How to Think Like a Futurist
Why Power is Everyone’s Business
Creativity in the Virtual Age
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The Magazine of the Rotman School of Management UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
FALL 2021
THE SOCIALLY-CONSCIOUS BUSINESS PAGES 6, 32, 108
MANAGEMENT
Now What?
QUESTIONS FOR
Sinan Aral, Director, MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy and author, The Hype Machine
Q &A
A scientist, entrepreneur and investor describes how social media is disrupting our democracy, our economy and our health—and how we must adapt. Interview by Karen Christensen
A few years back, you discovered what you consider to be the scariest scientific result you have ever encountered. What did you find?
My team and I were studying Twitter and all of the verified true and false news stories that had spread on the platform over a decade, from its inception in 2006 to 2017. The scary finding was that false news travelled farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth in every category of information that we studied — sometimes by an order of magnitude. That is what led me to focus my research on what I call the Hype Machine. How do you define the Hype Machine—and why is it more relevant now than ever?
The Hype Machine is the social media industrial complex, which consists of all the various platforms — from Twitter to Facebook, Snapchat, Linkedin, Instagram and so on — along with the third-party companies that support this ecosystem. I call it the Hype Machine because it is designed rotmanmagazine.ca / 121
Fake news is a public health crisis. There is a tremendous amount of misinformation out there about COVID-19.
to hype us up and engage us in order to provide opportunities for advertisers to persuade us with their advertising. This massive machine is run by algorithms that optimize human engagement by taking into consideration a vast amount of information that determines, in large part, who we friend, what we read, the types of information we’re exposed to — even who we date. Romantic matches created by algorithms surpassed those created by more traditional methods way back in 2013. To say that all of this is having a profound effect on the evolution of human society is an understatement. There are a couple of reasons why the Hype Machine is more relevant now than ever. Throughout the global pandemic, we have spent time online like never before. These companies have been breaking records day after day as people shelter in place and rely upon them to gain access to meaningful human connection, news and life-saving health information. The pandemic has only served to accelerate our reliance on digital technologies. You have called fake news a public health crisis—and you believe it is about to get worse. Please explain.
It’s a public health crisis because there is a tremendous amount of misinformation out there about COVID-19, and as a result, we are seeing vaccine hesitancy increase. This was actually foreshadowed a couple of years ago by misinformation about the measles vaccine. Measles was eradicated in the U.S. in the year 2000. In 2010, there were only 122 / Rotman Management Fall 2021
63 cases in the entire country, but in 2019, there were 1,250 cases in just the first six months, and that was directly related to messages promoted by anti-vaccination groups online and elsewhere. The outbreaks of 2019 were concentrated in tight-knit communities like Rockland County, New York, and Clark County, Washington; if you look at the Facebook ads for anti-vaccine content during that time, you will see that they were concentrated in exactly these tight-knit communities. Unfortunately, all of this is about to get worse because the technologies for creating false information are accelerating at an unprecedented rate. We have the rise of ‘deepfake’ audio and video, which essentially create very convincing content that is becoming ubiquitous and pervasive. You may have seen the recent deepfake of Tom Cruise, which was incredibly well done. I predict that these technologies are going to get better and better at fooling us, and they’re going to become more democratized so that anyone can produce them at very little cost. Together, these two things will create a new wave of misinformation that is potentially more persuasive than the textual misinformation we’ve seen in the past. Three technologies make the Hype Machine possible. Please summarize them.
The technology trifecta that makes the Hype Machine possible is the combination of digital/social networks themselves; the digital interconnections of humanity created by these
The meteoric rise of social media is no surprise, because it was like tossing a lit match into a pool of gasoline.
platforms, combined with machine-learning algorithms that direct the flow of information over the network; and finally, smartphones, which make all of this ubiquitously available to us throughout our daily lives, 24 hours a day, while simultaneously collecting information about our location, our behaviours, perceptions, interests, and our likes and dislikes on an unprecedented scale. These three technologies have converged to enable the rise of the Hype Machine over the last decade. Readers of a certain age will remember the advertising slogan from the 1980s, ‘This is your brain on drugs’. What does our brain on social media look like?
