![]() They did experiments in 2010 and in 2012, and they've shown that voter turnout can be affected. MARTIN: But what you're saying is, actually, they were there.ĪRAL: Large-scale experiments involving over 60 million people on Facebook have demonstrated that very easy short messages on Facebook can dramatically change voter turnout. And she said, well, I didn't see any Russians in the voting booth with me, so my vote had nothing to do with that. And she was asked about whether, you know, the whole Russian influence campaign. And she was asked about - she acknowledged freely that she had voted for President Trump, but she still voted to convict the particular person because she felt that the evidence warranted that. And I'm thinking about this because I'm thinking about a juror that I heard speak on, you know, one of the cable news programs after she served on a jury in which one of President Trump's associates, you know, was convicted of conduct related to trying to - was related to, you know, Russian malinfluence influence during the 2016 election. MARTIN: It's - talk a bit, if you would, about the - how it affects the way people vote. ![]() When I read that, I thought to myself, what do the matches that are created by these algorithms - how did they differ from matches that would have been created in real normal life if they weren't created by algorithms? What does that mean, for instance, for our genetic diversity or our evolution going forward if the matches that are being created in relationships via algorithms are different? So it has numerous effects on many different facets of society. Relationships formed by algorithms surpassed relationships formed by human introductions in 2013. Very large-scale experiments have shown that social media can change voting behavior, can change how we exercise, certainly how we shop, how we date. It's something that actually changes us.ĪRAL: Absolutely. MARTIN: You're saying that social media isn't something that just we experience. I thought it was appropriate to have a book that asks, what can we do to really fix the social media morass we find ourselves in? I've seen its evolution and also the techno utopianism and dystopianism. Why I wrote the book - I've been researching social media for 20 years. We showed that was true of false news as well. And if you read the sociology literature, we gain in status when we share novel information because it looks like we're in the know or because we have access to inside information. So if you read the cognitive science literature, human attention is drawn to novelty. The why is because of what we called the novelty hypothesis. And we found that false news traveled farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth in every category of information that we studied. So, first of all, why is that? And is that what made you want to write this book?ĪRAL: Well, in that study, which we published in Science, we found - we studied all the verified true and false news that spread on Twitter over 10 years. MARTIN: So people who follow tech probably know your work and may know your name because in 2018, you and two colleagues made headlines when you published a study that found that lies travel faster than truth online. His new book is called "The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, And Our Health - And How We Must Adapt." And Sinan Aral is with us now to tell us more. ![]() And he uses this experience to describe in lay terms how social media actually works. He's also invested in tech companies and consulted with some of the most prominent tech companies in the world. Sinan Aral teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT. And to reap the benefits of these technologies and to avoid being victimized by them, we need to better understand them. A new book from a data scientist and entrepreneur argues that that is by design, and thus, social media, like any powerful tool, has both promise and peril. In recent years, many of us have been thinking about and, in fact, worrying about how social media is affecting our daily lives, everything from how we vote to how we think we should look. ![]()
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