USING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TO MANIPULATE PEOPLE ON SOCIAL MEDIA
4. COUNTER-MEASURES
5.2 Worst case: Social media is used to control people
Social media has grown to be important aspect of our day-to-day life without us noticing it. This combined with the advancement of technology has made all these manipulation methods extremely effective. Efforts done for improving internet user's media literacy was out-paced by improvement of manipulation methods by capital corporations and po-litical organizations. At first laws were made to prevent manipulation, but eventually lob-byist and unstable political landscape forced politicians to use these methods instead of trying to stop them.
Manipulation was first only used to small and specific things. Like effecting what brand of cereal, we want for breakfast. Then for “small ethical” goals, like manipulating us to stop smoking and guiding us towards more ecological transportation habits. But slowly these turned into greater and greater effects. After a while all out opinions were formed through intentional manipulation.
Globalization of internet had to be reversed. After a few countries had been driven into civil war through manipulating citizens in social media, governments started to censor the internet connections crossing the national borders. In addition to preventing outside manipulation, it also gave full control to the own government and corporations working with them. Since this also limited access to foreign social media platforms, had countries themselves develop new state-run alternatives, which further enabled them to control all content shown.
Illusion of free will still exists. When you are not directly told what to do, but just manip-ulated to make that choice “yourself”, you don’t just fall in line, you stay happy while doing it. All information you see is selectively chosen, all controversial posts are flagged by AI and lot less likely to show up on anyone's feed. When needed you are shown only people with specific opinion about given agenda, even though you are not even looking for anything related. If these types of people do not exist, you are shown fake people who appear identical to other users. Authority of the state is abused to the extreme. And vari-ous psychological methods are used to ensure that your trust for their authority does not falter.
The above example strongly relates to legitimate fear, shown also through Cyberpunk type of science fiction. Cyberpunk focuses on high-tech future and blurred lines between reality and virtual spaces (Albright, 2016), which relates to the illusion of free will. If traditional governments fail to do their job, technological companies could indeed be the new norm, leading us in the absence of traditional forms of governance. In the worst case, technological innovations do not lead to exceptional advancements in society and quality of living, but diminishes our freedom to the minimum. If technology overpowers our ability to acknowledge our behavioral limitations, there is little technology cannot make us do.
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