With less content moderation, Mark Zuckerberg’s social network users can expect more brain rot.
Brain rot was the “word of the year” for 2024, according to the traditional annual choice of Oxford University Press, the world’s largest university publisher. Translated as “brain rot,” brain rot refers to the deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, seen especially as a result of excessive consumption of material considered banal or not challenging. According to Oxford, the 230% increase in the frequency of use of the term between 2023 and 2024 reflects societal concerns about the potential impacts of prolonged use of digital technology to consume irrelevant, uncritical and low-quality content. More specifically, this concern affects parents and guardians of children and adolescents who are accessing digital social networks at increasingly younger ages and in increasingly addictive ways.
A symptom of this parental suffering is the sales phenomenon, in Brazil and abroad, of the book “The Anxious Generation: How Hyperconnected Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Disorders”, by Jonathan Haidt. The social psychologist is part of a group of researchers who have highlighted the close relationship between the commercial exploitation of digital communication platforms and the increase in the rates of depression, anxiety and other mental disorders over the last 15 years, precisely the period in which there has been an accelerated development of artificial intelligence, social networks and machine learning. These advanced techniques that generate the production and circulation of information in digital format have been used by major technology conglomerates to stimulate the intermittent production of personal data by users of their services.
As is already known, in practically all business models structured around digital platforms, the data produced by Internet users today represent an indispensable input, whether geolocation data (essential for transportation platforms such as Uber or delivery platforms such as iFood), tastes and preferences (such as those used by Amazon, YouTube and Netflix to suggest products and recommend audiovisual content), or all of this together and mixed with data on likes, comments and shares, as is common in social networks such as Facebook, X, Instagram and Tik Tok. The more time a user spends interacting on a platform, the more personal data they produce.
To capture attention, the contents presented on social networks and news pages often appeal to the emotional reaction, not mediated by rationality, which communicates with the unconscious and the undomesticated, to capture the gaze, dilate the pupils and mobilize thumbs and index fingers, even if only for a fleeting moment.
The architecture of the platforms is also designed with this objective in mind, as can be seen in the infinite scroll of social networks, a type of gamification inspired by slot machines in casinos and bars, which stimulates the nervous fingers in the addictive search for information coins.
As economist Herbert Alexander Simon put it, the downside of the attention economy is that information wealth results in attention poverty. This is the current condition of hyper-information that causes inattention, inability to concentrate, compulsion and anxiety in individuals. As people receive constant reminders, notifications, and nudges via electronic devices that deliver information as a group and often cut into short bursts of text, video or meme, it becomes increasingly difficult to stay focused on activities that require concentration, such as reading a book or even watching a movie or music program.
Culture being a dimension that presupposes the possibility of deep and contemplative attention for human beings, philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues that the excess of stimuli, information, and impulses coming from information technologies, combined with the demand for performance (both at work and in personal life shared on social networks), tends to shift deep attention towards a form of “hyperattention”, that is, a dispersed attention that rapidly shifts focus between different activities and sources of information.
In addition to affecting people’s mental health and ability to concentrate, the free and unregulated circulation of disinformation and scientific and environmental denialism on digital networks fuels fascist extremism, feeds anti-vaccine movements and creates an environment of information pollution that harms the fight against global warming, fuels hate speech against vulnerable groups. The political use of what Marco Schneider calls networked digital disinformation, with the large-scale pursuit of fake news to manipulate public opinion and interfere in electoral contests, could be seen in the actions of the Cambridge Analytica company during the Trump campaign in the United States, and the Brexit, in the United Kingdom, both in 2016.
Revealed in 2018 by former employee Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica scandal involved the mining of personal data of more than 80 million Facebook users, forcing the platform’s owner, Mark Zuckerberg, to appear in a five-hour interrogation before the US Senate. The case was so serious that the billionaire’s questioning was broadcast live on television, and Zuckerberg was asked for greater effort and investment in combating misinformation and moderating hate speech in the digital ecosystem-his company, Meta, now controls four major communications platforms. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads, and Facebook alone has more than 3 billion daily logins.
During the Trump administration, whose Facebook account was blocked by Zuckerberg in the wake of the Capitol Hill invasion, the social media mogul boasted of working with more than 100 organizations in 60 languages to combat misinformation on his platforms. Now, with Trump back in power, Meta’s owner is coming out publicly — exactly four years after banning the Republican extremist from the blue network — saying he will “work with President Trump to combat governments around the world that are attacking American businesses and pushing them for more censorship,” and declares he will get rid of fact-checkers and relax filters that moderate content on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, to “ensure that people can express their beliefs and experiences.”
For Zuckerberg and Meta’s shareholders, the measure means not only an immediate saving of billions of dollars that will no longer be spent on content moderation, but also a potential increase in profits through the intensification of political confrontations that generate “engagement” on social networks. The foreseeable effect of this measure is a greater permeability of the network to the circulation of disinformation and hate speech, especially directed at the LGBTQIAPN+ community, as evidenced by the authorization to users, based on their political or religious beliefs, to share allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation.
And for the billions of individuals who use Zuckerberg’s social networks, the expected consequence is an increase in the brain rot of which this text speaks, accompanied by obsessive-compulsive disorders, agitation, depression, irritability, empathic insensitivity and all sorts of psychosomatic disorders. It remains to be seen whether people and governments around the world agree with this goal.
*Machine translation proofread by Janaína da Silva.
Autor
Researcher at the Brazilian Institute of Information Science and Technology (IBICT) and professor of the Graduate Program in Information Science at IBICT/UFRJ.
