Showing posts with label social media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social media. Show all posts

Monday, June 8, 2026

Psychosis Engine


There are some conflicting findings floating around the electroniverse. Japanese philosophizing psychologists suggests that addicts make phones look bad, and a Netherlands twin study says something similar. Likely only a coincidence that these studies were coming out at the same time Facebook was on trial in California for intentionally hurting kids. 

In the end, the only conclusion we can make is that science is hard:

People who are easily distracted by smartphones are more physiologically reactive, less attuned to their bodies
Apr 2025, phys.org

People who have an attentional bias towards smartphone stimuli typically display a lower interoceptive awareness, meaning they were less attuned to internal bodily signals such as their heartbeat - a pattern mirroring behavioral addictions like gambling or substance use.

Note, Japanese institutions think differently about the intersection of humans and technology:
"This project began as an interdisciplinary exploration between philosophy and psychology, aiming to understand the relationship between technology and the human body." 

via Hokkaido University: Yusuke Haruki et al, Attentional bias towards smartphone stimuli is associated with decreased interoceptive awareness and increased physiological reactivity, Communications Psychology (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s44271-025-00225-6.

Mostly unrelated image credit: Woman Eating a Sandwich, from the archives, pre-AI era 


Twin study challenges oversimplified claims about social media and well-being
Oct 2025, phys.org

6,000 twins in the Netherlands:
  • Small associations were found between social media use and well-being, with most being either negligible or statistically minor.
  • Genetic influences explained up to 72% of the variation in how much time people spend on social media.
  • People with higher well-being tended to use more platforms, but more passively (browsing rather than posting).
  • Those with lower well-being were more likely to post frequently on fewer platforms.

via Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics: Selim Sametoğlu et al, The Association Between Frequency of Social Media Use, Wellbeing, and Depressive Symptoms: Disentangling Genetic and Environmental Factors, Behavior Genetics (2025). DOI: 10.1007/s10519-025-10224-2


Social media research tool can lower political temperature — it could also lead to more user control over algorithms
Nov 2025, phys.org

Key: This research was done "without the direct cooperation of the platform"

Web extension tool coupled with an artificial intelligence large language model that scans posts for antidemocratic and extreme negative partisan sentiments. The tool then re-orders posts on the user's X feed in a matter of seconds:

Antidemocratic attitudes:
  • advocating for extreme measures against the opposing party
  • statements that show rejection of any bipartisan cooperation
  • skepticism of facts that favor the other party's views
  • willingness to forgo democratic principles to help the favored party

Where has this been all these years? Consider, there is often an immediate, unavoidable emotional response to seeing ^this kind of content ... making people feel bad the moment they see it. 

via Stanford's School of Engineering and Universities of Washington and Northeastern: Tiziano Piccardi et al, Reranking partisan animosity in algorithmic social media feeds alters affective polarization, Science (2025). DOI: 10.1126/science.adu5584. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adu5584

Also: Jennifer Allen et al, Platform-independent experiments on social media, Science (2025). DOI: 10.1126/science.aec7388 , www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec7388


Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , ,

Friday, December 20, 2024

Inside the World of the LSD User


The spread of misinformation varies by topic and by country in Europe, study finds
May 2024, phys.org

Researchers analyzed news activity on Twitter (now X) in France, Germany, Italy and the UK from 2019 to 2021, including a focus on news about Brexit, the coronavirus, and the COVID vaccines. Each news source they analyzed was rated as either "reliable" or "questionable" based upon their NewsGuard score.
  • Across all four countries, the vast majority of users only ever consumed reliable news sources on each of the three topics.
  • But in every country and in each topic, there was always a small percentage of users who only ever consumed questionable news sources - with very few people consuming a mix of both reliable and questionable sources.
  • Germany had the highest ratio of questionable news retweets to reliable news retweets on all three topics, with France in second, followed by Italy, and the UK had the lowest proportion of questionable news retweets overall.
  • Italy had the lowest proportion of questionable news retweets for the topic of the coronavirus - but had the highest percentage of people consuming only questionable news sources on Brexit.

