Tristan Harris Congress Testimony: Understanding the Use of Persuasive Technology

Mr Harris thank you Senator thune and Senator Schatz um everything you said I it's sad to me because it's happening not by accident but by Design because the business model is to keep people engaged which in other words this hearing is about persuasive technology and persuasion is about an invisible asymmetry of power when I was a kid I was a magician and Magic teaches you that uh you know you can have asymmetric power without the other person realizing it you can masquerade to have asymmetric Power by looking like you have an equal relationship you say pick a card any card well meanwhile you know exactly how to get that person to pick the card that you want and essentially what we're experiencing with technology is an increasing asymmetry of power that's been masquerading itself as a equal or contractual relationship where the responsibility is on us so let's walk through why that's happening in the race for attention because there's only so much attention companies have to get more of it by being more and more aggressive I call it the race to the bottom of the brain stem so it starts with techniques like pull to refresh so you pull to refresh your news feed that operates like a slot machine it has the same kind of addictive qualities that keep people in Las Vegas hooked to the slot machine other examples are removing stopping cues so if I take the bottom out of this glass and I keep refilling the water or the wine you won't know when to stop drinking so that's what happens with infinitely scrolling feeds we naturally remove the stopping cues and this is what keeps people scrolling but the race for attention has to get more and more aggressive and so it's not enough just to get your behavior and predict what will take your behavior we have to predict how to keep you hooked in a different way and so it crawl deeper down the brain stem into our social validation so that was the introduction of likes and followers how many followers do I have and that got every it was much cheaper to instead of getting your attention to get you addicted to getting attention from other people and this has created the kind of mass narcissism and mass cultural thing that's happening with with young people especially today and after two decades in Decline the mental health of 10 to 14 year old girls has actually shot up 170 percent in the last eight years and this has been very characteristically the cause of of social media and in the race for attention it's not enough just to get people addicted to attention and the race has to migrate to AI who can build a better predictive model of your behavior and so if you give an example of YouTube so there you are you're about to hit plan a YouTube video and you hit play and then you think you're going to watch this one video and then you wake up two hours later and say oh my God what just happened and the answer is because you had a super computer pointed at your brain and at the moment you hit play it wakes up an avatar voodoo doll like version of you inside of a Google server and that Avatar based on all the clicks and likes and everything you've ever made those are like your hair clippings and toenail clippings and nail filings that make the avatar look and act more and more like you so that inside of a Google server they can simulate more and more possibilities if I pick you at this video if I pick you with this video how long would you stay and the business model is simply what maximizes watch time this leads to the kind of algorithmic extremism that you've pointed out and this is what's caused seventy percent of YouTube's traffic down be driven by recommendations not by human choice but by the machines and it's a race between Facebook's uh voodoo doll where you flick your finger can they predict what to show you next and Google's voodoo doll and these are abstract metaphors that apply to the whole tech industry where it's a race between who can better predict your behavior Facebook has something called loyalty prediction where they can actually predict to an Advertiser when you're about to become disloyal to a brand so if you're a mother and you you take Pampers diapers they can tell Pampers hey this user is about to become disloyal to this brand so in other words they can predict things about us that we don't know about our own selves and that's a new level of asymmetric power and we have a name for this asymmetric relationship which is a fiduciary relationship or a duty of care relationship the same standard we apply to to doctors to priests to lawyers imagine a world in which priests only make their money by selling access to the confession Booth to someone else except in this case Facebook listens to 2 billion people's confessions has a has a super computer next to them and is calculating and predicting confessions you're going to make before you know you're going to make them and that's what's causing all this Havoc so I'd love to talk about more of these things later I just want to finish up by saying this affects everyone even if you don't use these products you still send your kids to a school where other people believing that anti-vaccine conspiracy theories causes impact for your life or other people voting in your elections and when Mark Andreessen said um at the you know in 2011 that the quote was software is going to eat the world and what he meant by that Mark Andreessen was the founder of Netscape what he meant by that was that software can do every part of society more efficiently than non-suffer right because it's just adding efficiencies and so we're going to allow software to eat up our elections we're going to allow it to eat up our media our taxi our transportation and the problem was that software was eating the world without taking responsibility for it we used to have rules and standards around Saturday morning cartoons and when YouTube gobbles up that part of society it just takes away all of those protections and I just want to finish up by saying that I know Mr Rogers Fred Rogers testified before this committee 50 years ago concerned about the animated bombardment that we were showing children I think he would be horrified today about what we're doing now and at that same time he was able to talk