Social Medias Algorithms Make Us Turn on Each Other Heres How

[Music]

i never called myself

an influencer but that could be because

the word hadn’t been invented at the

time

but let’s say i had a strong online

reputation for a little while

it started off small i was a waiter in

london drawing

cartoons of the people that i was

attracted to handsome

sexy butches i called it a comic strip

100 butches and i sent it to a lesbian

uk magazine

and that moment changed everything the

magazine loved

the concept and so did their readers

including

radio hosts and bloggers who promoted me

on myspace because this was the 2000s

that comic strip led to book deals and

writing tours

and keynote addresses and a wikipedia

entry i was even

honored with a title of the trans parade

marshal of salt lake city

inside of the tiny world of cutie by pop

comics

i’d become an influencer

the story starts well but it gets

twisted i started introducing myself by

saying

my name is alicia lim and i’m a queer

person of color

this intimate information about my race

and my sexuality

became the first thing that i would say

to strangers to establish

my authority and my brand and gradually

this made me cynical

because my identity was shorthand for my

griefs

and my struggles and my triumphs but

i became an expert at manipulating it

for shares and likes

i started thinking about ways that it

could help me win arguments

and gain positive attention and shore up

my brand

gradually my cutie by pack identity

became my capital asset

and it even reached the stage that i

only wanted to take instagram selfies

with other queer people of color

unfortunately this type of sordid

strategizing probably isn’t totally

unfamiliar to you

when you apply to a school or a grant or

a new job there’s for a lot of us that

moment where you think about

how you check off the boxes of the

diversity mandate

and that used to be something we just

think about a couple of times a year

but now on social media it’s something

that you can think about every day as a

quick

shortcut to instant first-hand expertise

and if that gains you shares and likes

then for some of us

that means that we are soon limiting our

selfies to other people who also

check off the boxes and then calling out

people who we think

shouldn’t be checking off the boxes at

all which is what i started to do

there was a petition that i wrote that

successfully

managed to get gay canadian media to

adopt the pronoun they

but at the time there was a trans art

duo who publicly refused to join me

and so i called them out i wrote a

passive-aggressive post

about activists who just

exploit their cis-passing privilege and

bail on trans community whenever it

serves them to avoid bad press

this was a popular post that gave me

followers and i probably heard that duo

but i didn’t care i wasn’t trying to

connect with them

i was trying to establish my queer and

trans expertise and authority

this self-branding drive came to distort

everything

how i saw myself how i saw my community

how i aspired to friendships and even

lovers

and i wish i could say it was my choice

to quit

but the truth is i just became so

paranoid

and self-conscious and depressed that i

burnt out

my story is just an example of a new

norm that

on social media marginalized issues have

earned this special reverence that is

tempting to exploit

at the time of writing this ted talk i

googled instantly

three recent scandals number one

a highly influential white instagramer

named queer appalachia

fundraise hundreds of thousands of

dollars on behalf of queer and trans

people of color

but a washington post expose revealed

that they kept most of it

number two the next day a new york times

story revealed

that a neuroscientist named bethan

mclaughlin had invented a fake twitter

account

at silencing bi was allegedly a queer

indigenous scientist

who conveniently came to her aid and

defended her in high profile twitter

disputes

and then when that account gained too

many followers it died of covid

number three a month later jessica krug

a professor of african diaspora studies

at george washington university

publicly confessed that she was white

and pretending to be black

this might have been to increase her

credibility in academia

or on social media where she bullied

racialized scholars for not being

radical enough

and if you had any remaining doubt about

opportunism

around marginalized issues online the

final nail in the coffin

probably came in june after police

murdered george floyd an unarmed black

man

and that sparked a viral online movement

and on

cue notoriously anti-black corporations

like the nfl

and amazon tried to exploit that

virality by broadcasting their own

solidarity statements with black lives

matter

these are shameless examples of a new

norm that treats marginalized identities

as promotional opportunities

and while i am disturbed by fraudulent

and hypocritical white people using our

issues

i’m also concerned about us using our

issues

because it’s generating dehumanizing

contests

and lateral violence inside of our

communities it takes names like call out

culture or public shaming

i’ve watched members of my cutie by pop

community get

called out and excommunicated

and so many times i’ve thought they

deserve it

what is happening to me what is

happening to us

social media incentivizes us to be

cutthroat and of all people we need each

other

this concern drives my phd and over time

i’ve come to understand that this is not

this is the side effect of a business

model and today i’m going to explain how

it works

i could talk about any social media

platform this happens on twitter and on

tiktok

but i’m gonna focus on facebook because

of its size

if you’re on instagram you’re on

facebook if you’re on whatsapp

you’re on facebook if you’re on a

third-party app with a facebook sign-in

you’re basically on facebook at this

point facebook is more than a platform

it’s a ubiquitous infrastructure that

increasingly determines how we treat

each other

so every day facebook makes us more

receptive to identity politicking

through two tools it’s