"Cultural nuances" will be important when it comes to fighting misinformation.

via Ca' Foscari University of Venice: News and misinformation consumption: A temporal comparison across European countries, PLoS ONE (2024). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0302473

Image credit: 3D printed vacuum system traps dark matter - University of Nottingham - Jun 2024


Study finds avoiding social media before an election has little to no effect on people's political views
May 2024, phys.org

35,000 Facebook and Instagram users who were paid to stay off the platforms in the run-up to Election Day.

I'm thinking about the overall social influence, like if you're not online but your friends are, it's all the same. So if they did this study by taking only the friends of the people chosen, then we would see an effect? (Friendship Paradox)

via Stanford: Gentzkow, Matthew, The effects of Facebook and Instagram on the 2020 election: A deactivation experiment, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2321584121.


Mental disorders may spread in young people's social networks
May 2024, phys.org

Contagion - 700,000 ninth-grade pupils born between 1985 and 1997 from 860 Finnish schools followed for 11 years (largest and most comprehensive so far on the spread of mental disorders in social networks).

The number of classmates diagnosed with a mental disorder was associated with a higher risk of receiving a mental disorder diagnosis later in life.

The connection observed in the study is not necessarily causal. "It may be possible, for instance, that the threshold for seeking help for mental health issues is lowered when there are one or more people in your social network who have already sought help for their problems" (beneficial contagion).

via University of Helsinki: Jussi Alho et al, Transmission of Mental Disorders in Adolescent Peer Networks, JAMA Psychiatry (2024). DOI: 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2024.1126

Dual-species Rydberg array combining rubidium and cesium atoms to enhance quantum computing - BernienLab at University of Chicago - Oct 2024 [link]

Study suggests less conformity leads to more innovation
May 2024, phys.org

These methods reveal something crazy - how easy it could be to manipulate a big part of a population just by doing some very small adjustments to the recommendation algorithms, and the idea of synthetic networks cycling through the real networks as a kind of social regulator.

  • The Matthew effect aka "rich-get-richer effect" increases centralization in the network, which destroys the niches protecting minority opinions, reducing sociodiversity.
  • "Networks that promote sociodiversity have structural features that protect minority opinions"
  • "Unfollowing a few VIPs can help to promote sociodiversity"

via Complexity Science Hub and ETH Zurich: Andrea Musso et al, How networks shape diversity for better or worse, Royal Society Open Science (2024). DOI: 10.1098/rsos.230505


Misleading COVID-19 headlines from mainstream sources did more harm on Facebook than fake news
May 2024, phys.org

They showed thousands of survey participants the headlines from 130 vaccine-related stories - including both mainstream content and known misinformation - and tested how those headlines impacted their intentions to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Researchers also asked a separate group of respondents to rate the headlines across various attributes, including plausibility and political leaning. They matched that against 13,206 vaccine-related URLs and the number of users who viewed each.
  • Misleading content from mainstream news sources - rather than outright misinformation or "fake news" - was the primary driver of vaccine hesitancy on Facebook.
  • "Vaccine-skeptical" content was potentially misleading but not flagged as misinformation by Facebook fact-checkers.
  • One factor reliably predicted impacts on vaccination intentions: the extent to which a headline suggested that the vaccine was harmful to a person's health.
  • The most-viewed was an article was from a well-regarded mainstream news source, and its clickbait" headline was highly suggestive and implied that the vaccine was likely responsible.
  • (That's significant since the vast majority of viewers on social media likely never click out to read past the headline.)
  • Contrary to popular perceptions, the researchers estimated that vaccine-skeptical content reduced vaccination intentions 46 times more than misinformation flagged by fact-checkers.
  • Even though flagged misinformation was more harmful when seen, it had relatively low reach.
  • Gray-area content is less harmful per exposure but is seen far more often, thus it's more impactful overall.
(Also, what does this mean about actual advertising metrics?)

via MIT Sloan School of Management: Jennifer Allen, Quantifying the impact of misinformation and vaccine-skeptical content on Facebook, Science (2024). DOI: 10.1126/science.adk3451.


Advertisers may be inadvertently funding misinformation
Jun 2024, phys.org

(I think we're starting to see a pattern here.)

5,000 websites (1,250 were misinformation websites); 42,000 unique advertisers; nine million instances of advertising companies appearing on news websites from 2019 to 2021. 

The companies advertising on misinformation websites accounted for anywhere from 46% to 82% of overall companies in their respective industries.

