When Facebook Messed With Its Users’ Emotions

A piece of social media history worth re-telling as people assess their digital and offline lives

This newsletter is deliberately short. Like, extremely short. Why? I don’t want you suffering a case of memory interference (the concept’s been around since the 1960s, look-up Leo Postman).

Anyway, here’s the point, you need to do this: go onto your YouTube homepage, pick a video, and now scroll down.

Once you hit the bottom of the page, scroll back up – do you remember the first video you selected? If you have, well done. But don’t cheat.

Now do the same task – select a video, and then scroll down – but this time refresh the page. Can you find your video? Good luck.

YouTube never used to be like this. The Google-owned outlet has had to keep up with the other video platforms, most notably TikTok.

The overwhelming tiling of thumbnails is the best it can do to achieve a news feed-style flow for desktop devices.

On mobile, it’s a different story. YouTube Shorts just auto plays videos. You’re onto the next one, then the next one and the next one before you know it.

I like YouTube, but I’ve used it as an example because many people who have been knocking around on the internet for at least a while will recognise these changes too.

The other reason is that sometimes the past is a very helpful measuring stick which we can compare the present against.

Talking of the past, there was a time without screens and cameras in our pocket, a constant connection to the internet and the news feed (patented in 2006).

Social media was usually about private networks, and the content you generated was shared exclusively amongst friends or loved ones – occasionally that also extended to colleagues.

Everything’s changed and now we’re really worried about what Web 2.0 is doing to ourselves and our children. We’ve got news feeds, we’ve got screens, we’re always connected and all of this engagement is being super-charged by algorithms.

What does the algo want? More clicks, more likes, more engagement. We would never now call the internet the ‘information superhighway’, but that’s how it used to be described.

It’s more of a maze of content now. There is an end, but it’s masked by parlour tricks, changes of digital dials which can even impact your emotions.

Social media firms have known about these effects since at least 2014.

Back then Facebook experimented on its own users (689,003 to be precise), finding that “emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness.”.

Here’s what exactly went down (link):

“In an experiment with people who use Facebook, we test whether emotional contagion occurs outside of in-person interaction between individuals by reducing the amount of emotional content in the News Feed.

“When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred.

“These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks.”

There was an apology of course (link), but the work proved a point: the news feed and the algo could really mess with people’s heads.

That was more than a decade ago. It might have got worse.

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Charting the UK's £45 Billion AI Claim

How much money can 'Humphrey’ really save the government?

‘A smaller and more efficient state’. Sir Keir Starmer was sounding a lot like Elon Musk this week as he unveiled his plans to make the UK public sector more productive.

The vibe shift came as his Labour administration announced it would scrap NHS England (link). The bureaucracy was duplicating other parts of the health service and causing inefficiencies at taxpayers' expense. It had to go.

The move, which includes the axing of thousands of jobs, sounded extremely reasonable, but you can only imagine the uproar if a Conservative government tried this.

‘They’re privatising the NHS, the b*****ds,’ would’ve been the cry from the left.

Alas, Labour once oversaw the creation of the NHS, the party often gets a pass on all things healthcare and the decision has actually gone down reasonably well.

This is partly because voters increasingly understand the UK’s delicate financial state.

The country’s debts have soared (link) and economic growth is sluggish (link). Labour’s big play to boost productivity across the UK economy is to focus on the public sector, where 45% of national income will be spent in 2024/25 (link).

Productivity rates in the UK have been worryingly low for years, so by making these gains in the public sector, where the government apparently has most control, it should have a substantial impact.

Here’s what Chancellor Rachel Reeves said in her Budget speech last August (link):

“We are setting a 2% productivity, efficiency and savings target for all departments to meet next year, by using technology more effectively and joining up services across government.”

It should also be noted that the government is employing hundreds more tax collectors to boost Treasury revenues (link).

So, going into the start of 2025 we’ve got a fairly clear picture of what Reeves and Starmer want to do: Boost economic growth, achieve this by increasing productivity in the public sector and raise more taxes by hiking levies whilst increasing the number of tax collectors.

They are also going to ‘use technology more efficiently’. But what does that even mean?

Well, we got a further sense of it in January, when the UK government promised to deploy AI tools to improve the NHS (link):

“A new package of AI tools – nicknamed ‘Humphrey’ – will be available to civil servants in an effort to modernise tech and deliver better public services to set the country on course for a decade of national renewal.”

