Claim: There is no information on Social Media.

NorCal Dave

Senior Member.
I found this back in June and have been thinking about it ever since. Not sure if it works here, maybe it's just "chit-chat", but with the perceived power of Social Media, it’s still an interesting idea. It looks at Social Media through the lens of physical science and information theory.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/physi...hQHhTkrInSraM4EbtfACpZUbm8-bKHJL_L70j1bxSKfik

I think this pull quote sums up the claim the best (bold by me):

Thus, the explicit information -- here's a photograph of my vacation, or, here's my view on the mayoral candidates -- is not the important component on social. What's important is the bucket of interests into which such behavior falls. It's the unconscious, hidden signal behind the individual messages.

But explicit coding is not the only element at play. Humans on social media understand on some level that reducing entropy is important. That's why they voluntarily work with the system to reduce entropy.

Mindful of likes and follows, humans will choose behavior that reinforces predictability. Verbal ticks of the sort "I can't even" on Twitter, conveying an attitude, or the perfect dance move replicated on TikTok, are ways for a person to put themselves in accord with the dominant signal on these social networks. They are examples of people making every message redundant so that the signal comes through the noise.

People will, of their own choosing, reduce their entropy and align with the machine. Every time someone on Facebook chooses to recirculate something known to produce oohs and ahs, and every time someone prepares the perfect sunset beach photo for Instagram that can be assured to receive "likes," if accompanied by the proper hashtag, it is an instance of self-shaping behavior, the voluntary reduction of entropy, and, hence, the reduction of information.
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If I understand it right, while we thought in the beginning of Social Media as this revolution that democratizes the spreading of information, it’s slowly working towards the opposite and the users are helping to push it there because that's what Social Media wants us to do. What we share is irrelevant:

Such critiques suggest that manipulation is a departure from the true mission of social -- namely, to allow people to come together and communicate.

Seen through the lens of Shannon and Boltzmann, the reduction of entropy via redundant, and therefore predictable, behavior is not an aberration of the communications channel, it's the whole point of the communications machine. As a machine to transmit a signal of intent, social is designed to reduce entropy -- to promote predictability.
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I’m not saying this is a claim that needs to be debunked, though maybe it can be. But it would suggest that the spreading of good or bad info on Social Media is largely irrelevant, at least to Social Media, and may be ultimately self correcting. The whole point of Social Media is NOT communication, it's selling users (us) as the product to advertisers and the lower the amount of information the easier it is to sell us (bold by me):

Do humans get anything in the bargain? The signal that is transmitted by social media is not meant for human consumption. It is meant to be plugged into another machine, the advertising buying machine, especially the machine known as programmatic ad buying, which responds reflexively to data. Whether humans enjoy social media, or learn anything from social media, is irrelevant.

Of course, humans don't feel that way. Anyone who has posted a vacation picture on Facebook feels that they are not merely participating in collective activity, but sharing information, and also conveying meaning. And that may be true on some level.

Without getting into the philosophical implications of shaped, and self-shaping, behavior -- "See how great my vacation is!" -- whether such acts are information-rich is irrelevant to the machine if those utterances don't monetize. Because then they don't help to recover the buying signal of advertising.

To social media, most human behavior, including your vacation pictures, is just noise.
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It’s a quick read and it struck me as something MetaBunkers would find intriguing

I had to get my chemist son to teach me about entropy.

I did my own quick survey with Facebook as that and Pinterest the only social Media I use, which I can elaborate on later if anyone is interested. The wife and I have a shared account with 154 “Friends”, all of whom we personally know or went to school with. We check Facebook maybe 3-5 times a week.

In a ½ hour of checking around ~200 posts I got:

56 ads and 7 “liked” or “shared” ads so over 25%. 14 of those were targeted, things Facebook knew we had been searching for.

~57 Reposts. These are friends “sharing” unoriginal simple content created to be “shared” or reacting to a dumb or simple question.

11 Memories, people reposting their own stuff.

71 Group posts. The largest as these come from Groups we have joined or follow, some of which have thousands of members and so generate a lot of posts. But these are narrowly focused with over half of them from a Food and Drink group.

38 of the non-ad and non-group posts where from 3 Friends.

So yeah, bland, predictable and largely inane.
 
The argument in the first quoted block seems fallacious - adding low information content is not reducing total information. Even dreaded reposts on meme sites aren't reducing information - you add almost no information with the image repost itself, but you add the information "you can probably consider ignoring my future posts" too, which might be quite useful information.
 
TV has been accused by its critics to pander to the "lowest common denominator" in the search for audience numbers (and advertising revenue). Why should social media be different?

The social media phenomenon is the ability to segregate its audience better: the feed of a conspiracy theorist will look considerably different from yours (but predictably similar to other CTists) because you're not anonymous any more.
 
The absolute nature of the claim is obviously wrong (and was actually "Physics explains why there is no information on social media")

I get a lot of information from social media. There are lots of interesting and useful discussion groups. I also get to keep up with events in my friends lives. Unique information that I would have a hard time getting elsewhere.

So the claim is obviously false. The discussion about entropy is basically speculative nonsense.
 
while we thought in the beginning of Social Media as this revolution that democratizes the spreading of information, it’s slowly working towards the opposite
did we ever think Social Media was a revolution to democratize the spreading of information?. I remember "the world wide web" was touted that way.

and the WWW does. you just gotta dig a bit to find it :)

i always saw social media (and most forums) as a popularity contest. it's like high school for all ages, on a mass scale.



we do have several other threads on "information bubbles" caused by algorithms selling product, if you want to read up on that bit more.
 
This made me think, though ... if we modify the claim to "There is no net gain in REAL information created by social media," because there is more flase/untrue information, spreading faster, than there is true information, that might be a valid point. You'd have to do more research than I want to do to prove it, but it would, at the least, not surprise me if it was shown to be true.
 
because there is more flase/untrue information, spreading faster, than there is true information,
i dont think that is true. i think we (MB members) just see more of that stuff because we are engaged in that "social network". i think the vast majority of social media users are still only seeing cooking recipes and cat videos in their feeds.
 
This made me think, though ... if we modify the claim to "There is no net gain in REAL information created by social media," because there is more flase/untrue information, spreading faster, than there is true information, that might be a valid point. You'd have to do more research than I want to do to prove it, but it would, at the least, not surprise me if it was shown to be true.

They're probably just taking something akin to the economic concept of utility, and rewording it to make it sound more sciency. It really annoys some scientists when economists do that. But maybe scientists are a fragile lot, as it also annoys some of them when they hear the phrase "Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences" (and "Nobel Prize in Economics" for the times when being doubly wrong is the order of the day).
 
Looks like we'll call it debunked, if it was ever really debunkable in the first place.

I found that it resonated with me and maybe explained why I was noticing less and less of what Mick called "events in my friends lives" and more just shared memes or responses to very generic posts. Maybe that says something about me or my friends. I find, that for the amount of time spent on a screen, I much rather spend it someplace like here, among strangers that at least make me think.

I still think there is something to the "dumbing down" or what the article describes, wrongly it seems, as "lowering the entropy". If users are the product and Social Media companies want to sell product, wouldn't they want that product to be as "packageable" possible? Either in large generic quantities: here's 5 million people that based on a quiz all think "blue crystals represent their personalities". Or in very specialized tranches: here's 2K people from a Facebook group that only share about cocktails.
 
It was a poor headline. If he had written something like "Physics explains why the information content of social media is lower than an evening in the pub" then he might have had something.
 
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