Companies that used digital advertisement platforms were 10 times more likely to appear on misinformation websites than those that did not.

Authors propose two low-cost, scalable interventions: 
  • Improve transparency for advertisers about where their ads appear 
  • Make it easier for consumers to identify which companies advertise on misinformation outlets through information disclosures and company rankings

via Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College and Stanford: Wajeeha Ahmad et al, Companies inadvertently fund online misinformation despite consumer backlash, Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07404-1

Entangling pairs of photons using 1.2 micrometer niobium oxide dichloride - Leevi Kallioniemi at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore - Oct 2024 [link]

Study suggests ambivalence and polarized views can promote political violence
Jun 2024, phys.org

Time to get confused! 

Previous research has shown that ambivalence about a political issue typically leads people to avoid taking moderate actions such as voting or donating money in support of that issue.

And that's why these findings for extreme behaviors surprised the researchers.

Here, researchers found that ambivalence can actually lead some people - especially those with polarized views - to be more supportive of extreme actions.

The reason? Ambivalence creates discomfort in those with extreme views by making them feel weak or insecure about their beliefs - and that can lead them to compensate.

"When people have these polarized views on a political topic, but also feel some conflict about that belief - that is really a potent combination."

"Those who are conflicted are more willing to give their money to extreme organizations."

"Those who have extreme views, but still feel conflicted about them, feel a need to prove themselves, to show that their beliefs are real and strong."

via Ohio State University: Joseph Siev, Ambivalent attitudes promote support for extreme political actions, Science Advances (2024). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adn2965.

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Monday, March 20, 2023

Habitual Sharing of Misinformation is Not Inevitable


Feels like somebody's playing hardball:
Study reveals the key reason why fake news spreads on social media
Jan 2023, phys.org

It's the algorithm, stupid. And specifically, algorithms that prioritize engagement:

Upends popular misconceptions that misinformation spreads because users lack the critical thinking skills necessary for discerning truth from falsehood or because their strong political beliefs skew their judgment.

15% of the most habitual news sharers in the research were responsible for spreading about 30% to 40% of the fake news.

"Due to the reward-based learning systems on social media, users form habits of sharing information that gets recognition from others," the researchers wrote. "Once habits form, information sharing is automatically activated by cues on the platform without users considering critical response outcomes, such as spreading misinformation."

The study's conclusions:
  • Habitual sharing of misinformation is not inevitable.
  • Users could be incentivized to build sharing habits that make them more sensitive to sharing truthful content.
  • Effectively reducing misinformation would require restructuring the online environments that promote and support its sharing.

And the best conclusion:
"These findings suggest that social media platforms can take a more active step than moderating what information is posted and instead pursue structural changes in their reward structure to limit the spread of misinformation."

Public Service Announcement:
Business will never do something unless it increases profits, because unlike humans who need air and water and food to live, business needs only profits. Business will never do something that directly inhibits its own profit-generating activities. In this case, social media makes money from "engaging users". To expect them to stop would be to expect a starving mother not to steal food for her children. Government, and regulation, is the immune system of society. In our attempts to maintain the human race as a species, unregulated business is a parasite, not a partner. 

via University of Southern California: Gizem Ceylan et al, Sharing of misinformation is habitual, not just lazy or biased, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2023). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2216614120


True stories can win out on social media, study finds
Feb 2023, phys.org

"A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on." Or at least that's how the saying goes. That's what we thought back in 2018 when we heard the same thing from MIT's Laboratory for Social Machines

It turns out that only held true for Twitter; on Reddit they found the opposite.
The difference? Twitter has no moderators.
And who can blame them; for that kind of money?!

Unpaid social media moderators perform labor worth $3.4 million a year on Reddit alone (June 2022)

via The Ohio State University: Robert M Bond et al, Engagement with fact-checked posts on Reddit, PNAS Nexus (2023). DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad018



Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , ,

Thursday, October 7, 2021

The Disease Model


That's what they call it -- Susceptible, Infected, Recovered. Disease transmission follows a fairly predictable pattern, just ask the covid epidemiologists.


It's about the way things spread within a network; nodes and links. Throw some complexity science in there, and you can model a pretty good simulation of waves of infection, where they spread, how fast. 

