The Social Dilemma #RB23

hello everyone in this episode we'll discuss the recent netflix documentary the social dilemma that discussed various aspects and what's going wrong with the with social networks and this is a topic on which lei and me have like a significant part of our book deals with and which was um which was uh very important in the recent years so as we would like to say always like when we tell people we do research on ai safety they think about killer robots and so on and always tell them no no it's or more focused on or not on the killer robot or but on the recommended recommender system that that shapes your life and and your decisions and your opinions and um it's good that this documentary appeared because now more and more people are finding that arguments like ours which two years ago even even at circles academic circles of ai safety were not um were considered as exotic are now gaining gaining momentum uh so so the documentary invites a few former employees of large tech companies uh to to to give test testimonies unfortunately there is no actual employee which we can understand because when you are hired by these companies you have to sign non-disclosures non-disclosure agreements and so on uh and but but also unfortunately like the set of the set of people that were invited is not a really a diverse set of opinions of what we can have from from these uh even from former employers and in particular many people have left like quite a while and none almost none of the interviewers the people who were interviewed have left recently so none of them have like a recent insight of what's there uh so for example for instance like at least two of them left in 2010 like in the digital age a decade the change of facebook between 2010 and today is just so huge that maybe the insights you have some of the insights are not relevant anymore maybe you need new insights etc so maybe like luige uh would tell tell us so what's what's the real problem what's what's the problem here why why people decided that we needed this documentary so yeah so the commentary tries to identify what is the problem it's a it's very complicated because there is a lot of dimension to to that problem one of the main points that they identify is the business model on which large scale social media and social networks are are built and uh this business model uh relies on advertisement a lot and on maximizing uh the time users spend on these platforms and and getting as much user attention as possible so this led to the famous saying of uh if you're not paying then you are the product and this documentary explained this thing uh quite better because before before watching the documentary i i knew about it i heard it from many places already but uh after watching the documentary i better understood so what uh what what the way to think about is that advertisers are paying these social networks and the goal of this uh investment on advertisement for social network is to change slightly the behavior of all the users of the social networks so that their products are sold better so what these social networks have learned to do is as much as possible being able to influence uh the behavior of their users to sell these changes of behaviors to the to the advertiser company and so they say you know quoting uh what they say in the documentary is uh gradually and imperceptibly changing how you behave what you think and who you are that is the product um and this advertising this advertising model is also uh put in part with the the power that this uh social network uh built uh specifically a computing power they own a thousand of super computers that have a sole role to uh to be able to anticipate and predict our behavior and and compute what will change us the most so that they can get as much benefit on their uh given their business model as possible there is this nice story in the documentary where you see one user and a virtual clone of that user which uh is like a puppet and we see three person that uh symbolize the super computers that are computing the recommendations from social network and deciding what to show on the on the train on the on on the page of social network what to scroll for and uh it's really uh crazy how in how these pictures the the way social networks uh pick what to show us in order to manipulate us as much as possible yeah from a purely uh cinematographic viewpoint and also like pedagogical viewpoint i think this is the the best idea of this uh documentary because a lot of this is very classic but like the idea of i mean classic in people who think about these technologies but the idea of replacing this algorithm this recommendation algorithm this very abstract recommendation algorithm by three people who do the reasoning out loud of what the algorithm is doing i think it really better highlights like all the way it is that people see uh for instance what they see on their news feeds and it really contrasts with them it really on the lines one of the prime of the the systems is that people don't realize that a lot of the things that they're exposed to is the result of an algorithm uh and they won't talk about ai artificial intelligence i think as many said in the in the introduction a lot of people will be thinking about robots and stuff like this but the the algorithms the ais that are the most impactful today that influence billions of people every day are the ones that are well in these new phones that interact with us every day and the danger of ours is not this very spectacular thing that we really recognize once we see them it's more like this really sort of thing that has invaded our lives and we don't even realize that we're constantly acting are interacting with uh with that's exactly they say in the documentary that ai is already controlling the world and uh it's quite easy to agree with that uh given the scale of decisions that algorithms are taking every day so maybe just like to repeat an argument we bring a lot we used to bring for the past several years