The announcement followed a review of the government’s technology stack (link), finding that public sector workers were being held back by “archaic technology”:

“With nearly half of public services unable to be accessed online, people are spending too much time applying for support in person, including time on hold or travelling to council offices.

Public sector workers are also wasting time sifting through physical letters. This means response times are unnecessarily long with British citizens paying the price and wasting valuable time on government admin.”

It’s here, in the State of Digital Government report, that we’re introduced to a bold claim by the government: Whitehall is missing out on £45 billion per year of unrealised savings and productivity benefits, as 4-7% of public sector spend could be achieved through full potential digitisation of public sector services.

Crucially, there are no footnotes attached to the “£45 billion per year” claim, but that doesn’t stop later government announcements citing the State of Digital Government report (link).

In fact, it looks like the figure has been repeatedly used by the UK government, including in Starmer’s speech on 13 March (link):

“We don’t want a bigger state, or an intrusive state, an ever-expanding state.

“A state that demands more and more from people as it fails to deliver on core purposes. So we’ve got to change things.

“Now the good news is technology can massively help. If we push forward with digital reform of government – and we are going to do that, we can make massive savings, £45 billion savings in efficiency. AI is a golden opportunity.”

Technology Secretary Peter Kyle also referenced the £45 billion “jackpot” on the same day (link), as it was announced that new AI teams would be deployed into Whitehall departments.

“One in 10 civil servants will work in tech and digital roles within the next five years, with 2,000 tech apprenticeships turbo charging the transformation,” the government stated.

Most of the British media accepted the £45 billion claim as stone-cold fact and simply repeated the figure after Number 10 trailed Starmer’s speech. Other journalists, including the FT’s Lucy Fisher, shared their scepticism (link).

The government was subsequently forced to share some of its workings. Here’s what they disclosed: £36 billion of the estimated efficiencies would derive from “simplifying and automating delivery across the public sector”, a further £4 billion would come from “migrating service processing to cheaper online channels” and the final £6 billion? This could be saved by reducing “fraud and error with digital compliance solutions”, according to officials.

This answer is unsatisfactory to me. What time frame are we working with here, when does it reach the full £45 billion per year and what financial probabilities surround the government’s thinking?

Without some fully fleshed-out workings, it looks like this “jackpot” will remain elusive, though I bet we will see the figure again soon.

Around the same time tech journalist Chris Stokel-Walker was able to find out how the government is actually using generative AI.

He FoI’d Peter Kyle and discovered that the Technology Secretary had asked ChatGPT for advice on why the adoption of AI was so slow in the UK business community – and which podcasts he should appear on (link).

“ChatGPT is fantastically good, and where there are things that you really struggle to understand in depth, ChatGPT can be a very good tutor for it,” Kyle had previously told journalists.

That £45 billion in savings just might remain elusive, folks.

The FT’s New CEO

Jon Slade, currently Chief Commercial Officer, will take up the role of CEO on 1 July. Slade has 30 years of media industry experience, more than 20 of which have been spent at the FT.

He held various roles in the outlet’s advertising team, before becoming CCO and joining the FT’s board in 2014. He is currently responsible for three quarters of the FT Group’s more than £500mn annual revenues, the FT said.

D is For ‘Disinformation’

As the hostilities between Russia and Ukraine continue, remember this: the Russian state has been practicing organised disinformation campaigns since the start of the 20th Century. The Bolsheviks adopted the methods of the Tsarist secret police.

Those tactics included forgeries, rumour mills and other deceptions. One of the most infamous early campaigns was Operation Trust. Initiated by the Cheka, fake anti-Soviet groups were established in the 1920s to lore monarchists and other anti-Bolsheviks into the hands of the secret police.

This not only helped the Soviets capture their adversaries, but also discredit émigré groups in Western Europe. Disinformation was later codified and cemented into the practices of the KGB when it established a Department D within its First Chief Directorate in the 1950s.

The First Chief Directorate was responsible for running foreign agents and one Vladimir Putin would reportedly serve in its ranks as part of his KGB career. Deception is baked into the playbook.

Remember the ‘little green men’ who appeared in Crimea in 2014? Putin described them as a “self-defence group” at the time (link), that was well before he launched his ‘special military operation’.