But it's not just diseases, which are spread by physical particles floating through the air. Behaviors follow the disease model too, and ideas, and preferences and tastes. They're spreading through people, just like diseases.

That's getting into the science of memetics though. For now, let's keep it more simple than that -- think about how you started using social media, what was your first account and who got you into it, what social networks were you a part of then?

You were being infected.

Honestly I won't even repaste any of this paper, because it does come from the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department, which seems weird for a paper about disease modeling. But it is from Princeton, and that department does cover some pretty crazy stuff, and some of it is partially related. It concluded that Facebook is going through humans like a wave of the Delta variant, but at the same time, losing the people who recover from the disease. They said there won't be anyone left by 2018, because everyone's either still infected, or been recovered. (Luckily for Facebook, bots are infinite!)

And would you look at that, here's Facebook being called out for misleading investors by blending their actual user numbers with those of their Single Users with Multiple Accounts, i.e., among other things, the botnet.

But long before this information was divulged under congressional testimony circa 2021, this paper, from 2014, and generated from even earlier discussions at a 2012 research symposium, predicted this already -- they followed the disease model on a social network. It makes you wonder why there weren't other studies like it:

Epidemiological modeling of online social network dynamics, John Cannarell, Joshua A. Spechler. Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University. arxiv:1401.4208v1 [cs.SI] 17 Jan 2014. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.4208v1.pdf
 
Think about the last few songs you downloaded (do people still?). Where did you hear them, from who?

They infected you.

Music download patterns found to resemble infectious disease epidemic curves
Sep 2021, phys.org

"The researchers found that downloads from the site very much matched patterns of diseases spreading. With infectious diseases, one-to-one contact is needed. With songs...hundreds of people might respond by downloading it." -link

"We draw conclusions about song popularity within specific genres based on estimated SIR parameters. In particular, we argue that faster spread of preferences for Electronica songs may reflect stronger connectivity of the ‘susceptible community’, compared with the larger and broader community that listens to more common genres." -link

via McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind in Canada: Dora P. Rosati et al, Modelling song popularity asacontagious process, Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences (2021). DOI: 10.1098/rspa.2021.0457

Even ideas can be infectious. They're reproducing in our minds, after all. Memetically transmitted diseases, following the S-I-R model. Dairying was an idea that changed the genome of a lot of humans. And olfactory receptors make up the biggest family of your genome, like 2%, and they're changing all the time, and sometimes because of cultural reasons, like bacon. 

Probably the greatest example of an idea being infectious is the idea against vaccinations, because technically, under the memetic paradigm, the virus, any virus whether measles, covid, or syphilis, is figuring out how to fight the scientific advancement of vaccinations by infecting our minds with antivax thoughts -- they're evolving in more ways than one! (See below for more on this, but be careful, you may want to inoculate your brain first.)

Post Post:
If you're into this topic, prepare to go deep, very deep:
Adaptive Metamemetics, Infectious Disease Networks, and Ludwig Fleck's Thought Collectives
March 2020, Network Address

I had no idea how prescient this would be when I wrote it, but studying Ludwig Fleck prior to a global vaccination campaign wasn't a bad idea.

Post Post Script:
They don't say it but I will, claim of memetic supremacy right here:
[I call it Memetic Supremacy] Parity and time reversal elucidate both decision-making in empirical models and attractor scaling in critical Boolean networks. via Pennsylvania State University, Broad Institute, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Semmelweis University, and Center for Complex Network Research. Science Advances (2021). https://advances.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abf8124
 
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , ,

Monday, October 16, 2017

So Long Stabranja


Maybe it's all this Equifax bonanza stuff going down, but I thought a post about identity and security and automated account attacks would be appropriate.

I was very excited to be able to see my facebook account hacked in a (perhaps) methodical, slow attack that has left me unable to verify my own identity, i.e., access the account. I say perhaps because, perhaps, there is no method-making person behind this; maybe it's just a program following instructions. Regardless, I got to watch it happen, and I'd like to share.

In preface, it should be noted that here at Network Address, we certainly don't present ourselves as digital liberators, that is, computer hackers. However, the world that surrounds the activities of such folk are very interesting to us. Listening to Off the Hook on 99.5 WBAI and attending the HOPE conference at the Hotel Pennsylvania are a great source of the material seen on this site. If interested yourself, please look into these, they're very much worth it (The next HOPE is summer 2018, check it out...https://hope.net/).

