What’s the Connection Between Social Networks and Gaslighting?

US publisher Merriam-Webster, best-known for its dictionaries, has chosen “gaslighting” as its word of the year 2022, based on the number of searches for the term, which it says was not related to a single event, as is usually the case, and instead was “pervasive”

The term comes from a 1938 play by British writer Patrick Hamilton, and was made into a film in 1944 by George Cukor in which a sadistic husband attempts to drive his wife mad by literally turning down the gas light at certain moments in their London mansion. Since then it has taken on a wider meaning referring to psychological manipulation to make others think they are in the wrong or the problem, due to their own circumstances or actions.

The link to current affairs is clear, and Merriam Webster cites it in the context of an era disinformation, fake news, conspiracy theories, Twitter trolls and deepfakes made possible by technology and the spread of social networks and, above all, their exploitation through a particular business model.

The use of an online tool to store our relationships and social interactions in the form of a database has its origins in the first forums and Usenet groups in the early days of the Internet, and was consolidated through initiatives such as Friendster in 2003, and subsequently many others both locally in various countries around the world and globally in the case of Facebook and others. The exploitation of social networks as a business model has consisted in practically all cases in a system based on the generation of attention and the capture of time of use, initially used as a way of exposing the user to more advertising, and later in the capture of their information in order to make that advertising more precisely segmented.

In order to get our attention, social networks developed a model based on two layers: in the first we receive more information on the topics we’ve shown an interest in. The expression of interest is evaluated according to our behavior on the network, and follows a scale that goes from simply reading an update on a given topic to actions that imply a higher level of participation, such as searching for related content, using the Like button to express interest, inserting a comment, or even creating content on the topic. This continuum of actions expressing greater or lesser interest was created by the various social network platforms and has been consolidated over time: some of its stages respond to purely natural patterns, but others, such as the Like button, correspond to attempts by social networks to provide users with simpler ways of expressing their interests. For many, Facebook’s introduction of the Like button in February 2009 marks the moment when social networks became a constant popularity contest, providing the company with continuous metrics on its users’ likes and interests.

As a result, social networks went from being a way to keep in touch with friends, acquaintances or public figures, to being an instrument to obtain our personal information. By reinforcing that first layer, the company achieved more stickiness, longer usage times, and could, as a result, increase the user’s exposure to advertising. But a second layer quickly developed, the true social layer: based on the mechanism of the proverb “birds of a feather flock together”, social networks began to give users more content related not just to what they had shown an interest in, but to what made their network of friends and acquaintances react to it.

This was how social networks built “echo chambers”: just as search engines had previously done by creating the term filter bubble, by giving users more of what interests them and also more of what interests their network of contacts, social networks build an echo chamber around us, which tends to reinforce our beliefs and even radicalize them. The community that is established around a given topic encourages the creation of content, and builds popularity rankings that feed radicalization. Somebody who may start out with a minor interest in a topic can easily end up falling into a spiral that leads them, after a short time, to become an active creator of content related to it and a reference in a community of people interested in the topic, in a phenomenon that feeds back on itself. In practice, the social media management companies essentially lure users with content to keep them online so they can bombard them with advertising.

The consequences are clear: if they give you more of what makes you react the most, and in addition, they surround you with people who think the same, react to the same and applaud what you say about it, you end up not only not seeing more alternatives on the subject, but also radicalizing your opinions. Let’s not forget: a selection of topics based on our interests is the same, from another point of view, as a concealment of other topics that are not or that do not coincide with our opinion.

In just a few years, less than two decades, we have gone from developing platforms for people to follow their contacts to creating powerful tools for psychological manipulation. In the attempt to consolidate business empires, half of humanity is now being gaslighted, and in the process a more radicalized, easily manipulated and more confrontational society has emerged. We can’t blame technology, but instead we need to call out the companies that have misused it. When your slogan is “move fast and break things” (even if you try to forget it later on), it’s pretty obvious that you’re going to end up breaking things. Lots of things.

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This post was previously published on Enrique Dans’ blog.

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