The questions to ask

• What was Social Media like in the early days?

• What is it now? What does it represent? How is it used?

• Why are there so many bot accounts?

• How can we eliminate them? And why don't we?

• Why are people so toxic online? Why is "Cancel Culture" a thing?

• And most importantly...

Do we trust too much?

Social media has been constructed in a way that is open to manipulation. It was a trustful design. Which we moved away from, thankfully.

We sometimes forget that our platforms also educate users on how to use the platform.

How we layout the UI, how we design the UX, which fonts and borders we use, and much more contribute to teaching users what to expect from the platform.

We shove metrics and numbers in their faces while hiding away the fine prints in hidden pages at least three clicks away from the home page.

But it wasn't always like this. We weren't as conscious of this back in the earlier days of Social Media.

Think about Facebook. In the early days, it only gave you the option to sort by the newest posts or the most liked posts.

People look at it and rightly said that the more likes, the more exposure. There was a whole culture around it. People wanted more likes, more shares, more comments, more of everything. Because that's what the platform emphasized.

There were people evaluating their friendships through other people's contributions to their numbers. It isn't a nice thing to do for sure, but everything is fair for the internet fame, right?

But personal posts weren't enough because new eyes on the post didn't know the person. People needed something more global, something more relatable.

So they began to share the most interesting stories, eye-catching news, and the funniest memes. Yes, we had memes back then. We just didn't have a name for it.

But even that reached a limit as any account on Facebook can only have 5000 friends at max.

But groups don't have those kinds of limits. And there isn't a limit to how many groups you can have.

People who learned about the limit created a group, took the most liked and the best performing posts, and started to pump them there.

Others started to follow it and the group grew.

Followers got the content they wanted.

Group founders and moderators got the numbers they wanted.

Perfect plan.

And then came the hackers.

They published fake posts and then bombed the post with likes and took it to the sky with an unlimited number of free accounts. Because accounts are free to create. And bots are easy to control.

Then they spread the posts everywhere with another set of an infinite number of accounts.

Some of them got enough attraction that the accounts posting them got to a high enough number to be sold off. This was the first business model.

There are groups where members can post into the group's feed. Members of these groups usually have a higher level of attachment to the group. And some of them found some fake posts doing numbers in the wilderness. And they decided to share the post with the group they feel part of, to contribute to the group and the community.

And also because of the likes. Mostly the likes.

The groups where only the founders and moderators can post, who saw the post circulating and doing well, also shared them in their group.

What happened so far? That fake post is not only visible to real people, but because it came from a trusted source such as a moderator, the credibility of the post has increased, and people started to argue that it was real and right.

Those who saw this and claimed that it was wrong began to be humiliated, shunned, and got kicked out of the group. Because founders and moderators always need to be right. They need to have authority. They need to have power. And power only wants more power.

How to calculate interactions.

When social media looked at the problem, they saw that likes alone are not enough to solve this issue. This time they started to move on to other metrics like the number of shares, comments, and how long videos were watched. So they looked at the full interaction cycle instead of just one metric.

Well, people who have endless accounts in their hands have started to use these accounts according to how each social media network works. They started to make specialized bots for different platforms.

In the meantime, groups started to become elitist and arrogant as a result of the strife.

And they began to impose their ideas. One of the best ways to do that was to reach out to and influence more people. Because higher numbers are king.

But who can do this? Of course, people with infinite accounts in their hands. They were more than happy to step in.

To boost their content, groups started to make deals for money over thousands of likes, comments, or whatever interaction they needed.

Seeing that it was getting a lot of traffic, the guys in the marketing department started making deals with these groups and their admins. You share our ads and we will give you money.

Who would say no?

And people who consume the content didn't really care because they were blindly attached to those who published it.

It was also reasonable for these people to make money every now and then while they spent the day and night providing people with entertainment and content.

You don't make money, we let you have money.

But social media organizations saw this and said stop.

They said, "Companies are not going to give money to content creators, they are going to give it to us. We will put ads in people's feeds."

This is where today's social media ads came from.

And since that time, some of the content creators who were cut off disappeared from the platform. Because they didn't have any incentive anymore.

Those who remained began to fight to be the best in their field. Best as in numbers of course.

Content creators who couldn't make money from ads also stopped turning to hackers to promote their content.

Where did the hackers go from here?

Deeper. They started taking money from guys who work on the deeper end of this hole.

They have set up and prepared their accounts to send automatic posts as if they have been active users for years.

All the information on fake accounts came from the information stolen from real users or slightly modified versions of them. Especially profile photos.

Most of these accounts tricked the system into believing that these were real people. Trusted users active on the platform for years.

As real people saw their posts and followed group pages, the number of real feeds hackers can send posts to have increased.

And then they started posting content that would manipulate people's ideas and thoughts, their feelings and perspectives on certain topics.

The bad content came from malicious actors on the deep end. "You post my content, I give you money", a simple trade, not that different from what the marketing department was doing.

While reasons varied, all content was tailored towards one goal: to manipulate people. It is often seen in the form of Us vs Them or Are you X? Then you must do Y. Most of the time, these messages are subtle and well-hidden but the message always gets across.

And people believed them. They trusted the source which was an authoritative figure for them. And they felt attachment and belonging to their favorite groups.

They wanted to be a part of this. Whatever "this" was. And "this" didn't stop there.

Ideas spread.

To impose their opinions, these manipulated and brainwashed people also started sabotaging other spaces, raiding comment sections, and making hate speeches against whatever group was declared the enemy by their favorite leader.

Manipulated and mislead people started to spread misinformation all over social media with the thought that they were enlightening others.

At this stage, neither automation nor falsity remained in the system. It was a flow of manipulating ideas, from real people, to real people. No more malicious actors are needed. No more bots involved.

Once the seed of an idea is planted, it grows. Human nature seeks out validation and support.

When the finger points, the mob mentality kicks in and the movement begins.

Ban Hammer Everywhere!

Social media organizations have taken many precautions to prevent this. Some of these measures are still kept secret for security reasons.

But it is far more difficult to identify the source of a movement now than ever before. So much content is being put out every day, so much is being consumed every second. As long as it is not public, it gets pushed under the rug.

Just banning accounts and deleting bots are no longer enough. And they don't want to do that anyway because a higher number of active users is good for sucking up to the investors.

This is where we stand right now.

We have to be exposed to hundreds of advertisements and share our most private information with the deepest ends of the internet to access bad content disguised as entertainment that is forced onto us and tries to manipulate us.

People are working hard to prevent this stuff from slipping through the cracks. But there are also people exploring and finding new cracks every day.

Don't trust the internet, curate the content you see.

Don't trust your system, have a moderation team.

Don't trust your users, sterilize the user data.

Don't trust me, do your own research.

Wake. Up.