I watched The Social Dilemma on Netflix last night. If you haven’t watched it, DO IT NOW. It’s a MUST watch for everyone. It doesn’t matter what your world view is, what your political persuasion is, or where in the world you are. You MUST watch this documentary about what the internet is doing to your brain, and how it’s manipulating you.
After you watch that (assuming it got your attention), you should read Weapons Of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil. She’s a quant who wrote a very informative book about how AI can go horribly wrong. She actually did an incredible talk for my company last month, and I can tell you that she knows her field, and she’s very thoughtful about her conclusions.
Anyway, The Social Dilemma didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t already know in great detail but after having watched it, I thought I would share a few things that the documentary didn’t go into. Actually, I had an interaction on my Facebook page about a month ago that got me thinking about writing this post. I said, on something that I posted that I never use Google for search. One commenter was genuinely perplexed and wanted to know what I use and why I don’t use Google.
Most people don’t take their internet privacy too seriously because they don’t care if advertisers use their data to sell them shit. Seems harmless, right? It’s totally not. In order to sell you shit, the name of the game has become to not only build a psychological profile about you, but to also use that profile to keep you online more. This is accomplished by feeding you what you crave. If you’re trying to stay informed about politics, this is actually destroying your perspective and your ability to access objectively true information. Watch the documentary to really learn how terrifying this is. I’m not going to repeat much of what’s in the documentary because this post is more about what you should do after you’ve learned what the documentary teaches you.
So I’m going to share my best practices with you. First of all, I quit social media as myself about 6 years ago. I only maintain a social media presence for my Bitchy self. My [NAME REDACTED] self hasn’t posted a single piece of information about herself in years. The only social media app I have on my phone is Twitter. I keep Twitter because it’s the fastest way to get information in real time. There was a pretty big fire in my neighborhood a couple of months ago. It was about 3 blocks away, and we could see the thick black smoke. No news outlet had that story until the next morning. With Twitter, I knew which building was on fire within minutes. Plus, the only thing Twitter knows about me is that I’m a progressive and a political junkie. The ads I get on Twitter are all over the place because they don’t have enough information to build a manipulative profile on me. My Twitter suggestions on who to follow come from all sides of the political spectrum. Why? Because I follow people I don’t agree with.
I’m going to take a tangent for a minute. If you’re not following people you don’t agree with, you are actively telling tech companies that you would like to be manipulated with confirmation bias. I posted a comment about my thoughts about Bob Woodward a few weeks ago. Fifty some odd dumb dumbs unfollowed me because they couldn’t bear the idea of being exposed to an opinion they don’t agree with. The super dumb ones announced their departures (thereby letting everyone else know how stupid they are) before leaving. My opinions are not so fragile that they can’t withstand exposure to differing opinions. If yours are, you’re (and I mean this literally) part of the problem that gave us Trump, Bolconaro, and Boris Johnson even if you’re diametrically opposed to them. Intolerance to differing opinions is how we got here, and more tolerance will be a step in the right direction for getting us out. I’m not saying you need to follow Trump supporters, although if you can find a few who are respectful I do encourage following them. If you’re a Hillary or Biden supporter, find some progressives to follow. You can’t just silo yourself to the tiny sliver of the (left or right) spectrum that you want to live in. I follow more people that I disagree with (by a factor of 10), than I do people I agree with. This is a healthy practice. Not only does it give you exposure to different ideas, but it helps you to fine tune your own arguments (or change them if you’re persuadable by empirical facts).
Do not follow grifters on social media. When you follow a grifter, your social media platform will serve you up more grifters to follow. How do you know if someone is a grifter? Fact check! I don’t share anything without fact checking. The more you fact check, the more efficient you become at it. I can fact check almost anything in under a minute now. I like to employ a three strikes rule – if someone posts three pieces of total bullshit, I stop following them. Trump’s election has created a cottage industry for left wing grifters. Here’s a small sampling of who to avoid:
The Grifter Brothers, who suddenly developed a keen interest in politics after the feds shut down their previous grift and RICOed half a million dollars from them. When they got suspended from Twitter for basically doing what the Russian bots were doing, one of their wives suddenly took an interest in politics and appeared on Twitter. Grifters gonna grift.
The Click Bait Report, who serves up establishment talking points, but wraps them up in click bait and sprinkles in some outrageous lies to make those tasty nuggets go down more smoothly.
Scott Dworkin, running the oldest grift in politics.
Amy Siskind, Karen-on-steroids. I have all the respect in the world for people who change their opinions, but not acknowledging your past stances is not a good sign that you’ve turned a new leaf. It’s a sign that you’ve found a new grift.
There are more, but those are the big ones.
Social media platforms know who their grifters are. If you follow a grifter, you’re telling them that you’re receptive to a certain kind of grift and you end up falling down a rabbit hole of half truths and flat out lies. Before I move on to some more tips, I want to tell you something about my fact checking practices: I fact check articles that make me happy more vigorously than I do with articles that I think are bullshit. Part of that is because the right wind circulates the same bullshit for years so I have a lot of the facts around their bullshit down cold. I spotted this steaming pile of bullshit on Twitter a couple of days ago. Even though I know Jon Cooper to be a frequent poster of bullshit, I still fact checked because if it was true, it would be YUMMMYYY. Guess what? Yeah, it was bullshit.
