219B. The Threat of Threat Generation in Social Media
Social media sites use threat generation to improve engagement. Algorithms promote threatening language. Content creators have been trained to use threat creatively. This has Consequences.
Social media sites very quickly determined that threatening content is superior to non threatening content in terms of engagement. This is because the human brain is wired to prioritize threats over non threats. Basic survival instinct. I’ve been warning about the danger of this business model to the public mental and physical health of all nations subjected to it for 15 years. I’ve also been warning regulators since 2013.
Regulators are slow to act, but once they do they can completely change the math of an industry. By removing incentives to be “bad actors”, those harmful companies can be eliminated from various markets. Simultaneously, legal firms are always on the lookout for lucrative targets for litigation. The richer the company, the larger the potential reward for litigation.
Now that my warnings have moved from the realm of “expert opinion” to “legal fact” (following the losses of Meta and Google in court) it is time to move to the next step of analysis. What damage has been done, and how has it changed our culture and ideology? After nearly a generation of harm to our people, the effects could linger for generations more. As there is a certain inertia involved, things will likely get worse before they get better.
Aggravation Promotion
All of the major social media companies have been promoting threatening and divisive content, because that’s what gets the most engagement. We are biologically wired to prioritize threats for attention. In an attention based economy, that means the success of these companies is dependent on threatening our people.
People under threat act more emotionally, and less rationally. The algorithms will determine what a particular viewer is most threatened by, and bury them in related content. The result is that targets will over-perceive these threats and develop a hostile ideology to the source of that threat.
For instance, if a company bombards billions of viewers with “man bad” content, exaggerating the threat of this segment, then vulnerable viewers will adopt misandrist ideologies. The reality, at least in the USA, is that men-sourced violence and arrests have dropped 60 to 80% over the last 40 years. Men have become so passive that women are now complaining that men are too passive. Simultaneously misandrists are blasting content suggesting the opposite. Really whatever they’ve been watching has programmed them to have a polarized ideology either way.
Ten years ago I used to see men on LinkedIn saying openly sexist things about women. I was quick to react and others did also. Now I can’t really remember a single case of this in the last 5 years. What I am seeing, is really extreme ideologies in the opposite direction. This is one example:
This is the “job title” of a misandrist content creator on LinkedIn. There is no evidence of any education or experience in any of the things she says she’s a subject matter expert in, and she’s “helping women and brands to start being dangerous”. I will give you one guess as to who she wants women and companies to be dangerous to.
I got that content creator riding me last week after I asked them nicely to stop posting sexist content. This week I got this misandrist going after me:
She has the word “dickheads” in her job description. How is that even acceptable on LinkedIn? I will give you one guess as to what gender she’s describing there. She seems to understand that I was pointing out that she was creating a hostile environment on LI, and apparently this made me “problematic”. A dickhead, but relatively low on the dickhead scale.
She’s quite honest about coming onto LI and hunting down dickheads. She even says she’s explicit about it all over her LinkedIn page, which I did not read. I trust her about this. Her second to last paragraph where she says I’m “weaponizing [women’s] loneliness” refers to my Soulmates paper. I’m guessing she’s not looking for a soulmate.
I have no ego and I don’t take this personally at all. As a researcher what I want to know is:
where is this behavior coming from
why is it on the rise
why is it being promoted by the LI algorithm
why similar male content either isn’t being produced or is effectively blocked algorithmically so that we don’t ever see it
I’d like to follow the money. Someone’s making money here.
What are the long term implications
I don’t have the answers to all these questions yet, but this has definitely gotten my attention. Gender based divisive ideology isn’t the only divisive content I’m seeing being promoted by the LI algorithm, but it seems to be by far the most popular. I’m also seeing a lot of women content creators who have, based on their titles, created companies with the sole purpose of “fixing” the “man bad” problem in corporations.
Since their business model depends on people accepting the premise that “men are bad”, they are blasting this sort of content daily. Whether they believe what they are saying or not really isn’t that important. They have a business and they need to advertise it. LI will let you pay to advertise on the platform, but it is much cheaper to disguise your advertisements as social interest content and then just dog whistle your impressions up.
Cross Platform Indoctrination
Given that Meta’s own internal research indicates that using their social media is harmful for you, I don’t use social media. I already figured that out before they blew millions and millions on their secret internal research. They could have saved a lot of money by just asking me instead. That would have also resulted in less legal liability for them. But since they don’t care how many people they harm, they don’t really care what the results of the research are.
That’s what makes them such an easy target for lawyers. A regular 20ish year old woman got $6M out of them with relatively mild inflicted disability. There could be a billion people with similar complaints. A billion times 6M is 6000 Trillion dollars. I asked AI how to say that and it went tilt and just spit out 6e^15. That’s a 6 with 15 zeros after it for non math majors.
