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awesome-rosedale-tristan-stuff · 5 years ago

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YouTube and You

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The other day I was browsing the web looking for some online classes for animation and graphic design. There were a lot of options for classes to take and I felt overwhelmed from all my options, so I decided to unwind a bit by watching some YouTube videos. I clicked on an interesting looking video and an ad started to play, it was an ad for online classes for animation and graphic design. What a coincidence! The next day I had a friend come over and we were watching some videos together. She noticed that the ads on my computer were very different then the ones that she gets on her computer. I decided to do some research.

YouTube is the second most visited site on the internet, right after Google. With around 1.3 billion searches a day and over 400 hours of content uploaded every minute, it has made itself the perfect place for big companies to display their ads.

YouTube is one of the largest platforms on the internet with trillions of hours worth of content at anyone's disposal. The reason YouTube is so prolific and has close to no noticeable competitors is because of its mysterious algorithm.

YouTube's algorithm is the most complicated computer algorithm in the world, this artificial intelligence is able to offer viewers the content that is best suited for them. It is able to do this by collecting and analyzing viewer data such as videos watched, titles searched for, average time spent watching, click through rates, likes, dislikes, comments and thousands of other data points.

This algorithm is self learning and becomes more intelligent with every video watched, and it has been learning from us since 2005. How the algorithm works is a mystery to the public, and has evolved itself so far that even YouTube doesn’t understand how it fully works anymore. It has built itself so that after watching a video, another one is waiting on the side that’s curated just for you, just waiting to be clicked, and once you do, you fall into a rabbit hole of video after video, continuously feeding this all powerful algorithm. This is why YouTube works so well and people consistently find themselves watching videos on YouTube for hours.

However, this algorithm doesn’t just keep people addicted to the website, but it also uses this information to show ads that are targeted towards you. For example, if you watch a video about how to remove a virus from your computer, chances are you will start getting ads for virus protection software. On the surface, this can be great for the viewer, to be presented with a magical solution for your problem and all you had to do was watch some videos. But if YouTube knows what you want, what else do they know about you? And what can they do with that information?

YouTube probably knows more about you then you would think. Most people think of the internet as a safe place to find a quick answer to a problem. Think you’ve got herpes but don’t want to tell anyone? Just ask Google, they'll have the answer! Next thing you know YouTube is showing you ads for Valtrex and Lidocaine. That’s right, a simple Google search can be the result of the ads shown to you. This is because Google owns YouTube, so anything you do on Google, YouTube will know, and vice-versa.

Google controls YouTube as well as many other platforms that work together to create a digital bank of information all about you. Google has become the ultimate sales person that we don’t even know is there, with millions of products to offer you, they know the exact ones you are most likely to buy because you told them.

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awesome-rosedale-tristan-stuff · 5 years ago

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The All Powerful Google

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Google is the third most valued company in the world, but when it comes down to revenue Google doesn’t even make the top 50. So if money isn’t making them worth $309 billion, what is? Well, Google has something more valuable than money: information. Google knows everything about you, where you live, what your phone number is, where you like to get coffee after work, Google knows. And it’s more than just your passwords and emails, they know where you are every second of the day.

86% of Canadians have a cell phone on them most of the time, and most of those people use Google Maps. When you download Google Maps and allow them to access your location (which you have to do for Google Maps to work), Google uses your location for more than helping you to find a way home. Google uses your locations to better understand what advertisements to show you. For example, if someone goes to Starbucks everyday after work, Google can see this and will show you more ads for Starbucks, and even show the ads to you when it knows you are near a Starbucks and when it’s around the time you would usually go.

Tracking an individuals location through a cell phone seems like the type of task that could be done by an experienced computer hacker, but the reality is that the tools for tracking cell phones is free and available online for anyone to use. In an interactive ‘New York Times’ article written by Stuart A. Thompson and Charlie Warzol, the authors explain how easy it is to track a phone and demonstrate it by tracking President Trump.

Have you ever noticed that if you look up a shop on Google, it will show you the busiest hours of the day for that store. That information is collected by the amount of phones that enter that store every hour.