like for the past four years and in the book and some of the videos in this channel like uh most people don't really realize the scale uh yeah it's like you can give the youtube number again they yeah so it's like two billion uh hours of watch time per day for uh you know one billion hours of watch time for two billion users a half an hour for for 2 billion people on earth 70 percent of which according to the for the cpu the chief product officer or the former chief product officer of youtube 70 of these videos were recommended by the algorithm yeah and uh wow so so most of the videos are recommended by the algorithm and it has to be an algorithm that does a lot of the work because like the skills are huge like billions of recommendations per day there's 500 hours of new video per minute on youtube and they have to be screened for um for copyrights and for pedophilia or like very so spring uh maybe an argument also we hear less we here we don't hear a lot not even maybe in the documentary yeah uh so that's something we say in the book is that uh the technical challenge is way way like beyond imagination so uh in like good intention is not enough so you have a good intention i would like to filter let's say child pornography and uh and doing it in an automated manner when you have an influx of 500 hours of videos per minute like 30 000 hours due to 30 000 hours of video per hour so if you know a bit about statistics and fraud detection so most of the performance fraud detection algorithms are very costly and they take time like sometimes they're like quadratic they don't scale very well with the inputs so running them on videos does is not practical so it is there is a technical challenge that is often that is often um shaded by the discussion on the intention intentional challenge so of course there is an intentional challenge you need to have good intentions or otherwise you you just screw the word but even if you have good intentions that's not enough and it you can't implement good intentions just because you have good intentions yeah yeah i think this is one of the most important uh crux of disagreements uh that we may have with the documentary is that the documentary insists a lot on the incentives problem and if you think about this uh well we can discuss this uh uh at greater length but it's actually not very specific to the advertisement uh business model like if you think of netflix or of china for instance they don't have these uh like selling ads incentives but they're still like the same problems yeah netflix like we mentioned that in the book the ceo of netflix or the chief let's see i'll say that their main competitor is sleep and uh so they're aware that like they're really competing with sleep because like people would you go to sleep or would you watch another episode and they're not even ashamed at least not sufficiently ashamed of this to prevent the ceo from seeing outlook like this not only that not only that so for example on twitter you see a lot of the like a lot of uh a lot of the community managers of netflix i guess they are incentivized to do that some teenager would tweet oh tomorrow i have school at eight and uh or watch netflix and then netflix would code the tweet with the official netflix account and like make a funny joke about the fact that the teenager is really addicted then the teenager she or he would end up watching another episode or or just like the netflix like co tweeting and saying we are not responsible of your uh like you really have to go to to bed it's funny but uh it's funny but um i found it odd that netflix didn't like the the documentary was produced by netflix so i would have loved it there was at least a part of like self-critique like like self-reflection on what netflix also faces as an addiction problem yeah yeah just to say that the incentives prime i think the documentary is a bit narrow by saying that the problem is advertisement i think this is not uh like it's just like these things are extremely influential and whenever something is extremely influential but there is going to there's going to be a lot of incentives and so we need you you have this internet point but it's only part of the problem uh if you want to solve the problem i think as media said there's a big technical challenge and we actually need in addition to to fixing the incentives problems we need also i think a massive investment into uh better understanding the problem better providing providing better solutions in research essentially in century because like the moderation of all the information that goes through the internet is something that's really critical and if we don't have like the top people in the world and maybe thousands and maybe even hundreds of thousands of people uh working on this issue uh yeah like the good intentions will not be enough so yeah i would have wished to see the documentary a lot more so conveying this message of saying that yeah if you are interested in this problem if you are especially if you are a philosopher sociologist or if you are computer scientist definitely or even mathematician well try to to to to study the problem and find out what uh what contribution you could make because we need a lot more contributions to solve these points uh another aspect of the problem that's also mentioned in the documentary is the program of misinformation they give some numbers for example the fact that some study revealed that fake news spread six times faster than a true news uh that uh using fake news you can make more money on social networks simply because of the higher engagement that uh yeah that is uh that's come from it so somehow the the way social networks are built today is uh gives a bias towards a increased increased number of fake news which yeah is something that we don't want and people might think quickly that it doesn't uh it doesn't matter so much but unfortunately this uh these messages that people are uh are shown uh influenza behaviors in the in real life so there are plenty of examples of