This blog post is in response to the Jaron Lanier interview titled “Social media is ruining your life.” To start Jaron makes some good points about how social media can be used to manipulate and influence users. I think two of the biggest examples of this are youtube and facebook. I don’t personally either one too often, if anything youtube from time to time. But to start with youtube we all know that they use algorithms based on what you’ve watched and potentially also data collected on you to tailor what kind of videos are recommended to you. I agree with Jaron that this can be used and probably in some ways is being used to influence the way people think and feel. It’s not hard to fall into a rut of watching video after video nonstop on youtube (I know because its happened to me before), and in my experience you’ll notice that if the video are somewhat politically charged one way or another then you start to fall into a rabbit hole of the same types of videos being recommended over and over again. I agree on Jaron’s point that it is by design and it does influence the way we are going to view the world one way or another but I hesitate to acknowledge that it deliberate, targeted manipulation by the company youtube itself. I don’t use facebook almost at all but of course most of us have heard of the reports of Russians and others working to influence our elections through the use of social media. It was reported that they were targeted both sides of the political spectrum, dropping posts, images and propaganda that was meant to further divide the country, or so it seemed. For example, of the fictitious accounts that were found to be linked to Russia, some were found to push liberal agendas and others were found to push more conservative and in some cases right wing/nationalist agendas. Once again very impactful and in my opinion had a huge impact of the outcome of the election, however though one could argue that facebook shares in a huge part of the blame for allowing their network to be infiltrated in such a fashion I would not be so quick to that facebook is implicit in this attack on our democracy. Ultimately, I agree with a lot of points that Joran made in terms of the overall potential negative impact of social media in general, and most definitely one should “know themselves” to avoid being painted one color or another by these influences. However, I don’t believe that these are an issue for me personally.