The Decline of Intelligence

The FT’s John Burn-Murdoch has posted a rather worrying thread over on X (link) showing that literacy rates have been declining. “Recent results from major international tests show that the average person’s capacity to process information, use reasoning and solve novel problems has been falling since around the mid 2010s,” he wrote.

Quentin Skinner

Since Quentin Skinner has a new book out (link), I thought I would catch-up on the intellectual historian’s Liberty Before Liberalism.

He explains in the essay that a so-called ‘neo-Roman’ theory of liberty was popular before the classical liberalism of the 19th Century became the go-to theory for freedom.

The neo-Romans, including Machiavelli, the Commonwealthmen of the mid-17th Century, and the early Whigs (John Locke) of the late 17th Century and early 18th Century, perceived liberty through the prism of slavery. Namely, you were only free so long as you weren’t dependent on anyone else.

Since the neo-Romans also viewed the state as an artificial person (outlined in Hobbes’ Leviathan), any nation or dominion which depended on another country couldn’t — by definition — by free.

Such thinking, as well as the highly influential Cato Letters of John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, inspired the Patriot cause in the American colonies. It has since fallen out of fashion.

On a related note, my essay on the First Amendment can be found here (link) and my piece on The Craftsman can be found here (link).

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What is AI's Status in the Family?

The rise of AI Agents raises questions about tech's impact at home

Here’s the secret to stalking England’s most elusive coarse fish. Pre-feed your peg with an assortment of goodies at night. Luncheon meat, sweetcorn and maggots usually do the trick.

Next, return in the morning, use a light line, a small hook and a strong yet agile rod, and you just might be able to get into a barbel. If your hook does sink, good luck – you’re in for one hell of a fight.

These are the tactics my uncle taught me on the Avon when I was in my early teens. He wasn’t a massive fan of carp fishing, that was for the lazy anglers, the ones who fished with artificial bait and sat for weeks to catch bulbous bottom-feeders that looked remarkably like themselves or their dogs.

Nowadays, I imagine your average 11 or 12-year-old just looks this all up on YouTube, gets the cheat codes and heads out to their nearest lake or river, so long as they’re not engrossed by Fortnite or Call of Duty.

In many ways this is a good development. If my uncle wasn’t around, I had to find-out second-hand Bob Nudd fishing manuals and try to navigate their 2D diagrams. Let me tell you, it’s a lot easier to be shown how to do a knotless knot via a video, rather than a crusty old book.

Equally, there are some fantastic anglers online and they are expanding the sport to a whole new audience.

On the flip side, however, this is just another example of technology replacing at least two core benefits of the family system: education and recreation. What’s the point in a family member taking you out and showing you the ropes of any past-time, if you’ve already got the answers in your pocket?

Likewise, media phenomena like solo-viewership (link) make it harder for households to have shared interests and views. The algorithms of the social media platforms – programmed to push more and more of the same content to consumers – have also helped Balkanise the living room.

And even when the family does get together, there’s likely to be a form of multi-screening at play. Attention is subsequently divided between chat messages, games and alerts.

Sure, technology has allowed for more flexible work-patterns, but the barrier dissolving between home and office hasn’t been all good, contrary to what futurists like Alvin Toffler once predicted (link).

The electric cottage can limit personal interactions, further cement individualistic behaviours and create new tensions in families that didn’t exist before. Try being on work calls at the same time as a loved one in the same room.

And remember when people even started ‘fake commuting’ during the pandemic to get much-needed exercise in? This really showed that the suburban techno dream had physical pitfalls too.

Now there’s increasing talk of AI agents which could be deployed to run your life (link). Want to book a holiday? Ask your AI agent. Planning to make an exotic meal? Ask your AI agent. Want to learn French in just a month? Ask your AI agent.

If you think about it, such powerful technology could replace all of the major functions of the family system: education, communication, recreation and home management. And it could even help you make some of life’s big decisions: who to partner with, when to buy or rent a property and how to retire.

Here’s an important point to consider. The AI agent wouldn’t be carrying out these tasks and providing advice in a vacuum. No, they would be interacting with other frontier technologies, including IoT, XR and 5G/6G, and operating in an environment with a set of socio-economic norms.