people going out and destroying 5g towers because of this information and a lot of other inventor the who mentioned that uh vaccine hesitancies due to a misinformation social network was a one critical health issue um so one thing i i do want to because that's another i think it's interesting to talk about the disagreement like i think we mostly agree with a lot of the things that the documentary said but one thing again that you can notice that the prime of fake news is not only about like these uh algorithms trying to maximize uh for advertisements or for or for watch time uh there are like through emails or through whatsapp like you have these systems where there's like much less uh algorithmic uh uh recommendation or moderation and uh you do have a lot of fake news that that circulates arguably a lot faster like it's harder to have video about this of course but uh the prime of misinformation is not only the algorithm it it is partly the algorithm but it's not only the algorithm and the problem of trying to uh either remove or at least less we do recommend misinformation and to promote quality or information this is a very very difficult problem and uh we we need to arguably solve it at some point like if you want to address uh many of the big changes of the years to come like the correct literation for instance uh climate change uh the next pandemic because maybe uh koved is arguably cute in a sense uh well it's very very bad but it's not that deadly like you could imagine something a lot deadlier in the years to come so we need to prepare for all of these and this requires better uh more quality information uh people more prepared uh for follower of this yeah that's a that's one thing uh tristana raises in the documentary that he says if we can't agree on what's true then we are toast uh citing most of the challenges that you said later the next pandemi climate change and other things that could come up in the future yeah yeah so i think i've heard christian house saying that his main motivation for trying to make uh social medias better was climate change and i think it's a connection that no that's not made enough i think uh if you want to protect the environment i think the best thing you can do right now is trying to one of the best thing or most effective way to combat climate change is to make sure that there's better quality information circulating on social medias about climate change because it's a very complicated topic and um like there's this one question is there climate change and that's only part of the prime and can ask many more questions like for instance uh how important is it to reduce meat consumption uh what is the impact of nuclear energy and on all of these topics there's a lot a lot of quite information that's not promoted enough arguing yeah so the next problem that they raised in the documentary is the problem of political polarization and manipulation so i think manipulation is also something that uh is not relevant in terms of the advertisement model so it's a it's a problem that arise from uh from others so simply that this social network have huge influence because they show content to billions of users every day so simply for this reason they will be uh some actors will try to manipulate them because they want to have control on what information is this this manipulation often is uh as an annotation as a political orientation yeah like one example uh just imagine how bad uh mass manipulation and political polarization is there's this example of myanmar for instance so in the north of myanmar there's this ethnic community called the rohingyas and they have been well persecuted based on misinformation and well sort of racism and this has led to a genocide like a lot of uh i think it was like uh tens of thousands of people died something like this and hundreds of like 700 000 people refugees about a million refugees i think the the figures but this is like huge uh and this like originated from a lot of misinformation circulating on facebook uh over 900 000 refugees after fled their homes a million a million refugees and some like depending on the numbers you can find like the the united nations uh high committee on on on refugees like this like recognizes at least uh like order uh the order of one million yeah and it's important here maybe to say that that facebook acknowledged that uh it failed to act and most importantly is after pressure from the u.n but not only it said it's failed to act it recognized that it's also actively dismissed uh calls for action from uh human rights groups so here like we clearly have like an incentive problem not only a technical problem yeah but what's interesting is like the problem is has been recognized i acknowledge at least by facebook which is uh quite a big step forward so hopefully if like more of these messages uh go out there uh then it's going to be easier also to put pressure on on facebook like if even facebook acknowledges that this is a problem it's it's easier to incentivize facebook and people within facebook to take care of this problem seriously even though like uh it's hard like and lately there's been uh some uh sophie zhang former employer of facebook who who or through memos that should not have been leaked but like essentially like the bottom line is uh she she strongly believes and she was in the inside that this is a completely dismissed like too way too dismissed at least within facebook so far and she said this especially for uh like smaller countries for which if there's some disaster it's less likely to make uh uh the front pages of newspapers and uh this is again a bit of an incentive uh structural problem because like within facebook there's this public relation team and they're trying to uh avoid uh like uh public uh relation disasters and if it's like a small country they are much less incentivized than it is if it is a a rich country it's not even a matter of size of the country it's more like whether it's like how likely it is to be uh talked about uh in the new york