Getting back to how to fight the algorithm. I rarely use Google for search. I use DuckDuckGo instead. Here’s one reason. They’re actually good about protecting your privacy, while Google’s business model centers around selling your most intimate thoughts early and often. More importantly than that, DuckDuckGo doesn’t store your search history so it doesn’t use your past searches to serve you up the propaganda it has learned you’re looking for. If you and a conservative friend try and fact the same news story using precisely the same search terms in Google, your results won’t resemble each other in any way. Why? Because you’ve taught Google what your political leanings are and serving you up what you’re looking for makes them more money. We no longer live in a world where we share the same facts. DuckDuckGo will help you with that. Also, you have to teach yourself not to search with a bias. For example, “how has the climate changed over the past 60 years” is a good string. “Climate change hoax” or “the climate crisis” is not. You have to stop looking for what you want, and start looking for more objective results.
Another thing I do is dump my cookies every week. I have a calendar reminder set to remind me to dump my cookies every Saturday morning. This can be a pain in the ass, since you have to log into everything all over again but fear not! I have a solution that you should use whether you’re going to be a cookie dumper or not. Use a password manager. I have for years. I personally like Lastpass. A password manager will create unique passwords for you for every single sight you have a password for. I don’t know my passwords for anything and no two of my passwords even remotely resemble each other. I have LastPass installed in my browser, so it automatically fills in my passwords when I go to those sites. I also have the mobile app on my phone. I like this more than any password manager that comes with your OS because this generates unique passwords for me, instead of just storing my passwords. If I ever have to log into LastPass from a computer that isn’t mine (like if I’m traveling and my phone gets stolen for example), I change the master password as soon as I get home. There are a few password managers out there for you to look at. LastPass is just the one that I use.
Speaking of home, I use a VPN. I use a VPN on all of my mobile devices, and I use a VPN at home. This prevents my ISP from selling my web browsing data. When you’re traveling, or on an unprotected WiFi network, a VPN is essential for protecting your personal data. I use NordVPN, but there are several different products you can look at.
If you absolutely have to keep your Facebook account, use a browser to access your page. Delete the app from your phone. As I said, there are no Facebook apps on my phone. I know it’s a pain logging in every time, but trust me, it’s less painful in the long run.
The worst internet browser you can use is Chrome. I can’t believe I have to point this out, but Chrome is made by Google. Respecting your privacy is antithetical to their business model. I strongly recommend switching to Firefox or Safari. I’m currently running the beta version of Big Sur on my Mac, and the new version of Safari is actually pretty good at blocking trackers. Apple is trying to carve out a “we’re all about privacy” niche for themselves, and Safari is a good step. In addition to that, I use an ad blocker to make my internet perusal more pleasant.
I am loathe to recommend creating a total monopoly, but anyone who uses and Android phone knows nothing about how little privacy you have. Android is open source, so that means that anyone can customize it. Samsung has installed trackers in their version of Android. On top of that, your cell provider has also added trackers bloatware, etc. Android is a privacy and security nightmare. Up until 2015, Facebook was literally scraping every single scrap of information from Android phones, whether you were using the FB app or not. Every phone call that was made, and every text message that was send using any platform was captured by Facebook. This did not happen on the iPhone version because big daddy Apple was watching. Apple combs through every app that’s available in their store. Google has gotten better at this, but it’s still not good. That keyboard you downloaded could very well have been a key logger and no one cared to look because, YAY OPEN SOURCE!!! Open source is great for languages and frameworks, not so much for operating systems. I am not saying that Apple are “good guys”. They’re playing the data game like freaking champs but they are shutting out a lot of other players from exploiting you on your phone.
If this all sounds like a time suck that you just can’t manage, you haven’t watched the documentary. Please watch it. Yes, setting up a password manager to change all of your passwords will take a few hours to get up and running, and you will have to pay a couple of dollars a month but you won’t be vulnerable to identity theft and hackers. Yes, a VPN will also cost you a little bit of money but not using one could potentially wipe you out someday. DuckDuckGo is not as good a search engine as Google. They take a bit longer to catalog breaking news than Google does, and I occasionally have to use Google but that’s rare. The upsides to DuckDuckGo far outweigh the minor deficiencies.
The bigger picture here includes tech companies noticing a change in your behavior and responding with changes of their own. When tens of millions of people didn’t delete their Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp accounts after the Cambridge Analytica incident, they sent a message that they didn’t care about their privacy. The Cambridge Analytica incident told us that our individual FB privacy settings are meaningless, and that your privacy is only as good as your most clueless friend because their shit settings open you up to more exploitation than you’ve consented to. When Google starts to see that people are quitting them in droves, they might, just might stop serving each of us up different “facts”. Ultimately, we need legislation to deal with this monster but changing our behavior can help.
There is no way to stop all of your data from being sold and used to create a psychological profile about you. That’s not realistic but you can take steps to minimize the damage and send a message to tech companies.
