Even with his casinos, Trump wasn’t a gambler, either, saying he’d rather own slot machines than play them.
And yet, in a strange twist, Trump has ended up an addict.
.. Lanier, who met Trump a couple of times back in the real estate developer’s New York heyday, thinks the president’s addiction to tweeting is rewiring his brain in a negative way. As Trump picks up speed on Twitter, the Oval Office is becoming a Skinner box. Like other “behavior modification empires,” as Lanier calls social media sites, Twitter offers positive reinforcement for negativity.
.. “Twitter addicts take on this kind of nervous, paranoid, cranky quality, sort of itching for a fight,” Lanier said in an interview. “Trump used to be in on his own joke, and he no longer is. He’s just striking out every morning, fishing for somebody to harass or seeing who’s harassing him.
“I do think it creates a terrifying situation because somebody who is addicted is easy to manipulate. It’s easier for the North Koreans to lie to him than if he wasn’t an addict.”
.. I saw a report on PBS about a mother on the border who was reunited with her 14-month-old child after 85 days. “The child continued to cry when we got home and would hold on to my leg and would not let me go,” the mother wrote. “When I took off his clothes, he was full of dirt and lice. It seemed like they had not bathed him the 85 days he was away from us.”
On the occasion of America’s 242nd birthday, we must ask who we are, if we can see accounts of infants snatched from their parents and returned covered in lice, and not worry about our country’s soul.
.. We have a president who is an addict running a country overflowing with opioid and social media addicts. (In an interview with The Times a few days ago, our tech reporter Nellie Bowles said she dealt with her smartphone addiction by graying out her screen, noting, “These phones are designed to look and work like slot machines — hit us with bright colors and little pings to activate and please,” and “we all have to figure out little hooks to pull back into the physical world.”).. hopes people will resume a sense of decorum when they realize “there’s very little long-term profit from a viral tweet.”.. He figured out how to dominate Twitter, not with the cool-kid arch style of making fun of someone, but by being school-yard-bully mean.
His tweets propel the story on cable news and shape the narrative for reporters — who are addicted to the First Addict.
The real problem with Facebook is not a data leak
The little networking site is now a business colossus that’s affecting our minds and our relationships.
“Every publisher knows that, at best, they are sharecroppers on Facebook’s massive industrial farm.”
.. Indeed, Facebook has come to look a lot like the agricultural giants that control much of what we eat in this country. Recent documentaries have revealed the way “King Corn” or “Big Sugar” influences our eating habits, with little to no pushback or oversight.
.. Some former Facebook employees allege that “the platform’s features were consciously engineered to induce a dopamine hit to keep people hooked.” Author and professor Adam Alter compares these new technologies and smart devices to slot machines and other addictive substances in terms of their impact on our minds and physical well-being — as well as on our inability to turn away.
Zuckerberg’s Dilemma: When Facebook’s Success Is Bad for Society
Facebook’s chief has signaled he will do what it takes to curb the social network’s negative effects—but how far will he go?
.. In the face of pressure brought by a growing roster of Facebook investors and former executives, many of whom have publicly stated that Facebook is both psychologically addictive and harmful to democracy, the Facebook founder and chief executive has pledged to “fix” Facebook by doing several things, including “making sure that time spent on Facebook is time well spent.”.. he wants his company “to encourage meaningful social interactions,” adding that “time spent is not a goal by itself.”.. So here’s the multibillion-dollar question: Is he willing to sacrifice revenue for the well-being of Facebook’s two-billion-plus users?.. In June, he changed the company’s mission from “connecting” the world to bringing the world closer together. He said he used to think giving people a voice would make the world better on its own, “but our society is still divided. Now I believe we have a responsibility to do even more.”.. Facebook researchers surveyed the scientific literature and their own workand publicly acknowledged that while direct communication and sharing between individuals and small groups on Facebook can have positive effects, merely lurking and scrolling through others’ status updates makes people unhappy... the U.K.-based Royal Society for Public Health asked 1,500 young people to evaluate the five biggest social networks, to measure whether they are good or bad for mental health. The results showed all but one service had a negative effect on mental health... Facebook, Twitter , Snapchat and the Facebook-owned Instagram all pushed survey participants to contrast their lives with others, a phenomenon known as social comparison. The exception was YouTube, in part because the dynamic is usually one-to-many communication, with person-to-person socializing happening in comments... Social networks can also make us miserable by convincing us that whenever we’re away from our friends, we’re missing out on social bonding occurring among them, says Jacqueline Rifkin, a Ph.D. candidate at Duke University who collaborated on a study of the fear of missing out, or FOMO. The misery can kick in even if what we are experiencing—an awesome vacation, perhaps—is objectively better than what our friends are up to... Ms. Rifkin’s work indicates that FOMO isn’t about envy but something far more primal: If our kith and kin are bonding without us, we might soon find ourselves left out of the tribe... how much you use social media is at least as significant as how you use it... steps include things that Facebook itself believes will reduce engagement on the service, including hiding clickbait and fake news and promoting posts from friends... Facebook is built on the idea of bringing the world closer together, as its mission statement so boldly pronounces. The irony that Mr. Zuckerberg must confront is that the very means of that connection—what the company euphemistically calls engagement, but which experts say is more accurately described as addiction—appears to be detrimental to the humans whose thriving he seems earnestly to want to promote.
2017 Was Bad for Facebook. 2018 Will Be Worse.
The tech giant’s carefree years of unregulated, untaxed growth are coming to an end.
Facebook is projected to boost sales by 46 percent and double net income, but make no mistake: It had a terrible year. Despite its financial performance, the social media giant is facing a reckoning in 2018 as regulators close in on several fronts.
The main issue cuts to the core of the company itself: Rather than “building global community,” as founder Mark Zuckerberg sees Facebook’s mission, it is “ripping apart the social fabric.”
Those are the words of Chamath Palihapitiya, the company’s former vice president of user growth. He doesn’t allow his kids to use Facebook because he doesn’t want them to become slaves to “short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops.”
Palihapitya’s criticism echoes that of Facebook’s first president, Sean Parker: “It literally changes your relationship with society, with each other … God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”
.. Facebook, like Google, books almost all its non-U.S. revenue in Ireland with its low corporate tax rate — and pays most of it to a tax haven for the use of intellectual property rights. The practice resulted in a 10.1 percent effective tax rate for Facebook in the third quarter of 2017.
.. On Tuesday, Facebook announced that it will start booking revenue from large ad sales in the countries they occur, not Ireland.