times for instance well all these problems are proving to be uh exacerbated in the coming weeks we're talking about weeks now uh in for the usa so yeah while we're recording this we're like 40 days away from the u.s election yeah so the day before we were recording this i hope would be fast on on editing the video and uploading it so the day we were recording this like the the yesterday uh vladimir putin so this was reported in reuters vladimir putin invited the u.s to find a deal like a peace treaty some form of peace treaty on digital misinformation so he said like i invite like the u.s to sign a treaty where each of us commits to stop doing digital misinformation and in electoral interference so so you could see this as a at least an origin that they do they do it i know that they know they can do it yeah and uh an invite invitation to just like sign a deal and he compared this deal to the 1972 deal between the ussr like the soviet union and the united states of america so they're like there is a raise in awareness of the scale of the problem not only of the scale of the problem that the problem could become out of control so because if i'm a big state and i can use this tool why i would sign a deal with another big state to stop using the tour so arguably because like from a just game theoretic point of view i know that like this deal i'm like it's better for me to sign this deal with the us if i'm russia and vice versa because because if i don't sign it like i would not only face the states of the united states or vice versa of russia but i would face an intractable uh phenomenon like wherever there is a group of five people with enough money they could start attacking me like last year facebook twitter reported the misinformation campaign originating from saudi arabia and the united arab emirates and also egypt targeting an arab audience that was successful in reaching 14 million people quite effectively like in the sense that uh in these 14 million people i think they only counted people who like followed the facebook page uh like actively like the content or not like not just not just uh the the the i don't think they were counting so for example if i like the page and lei sees the contents because i like the page i don't think leo is counted so so it's like real interaction i think which is a big scale and even even if it was indirect interaction because the cost of the campaign was only a hundred thousand dollars a hundred thousand dollars is like the cost of this is this is an example we have in our book uh it's it's less than the cost of an electoral campaign in a small city in morocco or algeria like a poor country so with this budget you can reach 14 million people so i guess if you multiply by 10 you can reach larger scales and this budget is within the reach of like uh it's it's within the reach of of a median median uh a median network network of let's say what a french citizen so imagine if like uh whenever you find the five motivated people to put a hundred thousand dollars together to attack a state they can do it uh so it will scale and it will become out of control so there is an incentive for big states to sign this kind of agreement and i think it's a good thing for the world to so that they sign these kind of agreements and then but then like to enforce it it's also challenging because you have to control how it's happening but now it's good but just recognizing that this kind of cyber warfare is one of the main concerns that we should have for a lot of institutions i think this can change a lot of uh the way we think about these problems and especially i think in the end what i care most is much more investment into solutions and then maybe like just like to mention this like the point in the book we talk about the democratization of cyber warfare so just we just gave an example like it's within the reach of small groups of individuals to start attacking states or at least like start attacking significant portion of the state's opinion so like it is really important we start looking at solutions and also uh anticipating anticipating how this will evolve maybe i can say something about that but yeah one other disagreement i would say we may have with the some some at least some interviewers in the documentary is that i think there's a lot of the like the documentary almost presented it as a consensus that we should regulate uh these platforms and that regulation is the only way to go i think this is a dangerous method to believe that it is the only way to go um like for sure like we need to to to reason about like how do we better control the system so like regulation is a desirable thing but like if you want an efficient and uh uh regression is probably going to have to go through at least the government but probably through uh this uh the congress and stuff like this and it's going to involve a lot of people uh and whenever you have a decision that's made by a lot of people is going to especially if it's get politicized and like these days like a lot of topics are very politicized in the u.s especially throughout the world but particularly in the us and yeah there are many ways it can go wrong uh i'd say and if even if it doesn't it's going to take years like these things do not happen uh like that and we have an example of social law uh in the european union or the gdpr the general uh data protection uh regulation uh this was written up in 2012 and it took six years for it to be uh enforced in uh in the european union uh six years is quite fast like in the law in general uh and it has to take a long time for everyone to agree but also to make sure that the law he really works like he is meaningful and applies in practice but six years in terms of uh artificial intelligence algorithms social networks uh in this world six years is like uh this is the lifetime of a company like uh of many companies so it may be way too long and the way these social medias and the algorithms are going to work in six years may be actually very different from