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What Is Social Cooling?
- woleium 6y agoI know this post is only an hour old, but (in light of the article content) I found it amusing that there are no comments.
- liquidify 6y agoJust didn't see it. It is such an obvious idea when you read the authors take on it. It is presented perfectly for such a short article.
- tachyonbeam 6y agoTL;DR: data about us being collected, saved and published by social media makes us all more risk-averse when it comes to expressing our opinions online. I tend to agree. I have a twitter account and I try to never get into political discussions there, because I know that expressing the "wrong" opinion could cost me my job, as it has others. Even expressing something that I view as positive and encouraging could be misinterpreted. I feel like around 2000-2005, there wasn't so much pressure to be politically correct. People could discuss ideas more freely. That being said, I was younger too, and less risk-averse. That being said, I also remember that in the early YouTube days, comment threads were completely filled with hate. There were people posting messages like "you're ugly, you should kill yourself" constantly. You'd look at these people's accounts and you saw all the comments they posted. There were trolls who would just run around and post hate comments, particularly on LGBT videos. I really wished that someone would delete these accounts and all their associated comments, but YouTube did absolutely nothing about it for years. It was pretty depressing.
- shadowgovt 6y agoWe also don't, in general, shout our political opinions on street corners or in farmer's markets. What seems to be changing is the online space looks more like those spaces, only our voices online are very loud.
- tasogare 6y agoIt depends on the place. In Japan it is very common for cars, especially before elections, to roam the streets while shouting political stances. Politicians do the same at a road corners using a megaphone.
- coldtea 6y agoMany people are OK with it mostly because "the bad people" are targeted (they think, that is, those they disagree with). If the pendulum swinged conservative in the future and you could get fired for excess "wokeness", the same people would be fuming with rage at the censorship. Of course the conservative side (which is now all about free speech) did censor others amply when it had the upper hand (from McCarthy to the "parental advisory" stickers and album boycott campaigns from Mrs. Gore - funnily a Democrat, how times change). Double standards as usual. If you want a free society, defend free speech for those you disagree with and consider "a danger".
- tachyonbeam 6y agoThe way I see it, the people in power try to suppress ideas they disagree with. It's just more problematic now because with technology, we're going to get to a point where suppressing ideas and the people who hold said ideas can be automated.
- free_rms 6y agoThe thing about building cages and whips is they're inevitably used against the vulnerable. It sounds good when you're building them..
- RicoElectrico 6y agoYeah. I see my friends sharing less and less content on FB these days. But then again, most stuff you see on a typical FB feed today is ads, groups, fanpages, Marketplace and whatnot. Definitely way less content related to friends (other than their fanpage comments). Can we just go ten years back where everything was more spontaneous and candid? Where the thing to raise your pressure was your crush's hot beach photos, not people making themselves idiots in politically charged flamewars.
- cmdshiftf4 6y ago> Can we just go ten years back where everything was more spontaneous and candid? No. That life is sadly dead and gone, the damage of politics / identity politics as most dominant identity, bias enforcing algorithms and creepy behavioural psychology manipulation as “user experience” has not just corrupted the internet permanently but likely how we see and deal with one another online also.
- tachyonbeam 6y agoI keep hoping that eventually there will be some kind of push back against identity politics, and that we will go back to more of a "live and let live" kind of attitude. Maybe people will get sick of outrage culture and the narrative will eventually shift. Social dynamics are complex, but what you need to change the attitude of the public is essentially a number of thought leaders praising a different attitude.
- vkou 6y ago> I keep hoping that eventually there will be some kind of push back against identity politics, and that we will go back to more of a "live and let live" kind of attitude. "Live and let live" only ever worked for acceptable identities. You did not have that luxury if you were, say, gay prior to the early oughts. I think you're looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses. It was less 'live and let live' and more 'sit down and shut up if you are different'. Now those people have a voice, and a lot of folks are finding it quite upsetting.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hnaccy 6y agoIt's pretty easy to post online pseudonymously so I don't feel like it's a big issue. I post online a lot and the vast majority is pseudonymous or anonymous.
- anfilt 6y agoYet, I am seeing more sites require phone numbers to send an activation code before you can even use or make an account.
