A new epidemic of its kind social networking virus. Why is this dangerous for humanity?
Social media helps people connect and make new friends around the world. This is how it was conceived 15 years ago. But even their creators didn't assume that in 2021, half of the world's population would spend hours browsing endless news on Facebook and Instagram and wouldn't be able to sleep without a smartphone under the pillow, and an irresistible urge to look at a screen would lead to a pandemic. Severe mental disorders. Even worse is the fact that the content for billions of people is determined not by a person, but by an algorithm. It is he who is responsible for all the problems of modern social networks. How these algorithms were created, what they know about us and why humanity can no longer control them - in the first article of the algorithm of the large-scale private project “Lenta.ru”. “Who controls you?” ...
Brooke from California first picked up an iPhone at the age of 12. Since then, I've become obsessed. Every night, Brooke updated her social media feed, which showed her something new over and over again. Parents tried to explain to their daughter that it is impossible to spend a lot of time on the Internet, but it did not help.
From an ordinary child, Brooke quickly turned into a troubled teenager. Soon, the parents found out that their daughter was meeting suspicious men on the Internet, having sex with them, drinking and taking drugs.
“I stayed up all night, sending my nude pictures to strangers. In return, I received my compliments. It seemed to me that only this brings me happiness ”- Brooke later admitted.
When the girl was thirteen years old, the police came to her parents. It turns out that someone was threatening to send explicit photos of Brooke over the Internet. Soon her dangerous hobbies became the cause of bullying at school. On the same night, the parents discovered their daughter's suicide note.
After attempting suicide, Brooke spent nearly a year and a half in a rehab center. There she fought with doctors mental disorders, drug problems and addiction to social networks.
In 2017, the story of this young man thundered across America. It became clear to many that the generation that lives in social networks from an early age needs help.
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Mark Zuckerberg virus
Today there are 7.83 billion people in the world. The largest social networks have 4.2 billion users. During the quarantine year 2020, their number increased by 13 percent. This means that social networks are used by 53.6% of the world's population.
All these numbers indicate one thing: humanity lives in a smartphone, and the division into real and virtual life no longer exists. The web is no longer a place for advanced youth, we all are in it.
For many years, Facebook has been the most popular social network in the world. At the beginning of 2021, the audience of the American giant reached 2.74 billion people - about a third of the world's population. To write a message on Facebook , you need Facebook Messenger with 1.3 billion users. WhatsApp messenger, acquired in 2014, added more than two billion people to Mark Zuckerberg's empire, and Instagram , acquired in 2012, added 1.221 billion people.
In terms of audience size, the video hosting service on YouTube from Google is the only that can be compared to Facebook Tags - where he used 2.291 billion people.
What do these billions of users see every day? Any social network starts with a news feed. Information from all over the planet is concentrated there, updated and replenished every second. But a person is not able to assimilate everything, which means that he needs to simplify.
Users have long been deprived of the opportunity to choose content independently - algorithms participate in the formation of a smart news feed. Their main task is to keep the user within the social network. After all, the more time a person spends in an app or on a website, the more ads they see. Any social network is free, which means that users pay for it with their time and attention. But it wasn't always like that.
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The first social networks did not look what we are used to seeing today. Before News Feed (the official name for Facebook's news feed ) came along, users crawled friends' pages for updates. It took a long time. And the larger the circle of acquaintances, the more difficult it was to stay informed.
A solution to the problem was found in 2006: the developers of Facebook created an alternative home page, which automatically receives all news from friends. The need to log into other people's profiles every time disappeared by itself: recent photos, statuses and messages were collected in one place.
“The News Feed is constantly updating a personalized list of news throughout the day, so you know when Mark [Zuckerberg] adds Britney Spears to his favourites, or when the person you love is feeling lonely again. These features are not only different,” said then- Facebook Product Manager Ruchi Sangui. Not just anything that was previously on Facebook, but also completely different from anything on the Internet.” Competitors did not really have such an advantage. In a few years, this very decision will completely change the Internet.
“Before news broadcasts, the Internet was a strange, quiet and perhaps very secluded place. I say 'maybe' because I can barely remember how everything was working at the time. After Facebook launched the news feed, nothing on the network was the same,” said journalist Slate. Farhad Manjou seven years after the News Feed was announced.
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