‘Anger keeps people’s attention’
‘The truth needs to be valued more’, says Dr Philip Zimmermann in a reference to the inherent resilience of the internet. That calls for both technological solutions and a sociological perspective.
Zimmermann (Cybersecurity department, Faculty of EEMCS) is a veritable internet guru. He developed the encryption software PGP and was made a member of the Internet Hall of Fame. But at the time of our interview, he was more concerned about the resilience of democracy in the face of social media. In the United States, his home country, the storming of the Capitol had just happened.
“Before the age of social media, we had a shared reality,” explains Zimmermann. “We got our news from newspapers, radio and TV and spent time in the local neighbourhood. People in daily contact with neighbours and acquaintances don’t develop conspiracy theories. The physical social environment had a normalising effect. If you believed in conspiracies, it never became really radical because people around you weren’t taken in.”
On the internet, however, you meet people with the same paranoid ideas, says Zimmermann. He cites the Qanon conspiracy theories as an example. “They’re very damaging ideas that propagate right-wing populism and set population groups against one other.”
According to Zimmerman, the algorithms in social media have been developed to maximise users’ time and attention. “No other emotion is as effective in doing that as anger. That means it’s in the interests of Facebook and other social media to make people angry. Because that strengthens engagement with the application.”
“It’s these algorithms that have created these problems for us, and we may be able to escape by changing them. Facebook is continually experimenting with changes to algorithms, testing them on several million users. If the result is favourable, they then distribute them across two billion users.” Zimmermann is calling for this approach to be used to expose people to a wider range of views.
“Ultimately, it’s a technological problem, but in a broader sense. We need sociology to reach out to people’s heads and hearts. The truth needs to be valued more. We also need to develop mechanisms that can stop lies and spread the truth, because lies always spread faster.”