- tachyonbeam 6y agoMy policy is always to be considerate to other people, never to try to hurt someone's feelings on purpose, but beyond that, I feel like I'm generally being somewhat guarded even when it's anonymous. It's not impossible that there could be some kind of leak, or that an algorithm could look at what you wrote, and compute some kind of signature based on what you wrote (eg: n-gram probabilities), and match it up with your other online identities. In general, you kind of have to assume that anything you write online could eventually be tied back to your public identity. That being said, I tend to assume that if you said something your employer might disapprove of, it wouldn't be a problem unless what you said somehow gathered a lot of attention online. For that you'd have to be famous, or stir some serious shit on twitter. Even if the identities of everyone on HN were outed, I'm guessing mostly nobody would care, except if they found out Jeff Bezos was secretly posting hateful messages.
- gwright 6y agoWhile I understand the value of anonymous public communication, I think it comes with a huge "bad-actor" problem that we haven't figured out how to offset. Anonymity is a problem when it is used to commit crimes and law enforcement seems inadequately staffed to police cyber crimes even when the perpetrator isn't even anonymous or pseudo anonymous. Do we need something like an Internet "drivers" license for anyone who wants to post content to the public? Analogous to needing a license to drive on public roads? Maybe that idea can be tied into Section 230 concerns? I'm sure there are obvious difficulties, just spitballing. Balancing liberty and safety isn't easy.
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- Simulacra 6y agoAnyone read the book Daemon by Daniel Suarez? Sometimes it feels like we're heading in that direction, where each person has a reputation score, and everyone can see it.
- pmiller2 6y agoSee also this Black Mirror episode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror)
- coldtea 6y agoWhen one side or another wants/gets to control the totality of life, including morality in the abstract (aside concrete actions) and what are "good ideas", that's the endgame. That's regardless of whether this control falls under direct state power (as in China) or is shared between state and private corporations (as in the US). That's also regardless of whether the control is total and absolute or not. It's enough that it exists as a presense to stiffle thinking freedom and social expression.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- liquidify 6y agoI love this article. It hits home as well. I stopped posting a long time ago on sites that tie my posts to my identity (thank you HN for at least not being overt). I hope that we as a society can adopt to this understanding. It may mean normalizing things that are now considered to be deviant. The question is where we draw boundaries. And the reality is that the second we start drawing any boundaries, is the second we fall back into the social cooling trap. It is like a giant compressor operating on the entire planet's behavior.
- echlebek 6y agoIt's an interesting theory, and it may well be true, but I'm going to need to see studies before taking this idea seriously.
- cwyers 6y agoA bunch of people just stormed the Capitol less than a week ago on account of being Terminally Online, I don't think there's a lot of evidence for this hypothesis.
- zmmmmm 6y agoI have noticed I avoid watching "inappropriate" things on netflix because I am afraid of the suggestions they will generate, which inevitably everyone will see when I bring it up on the TV. The few times I did, I thumbs-downed it to avoid that. I wonder how much unconventional content is being harmed by this. It's really annoying.
- conception 6y agoYou can remove items from your Netflix watched history on their website. :)
- ohazi 6y agoNow that storage is infinite and cheap, it's become trendy for engineers to never actually remove anything, but to just set a "deleted" flag in a database somewhere. This makes a lot of tricky things easier, but there are pitfalls. Years later, in the fifteenth re-implementation of some part of some service, somebody is going to forget to read that bit. Or an errant database migration isn't going to transfer it properly. Or the database will be leaked, and all of the "deleted" content will still be there (e.g. the Parler dump). Or a race condition will cause the check to occasionally be ignored every other Sunday. Discovering that this is happening can be next to impossible. An application might read the deleted bit correctly when generating the ordered list of stuff you've looked at, but might not read it correctly (or might deliberately ignore it) when generating your advertising profile or when making content recommendations. I swear I've seen this on Amazon, though of course, I'll never be able to prove it. Chilling effects / social cooling includes stuff like this. "I'm not even going to click on that, because I don't trust the platform to clear my history properly."
- genghizkhan 6y agoJust look at Parler. That's the same thing which happened there.
