So these are not friends. These are eyeballs.

And so if social media were really about social interactions, they would have been designed totally differently, totally. You look at the design and you learn about the purpose.

There was a big argument during the medieval Middle Ages. And people were saying, what was the intention of God? And one of the arguments was, well, you look at what God did, what he created to understand the mind of God. And even in the Bible, they say that man was created in the image of God. Look at the creation to understand the mind of its creators.

If a designer allows you to have 5,000 friends, clearly the word friends is misleading, perhaps criminally misleading, because false advertising is a criminal offense.

It’s interesting, Sam, what you were saying just a little bit earlier in this last reply, because you said that social media isn’t being used how it was intended to be used.

So that would leave me to believe that these arguments, that these heads of these different social media companies are making that while it’s taken a life of its own, this isn’t what it was meant to be, that they can then justify that and say, well, no, but this isn’t how it was meant to be. People weren’t supposed to be aggressive. People weren’t supposed to be emotional.

So is it then fair for them to defend themselves in that way?

No, of course not. Because the platforms were designed as they were.

But once the platforms began to be used in a specific unsavory way, all these executives jumped on the bandwagon and provided the new junkies with drugs.

It’s like a pusher saying, like a drug pusher saying, listen, cannabis was meant to be used for medical purposes.

But since suddenly 20,000 people came to my door asking for recreational use, I started to sell them drugs. So by default, they wanted it.

The executives in Facebook and information in Facebook, they’re not limited to Facebook, of course, executives in Instagram and other places.

The minute they realize that the platforms are being used in a highly specific way, idiosyncratic way, they didn’t say, wait a minute, wait a minute, let’s build tools to reverse the process. Let’s build tools to prevent this from happening.

There’s too much aggression. Let’s build tools to avoid aggression. There’s too much narcissism. Let’s limit the technology so that it fights narcissism back.

Let’s, you know, for example, let’s put emphasis on content, not on empty likes. Let’s moderate like they’re doing now. They are being forced to moderate now, 15 years later. So let’s moderate. Let’s let us ban people who are aggressive.

There were so many policy choices to keep the original nature had they wanted to. But when they discovered that aggression is addictive, they provided you with tools to be aggressive. When they discovered that you can be conditioned and they can monopolize your time, they made the technology to condition you and to play on your addictive personality.

I mean, they acted with malice to leverage all the sick pathologize aspects of you that came to the surface. They brought out the worst in you, not the best in you. They could have easily, absolutely easily made different policy choices and create a truly a true social platform for real life, meaningful, contentful social interaction.

And I’m telling you that this existed before social media, before social media came on the scene, which is about 2006.

There were hundreds of thousands of people interacting on forums, on bulletin boards. There was something called IRC. There were channels for thousands of people to talk to each other.

I had a group, a support group with 250,000 members and so on. So it’s not true that social media was the first to leverage interactions of millions of people, millions, tens of millions of people were interacting with each other long before social media.

But they were doing it in a civilized, content oriented, tolerant way. And when people, when people overstepped the line, when they became aggressive, when they were trolling, when they were off point, moderators stepped in and either banned them and blocked them or rectified their behavior, remedied it, but did it in positiveness.

So social media, when it came on the scene, was meant to be a variant of this, a bulletin board.

But the only innovation was that there was no moderator.

So it was a decentralized peer to peer bulletin board. And then they discovered amazing things.

The more aggressive people are, the more sticky they are, the more they stay, you know, glued to the screen. Great, let’s give them tools to be more aggressive.

The more envious they are, the more they post, the more they monitor other users, the more the eyeballs are ours. Great, let’s give them tools to be envious. The more empty the interaction, the more addicted they become, because it’s pathological narcissism.

Great, let’s make the interactions totally content free, vacuous, so that they become addicted, so that they don’t pay attention to their families or anything else, so that we can monetize their eyeballs.

Don’t you see, these were policy choices to enhance sickness, because sickness guarantees eyeballs, attention, and attention can be monetized.