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awesome-rosedale-tristan-stuff · 5 years ago

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The Danger of AI

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Most of the large scale corporate sites we use everyday use these same algorithms to collect information about their users, and in the past decade the information they are collecting is getting a lot more personal than most people would think. To understand the scale of which this crisis is escalating, you first have to understand how an algorithm works. An algorithm, or AI (Artificial Intelligence) is a set of rules for a computer to follow in order to reach a set objective. In this case, the objective of these platforms is to understand the users, keep people interested and show the paid ads to the right users. The thing that's unique about these algorithms is that they learn, and they learn incredibly faster than any human possibly can, in fact they learn nearly 10 million times faster. This process is called Machine Learning. Using machine learning, an AI can learn from it’s mistakes and successes, and can find patterns in human behavior, and individual behavior, similar to how humans learn. The reason these algorithms are learning at an exponential rate is because they’re getting millions, sometimes billions of responses from individuals using their platform every day. Through these companies’ Data Centers from around the world that take up full buildings worth of processing power, they’re able to compute every user response in a matter of seconds, and apply that information towards strengthening their algorithm. Imagine being able to see everything everyone is doing online every second of the day, that is what a supercomputer does. But a supercomputer doesn’t forget, it only learns.

The scary thing about these AIs is that no one actually knows how the algorithms fundamentally work. They just know that this set of math equations does this result, and the algorithm takes care of the rest. How can we know that we can trust these algorithms if we don’t even understand how they work? This isn't just a conspiracy theory against technology, this has been confirmed by numerous reliable sources, even Elon Musk claims that AI is humanity’s “biggest existential threat”, and compared AIs to “summoning demons”. Elon later reiterated his fear being “As AI gets probably much smarter than humans, the relative intelligence ratio is probably similar to that of a person and a cat, maybe bigger”, and we’re the cat. At the incredible speed that these algorithms are learning, how long will it take before the intelligence of these algorithms become god like, and what would happen if they develop a sentient understanding of the world. There is always a potential risk when messing with science we don’t fully understand, but at the same time there is always the chance to discover something great. We've created and discovered amazing things using these algorithms, but maybe we should take a step back and consider what the long term effects are that this technology may have on the earth and humanity. Similar to removing species from an ecosystem, we don’t know the effect it could have on the world, because its never happened before. When humans mess with science they don’t know enough about, bad things can happen, the Chernobyl disaster is a perfect example of this. We’re living with a real life Skynet, and it’s called Google.

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awesome-rosedale-tristan-stuff · 5 years ago

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Social Media: An Evolutionary Nightmare

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Why do we use social media? Human beings are social creatures. We’ve worked together to create societies that prosper because we work together to achieve feats that no person can achieve alone. Because social interaction has worked so well for the human race, we have evolved to receive large doses of dopamine from being social with each other. This is one of the main evolutionary tactics that make us social creatures. With social media, making these connections with people becomes so much easier to do, and you don’t even have to get out of bed. Each time you like a post or get a like from someone, you get the same dopamine rush you would get from social interactions. The problem with social media corporations like Facebook is that they’re designed with the sole purpose of making money, just like any business. Facebook makes money from ad revenue, so the more ads they show the more money they’ll make, and the more people that use their platform, the more people there will be seeing their ads. The algorithm Facebook uses has a set goal just like any algorithm, but their algorithm’s goal is to get as many people on the platform, and to have people using Facebook as much as humanly possible. Since using social media mimics the feeling of making human connections and causes a powerful dopamine rush, the Facebook algorithm is basically learning how to turn people into addicts, constantly trying to get the dopamine release we have evolved to be rewarded with when making human connections.

Instagram, while being a different social media platform, is owned by Facebook and uses the same algorithms. There is a secret to Instagram and Facebook’s success that most people don’t know about. When you download Instagram or Facebook on your phone it will ask to use your location. The app will say that it uses your location so that you can add locations to your posts. But this isn’t why Instagram wants your location. Using the same technology as Google Maps, Instagram uses your location to track where you are everyday. If you’ve started using Instagram for the first time, you may notice that it will give you suggestions for people to follow, and most of the time they are people you know personally that it will suggest. This is because Instagram tracks the location of other Instagram users and keeps track of which users you consistently are physically close to. So if you go to work at the same place every day with the same people who also have location sharing connected to their Instagram, there is a very high chance Instagram will recommend them as a friend. Instagram also uses this feature to show ads that are relevant to your location, and prioritizes to show the posts of people that are near you, in fact if you are in the same room as someone and look on your Instagram there is a very high chance their posts will be at the top of your feed.

What are the effects that social media and addictive algorithms have on us? The problem with these social media platforms and their addictive algorithms is that it gives people the feeling that they are socializing, when in reality they’re more anti-social than ever. Humans have started to judge each other based on the social constructs they’ve created of themselves online rather than through their actual human traits and personalities. But the people we judge the most online are ourselves. With millions of pictures of unrealistic beauty standards and people living their best lives, we can’t help but to compare ourselves to those standards. But the truth is we are all faking it! None of us have the perfect life we show on social media, we’re only showing the parts of us that we want to be seen. However, a lot of people don’t see social media as a construct and believe everything they see online. When people think that they have to live up to these impossible standards, it often can result in low self-esteem, loneliness, depression and sometimes even suicide. Ever since the rise of social media, teen suicide rates have escalated dramatically and continue to grow.

