1. Reines is one of my favorite Twitter personalities. If you aren’t following him you should. I want to use the research he’s sort of suggesting here to make a point about social media algorithms and AI. https://twitter.com/philippereines/status/1293915654576193536

2. Social media algos are coded to register when you are own, the AI can use language, likes, shares, blocks, mutes, and pace of posting to curate information into your news feeds to exploit your moods for advertising revenue. It’s a corporation. It’s their duty.

3. The AI that comes trolls social media content knows your mood as certainly as any external research does and it knows it more precisely, it knows it’s variations, and it knows it down to the second.

4. We’re used to thinking about disinformation as fake news and automated accounts aka bots as the delivery mechanisms for disinformation. And this is all true. But advanced bad actors, the ones really engaged in so-called 3d chess know that SocMed affects neurotransmitters.

5. Knowing this, having access to information they can purchase from SocMed corporations they can target disinformation and bots not only to pollute social media as an information public square to confuse folks politically and psychologically they can do it neurologically as well

6. When you interact with trolls or bots (it’s hard even for experts to tell the difference) it affects the way the AI that controls the platform feeds you information. Because of hostike state actors can use Trolls/bots as sheep dogs to herd folks into socially fractured groups.

7. What can you do about it? a. don’t play with bots. b. pay attention to your news feeds and the language you use in posts. Be mindful not just of what you are reading and passing on but how it makes you feel and how that carries into your offline day.

8. Someone once said that politics is a game of addition not subtraction, you can’t win by subtracting voters. If your are alienating others, you are not alone. We all do only from time to time. But realize this is at least in part the work of SocMed algos and may not be helpful.