As the expense of everything else, I keep giving this example. If you have a girlfriend, and if you have Facebook, Facebook will do everything in its power to separate you from a girlfriend, because your girlfriend competes with Facebook for advertising money.

It’s very simple. Why pretend otherwise? Facebook needs you to look at the screen. If you are doing anything else, it’s bad for Facebook. It’s bad for Facebook.

So do you basically think that now, when they talk about all these things they’re trying to do to stop the kind of, you know, negative behavior that you see on social media, and them explaining that it isn’t that easy, but they’re working on it, that’s all actually not true. And what they’re really doing is they’re looking at this stuff and thinking, actually, this is, as you say, putting eyeballs on the screen, they don’t want to lose that.

They have to tell the public that they are trying to do something about it, because there’s such a negative backlash from it, and also the political pressure, as you mentioned.

But really, they would ideally like to keep it the way it is, because it’s making them the most money.

If social media were not challenged by lawmakers and others, they would have allowed the posting of ISIS beheading videos, because ISIS beheading videos would have garnered tens of millions of views.

They have no compunction, no morality, but the bottom line. There is no question about this. YouTube had allowed had allowed videos by terrorist organizations for well over 11 years, without any form of censorship. None of these videos had been removed.

I personally found videos of beheadings and worse on YouTube with millions of views. And by the way, the irony is some of the hashtags were beheading or killing.

What’s the problem?

To write a single line of code, if beheading, then delete. But for 11 years, you had beheading videos on YouTube. They still do, by the way.

This is a policy choice. It’s a technological choice. It’s not an accident. It’s a mindset.

So you can say, OK, so why now they are trying to clap to kind of a clamp on fake news and so on, for two reasons.

The hit is on. And these companies can face regulation or antitrust.

Antitrust, you know, they can be broken up. Google was threatened with being broken up. Facebook is not threatened with being broken up, as was Microsoft a decade and a half ago.

So they are terrified of it. They’re terrified of being broken up. They’re terrified of regulation. They’re terrified of people looking deeply into their operations because they haven’t, because the malice, the pseudo, almost quasi criminal activity was not only up front. It was in the bank office as well.

We are now discovering that they were selling user data in a totally, you know, without any constraints to to everyone, including very personal user data.

So what went on behind the scenes was as bad as what went on screen. And they’re terrified. They don’t want anyone trying into their business because it’s a swamp.

I have no doubt, although I have no proof, that there were vast criminal undertakings there. No doubt.

And so now this is my final question, Sam, to sort of bring it back generally to the internet as well, maybe not just social media.

I’ve seen a quote from you where you’ve said long term exposure to the net has a beneficial effect.

And I just wanted to ask, because obviously there’s a lot of negative things that you can point out about it.

Well, what is the beneficial effect that long term exposure to the net can have on the person?

Well, I think we should not make the mistake that is very commonly made in Asia.

In Asia, they confuse Facebook with the internet. So when they say internet, they mean Facebook. The internet is not Facebook.

So you don’t feel this way about social media.

I’m sorry. So I was going to say, so you don’t feel this way about the positive effect about social media.

It’s more just about the internet itself.

Yeah, there has been a lot of stuff.

Yeah, there has not been a single positive effect of social media ever documented in any of the numerous studies conducted on the very contrary.

Scholars like Twenge and Campbell and numerous others have proven conclusively over a decade that social media increases anxiety and depression, especially among teens and is very powerfully correlated with the skyrocketing suicide rate among teens, especially, but not only that.

I am not aware of a single one study that had demonstrated any positive effect of social media of any kind. That is shocking.

Do you know why it’s shocking? Because social media have a lot of money and academics are not immune to money. Where there is money, you can always find a professor for hire who will write glowing reports about something.

So the tobacco industry had professors writing about the benefits of tobacco. The opioid industry, Purdue, had professors writing about or scholars or doctors writing about the benefits of opioids.

Where there is a lot of money, there is always someone who will write a very positive report.

And social media have a lot of money, billions of dollars, and yet they could not find a single academic, a single scholar, a single professor, or a single doctor, single psychiatrist or single psychologist who would write anything positive about social media because the evidence is so overwhelming that no one would risk their career.

