Are social media algorithms shaping your opinions?

In My Mind #22

This week: communication, consistency, and whether your opinions are actually yours.

Why speech is so much better than text

I’ve recently started using Wispr Flow to dictate everything that I want to type up (when I’m not in an office full of people). I’m actually using it to write this part of my newsletter as well and it is incredible.

It is amazing how many words you can get out of your mouth and out of your brain when you talk. It is far, far greater, four or five times greater, than the amount I can type in the same amount of time. This means that I’m able to put down exactly what I’m thinking and then edit later. When I type I tend to self-edit as I go and I will correct myself. I’ll type something out and then say, “Oh no actually I don’t think I want to say that. I’ll remove it.” Whereas now, I’m just talking into my microphone and at the end of my little speech here Wispr Flow will write everything in and then I can just go back and make grammatical changes and changes to better explain what I’m trying to say.

Now, when I text people, messages are longer, and they explain in more detail what I’m trying to say because I just say what I’m actually thinking and Wispr flow edits out all the “erms” to make it clear and readable for the other person. I dictated what was meant to be a quick text, and suddenly three paragraphs appeared and I thought, “Well I would never have spent the time to type that out on my phone.” Whether that person actually read it or not is a different matter but the opportunity for explaining yourself further, getting more information and context across is incredible if you use this app.

I’m a big believer that a lot of communication has been lost since we’ve been using text message services and messaging apps because you can’t understand someone’s tone of voice or their body language when you’re just looking at text. Now I’m not saying that this solves that problem entirely. Phone and video calls are far greater than text will ever be and in person communication is better still but by taking the friction out of writing a text message with enough detail for you to be able to get your point across, apps like Wispr Flow start to break the barriers that exist in text messaging.

Putting in the reps

I’ve been trying recently to reframe my mindset whenever I’m trying something new, going from a position of “I’m going to be bad at this or I’ve never done this before, therefore I’m going to fail” to thinking more like “I’ve not done this before, but I have an opportunity to tick one attempt off my hundred attempts that it’s going to take me to be competent.”

I first heard about this thinking from Ali Abdaal, who speaks about it as part of his part-time YouTuber academy. He says that your first hundred YouTube videos are going to suck. No matter what you do they will be terrible so post your first hundred videos as quickly as you can while being intentional and gather information and learnings along the way. Figure out what works and what doesn’t work while understanding that there are certain things that are the Unteachable lessons. In order to learn those lessons you need to have experienced the pains and the only way of doing that is to get the reps in.

I recently asked Claude AI to give me the top three things that I would need to do in order to succeed in any domain. I didn’t care whether there was a need for technical experience, professional experience, or whether it was a sport or a knowledge-based task, I just wanted three things that I could do to ensure success no matter what I tried. The number one answer, and arguably the most important, was consistency in terms of showing up time and time again and learning from your own mistakes. It’s all very well and good learning about things in theory, but unless you apply that theory and start to learn the pain points for yourself, you’re never actually going to be able to put any of it into practice.

Social Media vs Interest Media

Something I’ve heard a lot recently, is that social media platforms are now more “interest media platforms” than they are “social media platforms”. The difference, as far as I understand it, is that social media platforms first started with you being able to follow or be friends with people that you knew in real life. It was a chance for people that you know to share stories from their lives with you and then you could share your life back. Newsfeeds were full of photos from their day or their thoughts. Essentially creating an extension of your friendship in the digital space. Whereas now, with algorithms in play, these platforms have become interest media platforms. Meaning the platform itself is now providing content based on what you like, rather than the people that you know. If you go onto Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, or wherever you decide to spend your time, you will find that there is a lot of content there that is coming from people that you’ve never even met. Nine times out of ten you will find that you will watch their video or you’ll read their post because it actually does interest you. The algorithms are really good at picking out what you’re interested in. But we must remember that the algorithms are trying to keep your attention for as long as possible so you don’t close the app. There are two ways that it can do this:

Firstly, it can show you content it thinks you already like. If you have been spending time watching football highlights recently, it will keep suggesting more. The logic being “you’ve watched football videos before, therefore I’m just going to keep giving you football videos.”

But it can also start to push your interests in a certain direction. If your feed is constantly filled with a particular footballer, you are going to develop an opinion on that player. If the content is positive, you’re going to get more of a positive attitude towards them. If the player is constantly portrayed as the villain, you’re going to develop a negative opinion of that player.

You can swap in ‘footballer’ for ‘political party’, ‘politician’, ‘celebrity’, anybody really. Essentially the algorithms are now also manipulating our interests and developing a society where we are divided into binary thinking. If you start to have a slightly biased opinion on a topic, the algorithm will pick up on that and will show you more things that go towards that bias, which only develops your bias further. It means that as a society we are becoming far more polarised than we ever have been before, surrounded by content that becomes an echo chamber.