the way it is now so just imagine back like in 2014 even uh like six years ago trying to predict the algorithms that we have today it was extremely hard and to make laws that were uh that fits the way algorithms are today is extremely hard so i think there are caveats that need to be taken into account when you're thinking about regulation and uh well all in all it suggests that it's not going to be sufficient and there's even a risk that it fails or that it becomes counterproductive uh because some uh some politician like push in for something that was actually not very useful i think it's dangerous to think that we should put all our energy into regulation uh because uh like one consequence uh uh i have in mind about this is that uh top scientists top engineers top top managers in these companies will say well we're just going to wait for the regulation to come and i think this is like uh like if you have to wait five years i think there are huge risks within this uh uh time frame and instead i think we should be proactive as of today uh anyone who can and we could we should encourage like managers uh uh with heart but uh employees uh software developers and also researchers within these companies and outside of these companies to just like tackle the prime themselves uh so taking the whole prime is very hard but trying to to promote ideas that go this way to uh work on some potential partial solutions to better understand the challenges to uh like ask for journalists to to better to inquire what's going on in these companies what are the impacts on the users that there's a lot of stuff to be done that are not regulations and i wish one more program that is mentioned in uh in the documentary is the prime of mental health and how especially a young user are affected by these platforms so some statistics that don't directly show that this platform are causing suicide but we can see an increase in young girls of suicide that is a threefold between 2010 and now and this is a quite scary because one thing we can uh one thing we see obviously change between the the life of uh younger young girls in 2010 and now is the increased exponential increase of social medias other statistics that are not not very happy to look at is that young people get a less driving list license and also have a less romantic relationship than they used to and uh and we can build a we can understand this as a as a side effect of spending us so much time and attention on a social network that are extremely addictive and in the documentary they show this example of a of a young girl that spends her time taking photo of herself posting it on social media so that you can receive uh likes from friends from people that follow her and that tell her she's beautiful and the few times that uh she received negative comments we see that it's extremely strongly affect our emotions and we can understand this is the case of a lot of young people using social medias uh there is uh there is the same trend happening with a tick tock that is set to make you become extremely famous from uh within a split second without you even realizing that you go from 10 people following you to a hundred thousand people liking or commenting on on your posts and photos well there is a lot of research about about this but maybe there needs to be even more research about this because clearly social medias have changed the way we interact with a lot of different people and uh yeah there are a lot of very concerning data uh especially about like uh for instance depression uh suicide uh there's also i think a concern to be had about uh like for instance uh the increase of loneliness can have also all sorts of other impacts as well uh maybe an increase of aggressivity uh so there's a great video by quotes act about this and then this can create all other sorts of primes so uh i think like mental health is extremely important in itself but it also has impact on other aspects uh better like more curiosity and because it is extremely negatively impacted by all of this and this hinders our ability to to to discuss complicated topics such as climatic change yeah so again i think this is a very concerning uh aspect of the social medias um i just wanted to mention something here like on on mental not like mental health psychological part of of social media but just like in this part on psychological aspects and the previous part of polarization so i've been i've been running an amateurish research for more than a month now on a group like on a network of fake profiles like clearly like fake profiles which looks like states a state run or at least state paid for clearly like clearly uh motivated uh by a state engine like it has the scale of something that is actually even state either state run or paid for by a state uh something like an emerging phenomenon that i'm like this is still like observations and i would really like researchers who have the data if they ever watch this video to to like test it which is now like beyond the classic trend of fake profiles to harass people and tweet at people or like promote an opinion that's like a classic way to do to do bots and trolling um remark in a new trend where you create an army of trolls not just to harass people or tweet to them but to give them likes for things you want them to say more and not for things you don't want to say so like instead of creating fake profiles that like let's say louie and lei would be on twitter and they are known i am a fake profile so if i'm starting to promote my ideology nobody would believe me because now people are more and more aware that there are trolls so people would look at your date of creation of september 20 2020 probably a fake profile i would dismiss so instead of me tweeting as a fake profile i would look at louie and lay and if lee if if louis starts saying something that said that i want to be promoted i would give like i would bring my army of trolls and send to louis 30 likes or like 20 year tweets and then when louis is not talking about my