Suicide is a hidden performance indicator for social media

In the aftermath of the death of Molly Russell (below), we are told that social media giants are going to alter the algorithms that introduce users to increasingly addictive content.

I'm sure they will, because Big Tech is in the crosshairs of public opinion like never before. But we need to remember that these algorithms did not come about by accident. As I wrote in Planets and Meaning: A Phenomenology of Fate, quoting The Times' Ben Machell,

There are hundreds of incredibly clever, incredibly well-resourced people in Silicon Valley armed with a very detailed understanding of how the human mind works, and who have made it their business to make sure we cannot put down their apps or hardware...it’s possible that half of us now suffer from some form of behavioural addiction. And while this is bad news for adults who wish to escape their smartphone screens, it’s even worse news for children…“People are carrying around a portable dopamine pump, and kids have basically been carrying it around for the last ten years”, argues David Greenfield, addiction expert and assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine.

I continued by saying that these professionals send their own children to an exclusive school in the San Francisco Bay area where use of smartphones and tablets is severely limited so that said children are not exposed to the abusively addictive content their mothers and fathers ensure that other children are able to find if they spend just a little time searching.

But shadowy security organisations have not invested in organisations such as Facebook for nothing. Such organisations are interested in the mechanics of behaviour-change on very large scales, and social media has helped them achieve results possibly beyond anything their operatives had dreamt of. 

For example, NATO had to sent radicalised, radicalising operatives into the former Yugoslavia in order to create military-grade mayhem, giving it a Raison d'être after the Berlin Wall fell. Contrast this with the situation in Myanmar, where Facebook has been "weaponised" in order to foment hatred against Rohyngya Muslims and create an exodus into Bangladesh into which jihadis can embed themselves. The trouble is spreading to north-west India, which surrounds Bangladesh, with the net effect being major destabilisation on China's southwest border, providing a reminder that despite its own financial woes selling on the huge quantities of American debt it owes would bring consequences.

The success or otherwise of any system can only be measured through indicators, and such a diffuse system as social media with a global reach is going to test the assessors' inventiveness. 

If the hidden purpose of social media is behaviour-change, on whatever scale, the relevant performance indicator has to show behaviour-change related to social media and to nothing other than social media, and measuring how many people shop at a different supermarket because of posts or likes isn't going to give much information. Senior social media managers need to demonstrate to their masters that their products have the ability to push behaviour-change to the furthest limit possible, and I would suggest that this limit is suicide. Suicide, then, is a hidden indicator as to the efficacy of social media in occasioning behaviour-change on an individual level, providing feedback that can then be extrapolated to provide predictors as to extreme behaviour-change on a group level.

Again, I wrote in Planets and Meaning:

I’m sure most middle managers in social media outfits are horrified and depressed at suicides, or rather murder-by-networks, but within the cloud-hidden heights of their own overseers lurk individuals who see such deaths as proof of the networks’ continued potency.

Let's be clear: Big Tech is not altering its algorithms because of any moral sensitivity at very high levels. It is doing so because a traditional media campaign around one victim has focused general attention on its practices more acutely than before. 

The algorhythms will not go away. I predict the worst of social media on the worldwide web will be reincarnated on the Deep Web, where it will be subjected to even less controls than at present. If the government is serious about addressing suicides and other extreme behaviours linked to big tech, it will treat the big companies as what they are, which is non-state aggressors with the demonstrated ability to cause as much trouble as ISIS, and act accordingly to protect the vulnerable from social-media radicalisation. Of course, if the government is covetous of social media's potential to occasion social, cultural and political change, it will do nothing other than cosmetic tinkering.