Online Mental Hygiene 1.0.1: Who Is The Real Villain Online?

Today, the world is getting polarized, and online sentiment is getting increasingly negative. The two professional groups put in a particularly bad light online are politicians and entrepreneurs. But who deserves bad press in fact? Who is engineering the Internet in a way to divide people? Perhaps it is journalists and hackers who work full-time to influence your opinions and put you against others.

“Don’t Be Evil” — How Did Google’s Moral Standards Change Over Time? For Google, You Are a Consumer.

For many years, “Don’t be evil” used to be the official company motto of Google. In 2015, the motto was changed to “Do the right thing.” Why? Because in the current market conditions, not being evil was no longer an option.

Google has become a trillion-dollar corporation, and as such, it must maximize its profits to stay afloat. Therefore, treats its users like nothing else than consumers.

“To Google” means “to filter.” Indeed, every Googler sees the world differently. Did you know that Google picks and chooses what it does and doesn’t show you? Google uses AI to build a specific profile on you built over time. Consequently, it uses that information to push you toward buying the products they advertise.

Google literally has a vested interest in distracting you as much as possible, so you buy more. This props them up as the greatest advertisement market penetrator.

Google Collects All The Possible Information About You And Tries To Predict Your Future Needs.

The recent Hollywood flick, “Don’t Look Up,” features the character of Peter Isherwell. He is the CEO of a fictional corporation called BASH — a parody of Google and Apple. In the movie, BASH uses the data of its device users, for instance, to predict their medical future. This includes the circumstances of their death.

Unfortunately, this portrayal of Google is not that far off from the truth. Google indeed can store all your browsing history, extract and store your medical data. Furthermore, it can use machine learning to figure out your current and possible future medical needs.

They don’t even hide the fact — quite the opposite: they openly publish the results of their predictive models in medical and machine learning literature! So, do you want a third party with trillion-dollar capital to keep on betting on when and how you will die?

How Does Google Manipulate Our Reality, Including Our Political Views?

But Google is not only interested in your consumer behaviors and medical past and future. It also actively influences your political views. We have all heard about the Cambridge Analytica scandal starring Facebook, but do you know that Google also has a major impact on American politics?

Hard to believe? Check out this article with information from Gregory Coppola who was working as a Senior Engineer at Google, and Robert Epstein, a psychologist and journalist. In the article, you will find a timeline of political biases entering the workplace. It also raises the questions of censorship and what is “appropriate” to show people.

A search around the internet can reveal a vast number of photos that exist comparing suggested search queries between Google and other search engines. What you will see is that Google has actively suppressed people from searching for certain things.

See this example from Robert Epstein, coming from the American presidential campaign in 2016. In general, Google News search results are politically biased (which can be summarized as Google showing you more of what you’ve seen before).

What Are The Societal Consequences Of This Manipulation?

Unfortunately, these manipulative strategies have far-reaching consequences for society. Research shows that in America, Democrats and Republicans have been diverging in views and growing apart for the past 20 years.

According to Pew Research Center, the ideological distance between Republicans and Democrats has grown wider than at any point in recent history, with 92% of Republicans now positioned to the right of the median Democrat, up from 64% two decades ago.

The view of the opposite side of the political spectrum is also becoming more and more negative. To a large extent, this process is stimulated by Google-induced biases.

To sum up, we are social beings who need to have a sense of belonging. The biases created by commercial online browsers and privately owned social media led to a new kind of online tribalism. As a result, groups of users cluster together and further polarize their views in a never-ending reinforcement loop.

Our Minds Work Against Us While Googling.

According to this Ardorseo article, the number of Google searches per day could be well over 3 billion. This figure is extremely likely to have increased since it was estimated in 2012. What a wide scope of influence!

To understand the effects of these changes, we must first understand our own minds. Our minds, while the most advanced organic creation on the planet, are far from perfect.

We are social beings, and while we as a species have integrated the Internet, numbers have played a strange and invisible role. We see a search suggestion and have a subconscious leap of logic to say that many people must be using those search terms.

Likewise, the opposite is true. If we google a politician’s name expecting to see information about the recent scandal they participated in, and it is not there, something happens in our minds. We may become more prone to make a subconscious leap in logic.

Namely, we might conclude that the scandal must not be that big of a deal. Alternatively, we might conclude that our understanding of it as a big scandal is false. It is known as the social proof bias, and it is one of the multiple cognitive biases that we are prone to.

Browsing Is Addictive.

Most users don’t give much thought to what is shown to them vs hidden and why. It makes sense; it’s easier to just search for what you want to know and put no more thought into it than needed.

Why waste the extra thinking power? Just give me the link I want, and let it be done right? This lack of second thought will be taken advantage of with a system like Google’s.

Well, that leads us to our second problem. Which is quick access to extremely large amounts of information combined with the human presupposition to believe what we hear.

Throughout human history, the majority of us rarely read, or we had to actively seek out the source of information. For example, we would take a walk to a library or another place of information. Now it’s all with the lift of an arm and a few thumb taps.

Why Is Constant Browsing So Hard To Resist?

Our body and energy systems love this optimization, but our brains were not ready for it. We modern people using technology now have services like Tik Tok! that blast so many videos at you per minute all giving you a little hit of dopamine and making you feel great. You feel great… but that is exactly what addiction is.

According to a peer-reviewed bibliometric analysis published in the journal Cureus, every like, comment, or share on social media contributes to an increase in dopamine production, a mechanism that reinforces the compulsive, uncontrollable urge to keep checking these platforms.

The media addiction has had a very negative effect on society when it comes to consuming garbage media on sites like Youtube, Tik Tok!, Facebook, 4chan, and adult content websites. The internet is very similar to a drug, and we must take responsibility for ourselves. In particular, we must be aware and act in accordance with what is healthy for us and our personal development.