What is Persuasive Technology and How Does it Work
The Social Dilemma is a 2020 American docudrama film directed by Jeff Orlowski and written by Orlowski, Davis Coombe, and Vickie Curtis. The documentary examines how social media's design nurtures addiction to maximize profit, and its ability to manipulate people's views, emotions, and behavior and spread conspiracy theories and disinformation. The film also examines social media's effect on mental health, in particular, the mental health of adolescents and rising teen suicide rates.The film features interviews with many former employees of social media companies along with academic researchers. Some of the interviews also note that social media platforms and big tech companies have provided some positive change for society as well.
Automating Humanity is the shocking and eye-opening new manifesto from international award-winning designer Joe Toscano that unravels and lays bare the power agendas of the world's greatest tech titans in plain language, and delivers a fair warning to policymakers, civilians, and industry professionals alike: we need a strategy for the future, and we need it now. Automating Humanity is an insider's perspective on everything Big Tech doesn't want the public to know—or think about—from the addictions installed on a global scale to the profits being driven by fake news and disinformation, to the way they're manipulating the world for profit and using our data to train systems that will automate jobs at an explosive, unprecedented scale. Toscano provides a critique of modern regulation, including parts of the new European Union's General Data Proctection Regulation (GDPR) suggesting how we can create proactive, adaptable regulation that satisfies both the needs of consumer safety and commercial success in the international economy. The content touches on everything from technology, economics, and public policy to psychology, history, and ethics, and is written in a way that is accessible to everyone from the average reader to the technical expert.
Manipulative marketing strategies have existed for long time. However, these strategies in combination with collection of enormous amounts of data for AI algorithmic systems have far expanded the capabilities of what firms can do to drive users to choices and behaviour that ensures higher profitability. Digital firms can shape the framework and control the timing of their offers, and can target users at the individual level with manipulative strategies that are much more effective and difficult to detect.
Interviewees[edit]
- Tristan Harris, former Google design ethicist,[9] co-founder and CEO of Apture (2007),[10] and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology;[11] co-host of podcast Your Undivided Attention with Aza Raskin[12]
- Tim Kendall, former director of monetization at Facebook,[6] former President of Pinterest, and CEO of Moment (a mobile application that tracks screen time)[13]
- Jaron Lanier, American computer philosophy writer, computer scientist, visual artist, and composer of contemporary classical music; author of Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (2018)[14]
- Roger McNamee, early investor at Facebook,[15] author of Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe (2019), and cofounder of venture capital firm Elevation Partners[16]
- Aza Raskin, former head of user experience at Mozilla Labs and creative lead for Firefox;[17] co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology[11] and founder of Massive Health;[18] inventor of the infinite scroll[19]
- Justin Rosenstein, former Facebook engineering manager,[20] former Google product manager,[21] and co-founder of Asana[22] and One Project
- Shoshana Zuboff, Professor Emeritus at Harvard Business School, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019)[23]
- Jeff Seibert, former head of product at Twitter,[24] serial tech entrepreneur, and co-founder of Digits[25]
- Anna Lembke, medical director of addiction medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine[26]
- Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist at the New York University Stern School of Business,[27] author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012) and coauthor of The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (2018)[28]
- Sandy Parakilas, former platform operations manager at Facebook[29] and former product manager at Uber[30][31]
- Cathy O'Neil, data scientist and author of Weapons of Math Destruction (2016)[32]
- Randima Fernando, former product manager at Nvidia, former executive director at Mindful Schools, and co-founder and executive director of Center For Humane Technology[33]
- Joe Toscano, former experience design consultant at Google and author of Automating Humanity (2018)[34]
- Bailey Richardson, early team member of Instagram and partner at People & Company[35]
- Rashida Richardson, assistant professor of law and political science at Northeastern University School of Law[36] and former director of policy research at AI Now Institute[37][38]
- Guillaume Chaslot, former software engineer at Google (YouTube) and founder of AlgoTransparency[39]
- Renée Diresta, technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory[40] and former head of policy at Data for Democracy
- Cynthia M. Wong, former senior Internet researcher at Human Rights Watch[41]
- Alex Roetter, former senior vice president of engineering at Twitter[42]
- Lynn Fox, former director of corporate PR and Mac PR at Apple,[43] former executive of corporate communications at Google
Geoffrey Everest Hinton CC FRS FRSC[12] (born 6 December 1947) is a British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks. From 2013 to 2023, he divided his time working for Google (Google Brain) and the University of Toronto, before publicly announcing his departure from Google in May 2023 citing concerns about the risks of artificial intelligence (AI) technology.[13] After leaving, he has commended Google for acting "very responsibly" while developing their AI[14] but changed once Microsoft started incorporating a chatbot into its Bing search engine, and the company began becoming concerned about the risk to its search business. In 2017, he co-founded and became the chief scientific advisor of the Vector Institute in Toronto.[15][16]
Experts from many different fields have conducted research and debates and debating about the links between using digital media and mental health. Research suggests that mental health issues arising from social media use affect women more than men and vary according to the particular social media platform used. Psychological or behavioral dependence on social media platforms can result in significant negative functions in individuals' daily lives. Studies show there are several negative effects that social media can have on individuals' mental health and overall well-being.[11][12][13] While researchers have attempted to examine why and how social media is problematic, they still struggle to develop evidence-based recommendations on how they would go about offering potential solutions to this issue. Because social media is constantly evolving, researchers also struggle with whether the disorder of problematic social media use would be considered a separate clinical entity or a manifestation of underlying psychiatric disorders. These disorders can be diagnosed when an individual engages in online content/conversations rather than pursuing other interests that occur in real life.
