Mass Manipulation A Popular Tactic
hi
my name is olivia montraperla and today
i’m going to be talking about something
that
i’m calling mass manipulation
particularly perpetrated by large
corporations
by my definition mass manipulation
occurs when one higher power
in this case large corporations exploits
an entire population
us the youth through a particular medium
now
now this may seem extremely broad
but i’m going to attempt to explain it
from a smaller perspective
my perspective quarantined we were all
there
months upon months of staying inside
without seeing anyone outside of our
immediate family
for months and months on end except for
outside the cracked screens of our
various devices
now before quarantine i was an extremely
busy person
doing what the normal newark academy
student does so
i rarely had more than an hour to spend
every day on my phone
but quarantine had other plans and soon
enough
everything i did was cancelled so i was
for
lack of better terms stuck in limbo
so i did what anyone my age did would do
and i turned to something i knew my
phone
and soon that little bar graph that
showed me how long i was spending on my
phone every day
was reaching three four five hours a day
it turns out i wasn’t alone according to
fox news
at the end of 2019 the average american
spent three and a half hours looking at
their cell phone every day
and an average of 10 hours looking at
screens and that includes things like
tvs
computer screens ipods if you still look
at that sort of thing
now let’s look at march 2020 just two
months later
that’s four and a half hours spent on
the phone every day
and an average of 13 hours looking at
screens every day
so what does me being on my phone a
whole ton have to do with businesses
like i previously mentioned
and to that i posed another question
what was everyone doing
during quarantine were you seeing any
flyers
were you looking at billboards were you
looking at real estate agents faces on
big benches
the answer is no because you weren’t
leaving your house
so businesses did what business do best
and
they adapted according to tech.com
businesses on average increase their
social media budgets
by 10 and 76 of small business owners
surveyed by tech dot co
say that they have upskilled in areas
regarding social media advertising
and nearly half of marketers have
invested in new marketing technology
additionally seven out of every 10 of
the cmos surveyed
have said that they have started
encouraging their employees
to become active on social media in
promoting their product
and so what does this have to do with us
why do we care
so next i bring up a popular example
instagram 95 million photos
are posted on instagram daily so this
can’t come to a surprise to many of us
as we experience it every day
however we don’t fully comprehend what
we’re seeing
of those 95 million photos posted
25 million accounts on instagram
are considered businesses as opposed to
the 15 million just three years ago
additionally of those 25 million
2 million are monthly advertisers
meaning that they pay instagram
huge sums of money to appear in our feed
once or twice a day a week a month
etc some ads that i’ve been seeing
recently i’ve seen the personalized
shampoo ad
i’ve gotten the inkbox ads the fake
tattoos if you’re into that sort of
thing
i’ve also gotten the fordham university
ads
but the point is these ads are
impossible to avoid
in fact 70.7 of us
businesses have admitted to using
instagram as a marketing platform
which has brought instagram’s net income
in 2019
from advertising to a whopping
10 billion dollars why does it matter
to that i pose another question what did
businesses do before
things like instagram well
they would choose particular tv channels
or radio channels
that had typically been consumed by
their target market
or the people that they were trying to
sell their product to
and they would advertise on those
particular mediums because
that was the most efficient way of
advertising those were the people that
were going to buy their product
so they could manipulate sure but not
nearly on the same scale
instagram takes it to a whole other
level as much as we would like to think
instagram was created simply for the
purpose of us being able to send funny
photos to our friends back and forth
a business can’t run that way it just
can’t
so how is instagram making
10 billion dollars in advertising what
are they selling
they’re selling you essentially i mean
but you probably already knew that
after mark zuckerberg exploited 87
million
facebook users and try to sell their
data
so why don’t we just delete instagram
why don’t we delete facebook why don’t
we delete snapchat
it’s because the opportunity cost of
deleting
set app is too high what we get from
deleting the app isn’t the same as what
we get from what we have when we have it
business is really similar to a game
that you might play
with your family on friday night friday
night game night say monopoly
someone buys something you react someone
sells something
you react someone makes a move of any
kind you react accordingly
businesses do the same however
there’s a small difference when you’re
playing that game of monopoly
your goal is to win that game as fast as
you can
that game is called a finite game
because there’s an obvious ending in
business
business is called an infinite game in
an infinite game
your goal is not to win your goal is to
stay in the game as long as possible
your goal is longevity your goal is to
not have to drop out
declare bankruptcy sell your business
etc
so businesses adapt
businesses have to become more efficient
in order to survive in today’s current
competitive market so essentially
in order to keep up businesses are using
platforms like instagram
to manipulate our thoughts actions and
ways of life
by knowing exactly what to show us based
on the data that they’ve been sold
so now i’m gonna tell you my story
i’m sure you guys have all heard of
makeup mogul and
reality tv star kylie jenner when i was
in eighth grade i had decided i hated
makeup and i was never gonna wear it
however after downloading instagram for
the first time
i was launched into this world of
beautification where
kylie jenner held the crown and all of a
sudden once i was seeing these videos
these ads for sephora and huda beauty
popped up on my feed
and soon enough i taken my first trip to
sephora and scoured the depths of