Back to the matter. I wonder how common this is. I plan to do some research on this dating site that requires your fb as entry. I have many facebook accounts, and many from back in the day before you had to use real names. This one is Stabranja Bones, part of a project from  almost 10 years ago, about hick-hop (at the time this was something we made up, but it's apparently a thing now) and bronix (same, although it was called Brocabulary by reddit). So I access this dating site using one of my facebook accounts, unfortunately, a favorite that I'm sad to see taken away from me. Although, I'm glad I got to see it happen firsthand.

I'm on this dating site for a couple days, that's all I need. You know how these sites work, btw - if you leave your account vacant it will be used as a bot. There's no such thing as deactivating or deleting an account. Content has value and will not go to waste, no matter what you think or want. (Remember, when things are free, you're the one giving the value, not taking it.) We used to call this a zombie I guess, like you killed the account but someone else uses the empty shell, the carcass, to impersonate a real person. This makes the site look like they have more people than they really do, which makes the prospects of finding a date better, which makes the site more attractive, which makes it more likely that you'll pay for a subscription after your free trial. (If you're new to all this, just look into the Ashley Madison scandal, "angels" and "engagers" and etc.) So, I get into the habit of at least deleting all the uploaded pictures on the dating site account, posting new picutres of people that are certainly not me, and then "deactivating" it. I did this.

About a week later, I get a message from a friend of mine, one of the few people I have connected to the hacked fb account, and a person who, unlike myself, is active on facebook and notices these things - he asks me, in real life via text message, if I changed the profile picture on the facebook page. I did not. I assume that my tooling around with the dating site via the fb site had caused some inadvertent change. In the back of my mind, because I don't trust anything, I thought there was a possiblity that everything was already compromised.

About a week or two later I check back into the dating site, just to check up on things, since I was suspicious. I see a chubby Middle Eastern man has taken the place of my profile picture (which until then was a photo of a college friend of mine in drag), and yes, the dating site is still using my profile/account, but with this new chubby Middle Eastern guy as the primary avatar. I log back into fb and delete this guy's pic, and reinstate my old profile pic.

A month goes by. I then get an email stating that my password has been changed, if I didn't do that, I should check into it. I do. They're asking me to confirm my identity. They show me some pictures of "friends" to test whether I know them or not. Hmmm. Some of these people I don't recgnize (I only had 3 friends, this was a bogus account we did for fun, after all.) I fail the test. I try again. I fail again. I don't know these people. I'm locked out of the account forever.

I go back to my email account (a second account that I use for bogus accounts etc.). Gmail separates "social" emails to another page, so I haven't been seeing the updates from fb etc. I go into this "social" page of emails and see that my fb avatar has been accumulating friends for the past month. I imagine that friend requests are sent out by the hundreds, and someone, be they either real or not, is accepting. Now I have a whole bunch of "friends" who I don't know. And if this is going on for a month, and I'm not doing anything about it, then whoever is doing this (see me giving agency to an algorithm here?) is like "great, nobody's at the wheel, let's take control." My password gets changed.

I recall some time ago, my credit card company called me about potential fraud. Have you been to Florida recently, they asked. No. That's what we thought, you have some fraudulent charges, we're going to take them off and give you a new card number. How did you know, I asked. They bought hard hats from a Home Depot in Florida, and we thought that was strange. ... I thought it was strange that they thought that was strange. Anyway, they know this stuff better than I do, because once someone has stolen your credit card number, the first thing they do is to test it; they buy some stuff and see if they get flagged. They see if there's anyone behind the wheel. If not, it's all their's.

And now Stabranja is all theirs, whoever they are.


Afterword

The next time you hear something like "Facebook has reached x million users," be aware that these are not real people. They're empty shells. Their "likes" are empty as well. Also, the next time you are deciding whether it's worth it to pay for a subscription to that dating site, many of those people are not real. That is to say, they may have been real at one time, but they are no longer; they are also empty shells. 

Post Script

etymology of Stabranja Bones:
Stabroned (brain + stoned) + ganja. Yup. Producer of Brody Lambone, hick-hop sensation.

The Semibots Are Coming
Network Address, 2015
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)