Overwhelming that social media is a form of mass poisoning. It’s utterly toxic sludge.

There is not one positive psychological, positive aspect to social media, not one that I’m aware of.

Whereas the net, as in your quote, can have beneficial effects. That’s a different thing, the internet.

So where are the beneficial effects from that? Is it basically just the kind of information you can find on there?

Mostly, yes, mostly information.

Well, listen, today you have access to millions of books online free of charge. You have access to archives of newspapers. I mean, it’s wonderful. It’s by far the biggest library that has ever existed. And I’m not talking about hackers that post new books. I mean, where do you want? You can find all the treasures of art and culture. I’m in love with the internet, I spend hours on the internet every day. It’s like browsing the greatest library to have ever existed. You can still find enclaves in forums and so on of like minded people, like minded, not in the sense that they don’t disagree with you, like interested people, same interests. You can exchange useful information. It’s a great tool for scheduling and appointment making and so on, coordinating activities, for example, a lot of activism, political activism, environmental activism and so on takes place through the internet.

And ironically, sometimes they use social media such as Twitter.

But the truth is that social media is used just to initiate processes. After that, it becomes real life luckily.

YouTube, for example, is not social media. It’s a platform for dissemination of information. A lot of information is trivial or junk or trash and so on. So that’s something else. That’s the quality.

But YouTube itself is technically not social media. And I regard YouTube as a powerful, positive force, all in all, despite what I mentioned before, that they didn’t remove terrorist videos. I gave that example not because YouTube is a social media medium, but because technology companies in general are focused on eyeballs, whether they are social media or not.

So there are many, I mean, I would say that most of the internet would be with the exception of social media. Most of the internet is a positive force.

So therefore, is there a way that someone who’s a narcissist, if they enter the internet, say for the first time, let’s not include social media in that, but do they enter the internet, they look around, they find things? Is there a way that can somehow improve them to be less narcissistic? Or is it if they have, you know, that mentality, it won’t make a difference, it will just kind of they’ll find the things that make them more narcissistic? Or can is there some way that they can look through all the gold that there is on the internet? And actually, that can change their perspectives in a positive way.

Why would exposure to Encyclopedia Britannica change you as a narcissist?

No hope.

No, I mean, no hope and no connection.

Narcissists are attention whores. They’re addicted to attention, because they need attention to regulate the sense of identity, the sense of self worth. Without attention, they crumble and disintegrate.

So it’s an existential leak. And exactly like other junkies, because it’s an addiction, they lose their attention. They look at everything from the angle of, can I get, can I obtain attention by using it?

So even if they visit Encyclopedia Britannica, they would probably be looking for some information that they can then post online in order to garner likes.

I mean, they’re narcissists look at everything via the lens of can I use it to obtain attention? So there’s no question of healing. There’s a, they couldn’t find one again, I say the internet is essentially a positive thing.

If you go, I used to work in Africa, work in Africa for four years, ask any farmer in Africa, and they will tell you how the internet change their lives.

For example, they now know they are, they become aware of international prices. So they comprise their commodities much better.

I mean, medicine has been as benefited enormously, especially in remote places via the internet. I mean, internet is indispensable. It’s a wonderful tool.

I am not anti internet. I was an internet pioneer, actually, I own the first internet company in Israel. I’m not, I’m not against the internet. I wrote a series of articles in 1996 for PC magazine on the future of the internet, where I predicted social media and mobile things.

But I’ve always been in a board with the internet. I would love it. It’s a great, the greatest platform ever.

However, it’s been hijacked. It’s been hijacked by unstructuredist, avaricious, greedy executives who then leverage human nature, the less savory aspects of human nature to make money. Everything can be hijacked. Knives can be used to cooperate with people. Internet has been hijacked. It’s a hostage.

Sam, thank you very much. Thank you very much for, for spending an hour with me. Thank you very much for answering all my questions. But yeah, thank you again. And I wish you a very good day today. So thank you again, Sam.

Thank you for your time. Bye bye.