- debaserab2 6y agoSoft deletes have been popular since the internet became accessible to the average person. When I was younger I was a huge advocate for soft deleting pretty much everything. It felt like the obvious, easy choice - why not retain the data incase you need to use it for something else down the road? It took years to understand the ramifications of storing that data in a secure way really means, and that often times the reason it gets used later isn't something you intended it to be used for when you designed the data structure. I don't think that way anymore and I truly believe hard deletes should be the default unless you have a very compelling reason to soft delete (and you should usually only soft delete with some guarantee of future deletion via a publicly accessible data retention/erasure policy)
- science4sail 6y agoPrevious HN discussions (about the source website that this article cites). * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14585882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14585882 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24627363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24627363
- tayo42 6y agoThis just sounds like being a polite human in public spaces? Common advice was always to avoid talking about politics and religion or anything else controversial in places you need to get along.
- SV_BubbleTime 6y agoIf that’s what we are talking about I embrace and look forward to it! I’ve been to enough museums, galleries, exhibits with people live streaming or FaceTiming that the pendulum swinging the other way would be a welcome change.
- inglor_cz 6y ago"Common advice was always to avoid talking about politics and religion or anything else controversial in places you need to get along." This is much more restrictive. For example, in meatspace, you can avoid talking about religion and politics at your workplace, but talk religion in your church meeting and talk politics with other supporters of the same party. Social media tear down the distance and compress the entire world into one single space. Unless you want to avoid any religious and political discussions completely, your comments on those topics, even in specific discussion groups, can be viewed by, say, your coworkers. I would say that this is quite a problem.
- XorNot 6y agoSocial media is the equivalent of publishing a newsletter about those things with an audience of millions and database search access. It has never been a "private" conversation or even vaguely similar to say, a discussion at a cafe. People have not treated it that way though.
- inglor_cz 6y agoYes, because this is an unfamiliar and hard to grasp form of communication. Social media feels intimate like a home chat by the fireplace - at least sometimes. But in fact it is wide open, including to people who want to harm you.
- d--b 6y agoI think this is merely an adjustment to how people use social media. Regular people expressing their opinion on public media is only a 10-year old phenomenon. But people have been self-censoring in real life forever. There are things you say at work and things you say at home. There are the subjects you avoid at family gatherings not to spoil the weekend, and you usually don't want all your neighbors to know what you've been up to over your vacations. Social media being new, people didn't realize the consequences and started expressing stuff they wouldn't have otherwise. Yes, people adapt, and share less. Perhaps it's social cooling, but maybe it needs cooling a little bit.
- SulfurHexaFluri 6y agoI think facebook and twitter pushed too hard for people to post everything publicly under their real name. Now we are seeing a shift back to made up usernames and private publishing. I don't know many people who share anything publicly but we all share constantly in private IM groups. For most sites I don't bother remembering a password. I just sign up every time I need to log in which keeps my accounts young enough that there isn't a significant backlog to trawl through and identify me.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago> all share constantly in private IM groups. Are you certain these groups are private? E2E and no meta data leak? > isn't a significant backlog to trawl through and identify me. Are you that confident in your OpSec? No browser fingerprinting, GUID, IP address, location data? Surely the alphabet soup agencies profile HN users.
- theshrike79 6y agoIt all depends on your threat model, like always. If your threat modelling includes Mossad, FSB and CIA, by all means do take E2E encryption and metadata into consideration every time you communicate with someone in any way. For most of us it's just selecting a group of people who know what is a joke or hyperbole in the current context. I've typed out some weird stuff in Telegram and Discord chats I wouldn't want my family or employer to see out of context. But my threat model doesn't include my employer or my suing Telegram or Discord for my chat logs, so I don't worry about it.
- closeparen 6y agoFacebook is conspiring with The Man to ruin your life over thoughtcrimes, so you... use it to livestream yourself participating in an insurrection? What exactly are people self-censoring, if not conspiracies to overthrow the United States? I thought this was a cool theory the first time I read it, but it's aged poorly. If anything we might have the opposite problem... social media freeing people from the norms of polite society, which turned out to be load-bearing.
- mastazi 6y agoSure, but the remaining 99.9999% of people are not participating in an insurrection. Their data is being collected too.
- closeparen 6y agoTheir data is being collected, but if not even the wackiest conspiracy theorists care to practice the slightest bit of OPSEC, do you think regular people are changing their behavior over it?
- mastazi 6y agoNo but that's precisely the thesis of OP. 20 years ago no one cared about global warming, just like not many care about data security right now. This is going to change in the future.
- throwaway13337 6y agoWhat's missed in that analysis is grouping. People are now more likely to be performative in a way that is encouraged by identity group. That would mean some people will say less and some will say more. Overall, though, you'll see more normalized groups wherein being different from that group has a higher cost. In this way, both the extremism and the self-censorship we see can be explained.