to the committee and that committee made a choice differently so I'm hoping we can talk more about that today thank you uh we know that internet platforms like Google and Facebook have vast quantities of data about each user what can these companies predict about users based on that data thank you for the question um so I think there's an important connection to make between privacy and persuasion that I think often isn't linked so maybe it's helpful to link that um you know with Cambridge analytica that was a a an event in which based on your Facebook likes based on 150 of your Facebook likes I could predict your political personality and then I could do things with that what the reason I opened described my opening statement that this is about an increasing asymmetry of power is that without any of your data I can predict increasing features about you using AI there's a paper recently that with 80 accuracy I can predict your same Big Five personality traits that Cambridge analytica got from you without any of your data all I have to do is look at your mouse movements and click patterns so in other words it's the end of the poker face your behavior is your signature and we can know your political personality based on tweet text alone we can actually know your political affiliation with about 80 accuracy computers can calculate probably that you're homosexual before you might know that you're homosexual they can predict with 95 accuracy that you're going to quit your job according to an IBM study they can predict that you're pregnant they can predict your micro Expressions on your face better than a human being can microexpressions are your um your soft like reactions to to things that you're not they're not very visible but are invisibly visible computers can predict that as you keep going and you realize that you can and start to deep fake things you can actually generate a new synthetic piece of media a new synthetic face or synthetic message that is perfectly tuned to these characteristics and the reason why I open the statement by saying we have to recognize that what this is all about is a growing asymmetry of power between technology and the limits of the human mind my favorite sociobiologist EO Wilson said the fundamental problem of humanity is that we have Paleolithic ancient emotions we have medieval institutions and we have god-like technology so we're chimpanzees with nukes and our Paleolithic brains are limited against the the increasing exponential power of Technology at predicting things about us the reason why it's so important to migrate this relationship from being extractive to get things out of you to being a fiduciary is you can't have asymmetric power that is specifically designed to extract things from you just like you can't have again lawyers or doctors whose entire business model is to take everything they learned and sell it to someone else except in this case the level of things that we can predict about you is is far greater than actually each of those fields combined when you actually add up all the data that assembles a more and more accurate voodoo doll of each of us and there's two billion voodoo dolls by the way there's one for one out of every four people on Earth with YouTube's and Facebook are more than two billion people the Stanford Senator Peters thank you Mr chairman thank you to our Witnesses a fascinating uh discussion I like to address an issue I think is of profound importance to our Democratic Republic and that's the fact that in order to have a vibrant democracy you need to have an exchange of ideas and an open platform and certainly part of the promise of the internet as it was first conceived was that we'd have this incredible Universal Commons where a wide range of ideas would be discussed and debated it would be robust and yet it seems as if we're not getting that we're actually getting more and more siled uh Mr Dr Wolfram you mentioned how people could make choices and they could live in a bubble but at least it would be their bubble that they get to live in but that's what we're seeing throughout our society as polarization increases more and more folks are reverting to tribal type Behavior Mr Harris you talked about our medieval institutions and uh and Stone Age mines tribalism was alive and well in in the past and we're seeing advances in technology in a lot of ways bring us back into that kind of tribal Behavior so my my question is to what extent is this technology actually accelerating that and is there a way out yes Mr Harris yeah thank you I love this question um the there's a tendency to think here that this is just human nature now that's just people are polarized and this is just playing out it's a mirror it's holding up a mirror to society but what it's really doing is it's an amplifier for the worst parts of us so in the race to the bottom of the brain stem to get attention uh let's take an example like Twitter I it's calculating what is the thing that I can show you that will gets the most engagement and it turns out that outrage moral outrage gets the most engagement so it was found in a study that for every world word of moral outrage that you add to a tweet it increases your retweet rate by 17 so in other words um you know the polarization of our society is actually part of the business model another example of this is that shorter briefer things work better in attention economy than long complex nuanced ideas that take a long time to talk about and so that's why you get 140 characters dominating our social discourse but reality and the most important topics to us are increasingly complex while we can say increasingly simple things about them that automatically creates polarization because you can't say something simple about something complicated and have everybody agree with you people will by definition misinterpret and hate you for it and then it's never been easier to retweet that and generate a mob that will come after you and this has created a call out culture and chilling effects and a whole bunch of other subsequent effects in polarization that are Amplified by the fact that these platforms are rewarded to give you the most Sensational stuff one last example of this is on YouTube let's say we we actually equalize I know there's people here concerned about