With the entire country up in arms over the Bell Pottinger fiasco. They have come under fire for orchestrating a racial divide in the country in order for the Guptas to pursue their agenda of state capture.

In truth all they did was a take a page out of Putin’s book and manipulate social media and mostly Facebook’s Algorithm for their nefarious agenda. But I would argue that there was already a racial divide growing thanks again to social media and Facebook being the main culprit. All they had to do is manipulate the mechanics of the Facebook Algorithm and just speed up the process up.

The Facebook Political Echochamber

Facebook like any company wants to make money and in order to do so they need people to be on their site for as long as possible as well as keep their users in a good mood which keeps them on the platform longer as well as making them more susceptible to advertising.

It’s not in their best interest to serve users news article that will spoil their mood because this makes them less likely to click on promoted content and more likely to get them to leave Facebook which in turn leads to less revenue for the company.

Facebook via their algorithm over time serve users only news that conform to their existing political and world beliefs. Essentially person with a certain political leaning will be served more an more stories supporting that leanings and will shielded from news articles that oppose their existing biases.

This actually has an impact on the way people think, being exposed to one way of thinking makes them think their worldview is the right worldview because that’s the only worldview they keep seeing on their primary source of News, Facebook.

If you don’t have this worldview there is something wrong with, as far as the person knows is that all the news articles he has seen on his primary source of news. This makes the person feel like their political views are the norm and any other view is an abnormal fringe.

Being exposed to only one worldview unchallenged will then will make them gravitate to the more and more extreme leaning articles over time. This has the knock on effect on the the news media with the more neutral and objective reporting articles tending not to do well as ones that affirm their respective growing biases.

As a result left wing articles become increasingly more left and the same goes for the right wing, suddenly we get a postive feedback loop of increasingly politically biased users and articles.

The South African Racial Political Divide

We have already seen what impact Facebook had in the increasing political divide between the left and the right in the US Elections and how Russian President Vladimir Putin manipulated the US election utilizing the same mechanic of the Facebook Algorithm.

But for a country like South Africa where the political divide of left and right seem for the most part is divided along racial lines. It is a recipe for a disaster.

Over time articles with racial biases will do better than articles that don’t. In fact this encourages news media to try to frame as many articles racial agenda to take advantage of this quirk in the algorithm even when these framings don’t really make much sense. This is why you see increasingly politicized articles on news media.

Spur was a very recent victim of this mechanic with the infamous “Spur Incident”. Which was a perfect storm in that it triggered both sides of the political divide and brought an onslaught news media coverage with many if not the most of the popular news articles being framed around a political/racial bias.

I wonder if Spur can actually sue Bell Pottinger for loss of income, there is a case that can be made on that front. They could argue that Bell Pottinger constructed a toxic social media environment that lead to the “Spur Incident” turning out the way it did. This still doesn’t excuse Spur for their really piss poor PR response to the incident though.

The whole Bell Pottinger situation is rather a symptom of a much bigger problem that our country faces in terms of Social Media, Facebook and the impact of artificial intelligence has on our society.