Social media

"Social media" link (communication technology, mass surveillance, social control) Campfire Wiki
File:Social media.webp
Websites in which users "connect" to their friends. Originally used mainly to track and monitor people, but as time has gone on, increasingly also to exert covert influence on people.

"Social media" (or increasingly "Anti-social media") are websites which allow users to choose friends and exchange information with them. It is only superficially a money-making industry, and is better understood as a form of social control and mass surveillance.

Weaponisation

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“Social media manipulation was pioneered by Israel in 2009, during its Gaza offensive, not by Russia and China. The UK and the US both have had online "psychological operations" for years. Calling out some actors but giving others a free pass does little to address the problem.”
Clare Daly (10 December 2021) 

In the late 2010s (if not before) it has been increasingly "weaponised" -- i.e. used as a tool of social control. In 2011 CBS reported that Social Media Is a Tool of the CIA.

The Integrity Initiative showed great interest in the use of social media for spreading (dis)information. "The Weaponisation of Social Media" was on the agenda for the 2019 Bilderberg.

{{#subobject: |Has superobject=Social media |Has objectClass=Quotation |Has author=G. Elliott Morris|+sep=, |Has text=“My thesis is that sometime around 2017, social media companies began a transformation into what I now call the anti‑social web. This transformation primarily resulted from the emergence of big data and algorithmic recommendation systems, which can individually target posts to users that maximize engagement and time spent on the platform.

Watch on YouTube

Sean Parker, Chamath Palihapitiya - Facebook is 'Ripping Apart Society'

If you look at the scientific literature today, the empirical harms of these platforms now clearly exceed the benefits the vast majority of users get from them. Unless you have to use these platforms for work, it’s time to quit them — or minimize the time you spend on them — for good... in 2025, the social web... is, in fact, an anti-social web...

Social media services in 2025 feel completely different than they did 5 or 10 years ago. Posts now seem more fake, more negative, and more algorithmic — and, notably, less social.” |Is about=Social media,social media|+sep=, |Has wikipediaPage= |Has location=|+sep=, |Has publicationDate=12 November 2025 |Sourced from= |Has sourceDetails= |Has sourceTitle= |Has sourceName= |Has sourceURL=https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/you-should-quit-social-media-for

}}

“My thesis is that sometime around 2017, social media companies began a transformation into what I now call the anti‑social web. This transformation primarily resulted from the emergence of big data and algorithmic recommendation systems, which can individually target posts to users that maximize engagement and time spent on the platform.

Watch on YouTube

Sean Parker, Chamath Palihapitiya - Facebook is 'Ripping Apart Society'

If you look at the scientific literature today, the empirical harms of these platforms now clearly exceed the benefits the vast majority of users get from them. Unless you have to use these platforms for work, it’s time to quit them — or minimize the time you spend on them — for good... in 2025, the social web... is, in fact, an anti-social web...

Social media services in 2025 feel completely different than they did 5 or 10 years ago. Posts now seem more fake, more negative, and more algorithmic — and, notably, less social.”
G. Elliott Morris (12 November 2025) 

Effecting social change

American social media companies have become instruments to analyze how social interactions in societies work at large and how information is spread. It stands to reason that when data is generated in large amounts, that beside revenue generation it is also fed into programs like the Sentient World Simulation, with an end goal to steer opinions. Earlier research of Skinner and Asch most certainly played a role; the need to fit with it's own circle of acquaintances may have been of particular interest, how much the need to do and say as the other does prevail.

Vince Ebert (a German cabaretist) says about the research of William von Hippel (a social psychologist) that:

• humans use a large part of their thinking power to find their way in their complicated social world
• Our "social" brain does check facts from time to time. But much more important to it is the question: what are the social consequences if I do or say this or that?
• So we have a mechanism in our heads that, in case of doubt, even prevents us from thinking what is right if, in return, it endangers our social status
• the higher the social and economic status of a person, the more this phenomenon occurs. Educated and/or wealthy people are more concerned about what others might think of their opinions
• the more educated and smarter a person is, the more adept his brain is at selling him the biggest nonsense as a reasonable idea, as long as it elevates his social status
• as a result, the upper educated middle class tends to be more inclined than ordinary people to chase after some intellectual boondoggle

2025 in Mexico

The Grayzone reported that in 2025 a wave of protests against the popular Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum was astroturfed, and that "anonymous social media accounts... mysteriously attracted hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter/X, Instagram, and TikTok in just a handful of weeks."

Research

Social media is increasingly being used to measure people's opinion.Template:Cn

AI influence

The University of Zurich ran an experiment on Reddit in 2025, which posted AI-generated comments to study how AI could be used to change views. The AI mined regular users comments from other conversations to personalize its answers and generated responses from accounts which claimed they were rape survivors, worked with trauma patients, or were Black people who were opposed to the Black Lives Matter movement. Andrew Torba noted: "This is happening on every social media platform by countless foreign and domestic actors by the way".

Censorship

File:Durov EU Commission censorship.jpg

"Social media companies are experimenting with Artificial intelligence technology to remove hateful content from their platform."

Hamster wheels

Full article: Hamster wheel

Hamster wheels are pointless topics that can be used to distract people from important issues. They abound on social media, and the richness of the data held by social media websites facilitates their algorithmic choice and deployment.

References