kylie’s website
and from my exploits i learned two
things the first being that my lips were
really small
and the second being that the only way i
could fix it was through buying all
these lip products
essentially what instagram did was they
took what they knew of my insecurities
from knowing what i was watching
and they knew exactly what to advertise
to me to know that i would buy it
however businesses can only depend on
that to get their products sold
there’s another reason why that they pay
instagram big bucks to appear in our
feed
the second reason is referred to as the
beta meinhof phenomenon
according to the beta meinhof phenomenon
the more you look at something through
one medium
the more you’re going to see it
everywhere else so the more you’re
seeing that lip gloss on your phone
in ads the more you’re going to start
seeing it outside of your phone
you’re going to start seeing seeing it
in coffee shops malls
hanging out with your friends hair
salons it’s going to be everywhere
and everyone’s going to have that
product except for you
and this combination of exploiting your
insecurities
by using your data and constantly
bombarding you with the same product
gets you to the counter that’s what gets
you to buy the product
another app that a lot of my peers use
is snapchat snapchat’s a primarily
interpersonal app
so i send you a snapchat you send one
back to me
however if you have a decent snapchat
following
you spend way too much time every day
tapping through snapchat stories
and sometimes in between those snapchat
stories are little ads
right because like instagram snapchat
is a free app and the only way that they
can garner revenue
is through essentially renting out
theoretical space
to various businesses to advertise
and so here comes tick tock
i think in 2018 was the first time i
ever saw an ad for tick tock
i was tapping through snapchat stories
as i usually did
and i saw this ad for this obscure
new app this new video sharing app and i
thought it was intriguing sure
but i had no idea that it was going to
all of a sudden permeate my everyday
existence
in fact in october 2019
tick tock was downloaded 614 million
times
and by february 2020 reached 1 billion
users
and is currently the ninth most used
social media app
only following long-standing apps like
snapchat and twitter and on top of that
the company has received allegations of
using your information for their own
purposes
and we just keep downloading it in
chunks of millions
so why is that
that’s because tick tock has found the
perfect solution to the infinite game
advertise at the most impressionable
level the youth
and exploit their impressionability by
constantly bombarding their daily lives
with advertisements
that biter mind-haul phenomenon that i
was talking about before
cenin iran is a student or was
a student at mit based in cambridge
and he decided to test how easily public
opinion is
actually swayed so he
put together a group of his peers and
decided to partner with a popular news
source in england
for roughly five months and what he did
was he gave
subscribers the ability to leave
comments
on various news posts and he also gave
other people the ability to give it a
thumb give those comments a thumbs up or
a thumbs down
essentially giving positive or negative
reviews on various comments
however there’s a catch synon and his
team
would leave fake positive reviews
and see how that affected how other
people gave their positive reviews
those comments that had gotten those
fake positive reviews
were 32 percent more likely to receive
positive votes
so essentially one fake person
said something was good said something
was correct said something was
innovative
said something was smart and all of a
sudden everyone else thought that too
all it took was one random person one
random positive vote
for everyone else to start positive
voting it as well
this is called the danning kruger effect
according to the danny kruger effect
when someone tells you something is good
you’re going into that something
believing that it’s good believing that
it’s smart believing that it’s
innovative
believing whatever that person told you
so even if the product itself
is not that great you’ve gone into it
with that notion
so you may be going into this product
without an open mind so that brings me
back to tiktok
i don’t know if you all remember the app
find
um maybe i’m old but i’m sure everyone
remembers the vine compilations on
youtube
just a bunch of funny videos put
together but
essentially vine was a video sharing app
where you could post videos of yourself
singing
dancing doing funny various stupid
things
and gain a following however vine
tragically died in 2016.
however fear not another app came to
take its place
we have musically musically is yet
another video sharing app
where you could post funny videos of
yourself singing and dancing
or doing stupid things and gain a
following however
this app went as quickly as it came and
i never downloaded it
but again fear not we have yet
another replacement here comes tick tock
tick tock is yet another video sharing
app
where you can post funny videos of
yourself dancing singing
and gain a following so
the question is why do people keep
recreating the same app
it’s because in the infinite game each
of these apps were playing as a finite
player
and they played to the heart of every
social media user
and they made everyone believe that
everyone was using their app
once you saw one person using the app
you assumed everyone was using the app
and because everyone is using the app it
must be good it must be innovative it
must be new
it must be something that i need in my
life
when in fact it’s actually a carbon copy
of the thing that came before it
the theme for this year’s ted talk is
this for that
what are you willing to give to get
something in return
are you willing to pay big bucks for
clearer skin
are you willing to essentially give up
your free will so that businesses can
manipulate you
i’m not going to stand here and try and
tell you to delete all your apps
because i would be an incredible
hypocrite if i did that
however in order to be shrewd internet
users
you have to know what businesses are out
there trying to do
because as you can see they’re pretty
successful at it
just keep in mind that nine out of those
10 ads
that are given to you on instagram won’t
end up actually changing your life
thank you
you