- closeparen 6y agoIf I understand the thesis here, people are allegedly afraid of Facebook the corporation and whomever it might share data with, not the groups of like-minded people they intentionally communicate with.
- anovikov 6y agoI hope this is true. If that happens, the tragic events of last week will not repeat.
- realjohng 6y agoIt's interesting. I definitely find myself censoring myself online at times. But I also find myself self-censoring offline: at work, with my girlfriend, family.. you name it. Filtering oneself is an important trait. On the other hand, self-censoring oneself to not criticize the current government or make an off-color political joke feels like oppression.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoSelf-censorship is important. But so is integrity (literally being "integral", that is, there being only one of you). You need to not have to hide who you are or fake being who your not. You need that for your mental health.
- offtop5 6y agoUsing social media at all, feels very risky. No matter what you say it can be taken out of context, or the context will change within the next decade and you can be made out to be a monster. I was actually able to find tons of friends and partners back in 2019 when I disconnected from social media. Even though there's a slight temptation to go back being trapped in the house, it's like the temptation to take another drink when you've already had too many. In fact during the pandemic I decided to delete my Reddit account, I found it was making me very angry for naught.
- SyzygistSix 6y agoI wonder if the lack of a social media profile hurts me in some cases. I don't look like a member of the Consumer/Business Party in good standing.
- wiz21c 6y agoPanopticon is a very old idea about this issue https://ethics.org.au/ethics-explainer-panopticon-what-is-the-panopticon-effect/ https://ethics.org.au/ethics-explainer-panopticon-what-is-th...
- Buckaroo9 6y agoOld site that I first saw on HN bringing up this issue: https://www.socialcooling.com/ https://www.socialcooling.com/
- watwut 6y agoI was always doing that, both online and offline. It is not like I would be saying everything that I think everywhere.
- eivarv 6y agoThis is also known as a "chilling effect"; A prime example of this is the self-censorship [0] of Wikipedia-readers after Snowden revealed that the US government was collecting data on people reading Wikipedia articles. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect#Chilling_effects_on_Wikipedia_users https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect#Chilling_effec...
- j0ba 6y agoI want to read that link, but not sure if I should... I'll ddg "snowden wikipedia" instead.
- novaRom 6y agoEven search engines cannot be trusted blindly. Browser fingerprinting is reality and nothing can be done to prevent it for sure. Duckduckgo is known to use Microsoft services and collecting user browsing data without consent. Once you share browser fingerprint with others services, it is trivial to identify your person in global database.
- touchpadder 6y agoI became interested in economics just because I was searching for some boring stuff to post in my Facebook feed to lower my insurance quote on a Camaro SS.
- rutthenut 6y agoInteresting article, and from 2017 so we are all more aware of how the tracking measures have continued to grow continuously since then. Nice example of how one fact can be used to deduce/guess/assume the following traits, which of course won't all necessarily be correct or accurate. >> (Example – I have an advanced degree. This simple piece of data predicts that: I despise and fear Donald Trump and the Republicans; I am a good critical thinker who understands the difference between the high journalistic standards of the New York Times or the Washington Post and the non-existent ones of Fox “News,” Breitbart, etc.; I don’t believe in alien abductions or faked moon landings; I know that evolution and climate change are true beyond any reasonable doubt; I’m not a theist, much less a Christian, Mormon, or Islamic fundamentalist; etc. All that from just one bit of data. Imagine what else others know about you and me?) >>
- p410n3 6y agoThat just sounds like proper opsec
- jakub_g 6y agoRelated: an illustrated guide https://www.socialcooling.com/ https://www.socialcooling.com/
- charlysisto 6y agoMakes me wonder if you have the corollary concept : Social Heating... my feeling is social media has a multiplicative effect on both sides of the thermometer
- deltron3030 6y agoGood catch. There's a huge discrepancy in social media between people who are employed/professionals, use it to climb the corporate ladders and people who are just hanging out there, like in a pub. These two worlds often collide, especially on Twitter. In the real world it's not a problem because there are much more specialized locations. You'd expect rough language and jokes in a pub.
- chrischapman 6y agoThat's a great idea. It probably is a continuum and makes me wonder what the mean point is. Are there behavioral characteristics that fit some acceptable norm? Or will the acceptable norm just become the new thing to manipulate with big data.