Another effect of social media and general communication through the internet is that humans have developed a comfortable feeling of anonymity while online. People have learned that they can say anything they want on the internet without any real world consequences. This has resulted in a lack of empathy from users towards others online, often making people comfortable saying controversial and hateful things towards people online. This comfortability of hateful speech combined with low self-esteem and suicidal tendencies caused by social media can be a deadly mix.

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awesome-rosedale-tristan-stuff · 5 years ago

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Fake News! An “Epidemic”

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Because of the amount of information these companies have on everyone, and the power they have to target demographics of people at such a large scale, companies now use these platforms to advertise for them. But the internet is huge and an unimaginable amount of content is being uploaded everyday. There are now millions of companies that use Google and Facebook to advertise for them. Google and Facebook are physically unable to research every source that purchases ads and can’t check the authenticity or objective of what is being advertised. Let alone content that isn’t paid to be advertised. This means anyone can advertise anything they want on these platforms including scams, fake news, virus carrying software, hate speech and anything else someone might want to advertise for unethical purposes. Algorithms are able to detect copyrighted content and sometimes are able to find keywords that may suggest inappropriate or hateful speech or use image pattern recognition to find inappropriate images such as pornography, but one thing these algorithms can’t do is recognize fact vs fiction.

In 2016 Facebook was accused of advertising fake news that may have influenced the results of the American presidential election.

Fake news is an epidemic on the internet that can have extremely damaging effects on the way our society functions. The biggest problem with fake news is that it can be very hard to differentiate it from the truth, and there is a lot of fake news. When the internet first emerged to the public it was a tool. You could use it for many different useful purposes and many great resources emerged from it. When news transitioned from print to the internet it was cost efficient, easy to use, and accessible world wide. Before the internet, news was fairly accurate, still biased, but at least it was pursuing the truth.

When people read something that claims to be news they tend to believe it because news is supposed to be reliable and true. People are also often ignorant to their own beliefs and refuse to accept that they could be wrong. This is why there are still people who believe the earth is flat or that vaccines cause autism. When there is fake news to support these arguments it makes it even harder for someone to change their beliefs and it only strengthens their false perceptions of the world.

One example of fake news having detrimental effects on people's beliefs is the infamous ‘Pizzagate’. In 2016 a news article emerged about a leaked email that claimed Hillary Clinton was running an illegal human-trafficking ring of children in the basement of a pizza shop in Washington DC and that multiple high-ranking democratic leaders were connected to the conspiracy. The article was completely fabricated and was made with the intent of damaging the democratic party and influencing voting. The article went viral and eventually a gunman attacked the pizza shop with the intent of liberating the captive children. In 2016 thousands of fake articles similar to Pizzagate were published and spread through social media. The reason Pizzagate became viral so quickly is because Facebook was paid to promote the article, and not just to anyone, the ads were targeted to the same people who followed conspiracy theory Facebook pages, primarily targeting anti-vaxxers, flat earthers and chemtrail groups. Facebook isn’t just making money from advertising fake news, but they’re also allowing people who are easily manipulated to be the target of these ads.

We live in a society where information is at anyone's disposal on the internet, if someone wants an answer to something they look at the first result on Google. But we’re approaching a time where there are just as many lies as there are truths, and if you include the fake representations of individuals through social media, lies easily make up most of the internet. We are approaching an era of hidden truths where people can’t trust the internet. Where corporations tell you what to believe and what to buy. For the first time in human history, we no longer have control of our own thoughts and beliefs. We are no longer the consumer, we are the product, our beliefs are being sold to companies in the form of advertisements. Most of what we think and believe is influenced by what we see on the internet, and if Google and Facebook control most of what we use on the internet, they can choose what we see.

How many of your thoughts are actually your own? How can you know that those thoughts weren’t influenced by what you saw online? The honest truth is you can’t. We’ve been taken advantage of by these corporations and used for their own selfish means. We’re giving these corporations our time, thoughts, beliefs, choices, mental health and so much more. And what do we get out of it? The worst part is that we gave them permission. You remember those times you agreed to the terms and conditions but didn’t bother reading them? Well you probably should have, because by agreeing to that, you’ve basically signed your life away. These corporations know how much power they have over us and yet, they still try to hide it. They don’t want you to read the terms and conditions, that’s why they make them so long and hard to read.

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