ideology i would not give louis any like or retweet and what i'm observing like over a month they're like there's evidence that some people start to be nudged by this army of truth so which is more efficient because if twitter detects my army of trolls i lose the army of pros but i don't lose louis who is a real human i would just bring another army for the next month and then start nudging louis again so louis becomes my tool and i really i really like i i it's not my field this is clearly not my theoreticians like mathematics but i would really uh like to see more research into this new trend of using trolls to influence people by sending them sending their likes and retweets yeah yeah and you can imagine like uh if there are like uh hundreds or thousands of fake accounts that do this you have people who will receive like hundreds or thousands of likes uh which is like for most users from me at least it's a huge amount of likes and you you even if you try not to care about this but most people care about this by default i guess but even if you try not to care about this it's very hard to be neutral about this like you you always receive this dopamine as is discussed in this documentary and it's like research and this changes uh this is like uh reinforcement uh learning and this is and this really changes uh people's behavior and it's because like you see like not only like a hundred of likes is a lot for an average like just five 15 20. and like when you look at the likes you find the same army show like i've been following a group for more than a month as i said now it's like recurrent i see a suspicious tweet that is from an unknown person a real person i know that got suddenly like uh 20 or sweets and 20 likes and then i go to the list and i see like i recognize all the lists of trolls that are already here like uh that i've already in my list of of of trolls and uh like with with 20 likes 20 retweets you can not only nudge people you can also make people famous like you can if you start it's like an account starts having 100 likes or tweets people start thinking it is relevant because of exposition bias like yeah expose it to this account that is this has like lots of likes and retweets and then the accounts of louis like this hypothetical real person i'm trying to influence starts getting more real people following louis so not only i can nudge louis but i can make louie famous and then use louis even more yeah well i really would like like this is something clearly not researched like there's a lot of research on the classic use of fake accounts and um try to get in touch like this is like my email in my website or something like we can discuss i have like like preliminary i have like a data set that you can maybe use to start and then grow and maybe maybe you can just show that my my hypothesis is wrong i have i have like one month of one month of daily uh like uh about 10 hours per day spent on this and uh enough evidence to believe it yeah yeah so it's still preliminary research but it sounds like something so effective that i would be surprised if uh like no like disinformation uh campaign has used it yet so finally in the in the documentary they discuss also what are solutions to that problem so they mentioned previously regulations and why there are very slow processes that uh that are likely not to be useful enough in due time also the the goal of such regulations would be to change the incentives of these uh platforms but we also discussed that uh the incentives and the money from advertisement is not the only problem and there are other problems caused by this like manipulation by other actors for example they discuss about the possibility of deleting your social medias and accounts and that is a something that sounds okay but might also not be desirable simply for all the positive aspects and all the good things that these social media brings um we can think in terms of if we want to make social media better imagine and uh use them to fight uh the challenges of humanity like climate change or the next pandemic then they are extremely amazing to uh to propagate the right kind of useful information that people need to hear and understand in order to to change the behavior to to act properly in a in for the challenges we are concerned about and other things that are amazing this is saying the documentary is for example being able to access uber and with just one click uh having a taxi coming in front of your home and going where you want to go within less than one minute is a is an extremely nice technology to have access yeah to think the there's a lot of benefits of quality people who care about these things and uh uh to to do a lot of good through social medias because you can have you can influence a lot of people and promote better quality information so i think it's important for many people to to to stay on social media but there's definitely a risk of mental health issues and all the things we've discussed and so i think it it's better like to promote a health more healthier use of of social medias and uh one thing uh well i'm sure like at least future christopher hayes mentioned him mentioned it at some point but it was cut from the documentary but one thing i would have been would have been nicer nice to see is like there are many tricks you can you can implement to have a healthier use of the social medias one of them is like adding apps that for instance block social medias uh for a given period of time so i personally use this for instance i think it's very uh useful and effective uh removing notifications i think many notifications are like extremely harmful like you have all the time so yeah and just like caring more like having a yeah having a better relations essentially with your phone trying to avoid the addiction while using exporting for the the good parts you can do using a lot of this i think would have been a nicer message to to send yeah another thing that uh that i would really like to see uh more in the world is discussions around