived and reproduced. Those who took pleasure in things that put them in danger, well, less of those genes were passed on to future generations. The result is that the genes we twenty-first-century humans have inherited generally make us feel pleasure around things that are good for the species, but produce pain to warn us away from things that would jeopardize our collective survival.

Of course, this emotional preference, this taste, for things that are biologically and socially good for the species also applies to food. Foods that are good for us tend to give us pleasure, while things that are bad for us tend to taste bad, or trigger our gag reflex.

Wait a second. That seems backward. Didn’t I just lament about how everything that tastes good is actually bad for us?!

There’s another piece to this evolutionary puzzle. Those evolved preferences, called adaptations, helped our ancestors adapt to their environment. To their environment. Let’s go back to that flourless chocolate cake. What are the ingredients? Cocoa (of course), sugar, salt, butter, and lots and lots of eggs. Nutritionally speaking, there’s not a lot of vitamins, minerals, or fiber—things we hear a lot about today. Instead there are carbohydrates—simple sugars, to be precise—fat, and protein. We hear a lot about these things from modern nutritionists, too. They lead to overweight, obesity, heart disease, diabetes, kidney disease, even gum disease and tooth decay. These ingredients sit nearer the top of the food pyramid, things we should consume sparingly.

If we should consume them sparingly, then why did we evolve such a strong taste for them? For those of us in the affluent West, 2000 calories a day are easy to come by. But the genes that determine our culinary tastes today were not selected in an era of such abundance. Those genes have changed little since the Pleistocene period, tens to hundreds of thousands of years ago.² Our metaphorical palates were developed in a time before grocery stores, fast food restaurants, fine dining, potlucks, refrigerators, freezers, even a time before agriculture. Long before humans built a tractor, a plow, a saddle, even a bow and arrow, our modern food preferences were being written into our genetic code.

Carbohydrates , fat, protein. While today we highlight the dangers of consuming them in excess, all of them are essential for our bodies to produce energy, build muscle, and keep in good working order. All of them are relatively easy to come by in a society with the technology to farm and hunt efficiently, not to mention the technology to preserve food and all its nutritional value for long stretches of time. But 150,000 years ago on the African savannah, our ancestors had no such technology. Those biological essentials—carbs, fat, protein—were scarce. Incredibly scarce. The human who took pleasure in consuming them would seek them out and, presumably, be more likely to find them and survive. And in an era when many humans lived on the brink of starvation, those who did not seek out those precious ingredients often did not survive to pass along their genes to us. It was the survivors who authored our genetic code, and it is their taste for what was scarce but essential aeons ago that governs our culinary predilections today.

And so we love things like flourless chocolate cake. Not because our ancestors adapted a taste for chocolate cake, but because it’s the perfect combination of all the essential, but scarce, things they evolved a taste for.

I mentioned before that our genetic code hasn’t changed much since the Pleistocene era. That’s because humans living in an era of abundance don’t get to write the genetic code! If most of humanity is no longer living on the cusp of starvation, there is no food-related natural selection going on. Death drives evolution, and genetic flaws get selected out, not the other way around. Take allergies as an example: my spouse and I have severe enough allergies that had we lived 100 years earlier, we both would have died from anaphylaxis before we reproduced. Thanks to modern medicine, we survived! And we both passed our allergy genes onto our children, leading to some severe medical situations in just the first few years of their lives. Once we’re no longer on the brink of extinction, those health advantages aren’t evolutionary advantages. And so, what was advantageous in our species’ distant past still governs our preferences today.

Supply and Demand: Why an Information Economy Is No Longer Sustainable

So I hear some of you asking, What does all of this have to do with big data, ‘fake news,’ and propaganda?

Everything.

Our ancestors’ taste for food was determined in a time of food scarcity . The ingredients that were essential but scarce became the ingredients that were most preferred and sought out. However, in an era of abundance , those preferences don’t fit, especially when the same ingredients that are essential in small to moderate amounts become harmful in large amounts. Our natural instincts for food have become dangerous in an era of relative abundance.

The same can be said of how we consume information. The way we deal with information is based on an evolutionary history—and an educational experience—in which information was scarce or at the very least expensive. Most of our cognitive system, which governs how our senses connect to our brain, evolved before Homo sapiens even existed.³ The bulk of our genetic code was pretty well fixed long before the invention of writing, let alone the printing press, mass media, radio, television, or the algorithmic news feed.⁴ Our instincts for determining reality, for parsing safety from danger, are not adapted to the media environment in which we live. We’re so tuned for information scarcity that consuming modern media is like trying to drink from a