One key aspect of this is the social brain hypothesis, which is the leading theory for why human brains are so big relative to our body weight, and why our neocortex ratio is so big compared to the rest of the brain. Cognitive scientists believe that in large part, this is because we evolved to be the most social species on the plant. We evolved to process social signals from our fellow human beings, and that evolution made us ripe for these technologies. We’re constantly in real-time touch with millions of social signals that other people are putting out on social media every day. In this context, the meteoric rise of social media is no surprise, because it was like tossing a lit match into a pool of gasoline. The second part of this is the dopamine-reward system that these platforms have been designed to engage with. Whenever we get comments, likes or shares on our con-
tent, we receive a hit of dopamine that keep us coming back for more. When Sean Parker was interviewed a few years ago, he said, “We actually designed Facebook to take advantage of the dopamine-reward cycle.” That’s why it’s so psychologically addictive. Social media messages are also delivered on a ‘variable-reinforcement’ schedule, meaning they can come at any time, so we are always thinking about them. Successful digital marketing remains a puzzle for many organizations. Can you share a few tips from your research?
The key to good digital and social media marketing is rigorously measuring return on investment (ROI). And the key to doing that is separating correlation from causation. When I’m teaching a class, on day one I ask my students, “What if I gave you a pamphlet advertising this class as you walked in today day, and then I asked you, ‘what is the conversion rate of that pamphlet’? The obvious answer is 100 per cent, because 100 per cent of the people who saw it are taking the class. Then I ask them, “How much did that advertising pamphlet change your behaviour?” and they resoundingly say ‘not at all’ — because they had already decided to take the class. That is the difference between an ad being correlated with the behaviour you are trying to encourage versus the causal effect of that ad changing behaviour. Figuring out that difference is the key to rigorously measuring ROI, which is the key to succeeding with digital marketing. rotmanmagazine.ca / 123
We need to proactively step away from social media on a regular basis. That’s a new habit for all of us to strive for.
Digital marketing, first and foremost, is about behaviour change. We can use it to get people out to vote, to get people vaccinated, or to encourage people to take HIV tests. Like any sort of process or technology, it depends on how you use it. I do believe that while digital marketing is a tremendously powerful tool, most organizations aren’t doing it right. I am on a mission to study, through science, how to do it right — and educate business leaders. Some people are calling for banning political advertising on social media and prohibiting the use of social media for people under the age of 18. What is your reaction to such recommendations?
I’m a big fan of living in a free society, so I’m not a fan of banning things. That approach doesn’t typically work, nor is it in line with a free and open society. I try to take a more nuanced approach and apply scientific rigour to solutionoriented policy suggestions, like interoperability and data portability legislation, which are designed to ensure competition. I also support new federal privacy legislation and policy suggestions for stemming the spread of falsity and protecting our elections from manipulation. But I don’t think we need to impose draconian policies. We’ve learned over time that living in a free society is great for innovation, it’s great for democracy and it’s great for the marketplace of ideas. We must make sure not to curtail any of that in our effort to solve the social media crisis — which, however, is a crisis that needs to be solved. 124 / Rotman Management Fall 2021
For those who want to be part of the solution, how can we start building a healthier social ecosystem?
I have identified four levers that we have at our disposal: money, code, norms and laws. Money is the business models of the social platforms; code is the design of the platforms and their algorithms; laws are official regulation around the Hype Machine; and norms involve how we use these technologies in our daily lives. A couple of norms that individuals can use to effect change in their own lives are, for instance, scheduling social media use so that you block off time to use it at a certain time each day and turning your notifications off. We need to proactively step away from social media on a regular basis. That’s a new habit for all of us to strive for.
Sinan Aral is the David Austin Professor of Management, Marketing,
IT and Data Science at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, Director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy and a founding partner at Manifest Capital. He is the author of The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health — and How We Must Adapt (Currency, 2020).
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