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
us
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
trending topics
include municipal budgets even if you
just shared the hashtag
you were thinking about economic matters
and class issues
blm harnessed algorithms not for
self-promotion but to unite
around the common needs of black
community
this is radical algorithmic literacy
using algorithms
to help each other and not to help
adverseness
this is my bottom line facebook has been
associated
with the problem of data privacy it
needs to be associated instead
with a problem of data privatization
i’m talking about the trend of
classifying
our identity so much that we have come
to think of our identities
as brand properties that we need to
protect
this is what i call identity economics
and it is not unlike an abusive lover it
flatters and promotes
our most narcissistic calculating
paranoid behaviors while isolating us
from the people who could save
us this is the facebook problem that
needs the attention
of curriculum and policy and newspaper
headlines
this is the battle we know and we need
to fight
you