the ethics of a recommender system and uh agreeing that uh what recommended system pick to show to uh or to billions of users is an ethical question even though every decisions small decision taken separately does not have a large impact but because it's concerns billions of decisions and billions of hours of human attention every day together this makes it for extreme extremely important ethical okay like beyond what you just said which was covered in the documentary and also we find uh like like this is something maybe original we should then can promote and we are actively going within which is like when we say like using social networks for good yeah people like you mentioned good like example the classical examples but if we think in the context of pandemic uh social networks were not used as much as they could be as a cure and as a cure as a as a medical as a medical uh device as amazing as a medical device like um treatment uh yeah intervention intervention as a medical intervention and uh so people like people when we hear like it talks about like ai and health and health or very over hyped because like what people think of when they say ai and health are like devices i mean your robots like plugged to your blood and then maybe analyzing your metabolism to your sweat and connected to whatever and this is arguably uh not yet delivered like it's under delivering compared to the premises and the number of talks and and and and hype over it and conferences but we don't mention uh social networks enough in when we say ai just like group vendor system just like showing you uh in the 20th century the world health organization was was was very efficient in that like the i grew up in morocco i grew up in morocco and in my childhood in the 90s a significant part of the tv advertisements were was was health advertisement like public public health advertising like about washing hands or about a vaccination of kids or about uh like uh yeah like hygiene and and things like that or like the danger of antibiotics in france you have this campaign about like eating fruits and vegetables five days per day like five times per day after every advertisement of a snack or of food products we can think of a world where social networks would be encouraged or not obliged uh for like obliged to have a fraction let's say five percent of the ads they say this they show uh free ads for for for for health uh ministries and for example like an example in the the early kovids that spot like videos that were produced by health ministries over the world were not as popular on youtube as the regular youtube activity like the regular uh entertainment and the youtube starts acting like they they acted rather quickly you have this whole profit banner and like a disclaimer etc but the things could be done better like you could promote more proactively but then again the caveat is that the challenge like it's a task because if you start promoting let's say every state run video like if you detect that this is a youtube channel of the states and start promoting all the content and then some states are promoting fake cures so so the task for youtube is not easy neither so i don't know what's happening inside i don't have a lot of i don't have i have zero insights about how they did it but i can imagine that they might have thought about it and then said that then what if a state is run by a dictator that starts that starts promoting unhealthy behavior or any healthy cures so so putting an algorithmic promotion like it's saying to the algorithm if you detect that this video is from the states then probably it's safer to promote it you end up maybe promoting bad content so it's not it's not easy yeah again it's very difficult for problem and we need a lot more brilliant people uh working on this problem trying to figure out what would be good recommendation algorithms that are robust and robustly beneficial yeah but but there's a line of research that uh gets more and more like there's a growing research both within these companies but but also in academia who care more and more about all of these issues so there has been a paper recently called ethical challenges of recruitment assistance for instance that really highlights this problem and yeah i think this should be given a lot more importance than it is uh currently given both from journalists and these companies but also from scientists themselves think it's all still often frowned upon within science to be talking about uh these issues and uh i think it's time to that more people tackled them i don't want to make the episode longer than it is yeah i think it's already quite hard there are many things to add i think we will have uh several other episodes we will talk about this line of research because like we were personally involved in it somehow we wrote a book on it uh two years ago this was out in 2019 uh we are writing a paper on it now like on how to use social networks as a medical intervention and uh so we'll have another episode to talk about this like the paper that i mentioned i will just put a link below and uh yeah we will like there are several other episodes of the upcoming episodes we touch on the topic of social networks and how how we could make them work for good actually not just pointing what goes wrong yeah like they're like easy like the easy solutions of like the later accounts delayed this delayed that uh like published a tradition like when when the cambridge energy scandal was out in 2018 there was a campaign to delete facebook accounts in 2018 and actually i don't like to like this is my personal opinion i i'm not i'm not i'm not comfortable with what facebook does today but i still believe it's not the best thing to do because if that was to to leave like to delete the accounts like or to give it because we need like there's like a significant billion scale fraction of people using facebook and it's like a tiny fraction of us leaves facebook and it was just like decrease the amount of pressure done by people who have