What China's Crackdown on Algorithm's Means for the US

You were just mentioning what China's doing to kind of regulate its Internet. That's because you're worth speaking about. Yeah, have you been following this? Yeah, that's what terrifies me is that we have to become like China in order to deal with what they're doing. I just I feel like one step moving in that general direction is a Social Credit Score system and I'm terrified of that. And I think that that is where vaccine passports lead to, I really do. And I think this idea that they're slowly working their way into our everyday lives and in this sort of inexorable way where you have to have some sort of paperwork or some sort of a Q code or something on your phone or QR code, that scares the shit out of me because that's the set, you're never going to get that back. Once the government has that kind of power and control, they're going to be able to exercise it whenever they want with all sorts of reasons to institute it. I'm worried about that too, but I will say also, just to also notice that everywhere there's a way in which a small move in a direction can be shown to lead to another big boogeyman and that boogeyman makes us angry. Social media is up regulating the meaning of everything to be its worst possible conclusion. So like a small move by the government to do X might be seen as this is the first step in this total thing. I'm not saying that they're not going to go do that. I'm worried about that too. But to also just notice the way that social media amplifies the degree to which we all get kind of reactive and triggered by that. The thing I think is worth mentioning is what China is doing regarding its internet because it's seeing real problems and we might not like their solution. We might want to implement a solution that has more civil liberties and we should. Let's explain what they're doing. Yeah. So I'll do it quickly. Quite literally as if Xi Jinping saw the social dilemma because they've in the last two months rolled out a bunch of sweeping reforms that include things like if you're under the age of 14 and you use Doi-Yin which is their version of TikTok when you swipe the videos instead of getting like the influencer dancing videos and soft pornography you get science experiments you can do at home museum exhibits and patriotism videos. Wow. So you're scrolling and you're getting stuff that's educating because they want their kids to grow up and want to be astronauts and scientists. Yeah. They don't want them to grow up and be influencers. And when I say this by the way I'm not just to be clear I'm not praising that model just noticing all the things that they're doing. Right. Well I'll praise it. If you can influence people that's a great way to do it. They also limit it to three hours, sorry 40 minutes a day on TikTok for gaming. Let me actually do the TikTok example. So 40 minutes a day for TikTok. They also when you scroll a few times they actually do a mandatory five second delay saying hey do you want to get up and do something else? Because when people sit there infinitely scroll even Tim Cook recently said mindless scrolling which is actually invented by my co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, Azaraskin. He was in the social dilemma. He was the one who invented that infinite scroll thing. China said hey we don't want people mindlessly scrolling so after you scroll a few videos it does a mandatory five second like interlude. They also have opening hours and closing hours. So from 10 p.m. until six in the morning if you're under 14 it's like it's closed. Being one of the problems of social media for teenagers is if I'm not on it one in the morning but all my friends are on and they're still commenting on my stuff I feel the social pressure I'm gonna be ostracized if I don't participate. And if your notifications are on your phone keeps buzzing. Totally and even if they're not on it's like oh but I want to see if they said something about my thing and so it's a it's a we call a multi polar trap if I don't participate but the other guys are I'm gonna lose out and Facebook and these companies they know that by the way even Netflix said their biggest competitor is sleep. So one of the because they're all competing for attention. So when you do this mandatory thing when you say we're gonna close from 10 p.m. to six in the morning suddenly everyone if you're in the same time zone it's another important side effect can't use it at the same time. So these are some examples for their military by the way when you if you're a member of the Chinese PLA army you you get a locked down smartphone it's like a light phone it's like hyper lockdown you can't do anything. By contrast we know that Russia and China go into our veterans groups on Facebook and they actually try to sow disinformation try to radicalize veterans. Hey Afghanistan happened don't you really pissed let me show you 10 videos right. And this is like dosing people with more mental health problems. So in a bunch of different ways we see that if you want to drive civil war in a meaningful way in the U.S. take the people who have real tactical capability and radicalize them. And so target those groups in particular and that's like that's it makes sense why their military wants to lock down the ability for external influence. Of course. Right. So while we're you know spending all this money building physical borders building walls or you know spending 50 billion dollars a year on the passport controls and the Department of Homeland Security and the physical you know Russia trying to try to fly a plane in the United States. We've got Patriot missiles to shoot it down. But when they try to fly an information like precision guided information bomb we instead of responding with Patriot missiles we respond with here's a white glove Facebook algorithm that says which zip code or Facebook group would you like to target. Right. So it changes the asymmetries typically what made us power what made the U.S. powerful was the geographic board. We had these huge oceans on both sides gives us unique you know place in the world. When you move to the digital world it erases that geographic asymmetry of power. So this is a imminent national security threat. This is not just like hey social media is adding some subtle pollution in the form of mental health or a it's adding a little bit of polarization but we can still get things done. It's an imminent national security threat to our continuity of our model of governance which we want to keep. Spoken to people in power. Have you spoken to Congress people about this? Yes but I'm hoping many more of them watch this because I think people need to see the full scope and I really do want to make sure we're not sounding like just full disaster porn because we want to get to the point. Don't worry about that. Go full disaster porn. Well it just better than not. It's not meant to scare people just to get an appraisal of what is the situation that works in. It's going to scare. It should scare people because we're so far behind the eight ball. There's a really important point Tristan was just at that we actually need to double click on which is that democracies are more affected by what's happening with social media than authoritarian nations are and for a number of reasons but do you want to. And we sort of hinted at it earlier but when social media's business model is showing each tribe their boogeyman their extreme reality it forces a more polarized political base which means to get elected you have to say something that's going to appeal to a base that's more divided. And in the Facebook files that Francis Haugen put out they showed that when Facebook changed the way its ranking system worked in 2018 to something called meaningful social interactions I won't go into details. They talked to political parties in Europe so here we are. In 2018 they do an interview with political parties in Poland and Hungary and Taiwan and India and these political parties say Facebook we know you changed your ranking system and Facebook like smugly responds. Yeah everyone has a conspiracy theory about how we change our ranking system because those stories go viral and they're like no no we know that you changed how your ranking system works because we used to be able to publish here's a white paper on our agriculture policy to deal with like soil degradation and now when we publish the white paper we get crickets we don't get any response and we tested it and the only thing that we get traffic and attention on is when we say negative things about the other political parties. So and they say we know that's bad we don't want to do that we don't want to like run our campaign that's about saying negative things about the other party but when you change the algorithm that's the only thing we can do to get attention. It shows how central the algorithm is to everything else if I'm Tucker Carlson or Rachel Maddow or anybody who's a political personality are they really saying things just for their TV audience or they also appealing to the algorithm because most more and more of their attention is going to happen downstream in these little clips that get filtered around so they they also need to appeal to how the algorithm is rewarding saying negative things about the other party. So what that does is it means you elect a more political representative class that's based on disagreeing with the other side and being divided about the other side which means that it throws a gear into the rent the wrench into the gears of democracy and means that democracy stops delivering results in a time where we have more crisis we have more supply chain stuff and inflation and all these other things to respond to and instead of responding effectively it's just division all the way down.