35 GENIUS INTERVIEW Taha Yasseri
and need some sort of guidance toward one or another option. We do not really use our own judgment. FEED: In the September issue of FEED , we looked at the online economy of likes and subscribers and how easy it is to manipulate. Do you think the practice of buying likes is common? How does it affect the credibility of an influencer and their audience? TAHA YASSERI: I don’t have hard data to say how many likes are bought, or how many fake reviews are out there. But I would be surprised if someone claims there is no artificial social boosting happening on social media. Of course, different platforms have their own strategies to suppress or control this, and they might be successful to a certain extent, but the more sophisticated the algorithms they use to detect and suppress artificially boosted content become, the more sophisticated the algorithms and methods will become on the other side of the field. That is, the algorithms that marketing companies would use. But, of course, most of us just see the numbers – we see this content has received this many likes and that one has received that many. What social media platforms could do is to look at the network behind these numbers. Seemingly similar numbers could originate from different structures. They could come from isolated individuals without many followers and without much content they have created on their own. Or the same number could come from users who are embedded in a social structure. ONLINE, WE ARE BOMBARDED WITH SOCIAL INFORMATION AND ARE THEREFORE MUCH MORE VULNERABLE TO MAKING OUR DECISIONS BASED ON OTHER PEOPLE’S CHOICES
TAHA YASSERI: I think it’s very optimistic to think humans make their decisions based on a true judgment process. And it has never been like that. I don’t think our judgement is fading due to the technology. I think the technology could just amplify what has always existed in all societies. And, of course, the technology allows us to observe it in a better way. How come, 200 years ago, a large number of people ended up cutting their hair in a ridiculous fashion? This is the same process. At the time, there was no Instagram. People just saw other people on the street with a certain haircut and thought they would copy it. They wanted to have the same identity or fashion taste. Social media can amplify it by providing this information on a whole different scale. We do not need to walk down the street to see how people cut their hair. We can sit in our home and look at hundreds of thousands of pictures on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. It’s much more visible today. FEED: What other science has been done around studying influence by social networks? TAHA YASSERI: My favourite experiment is one that Matthew Salganik and Duncan
Watts of Princeton University have done. They asked people to listen to different songs and choose their favourite, ranking the songs according to quality. Then, to a second group of subjects, they showed a preranked list of the songs based on what other subjects had selected. Many of the people in the second group ended up copying that ranked list. For a third group, they gave them wrong information with basically the worst song at the top of the list, and still people followed the list. People said, “Yeah, I really like that music,” when that was music that the majority of people on their own had said was not a great piece. But, because it was put on top of the list and because they were told this was the choice of the majority of the other people in the group, people followed it. That completely shows there’s very little value judgment. We can have value judgment only when we are completely isolated from social information. As soon as we have even some information about what other people would choose, or what other people have chosen or what decisions other people have made, we are very much prone to following it, particularly when it comes to things we have very little personal opinion about, or if we are thirsty for information
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