Look at where the West is now at, for example. The start of adulthood has been pushed back to the mid-20s, people are now buying their first home in their late 30s and retirement is in your late 60s (link), if you’re lucky.

More and more adults are living at home with their parents (link), while facing high student debts and an increasing tax burden as nation states try to deal with very high debt to GDP levels (link).

Could AI help families navigate these issues or merely catalyse the status quo? And, in doing so, would the AI actually become the head of the family unit? More omniscient host, rather than subservient butler. Well, if they’re waterproof, maybe.

JD’s Algo

“Have you ever been to Ukraine? You say what problems we have.” That was President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s rebuttal to JD Vance in the Oval Office two weeks ago.

The VP’s reply: “I have been to…I have actually watched and seen the stories [of Ukrainian troops forcing conscripts to the frontlines] and I know what happens – you bring people on a propaganda tour, Mr President.”

There was a lot to takeaway from the wider exchange in the White House, as I’ve written about here (link), but this part of the encounter got me thinking: what does the social media algo look like in the US government, and how much social media content is the VP and other high-up players in the new Trump administration consuming?

Here’s the point. After writing Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard later claimed that the Gulf War, played out in front of 24-hour news channels, was not real. To be clear, Baudrillard didn’t deny that there were acts of violence and war which did take place in the Middle East, but the media created its own synthetic version of the conflict.

This simulation of sorts was presented to and digested by consumers. It may have been inspired by the Gulf War, but it wasn’t the real deal. So when someone spoke about the Gulf War, or even created policy in reaction to the event, they were basing their actions on a warped perception.

Today, with the information overload of the social media feed, the algo both creating and benefiting from echo chambers and the popularisation of short-form video, the Russo-Ukrainian war has its own hyperreality, one which JD Vance isn’t immune to.

UX and 2FA

An old workmate of mine, Orlando Crowcroft, got me thinking about this issue and now I’m noticing it everywhere online. Two-factor authentication (2FA) is crippling the user experience of the web. Sure, it may be safer, but it’s definitely more frustrating. I looked up some of the academic research into the issue – the studies are limited.

However, some researchers (link) showed that 2FA standards were mixed across some of the web’s most popular platforms. At least going through the same journey every time might prepare you for the double-device click-fest. The $1 billion question: can you make Web 2.0 safer without introducing more friction?

Tech and Political Legitimacy

The interview of Professor David Betz by

Louise Perry

(link) is worrying, frustrating and a must-listen. Betz talks about political legitimacy — a subject I’ve written about in relation to what I’ve dubbed the ‘lazy surveillance state’ (link).

His intervention also comes after the rise of the anti-ULEZ ‘Blade Runners’, an activist group which took off after Sadiq Khan expanded his car/van tax into self-employed/suburban areas of London, and follows the UK government’s attempts to ban end-to-end encryption.

You could put more police on the streets in a bid to counter the predation of children and its causes, but apparently Apple should be blamed and the Home Office’s budget should be shrunk (this is happening under Starmer/Reeves). Did anyone vote for any of this by the way? No.

The TikTok Bid

Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian has joined Project Liberty (link), the group hoping to buy TikTok US from Chinese parent company ByteDance. Ohanian, who is married to Serena Williams, adds some further tech credibility to the bid being led by billionaire Frank McCourt.

The team wants to rebuild the platform “in a way that prioritizes the privacy of 170 million Americans while directly addressing the national security concerns at the center of the proposed ban”.

WaPo and NYT Changes

Jeff Bezos’ paper is reportedly (link) facing a big restructure. The Post will “divide its national desk into two sections that focus on national reporting, and politics and government coverage, respectively,” Axios said.

Beyond the politics and government desk and the national desk, business, technology, health, science and climate teams will be brought together to focus on “how businesses are transforming across the economy; how scientific and technological shifts are affecting daily life; and what it all means for people's health, security and the planet”.

The news follows the Post’s announcement that it would concentrate its opinion pages on two main subject areas: personal liberties and free markets. Some editors of its opinion pages quit in protest.

There are also changes afoot at The New York Times, where the outlet is “rethinking the frequency and design of its editorials, the makeup of its editorial board, and its policy on endorsements,” according to Semafor. “Opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury, deputy editor Patrick Healy, and publisher AG Sulzberger are contemplating having other editors in opinion getting more involved in the editorial board, and having fewer people on staff who solely write editorials.”

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