enough information and educational background to put efficient pressure on facebook so i'll rather like pressure facebook than leave facebook unless it disappears which is another question like the thing is like it's there and people are using it and like many groups like especially like in developing countries for some people it's like their main way to organize and socialize and communicate like for them it's like some people equate it to the internet which is too strange but and it's like that so and uh they will still be influenced by facebook so um uh so like it's an easy fix personally it's maybe like the best thing to do for your personal health to leave facebook but then if you want to have a positive impact on the people remaining on facebook maybe it's not it's not the best thing to do but but again if there is a threshold of people leaving facebook clearly that's a good signal and facebook will be pushed to react but so so just so talking about like the easy solution like delete this delete that we're not like uh like we can clearly go beyond the deletes and not delete and not only that and that's something the the documentary was not um was not good at which is talking about like all all the good things that happened since 2018 all the efforts and like the massive efforts the teams that have been growing uh in all of these companies almost all of these companies like for example the twitter team like just like the twitter team the twitter safety team is they are overwhelmed with work like for example i personally um struggle to get them reacts to when i like uh find like a state-run operation like a network of perfect but then i just recently learned that a major group of misinformation in europe which was established like it's like they are like a major group of people more famous than me more professional than me that this is their job and even then they struggle have this twitter team uh react quickly because not because just like maybe because they don't care about some countries and that's another problem another problem but also because they're overwhelmed with what's happening in the us like someone told me i've been trying to reach them since april like like they're overwhelmed like what's happening in the u.s so maybe like my opinion is that all of these teams in all of these companies are still under dimension like they still can be larger than what they think they are they should be like you can still multiply the the number of people working in these teams by 5 or 10 or even 20 and you will still need more people given the the the amount of the the scale of the the challenge the ceo of twitter recognized that this week like this like this week when we were registering like recording this episode he said that like so like the biggest challenge facing twitter is misinformation but again like as much as like they are not responsive and they are overwhelmed they are also very transparent and one good thing to say about the twitter safety team compared to for example the facebook tv team is that they are rather more transparent and since they are more transparent researchers have more input from them and and also since they are like when they react like even if like there's a company's information campaign that is small scaled in twitter but large scaled on facebook you can you can go through the public discussion on twitter and get insights about this misinformation but it goes under the radar of facebook so one way like i discussed with people working on this and like one way we agreed on is that you find the misinformation campaign in twitter you show that it is there and if twitter reacts then facebook has like a social pressure to follow even though researchers could not spot the campaign on facebook because you spot the twitter part of the campaign and you're sure there is a facebook part of it if twitter reacts and because they have a track record of reacting and being transparent facebook has a social pressure to react and others also would react like youtube etc so so just like this was just like a shootout to the twitter safety team like even though they are not responsive they are when they act it pushes others to act and vice versa yeah and you mentioned a lot of the importance of social pressure i think this has been a bit neglected in the documentary it would be mentioned but i think it's still neglected like we we can change the incentives by putting pressure but then now like something we mentioned and not mentioned in documentary is that these tools are there and uh i think we talked a lot about their negative side effect like negative side and we we tend to underestimate like the the side effects of boycott like we need to like the tools are there and we should use them like we should use them just like the ministries of health use the television to promote vaccines and health and hygiene in the 1980s and the 70s we should we should like grab the tools and use them for good and not just abandon them and boycott them yeah yeah interestingly like the these companies and especially youtubers have given more importance for instance to to the world health organization during the pandemic and i think it's nice to acknowledge this yeah youtube listed the vaccine hesitancy as something they would be posit like actively acting on yeah and other companies also released similar statements yeah so there are good things coming from these companies maybe not good enough i don't think good enough but it's partly a problem of incentives but it's also a problem my argument also is the problem of human resources like my opinion is that most of these teams like the teams working in misinformation could be larger than what they are now there is enough need and the resources to to have more people working on that yep so i hope they they will grow them they will grow these safety teams because i think it's more needed than ever with this we wrap up and uh we thank you for your attention if you stayed all the way until here and then see you bye see you bye