equal representation on the left and the right in media let's say we get that perfectly right as recently as just a month ago on YouTube if you did a map of the top 15 most frequently mentioned verbs or keywords in the recommended videos they were hates debunks obliterates destroys in other words you know Jordan Peterson destroys social justice Warrior and video so that kind of thing is the background radiation that we're dosing 2 billion people with and you can hire content moderators in English and start to handle the problem is as Ms Stanfield said but the problem is that two billion people and 100 you know hundreds of languages are using these products how many engineers at YouTube speak the 22 languages of India where there's an election coming up so that's some context on that well there's a lot of context fascinating and I'm running out of time but I I took particular note in your testimony when you talked about how technology will eat up elections and you were referencing I think another uh writer on that issue in the remaining brief time I have what's your biggest concern about the 2020 elections and how technology may eat up this election coming up um yeah that comment was that another example of we used to have protections that technology took away we used to have equal price campaign ads so that it cost the same amount on Tuesday night at 7 pm for any candidate to run an election when Facebook gobbles up that part of media it just takes away those protections so there's now no equal pricing um in terms of what I'm worried about I'm mostly worried about the fact that none of these problems have been solved um the business model hasn't changed and the reason why you see a Christchurch event happen and the video just show up everywhere or you know any of these examples fundamentally there's no easy way for these platforms to uh address this problem because the problem is their business model thank you Senator yes this is one of the issues that most concerns me um as I think Senator Schatz mentioned at the beginning there's evidence that in the last month even as recently as that keeping in mind that these issues have been reported on for years now uh there was an a pattern identified by YouTube that young girls who had taken videos of themselves dancing in front of cameras were Linked In usage patterns to other videos like that that it that went further and further into that realm and that was just identified by YouTube you know as a supercomputer as a pattern it's a pattern of this is a kind of pathway that tends to be highly engaging the way that we tend to describe this if you imagine a spectrum on YouTube on my left side there's the calm Walter Cronkite section of YouTube on the right hand side there's Crazy Town UFOs conspiracy theories Bigfoot you know whatever and um if you take a human being and you could drop them anywhere you could drop them in the calm section or you could drop them in crazy town but if I'm YouTube and I want you to watch more which direction from there am I going to send you I'm never going to send you to the column section I'm always going to send you towards crazy town so now you imagine 2 billion people like an ant colony of humanity and it's tilting the playing field towards the crazy stuff and the specific examples of this a year ago a teen girl who looked at a dieting video on YouTube would be recommended anorexia videos because that was the more extreme thing to show the voodoo doll that looked like a teen girl there's all these Voodoo girls that look like that and the next thing to show is anorexia if you looked at a NASA Moon landing it would show Flat Earth conspiracy theories which recommended hundreds of millions of times before take being taken down recently I wrote down another example of 50 of white nationalists in a Belling cat study had said that it was YouTube that had red pilled them red pilling is the term for you know the opening of the Mind the best predictor of whether you'll believe in a conspiracy theory is whether I can get you to believe in one conspiracy theory because one conspiracy sort of opens up the mind and makes you doubt and question things and say that get really paranoid and the problem is that YouTube is doing this in mass and it's created sort of two billion personalized Truman shows right each channel has that radicalizing direction and if you think about it from an accountability perspective back when we had Janet Jackson on one side of the TV screen at the Super Bowl and we had 60 million Americans in the other we had a five second TV delay and a bunch of humans in the loop it for a reason but what happens when you have two billion Truman shows two billion possible Janet Jackson's and two billion people on the other end it it's a digital Frankenstein that that's really hard to control and so that's I think the way that we need to see it from from there we can talk about how to regulate it yeah of course anyone else have a thought on a pretty important threshold question yeah I think so if it's okay if I jump in thank you Senator um the uh issue here is that section 230 of the communications decency is all about section two it's all about section 230. uh has obviously made it so that the platforms are not responsible for any content that is on them which freed them up to do what we've created today um the problem is if you you know is YouTube a publisher well they're not generating the content they're not paying journalists they're not doing that but they are recommending things and I think that we need a new class um between you know the New York Times is responsible if they say something that defames someone else that reaches a certain 100 million or so people uh when YouTube recommends Flat Earth conspiracy theories hundreds of millions of times and if you consider that 70 percent of YouTube's traffic is driven by recommendations meaning driven by what they are recommending when an algorithm is choosing to put in front of the eyeballs of a person it's if you were to backwards derive a motto it would be with great power comes no responsibility

Channel: Center for Humane Technology

Views: 297,662

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Id: ZRrguMdzXBw

Length: 16min 48sec (1008 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 10 2023