LI likely doesn’t go too far out of its way to promote hostile content. I would imagine that Meta is 100 times worse. TikTok, where divisive content is a feature, not a side effect, could be thousands of times worse. TikTok will pay you to be horrible, so there is an economic incentive. The same goes for YouTube, and I see a LOT of gender divisive content there. Not just women on men content, but also men on women content. It’s become really big business to promote gender hate.
Any sort of gender hate really concerns me because it is the gateway to all sorts of violence and a general breakdown of trust and society. As I’ve written about before, humans are natural apex predators. When you “uncivilize” them, or even train them to hate, they return to source.
I am of the opinion that the reason I’m seeing this huge spike in gender hatred on LI is that it’s being promoted on these other social media sites (the ones getting sued or in the process of getting sued) and people are getting paid to generate gender hate content. These creators then take their content and duplicate it across multiple social media networks in order to produce multiple income streams.
These creators don’t seem to be sensitive to LinkedIn being significantly different than any other platform. But while these other platforms are more voluntary in their use, for many people seeking work, they don’t have much choice (thanks to Microsoft loving monopolies) about which work related social media sites to use.
This makes LinkedIn an extension of a workplace. Any work environment where gender based hate speech is allowed is going to get sued. Hard. I’ve been spending way too much time trying to fix this problem for MS. They need to tighten up their algorithms or they are going to be far too exposed to litigation.
The Threat of Gender Based Hate
All sorts of hate speech is bad. It’s especially bad when you direct your hate speech at a particular group, instead of an individual. Governments often use communications campaigns to marginalize specific nationalities of people prior to or during a war to make it socially acceptable to kill those people. Besides the obvious problems with that, long term it can be very difficult to unprogram people. I talked about this in my paper on Generational Psychological Loops (content warning: Disturbing American WW2 propaganda cartoons).
For millennia humans have understood that men are the more aggressive and dangerous gender. Men are so much stronger on average that we’ve gone to great lengths to vilify and punish any aggression against women from men. This is (hopefully) taught to boys from an early age. You can hit other boys, but girls are off limits.
But what happens when we teach and reward women for hitting men? Hollywood puts out a lot of content like this, either as comedy or revenge-themed. As a kid I enjoyed watching Benny Hill get slapped or clubbed for being a lecher. Every episode. For decades. Benny Hill … you certainly knew what sold.
But decades of normalization, or even promotion, of violence against men has shifted our culture significantly. I often hear women gender supremacists saying that men deserve violence because they themselves are violent (collective punishment). 50 years ago men were probably the more violent gender against people they knew. But intense punishments and training for men, paired with very permissive attitudes towards women’s violence has shifted the math dramatically.
Because men are shamed or even ignored if they report being assaulted by women, our official statistics strongly under report the rates of F on M violence. Women with misandrist ideologies will use reported data to justify their collective punishment. But once you switch to survey data, the reality starts to hit home.
Once you move to surveys, it becomes clear that in the 21st Century, in intimate relationships, women tend to start the violence, are more likely to escalate violence, and men tend to finish it. That’s not good for men or women. It’s a very dangerous and destructive dynamic.
Women typically receive much more lenient sentences when committing crimes, so relying on official data can be misleading. When mandatory sentencing limits were deployed across the USA, women’s incarceration rates rose 500%. Double that rate if you just count State and Federal detention. That was just the result of blocking leniency for drug crimes. If we removed all gender leniency, the USA could soon end up with over a million women behind bars.
The Take Away
This is not a “woman bad” article. This is a “social media bad” article. People are being manipulated in the attention economy to drive corporate profits. That manipulation often encourages hate and disunity, because that sells. The USA now has the lowest opinion in the world of their own people. The USA is now the only country in the world where their own people think that most of their people are bad people.
They didn’t wake up one day and say “I want to hate my neighbours!” They were trained to feel that way by ruthless companies. I would also have to blame political organisations. All of them. I’m still a bit shocked when I see people come onto LinkedIn (Like above) and start hating on strangers openly. But I don’t use social media, other than LI. I imagine that for those who do, they are probably so numb to it by now that they could look at that post and not feel anything. They might even agree with the misandrist.
I don’t tell these people to stop being haters. I embrace humanity’s diversity. Everyone is my brother or sister (etc), even the annoying people. But I do often suggest they should take that back to TikTok or wherever they came from, where they will be appreciated and paid for their hate.
Supply and demand, baby. As long as we buy hate with our attention, there will be no limit to the supply. But if we stoke inter-gender hatred, I’m very concerned what will happen when gender violence becomes justified and normalized.
Eh, Toro, Toro!