The search engine manipulation effect (SEME) is a term invented by Robert Epstein in 2015 to describe a hypothesized change in consumer preferences and voting preferences by search engines. Rather than search engine optimization where advocates, websites, and businesses seek to optimize their placement in the search engine's algorithm, SEME focuses on the search engine companies themselves. According to the psychologist Epstein, search engine companies both could massively manipulate consumer and vote sentiment, and furthermore would do so to ensure their favored candidates win. Epstein propounded that such manipulations could shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20 percent or more, and up to 80 percent in some demographics, and would change the outcomes in over 25% of national elections.
Persuasive technology is broadly defined as technology that is designed to change attitudes or behaviors of the users through persuasion and social influence , but not necessarily through coercion . Such technologies are regularly used in sales , diplomacy , politics , religion , military training , public health , and management , and may potentially be used in any area of human-human or human-computer interaction. Most self-identified persuasive technology research focuses on interactive, computational technologies, including desktop computers, Internet services, video games, and mobile devices, but this incorporates and builds on the results, theories, and methods of experimental psychology , rhetoric , and human-computer interaction . The design of persuasive technologies can be seen as a particular case of design with intent.
Targeted advertising is a form of advertising, including online advertising, that is directed towards an audience with certain traits, based on the product or person the advertiser is promoting.[1] These traits can either be demographic with a focus on race, economic status, sex, age, generation, level of education, income level, and employment, or psychographic focused on the consumer values, personality, attitude, opinion, lifestyle and interest.[2] This focus can also entail behavioral variables, such as browser history, purchase history, and other recent online activities. The process of algorithm targeting eliminates waste.[3]
Traditional forms of advertising, including billboards, newspapers, magazines, and radio channels, are progressively becoming replaced by online advertisements.[4] The Information and communication technology (ICT) space has transformed recently, resulting in targeted advertising stretching across all ICT technologies, such as web, IPTV, and mobile environments. In the next generation's advertising, the importance of targeted advertisements will radically increase, as it spreads across numerous ICT channels cohesively.[5
Targeted advertising is a form of advertising , including online advertising , that is directed towards an audience with certain traits, based on the product or person the advertiser is promoting. These traits can either be demographic with a focus on race, economic status, gender, age, generation, level of education, income level, and employment, or psychographic focused on the consumer values, personality, attitude, opinion, lifestyle and interest. This focus can also entail behavioral variables, such as browser history , purchase history , and other recent online activities. The process of algorithm targeting eliminates waste.
Surveillance capitalism is a concept in political economics which denotes the widespread collection and commodification of personal data by corporations. This phenomenon is distinct from government surveillance, though the two can reinforce each other. The concept of surveillance capitalism, as described by Shoshana Zuboff, is driven by a profit-making incentive, and arose as advertising companies, led by Google's AdWords, saw the possibilities of using personal data to target consumers more precisely.[1]
Increased data collection may have various advantages for individuals and society such as self-optimization (Quantified Self),[2] societal optimizations (such as by smart cities) and optimized services (including various web applications). However, as capitalism has become focused on expanding the proportion of social life that is open to data collection and data processing,[2] these may come with significant implications for vulnerability and control of society as well as for privacy.
Economic pressures of capitalism are driving the intensification of connection and monitoring online with spaces of social life becoming open to saturation by corporate actors, directed at the making of profit and/or the regulation of action. Therefore, personal data points increased in value after the possibilities of targeted advertising were known.[3] Consequently, the increasing price of data has limited accessibility to the purchase of personal data points to the richest in society.[4
Social media began in the form of generalized online communities. These online communities formed on websites like Geocities.com in 1994, Theglobe.com in 1995, and Tripod.com in 1995. Many of these early communities focused on social interaction by bringing people together through the use of chat rooms. The chat rooms encouraged users to share personal information, ideas, or even personal web pages. Later the social networking community Classmates took a different approach by simply having people link to each other by using their personal email addresses. By the late 1990s, social networking websites began to develop more advanced features to help users find and manage friends. These newer generation of social networking websites began to flourish with the emergence of SixDegrees .com in 1997, Makeoutclub in 2000, Hub Culture in 2002, and Friendster in 2002. However, the first profitable mass social networking website was the South Korean service, Cyworld . Cyworld initially launched as a blog-based website in 1999 and social networking features were added to the website in 2001. Other social networking websites emerged like Myspace in 2002, LinkedIn in 2003, and Bebo in 2005. In 2009, the social networking website Facebook (launched in 2004) became the largest social networking website in the world. Active users of Facebook increased from just a million in 2004 to over 750 million by the year 2011. Making internet-based social networking both a cultural and financial phenomenon.