- ja3k 6y ago>Social cooling refers to the idea that if “you feel you are being watched, you change your behavior.” And the massive amounts of data being collected, especially online, is exxagerating this effect. This is a strange perspective to me. I feel like I'm much more aware of being watched by the other users of a social media site when I post than of the inscrutable algorithms.
- aluket 6y agoThis reminds me of the Hawthorne effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
- cainxinth 6y agoLiterally for decades I have been explaining to people that email is like a postcard, i.e. always assume your message is visible publicly. When social media became popular, I extended the analogy to it, and yet people continue to be shocked and amazed when their online conversations spread further than they realized. Wanna keep a secret? Don’t tell anyone!
- Taylor_OD 6y agoThis is a great way to explain it. I was told as a child, "Don't write anything in an email you wouldnt want forwarded to someone else" which has stopped me from sending several emails I would have probably regretted.
- dionidium 6y agoAt risk of missing your point (which I think is generally a good one), the problem with the postcard analogy is that nobody cares about what you wrote on your postcard! And even if a couple postal workers snicker at what you wrote, then that's where it ends. There is no conceivable scenario in which hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of people will spend tomorrow talking about your postcard, sharing your postcard, contacting your boss about your postcard, photographing your postcard and critiquing it in the NY Times, and so on. One of the weird things about social media for me is that my intuitions about the postcard -- nobody cares, nobody will read it, what do I care if the postal workers laugh at what I said? -- don't actually work all that well on social media.
- musingsole 6y agoNobody cared about what's on the postcard because you couldn't easily scan every postcard sent and mine its contents. The average social media post has even less content (especially sensitive content) than a postcard, but the ease of collection and analysis means that if there is smallest iota of useful information on the card, it can be mined and exploited.
- fatjokes 6y agoMy personal bigger fear which leads to cooling isn't that big corps extract data about me and try to sell me things, but rather small, dedicated Twitter mobs (I'll say it, wokes).
- rory 6y agoI know a lot of people are bringing this discussion back to social media which certainly has a dramatic effect, but it's interesting that there's a concurrent flame war over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25761017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25761017 with a lot of people coming out against Apple's "Racial Equity and Justice Initiative". Working at multiple tech companies and hanging out with people from others, I've never heard any techy people voice those kind of opinions in person. Are the people speaking up in that thread simply different people, or is there an afk social cooling happening too?
- jsight 6y agoI am curious, since this comes from being a good critical thinker, is it provably true for each of these news sources? "(Example – I have an advanced degree. This simple piece of data predicts that: I despise and fear Donald Trump and the Republicans; I am a good critical thinker who understands the difference between the high journalistic standards of the New York Times or the Washington Post and the non-existent ones of Fox “News,” Breitbart, etc.;"
- musingsole 6y agoAre subjective professional standards ever provably true? But to focus on that part of the statement misses the point of this example from the article: it's about what the individual is likely to believe predicted from a single datum. The objective truth of those beliefs isn't relevant.
- jsight 6y agoBut is that true? I've known plenty of well educated folks that do not "despise and fear" republicans. It seems that details are not so easy to discern from a single data point as he implies.
- musingsole 6y agoIf it's not specifically true, it's proverbial. Stories such as this[1] abound. Since I first read the post, it's been updated, but an earlier version in that same example called out unlikely to be Mormon. This similarly seems unlikely to me (of my acquaintances, being Mormon would dramatically increase your odds of having an advanced degree). 1: https://www.networkworld.com/article/2878394/mit-researchers-show-you-can-be-identified-by-a-just-few-data-points.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/2878394/mit-researchers...
- jessehattabaugh 6y agoExperiencing negative consequences and adjusting your behavior to avoid them is also called becoming a better person.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- iJohnDoe 6y agoI think many out there that are a victim of social cooling. Probably way more than we realize due to their silence. You have to think twice about posting or messaging anything because you have to assume that the service will later be breached and your privacy exposed. Similarly, you have to weigh the consequences of simply signing up for a service in the first place due to the risk of the service or company being breached later. I also think the archiving sites that want to download and archive everything add more to social cooling than anything else.
- jrochkind1 6y agoIsn't the opposite, a kind of social heating, what we are actually observing though? This model does not seem to predict what I feel we are actually observing.