ad manager and its algorithms

this is ad manager it is the keys to the

kingdom

advertisers flocked ad manager because

it’s cheap and easy to target customers

according to razor sharp specifics about

their identity

as an example i’ve made an ad targeting

myself and people like me

from ad manager i chose from drop down

menus and checked off the following

boxes

north american a strange category called

friends of people who have engaged with

ramadan

people who use a mac osx operating

system have previously lived in

singapore

are likely to engage liberal political

content work as teaching assistants

at the university of toronto are friends

with women with birthdays in zero to

seven

days have recently moved are interested

in barbecue

discount stores asian american culture

and free software

i could keep going but i stopped here

and amazingly i’m told that my selection

is still

fairly broad with a potential reach of

240 million

so after i’ve released my ad i toggle

over to data analytics

to see how asian liberal grad students

with muslim friends

react to my ad how much organic buzz

they generate

if they encourage their friends to click

on my ad

how do i know this because of culprit

number two

algorithms so facebook algorithms

promote our posts according to signal

which is

who we tend to interact with prediction

which is the likely interest in our

posts and

relevance this is important we think

that the popularity of our posts

is based on their likability but these

are advertising algorithms

the popularity of our posts is based on

their likelihood

to generate word-of-mouth marketing and

brand awareness

even the term influencer doesn’t

actually mean

popular and glamorous it comes from the

market research concept of

influentials people labeled as the best

marketing tools around

that’s right when i called myself an

influencer i was calling myself a tool

so add manager classifies us into groups

using the ultimate game of checking off

boxes

and then algorithms rank those groups in

terms of most receptive to buying

clicking and word-of-mouth marketing

we think of social media platforms as

these social spaces where we connect

with people

but there are commercial spaces that are

finally calibrated to create the

ultimate

advertising atmosphere in fact if you’ve

ever wanted to upload a post to get a

lot of visibility like to talk about

your new job

or your new degree or to come out as

trans

you probably found yourself using the

words of a sales pitch

because algorithms reward us when we act

like commercials

and commercials don’t thrive on mutual

respect they thrive on maximum buzz

so like when i wrote that post about the

trans art duo

because it generated maximum buzz

algorithms spread it far and wide and

made it seem

like the right way to act

as this becomes common sense i don’t

blame anyone who leverages their

identity

for influence and power i blame

corporate advertising models and

algorithms

that are taking advantage of our

desperation

because we live in a nightmare of job

precarity massive personal debt

and the breakdown of our social security

systems and so yes

we take the base we calculate the asset

value of our identities

and then allow ad driven algorithms to

dictate the right

and wrong ways to perform them i call

this a transition from identity politics

to identity economics and i don’t blame

anyone who pays their rent this way

i blame the neoliberal drive to

privatize our social lives

for this reason i’m tired of mainstream

concerns about facebook

gripping netflix documentaries anxious

headlines and whistleblowers

warn us about privacy infractions

and about surveillance about

misinformation and the breakdown of

democracy

my take is different because unlike

these voices i’m not a rich white

silicon valley executive

i’m glad they stepped forward but there

are side effects that they are not

seeing

most of you are seeing them because like

me we are the majority

people who are poor or racialized

or queer or sick who turn to social

media as a lifeline

of career advancement and authority that

we never previously had

we have come to feel morbidly worried

about our reputations

we have come to feel worried about

saying the wrong thing

we have come to feel socially anxious in

the circles we used to feel welcome in

this is the painful crush of the social

media machine and we are the experts of

his infrastructure

i’m not concerned about villainous

corporations invading privacy because

for many of us

privacy was a privilege we didn’t have

to begin with

i’m not concerned about the breakdown of

democracy because for many of us that

democracy was already broken

as the middle class shrinks and the

working clause balloons

we are the majority and my goal is to

launch a different

issue into a mainstream narrative

dominated by the problems of a minority

i’m talking about the breakdown of our

social ties at the grassroots level

these ties are dissolving into brooding

social anxiety and lateral violence

and we need these ties we inherited them

from 1960 civil rights movements

from black power movements from trans

activism from third world feminists who

taught us to reclaim our social

difference in the name of collective

empowerment and the redistribution of

our resources

today social media overwrites those

lessons and trains us

to reclaim our social differences in the

name of self-promotion and personal

branding

we need to teach each other radical

algorithmic literacy

to harness algorithms not to fight each

other

but to fight our common enemies our rent

premiums

our precarious labor contracts are huge

personal debts

the privatization of our social security

systems

in this regard the north star model is

the hashtag defund the police

black lives matter seized the moment of

emotion around the murder of george

floyd

to make concrete economic demands in

just three months their hashtag had

reallocated

billions of dollars in police funding in

the states to the basic needs of black

community

like food access mental health support

abortion access and violence prevention

programs

it was strange and amazing to see